Report: The next two late-night hosts who could face axing
NBC officially declined to comment on the reported losses. But an insider told the Daily Mail that the three shows are actually losing closer to half that amount when taking into account revenue generated through sources like streaming and digital - though conceded they're still in the red. The news come days after CBS announced the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, amid reports his program was losing $40 million per year.
Many, including Colbert - a longtime critic of President Donald Trump - cited political motivations in the decision to pull the plug. But as the speculation swirls over CBS's decision, industry experts told the Daily Mail that NBC's silence on its own hosts' futures speaks volumes.
'They're letting the narrative take hold that Colbert was canceled purely for political reasons - and that works in their favor. It distracts from the financial bloodbath happening across the late-night industry,' said Rob Shuter, a veteran media columnist and author of Naughty But Nice.
' NBC isn't denying the $100 million [loss] because if everyone's talking about politics, they're not talking about whether these shows are even sustainable anymore.' Robert Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, agreed. 'NBC would want people to think that CBS canceled Colbert for political reasons, not viewership,' he said. After news of Colbert's cancellation emerged, the host called himself a 'martyr' and told Trump to 'Go [expletive] yourself' as the president gloated publicly over the decision.
Colbert had previously ripped the decision by CBS' parent company, Paramount Global, to pay Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit he filed over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris . The settlement was seen by many as a necessary move by the company to earn the Trump administration's approval of its $8 million merger with Skydance. Colbert more bluntly called it 'a big, fat bribe.'
Colbert's Late Show has drawn hundreds of thousands more viewers than his closest late-night competitor, ABC's Jimmy Kimmel, whose show has remained profitable when non-traditional TV advertising revenue is taken into account, a source told CNBC.
And while Kimmel and Meyers have been more aggressive in taking on Trump, Fallon has avoided the pile-on. 'If you're really making these deals Paramount are making, Colbert, Kimmel, and Meyers come off as a one-trick pony,' Thompson said.
'Fallon was the only one who didn't completely alter their brand to make fun of the president.' Shuter said Fallon's style could ultimately end up saving his skin - but not forever.
'Fallon didn't pivot hard into anti-Trump satire, and that may have bought him time. But let's be clear - this isn't about politics anymore. It's about money,' he said. 'The moment a format stops printing cash, the ideology behind it becomes a footnote.'
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Daily Mail
21 minutes ago
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Victory for attorneys who waved guns at BLM protesters as they are rewarded after five-year battle
The St. Louis couple who drew national attention in 2020 for pointing firearms at Black Lives Matter protesters outside their home has finally regained possession of one of those weapons after a years-long legal dispute. Mark and Patricia McCloskey, both attorneys, went viral during the summer of 2020 when they were seen armed on their front lawn as demonstrators passed through their private neighborhood. The couple said they felt threatened after protesters broke through a gate and ignored 'No Trespassing' signs displayed on their private street - no one was hurt in the instance. Now, five years after the viral spectacle, Mark posted a video to X showing himself collecting the AR-15 rifle from the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department as he was finally rewarded with the return of the firearm after the lengthy fight. He wrote: 'It only took 3 lawsuits, 2 trips to the Court of Appeals and 1,847 days, but I got my AR15 back!' 'We defended our home, were persecuted by the left, smeared by the press, and threatened with death, but we never backed down,' he added. The McCloskeys were initially charged with unlawful use of a weapon. They later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges in 2021 - Mark to fourth-degree assault and Patricia to second-degree harassment - and agreed to forfeit the weapons. However, the couple was pardoned by Missouri Governor Mike Parson shortly thereafter. In 2024, a Missouri appeals court approved the expungement of those misdemeanor convictions, and under state law, the ruling meant the offenses were effectively erased from the couple's records - paving the way for them to reclaim the confiscated firearms. 'That gun may have only been worth $1,500 or something, and it cost me a lot of time and a lot of effort to get it back, but you have to do that,' Mark told Fox News Digital. 'You have to let them know that you will never back down.' According to Mark, the AR-15 had been in the possession of St. Louis police, while Patricia's Bryco .380-caliber pistol was held by the St. Louis Sheriff's Department. He said he expects the pistol to be returned sometime next week. The firearms were initially ordered destroyed after the couple entered their guilty pleas. However, court proceedings later revealed that both weapons still existed. Mark sued in 2021 to get the guns back, but his request was denied multiple times. He eventually prevailed following the expungement ruling last month, which came despite opposition from city attorneys, who argued the couple still posed a threat and cited McCloskey's use of the incident in political advertisements during his unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign. He also noted that the protesters' statements addressed only perceived threats on the day of the incident, not any ongoing danger. Judge Joseph P. Whyte rejected those arguments, the Daily Mail previously reported, writing in his decision that the court was bound to rule based on the expungement statute and not on political grounds. He also noted that the protesters' statements addressed only perceived threats on the day of the incident, not any ongoing danger. The case drew national attention and political reaction at the time, with President Donald Trump and several Republican leaders expressing support for the St Louis natives. The couple later appeared in a video message during the 2020 Republican National Convention.
The Guardian
23 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Unmasked: the man behind one of the fastest growing far-right YouTube channels
The Guardian has identified the self-described 'national socialist' behind an openly extremist YouTube channel that in just over two months has accumulated 50,000 subscribers, seen more than 2.3m views, and likely made thousands of dollars from YouTube's revenue-sharing monetization program. Johnathan Christopher 'Chris' Booth, 37, lives in the unincorporated community of Coral, a part of Maple Valley Township in Michigan's Montcalm county, and is married to a senior local Republican official. Booth has published more than 70 YouTube videos since May on his Shameless Sperg account, whose graphic design elements feature stylized SS bolts. Titles of his videos – generally a recording of him delivering his views direct to camera – include: 'Why I Dislike Jews. It's not complicated', 'Black Crimes Matter: Never Relax' and 'Jews and FBI hate you and your free speech'. Typically the videos attract hundreds of comments from like-minded YouTube users. His channel has seen such remarkable success that it has drawn apparently baseless allegations from other far-right creators that he is a 'fed'. On an X account that frequently advertises his videos, his posts include antisemitic comments and in one response to a post about actor Jim Carrey he writes: 'All of them deserve rope. I advocate for national socialism though, under which idiots like this would not fare too well.' Despite YouTube's stated policies against hate speech and content that promotes violence against individuals or groups based on race, religion or other protected characteristics, Booth's channel appears to be monetized through the YouTube Partner Program. The channel displays ads and Booth has thanked subscribers for their financial support through the platform. YouTube's community guidelines explicitly prohibit content that 'promotes violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization'. A YouTube spokesperson said: 'Upon review, we terminated the channel for violating our community guidelines. Content that promotes violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on their ethnicity, nationality, race or religion is not allowed on YouTube.' According to YouTube, another account associated with Booth was terminated, and creators are no longer entitled to earn any revenue if their channel is terminated. The terminations happened after the Guardian reached out to YouTube with questions about Booth's activities. Also according to YouTube, content that promotes violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on their ethnicity, nationality, race or religion is not allowed on the platform. In the wake of the ban, Booth took to X to say that he would move his content to 'alt-tech' platforms such as Odysee. Booth is married to Meghyn 'Meg' Booth, the Republican treasurer of Maple Valley Township. Meg Booth has 'liked' several posts with extremist themes on Chris Booth's Facebook account with her personal account. Chris Booth's Facebook page also features extensive racist propaganda along with iconography often employed by neo-Nazis. The revelations raise questions about the extent to which YouTube, whose parent company Alphabet also owns Google, Waymo and other tech companies, has backslid on monitoring extremism on its platform. Jeff Tischauser, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), said Booth's operation across YouTube, X and merchandising platforms was a 'boilerplate Nazi grift'. 'He may be earning money from YouTube, as well as hawking these racist and antisemitic items on his website like cups and T-shirts,' Tischauser added. He said that YouTube is 'the premier site that these guys look to in order to expand their following and to make money off of that following'. The Guardian retrieved a Coral, Michigan, street address from EU-mandated General Product Safety Regulation compliance information on the Shameless Sperg merchandise page on the merchandising platform Printify. The property at that address is owned by Meg Booth, according to property records. Data brokers indicate that Chris Booth lives at the same address. Sites including show exterior views of the house at the property. The property's color and cladding match those visible in videos published to YouTube on 14 and 15 May. Chris Booth appears to have made some efforts to remove photographs of himself and other potentially identifying information from his own social media accounts and other online spaces. However, he is visible in 'shorts'-style videos posted by Meg Booth to Facebook. This video of Chris Booth depicts the same person visible in Shameless Sperg videos. The Guardian emailed both Chris and Meg Booth for comment. In an email, Meg Booth appeared to repudiate her husband's views. 'I am not involved in my husband's content or political views, and I do not share or support any form of racism, antisemitism, or hate speech,' she wrote, adding: 'My values are my own and are grounded in respect, inclusion, and service to the community.' Meg Booth concluded: 'As an elected official, I've always acted independently, with integrity, and in line with the expectations of my office. I respectfully decline further comment.' Chris Booth did not directly respond, but in the day after the email he took to X to reaffirm his views, including a post in which he wrote: 'I've come to believe fascists are born, not made. Discovering real fascism in my early thirties was like looking into a mirror and finally realizing why commies have called me a fascist for so long. They spotted it before I could, but then I wholeheartedly embraced it.' In his videos and on X, Booth explicitly embraces neo-Nazi ideology and promotes antisemitic conspiracy theories. On his Shameless Sperg X account, Booth writes: 'I am the Shameless Sperg, I am a National Socialist, and I do sperg rants here,' with a link to his YouTube channel. On the YouTube channel, he writes: 'This channel is a collection of sperg rants and commentary on the news & issues of the day, or whatever else is on my mind, from an autistically dissident and NS perspective.' 'Sperg', an abbreviation for Asperger syndrome, is used pejoratively in far-right circles for those whose obsessive and open extremism might put off normal people or draw unwanted attention. 'NS' is commonly used as an abbreviation for 'national socialist' in far-right circles. His videos almost all contain neo-Nazi perspectives, enunciating conspiratorial antisemitism, anti-Black racism and claims that white people are superior to all other races. In a June video titled 'There is no Anti-Semitism without Semitism', Booth states in relation to interwar Germany: 'Extreme sadism and humiliation towards Gentiles is a Jewish tradition … Now, you might begin to understand why, after 14 years of seeing their people tormented by the Jews, millions of Germans organized, gained political power and broke the chains of Jewish tyranny in Germany.' The video continues with Booth arguing that antisemitism is a just response to the behavior of Jews, and sarcastically dismisses the idea that it is 'just some ancient mental pathogen in the minds of the goyim, it just springs to life for no reason just to make things harder for the Jews'. In a July video, Booth defended recent attempts to create a whites-only community in Arkansas. He said: 'White people are allowed to congregate together without being accompanied by some fucking Black person or some Jew.' In another July video Booth said: 'Black people oppress themselves. I don't do it. I have no interest in it. I, you know, I just want them away from me. You know, I want them away from me, my community, my state, my country. I don't know. Just, I don't know, get the fuck away from me.' In a May video supporting Trump's program of allowing Afrikaner refugees into the country on the basis of a fictional 'white genocide' in South Africa, Booth said: 'You know, I'm hoping that they don't completely lose South Africa to the Black plague, but, um, but in any event, uh, things are going to fall apart for them and go shit sideways.' Tischauser, the SPLC analyst, said that the themes of Booth's videos mix 'crass racism, basic historic white power talking points' and 'pseudo-academic kind of takes on Black criminality or Black behavior'. Meg Booth, Chris Booth's wife, was in November elected as the treasurer of Maple Valley Township running as a Republican. Her public social media profile does not feature the kind of extremist messaging that Chris Booth offers on his platform, though she has interacted with posts on his Facebook account, which is also freighted with racist messaging and neo-Nazi imagery. Chris Booth also 'liked' posts in which his wife discussed her candidacy.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Knife throwing and cheeseburger spinning: the agony and ecstasy of being a viral trickshot video star
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!' This article includes content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. 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. This article includes content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. '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.' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion 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.'
