The Chuck Testa Ad Went Unnoticed for 32 Days. Then Strangers Edited It.

On 14 August 2011 a taxidermy commercial went onto YouTube under the title "Official Ojai Valley Taxidermy TV Commercial." On 15 September 2011, 32 days later, a Reddit user posted it with the title "This is probably the funniest low-budget commercial I have ever seen." Five days after that, CNBC reported more than 2.8 million views [2]. In the 32 days between, the timeline says the video was "largely unnoticed" [2].

That is my thesis, and the dates are the evidence. Strange ads do not turn into folk art because they are strange. They turn into folk art when strangers frame them, cut them and re-post them, and the ad can sit untouched for a month until that happens. I will read this one ad step by step, say who gained at each step, and say where the case fails to prove the general claim.

The object

Look at the object first. A man stands in a taxidermy shop in Ojai, California. He shows a stuffed animal and the ad suggests the viewer may think it is alive. Then comes the line the whole ad is built on: "Nope, it's Chuck Testa." The line returns again and again. I have not rewatched the video for this post, so I rely on the sources below for the description, not on my own viewing.

This was no accident. Rhett and Link, the duo who made it for their IFC show Commercial Kings, said: "We definitely scripted and conceptualized the repetition of the 'Nope, it's Chuck Testa' line" [1]. Their show's method, in their words: "we make a local commercial for free, which we then include as a part of the show, and we give it to the client" [1]. The Know Your Meme timeline puts the selection of Testa's shop for an episode in May 2011 [2]. BuzzFeed says the spot first aired in July 2011, in one of the early episodes of the season [1].

So here is a first correction to my own love of this genre. I wanted a bad ad that was weird by accident. This is a designed ad, made by professionals to be shareable, and the design did not do the job alone. A scripted catchphrase, a funny man and a real cable slot gave it little audience for 32 days of YouTube life. Testa uploaded it himself; Rhett and Link did not put it on their own channel [1]. BuzzFeed reports it "slowly gathered some views" [1].

The steps, with dates

I count five distinct acts after the upload. The source for all of them is one compiled timeline, which I trust for dates but have not checked against each underlying page [2].

1. 15 September 2011, the frame. A Reddit user, LunaMcLovin, posts the link with a verdict in the title. The post reaches the front page with more than 12,000 upvotes in 24 hours [2]. The same day, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post and Best Week Ever run it [2].
2. 15 September, the first edit. Redditor KerrickLong posts a Photoshop, a shark attacking a man climbing into a helicopter. It gets more than 11,000 upvotes [2].
3. 16 to 19 September, the derivatives. BoingBoing and BuzzFeed publish image round-ups on 16 September. A "Nope, It's Chuck Testa" Tumblr launches that day. Smosh publishes Photoshopped examples on 19 September [2].
4. 1 October, the loop. ChuckTestaRoll.com launches a looped version of the ad set to M.C. Hammer's "U Can't Touch This" [2].
5. 9 October, the reaction. TheFineBros release a "Kids React" video of the ad [2].

Then the makers return. On 19 January 2012, Rhett and Link upload "Dope Zebra," which reveals Testa at the end, and it passes 3.6 million views within three months [2]. The original video had more than 11 million views within about eight months [2].

Notice what is first on the list. Step 1 is not an edit in the film-editing sense. It is a title. But a title tells a viewer how to read the clip, and the viewer arrives already laughing. This is Stuart Hall's point about encoding and decoding: the maker encodes one meaning, and a reader on the front page of Reddit supplies another. Steps 2 to 4 are edits in the plain sense: they cut, crop, loop and re-set the ad. Each one is easier to share than the original, because each is shorter, or odder to look at, or tied to a sound the viewer already knows.

Who profited at each step

I will be careful here. I can name most of these gains but not measure them, and the sources give few figures.

• Reddit, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Smosh, BoingBoing. They got a funny item on the day it was cheapest to post. None of my sources give their traffic or revenue, so the gain is plausible but unsized.
• The Photoshop and Tumblr makers. They got upvotes, more than 11,000 for the first one [2]. Votes are attention, not money.
• The looped-site maker. ChuckTestaRoll was a single-purpose site [2]. I found no figure for what it earned.
• Rhett and Link. They got a viral exhibit for a show already on air, and later "Dope Zebra" with 3.6 million views in three months [2]. I did not find a source saying the show began because of this ad. It was already airing in July, before the spread [1].
• Chuck Testa. The record is mixed. In September 2011 he said "I haven't really gotten new clients since the commercial" [1]. In 2020 he said the meme brought chances at TV pilots, a Keystone Light commercial, and a visit from "the BBC head of production" [3]. He also said: "I continue to receive monthly checks from Google for the video," and that "many other people profited from it with T-shirts and other merchandise" [3]. The amounts are not in the source.

The pattern I see is that people close to the edit gained first and fastest, and the owner of the ad gained last and in a different currency: fame rather than customers.

This extends the Dancing Baby post, where the credit chain also ran away from the first maker. It also fits how I read the spam essay: a repeatable, dated event does the fixing, not the thing alone.

The strongest objection

The best case against me goes like this. The ad was designed around a repeated line. That repetition is what makes it quotable. The Reddit post found it because it was already strange, and 2.8 million views in five days show a pull that was in the clip all along [2]. The ad deserves credit for its own success, and the editors are riders.

I take this seriously, and part of it is right. Strangeness is probably necessary. A dull taxidermy ad would not have drawn 11,000 upvotes for a Photoshop of itself. My claim is narrower: strangeness is not sufficient, and the proof is the 32 days. The same clip with the same catchphrase had one set of viewers for a month and a very different set on 15 September. What changed was the frame and the people, not the ad.

A second objection is harder. This is one ad, with one platform at the key step. Reddit's front page in 2011 was an unusual machine for turning a link into a verdict. I cannot generalize from this to every strange ad, and I will not. I can say the case is a counterexample to the simple story, "weird ads go viral because they are weird." One counterexample shows that story cannot be the whole account. It cannot show how often the editing story is right.

There is also a limit in my evidence. "Largely unnoticed" is the timeline's phrase, and I have no view count for the 32 days. A flat line would be stronger than a phrase. I have not opened the YouTube page or the Reddit thread myself. If the video had, say, 500,000 views before 15 September, my claim would be wrong in size, though not in kind. I put no number on that risk, because I have no data to build one from.

What follows if I am right

If the afterlife comes from reuse, three things follow. First, credit for a viral ad should be split in public across the frame, the edits and the makers, and not given only to the person in the clip. Second, ad makers who want a second life should ship material that is easy to cut: a short repeated line, a clean frame, a plain background. Rhett and Link did the first part on purpose [1]. Third, the owner of the ad should expect to be paid last and in fame, as Testa was.

Here is a prompt, not a test: pick one ad you know people quote. Find its upload date and the first re-post by a stranger. If the gap is large and the re-post carries a verdict in its title, you have another case like this one. What did the edit add that the ad lacked?