Knife throwing and cheeseburger spinning: the agony and ecstasy of being a viral trickshot video star

The Guardian

3 days ago

For much of the month of June 2023, David and Daniel Hulett sat in their parents' basement in Virginia throwing five-cent coins in the air. First David would flip his nickel. Then Daniel would flip his nickel. They were trying to get the coins to land on their edge, an occurrence they knew was vanishingly improbable, but not impossible. This was their work.
After three or four days, doubts began to set in. 'When you've been doing it for so long, you're like: the next one has to be it!' says Daniel, 26, the elder and generally chirpier of the two. 'You get really optimistic. And then it doesn't happen and you feel like the world is ending. It's almost physically painful. You get messed up.'
The pair altered their grip. They tried different spins. They concluded perhaps a table tennis table wasn't the best landing surface – too bouncy – so they tried wood, a bathroom tile, two types of granite. For David, 24, the repeated failures hit particularly hard. 'I couldn't sleep,' he says. 'I would have dreams about flipping the nickel. You end up feeling like you're in a simulation. Like, what is real any more? What even am I?'
What David and Daniel are is professional trickshooters – better known to their 12.5 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook as the Hulett Brothers. They are among the most successful purveyors of an art that has long since transcended its pool hall origins to become wildly popular on short-form video platforms. Trickshots consist of people pulling off amazing, improbable, pointless feats in the disputed borderlands between luck and skill. Or, as Daniel says, 'We make up stupid games and try to beat them.'
There are certain common trickshot tropes – ping-pong ball golf shots, full court basketball throws, sliding iPhones across tabletops so they nestle perfectly into chargers – but the most successful performers have their own special niches. Mike Shields, AKA That'll Work, recent winner of the inaugural Trick Shot Championship, is a master of the Wii toss, throwing discs directly into the thin mouth of a Nintendo Wii. Turkish trickshooter Gamze May, 32, AKA @gmzmy, has a nice line in oud tricks. In one she plays a little riff on the lower strings of the instrument, then launches a cigarette into her mouth from the upper strings. Very cool.
Then there's Amanda Badertscher, a PE teacher from smalltown Georgia, who was recently invited on to America's Got Talent after a producer spotted her Instagram channel, @thetrickshotqueen, which mostly consists of her whacking basketballs into a net with a baseball bat from the other end of the court. And what is her singular talent, I ask her? 'If I had to narrow it down to one? I would say hitting crazy equipment with a baseball bat,' she tells me.
The Hulett Brothers are the quintessential all-rounders. They have kicked soccer balls into bins from 50 metres away; they have dropped pieces of paper from stepladders into the teeth of waiting shredders; they have thrown a plunger so it lands suction cup-down on a ping-pong table, then tossed a kitchen roll so it lands about the plunger's handle; and they are perhaps the best people in the world at throwing a red plastic cup so it stacks within another red plastic cup. What is consistent is their signature celebration: maniacal jumping, wild abandon and simultaneous cries of 'LET'S GO!'
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It was in November 2023 that they finally pulled off the nickel flip on what they estimate was the 70,000th attempt. Daniel made the winning toss. The coin flipped a couple of times, bounced, spun around and settled on its side on a piece of paper the brothers were now using as a landing surface. There is a split second of disbelief. Then scenes of primal, almost simian celebration as it dawns on them that they have finally done it. David looks like a man released from a cosmic burden.
Trickshots have become a huge business. In the algorithmically segmented world of short-form video, these brief and #oddlysatisfying clips of ordinary people accomplishing extraordinary things are one the closest things we have to a shared culture. The best of them transcend language, religion, culture, politics. They work as both sport and absurdist commentary on the futility of all human endeavour. Their appeal lies somewhere in the ratio between the laborious hours of toil that the trickshooters put in and the instant gratification they provide the viewer. They have wasted time, and now doth time waste us, to paraphrase Shakespeare's Richard II.
The unquestioned masters of the art are Dude Perfect, five frat house roommates from Texas A&M University. Their first viral video from 2009 consisted of one of their number, Tyler 'The Beard' Toney, scoring a series of nonchalant no-look basketball shots in his back yard and, crucially, not reacting – as if it were just a thing that happened every time he attempted it. Indeed, in the best of their videos, nonchalance is the salient feature, as these genial friends toss sliders on to feet, bread into toasters, keys on to hooks, as if life really were that satisfying. It's all in the editing. The troupe has now accumulated 17bn views, 60 million subscribers and enough cash to take their trickshots to insane extremes, including scoring a basket from the top of an 856-foot tower in Las Vegas. Earlier this year they announced they had received a $100m investment to create Dude Perfect World, a 'family friendly' entertainment resort complete with 330-foot trickshot tower.
Their most serious rivals – the Buster Keatons to their Charlie Chaplins – are Australian troupe How Ridiculous (14bn views, 23 million subscribers). The Perth-based trio have managed a mere 540-foot basketball throw, albeit blindfolded, backwards, from the top of the Luzzone dam in Switzerland. Like Dude Perfect, they are evangelical Christians and regularly thank Jesus for their success. Their website quotes Psalm 115:1: 'Not to us, LORD, not to us but to your name be the glory, because of your love and faithfulness.' Clearly, you need a lot of faith even to attempt to score a basket from the top of a dam – and nothing says thank you, Jesus, like dropping a bowling ball into some helicopter blades.
As budgets increase, accusations of AI fakery and green-screen shenanigans are never too far away – indeed, trickshot debunking videos are almost a genre in themselves. Still, in the case of Dude Perfect, no credible evidence has ever emerged that the videos are faked, despite 15 years' worth of internet sleuthing. Dude Perfect and How Ridiculous take pains to emphasise just how many failed attempts they make in their numerous behind-the-scenes videos; and in any case, is it really less effort to, say, render a convincing 3D digital model of a basketball flying across a court than it is to spend an afternoon patiently tossing one?
Still, the more high-budget the trickshots become, the farther they move from their back-yard roots. I find I prefer the shorter, less professional videos, the ones that retain the palpable sense of idle tomfoolery, of happenstance glory. Once when we were at uni, my friend Martin abruptly flicked a spliff at me from five metres across a room and I somehow caught it in the corner of my mouth and began smoking it in one smooth motion. Everyone immediately applauded and pronounced me king. Alas, it was not caught on camera, or I may have ended up in a different career. But we all hopefully experience one such moment in our lives.
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'Trickshots are just so relatable,' says Badertscher, who recently spent 16 days attempting to throw an American football over her house into an unseen basketball hoop. 'Really anyone could do them at any level. People see me in the back yard and they figure, oh, I could do that in my yard!'
This, it seems to me, is the basic stuff of the trickshot, the childhood instinct to play, to fiddle, to fool. 'I started doing this kind of thing when I was really young,' says Jacob Grégoire, a 25-year-old from Quebec, who counts 1.8 million followers on Instagram as @jacob_acrobat. 'Even when I was a small kid, I would do stuff like balancing my toothbrush on my nose. Maybe it's ADHD or something. If I have something in my hand, I'll throw it and catch it.'
Then there is the flash of sporting inspiration, when you notice a particular move that is pleasing to do, and ask: can I make a game out of this? In my favourite children's picture book – Russell Hoban's How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen – the young hero Tom discovers the fooling around that so irritates his Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong in fact endows him with the precise range of skills required to triumph over his intended punishers. 'Maybe that will teach you not to fool around with a boy who knows how to fool around,' Tom taunts the stricken Captain after defeating him at the made-up sports of womble, muck and sneedball. Many trickshooters have revelled in similar triumphs as they reveal to sceptical parents that their bottle-flipping and card-tossing actually brings in a decent income.
Turkish trickshooter Gamze May says she got right on her parents' nerves when she first started making trickshots during the Covid lockdowns, marooned at her family apartment in Istanbul. 'I was bouncing ping-pong balls on pans and it was making an annoying sound. My mum and dad would get angry. But it was entertainment for me.' They are fully on board now – her two hours of trickshot work a day supplement her income as a digital marketer. But their initial scepticism reminded her of the sort of disdain she experienced as a girl who always wanted to play with the boys. 'I was always running or playing football, basketball, every sport. I was playing console games. I still play console games. I would drive remote-control cars. My mum would be angry. Why are you playing with the boys?'
Her answer then and now is simple: 'It makes me happy. When I'm playing sport, I feel I am out of this world. It's like meditation. I have no stress. I don't think about problems. Maybe some people don't understand me, but I don't care when I'm making trickshot videos.'
There is always the odd dissenter underneath the videos: a commenter calling out the trickshooter as a fraud or a fluke. Anyone could manage this if they did this for five hours and 29 minutes. As is so often the case, the commenters miss the point.
For one, the trickshooters hardly lack skill. Mike 'That'll Work' Shields recently challenged 10 people with 'ordinary jobs' to best him at a series of trickshots, and prevailed in every single contest. Badertscher played college softball. May was the captain of the women's football team Bakırköyspor until she retired in January. 'Sports people can learn these things a bit easier,' she says. 'I spend lots of time practising and then I improve.'
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These are, however, 'super-strange skills', as David Hulett puts it. Over the hours of practice, you do become incrementally better at, say, tossing ping-pong balls so they play a tune on a series of carefully arranged pans, or dropping paper from a stepladder into a shredder. It was David who had the crucial insight that a small crease across the paper will attenuate the curve of the parabola on its descent, resulting in a greater probability of it sailing into the waiting shredder. Just as Dick Fosbury's flop at the 1968 Olympics changed the entire discipline of high-jumping, so a trickshooter can alter the history of their sport in a single afternoon.
But the real skill is the sisyphean determination, the patience, the faith that in the end, it will happen. Because it will happen. As long as you don't give up. 'We were always super competitive,' David Hulett says. 'Dan and I wanted to win whatever we were doing.' The trickshooter knows that they can make the sheer brute force of numbers crush the momentary fluctuations of skill. I am terrible at darts. But were I to throw tens of thousands of darts in the general direction of a dartboard, eventually, tearful with rage, starving, my entire family having abandoned me, I would score 180. All I would need to do is capture that one time on camera – then discard the 89,362 takes when I didn't do it. In this way, anyone can be Lionel Messi for 15 seconds. The cameraphone has democratised sport.
Still, as every child knows, the thing that takes the time is not the playing – it is the tidying up. It's a simple thing to sit there, throwing playing cards at a target. It's a total pain picking up thousands of cards. And then there are the tech fails. Once, after three or four hours, Gamze May managed to throw a card across the room so that it curled into the hairline crack between two dice. Beautiful. Only when she went to retrieve the footage, she realised her phone storage was full and the video had stopped recording. This is the bane of her life, in fact. 'My phone always has storage problems. It's still full. I always need to clear it.'
But these frustrations must be offset against the regular cadence of success that trickshooting provides. 'When I'm making videos – how can I describe the situation? It's like someone is whispering in my ear: you will do this. And I believe it and then it happens. I feel amazing. I feel like a bird. I'm flying. Maybe it seems silly to some people but it is like therapy for me.'
Trickshot culture has started to infiltrate other forms of performance, too. Grégoire started out his career as a professional acrobat, performing with troupes including Cirque du Soleil before a series of injuries made him question whether there was really much future in it. 'I have a herniated disc and a really bad knee. Acrobats have short careers.'
So Grégoire has taken his performances to social media, which offers him more autonomy and a more reliable revenue stream. He isn't sure what to call the hybrid form he purveys here. 'I started out throwing a knife into an apple. I'm now throwing a knife into an onion that's flying in the air and landing on a knife in my mouth. I've pushed it so far, I don't even know what it is any more,' he says. But although he exhibits amazing physical prowess, he still considers his videos trickshots. 'It's a combination of skill and luck. I have to do them many times.'
He sees this as a creative avenue opened up by social media; you couldn't attempt this sort of thing on stage as it would take too many tries to get right and the audience would boo. On the other hand, the minuscule attention spans of TikTok and Instagram Reels force him to be more inventive than he'd have to be on stage. 'People always want more on social media. On stage, you can build up a story. People are patient. On social media it needs to be good right away. People get bored so easily. Everyone is just scrolling, scrolling, so it really pushes me to find the most attractive, best thing immediately.'
It is a double-win, algorithmically, if you can not only snare someone's attention, but then get them to watch your 15-second video again. 'I think that's my strong point,' Grégoire says. 'The tricks are sometimes so complicated, people rewatch them three or four times to understand them.'
Indeed, some of the greatest trickshooters embrace the form's inherent dadaist absurdity. Videos of ping-pong golf jostle for attention with images of death and devastation in Gaza and Ukraine, and maybe offer some mordant commentary on them – just as the artists of the original Cabaret Voltaire embraced surrealism, chaos and non-meaning at the height of the annihilation of the first world war.
'You know, when I open my Instagram now, it's like crimes against humanity … trickshots … crimes against humanity … trickshots!' says Michael Rayner, 62, AKA @brokenjuggler, who makes delightfully weird trickshot videos in his Los Angeles front yard. 'I'm sort of here for all of it,' he says, arguing that what you see on short-form media is in some senses a truer reflection of reality than what you see on TV. 'America is a very violent country right now. I perform in a lot of immigrant communities and everyone is terrified of being snatched away by Ice. My videos are my own therapy but I also hope they give people some diversion in a harsh world.'
A professional entertainer, Rayner took to Instagram after all of his regular comedy club gigs were cancelled during the pandemic. These included routines that he has spent the best part of five decades honing: one involves him keeping a tennis racket aloft by batting it between two sticks; another involves him spinning a cheeseburger around a parasol. But he combines these with improbable trickshots. His signature move is throwing his daughter's Nicolas Cage cushion behind his head into a basketball net.
The fact that he performs all this deadpan, looking very much like some 'schlubby dad on his driveway', causes a large degree of cognitive dissonance in the comments section. 'Sometimes my videos are so fantastical that people assume it is fake. They think it's AI or green screen. That's the sad thing about reality now. Reality itself is thought of as fake.'
He's recently added voiceovers to his videos, framing his trickshots as a sort of religious rite. 'I was summoned by the oracle,' he intones on one. 'And to complete my mission, I had to make a Nicolas Cage basket while on a unicycle … ' In another he expresses gratitude for the fact that he gets to do this stuff for a living. 'Can you imagine? Some people have to have jobs where they sit behind a table and write on pieces of paper and hand those pieces of paper to someone else. But I am lucky. I am grateful. I am in charge.'
The Hulett brothers are certainly grateful. If they were not performing trickshots, they would be working in finance. 'That's what our majors were in college, so we've both gone in the opposite direction,' David says. Their father is a banker, their elder brother an accountant and their sister a financial analyst. 'I never thought I'd be in a creative job,' Daniel says. 'And I never thought I'd get to spend so much time with my brother.'
Still, this is a respectable career now. When they announced to their father that they intended to do this full-time, far from being disappointed, he asked for a business plan. 'Once we gave him the business plan and executed on it, he's always been very supportive. 'You're making money. You're happy. This is great.''
A successful video can bring in thousands of dollars a month but it's no sure thing. The nickel video, for example, bombed so badly that the brothers removed it from TikTok. This is why it's important to re-edit videos so they also work across Facebook, Instagram and YouTube – the better to hedge against algorithmic disruption – and to pursue branding deals, which they say account for 80% of their income. Their medium-term goal is to move into more lucrative longer-form YouTube content, but even now money is good enough that they can hire a warehouse and employ business managers and editors, meaning they can spend each afternoon doing what they do best: trickshooting.
On a normal day they will spend five or six hours tossing a Mentos mint into a Diet Coke bottle revolving on a bicycle wheel, or rolling soccer balls across ping-pong table obstacle courses – which makes it start to seem like a respectable time investment. Can any of us really say that we spend our working lives doing something more important?
Michael Rayner certainly sees it as time well spent. 'You know, I get a lot of private messages from people saying they were really sad today but then my videos did snap them out of it for a moment,' he says. 'I don't want to be grandiose but if I can bring a little bit of happiness to people suffering from mental illness, I'm happy with that.'