The Internet Demands Uplifting Videos. So He Stages Them. (Published 2021) (2024)

Few online genres are as fascinating as the realm of “wholesome” content, an ever-widening pool of tender, morally uplifting stories about moments of kindness, human beings caring for one another and people leaving big tips. Most of this wholesomeness is found in real life, captured in videos of charming family moments or warm encounters with strangers. Other examples are at least manufactured in real life, as with the TikTok influencer who films himself buying things for people living on the streets of Los Angeles. You might think a staged, fictional video of an inspiring moment, clumsily scripted and stiffly acted, would be infinitely less compelling, and yet: Consider the YouTube sensation Dhar Mann and his 11.2 million subscribers.

Mann makes short sketches that deliver positive messages. In one recent video, “RICH Kid WON’T TIP Pizza Boy, He Lives to Regret It,” we see three teenagers playing video games when the doorbell rings, announcing the arrival of the titular pizza boy. One boy’s mother gives him $20 to pay. The dead-eyed son answers the door; finding that the pizza has pineapple on it, he derisively rejects it. The pizza boy — earnest, apologetic, saintly — races away and returns with yet another pizza the son takes umbrage with. Only on the third trip does the son, grudgingly satisfied, take the pizza and leave an eight-cent tip. His mother tells him he wouldn’t be so callous if he’d ever had a job and issues an ultimatum: He won’t get his birthday present (a BMW) unless he works for a month. In a slow-motion montage set to sad oboes, we watch the son deliver pizzas to his own assortment of rude customers. Back home, he orders dinner, and when the original pizza boy appears, the son apologizes and leaves a $5.08 tip. The acting is wooden, but the apology is weirdly affecting; it is, even against the viewer’s will, satisfying to see the sneering jerk from two minutes ago contrite.

Mann is a serial entrepreneur, the owner of a cosmetics business and a former cannabis-industry supplier. He was engaged to a star of the reality show “Shahs of Sunset” and once pleaded no contest to charges of defrauding the City of Oakland; the conviction was later expunged. He started his YouTube account in 2018, dispensing motivational advice. The pivot into morality plays came fast, and he has since cranked out more than 400 videos. They cover an astonishing array of topics, from the workplace (“CEO Threatens to Fire Janitor, Son Teaches Him A Lesson”) to assimilation (“Son Hates His Mexican Culture, Friend Teaches Him A Lesson”), fatherhood (“Dad Abandons AUTISTIC CHILD, He Lives to Regret It”) and race (“Lady Calls Cops On Black Man Who Has 2 Bikes, Instantly Regrets It”). The same tropes recur in shifting combinations: spoiled kids, “gold diggers,” homeless men, chefs, people being shamed. The realtor story is repeated in a sketch about bartenders; the one about the Mexican American son is mirrored by another about an Asian American daughter.

These are stories we already know, having watched the real-life versions go viral. Mann, recognizing our appetite for more, obliges by staging it.