A Tribute to Brilliance

(The following post is a speech I performed on March 21, 2007 for my Toastmasters club. It is limited to 5 minutes and was written in about an hour.)

I'd like to present a tribute to my favorite online personality: zeFrank.

He hit the web in a flash (pun intended) several years ago with a flash birthday invitation “How to Dance” he made for seventeen of his friends. Within days, it was forwarded to several million people. Ze followed that up with several more flash videos and small web toys until he started The Show on March 17, 2006.

Each three to five minute episode consisted of a close-up of zeFrank’s unblinking face talking directly into the camera with observations, songs, occasional games or challenges for his viewers, and videos of Ze’s silliness. The show was an instant hit.

His quirky sense of humor (a mix of dry sarcasm and earnest goofiness) and his ability to make extremely complicated subjects understandable won him thousands of daily viewers. The Show had a lot of running gags, including referring to viewers as “Sports Racers”, affectionately referencing “duckies” at any opportunity, "S-s-s-somethin' from the comments", “Ride the Fire-Eagle Danger Day” (Fridays), and following absurdist skits with the question "Are the new viewers gone yet?"

Not only did he make us laugh, he made us learn.

He taught us a lot about politics, including the complexities of the middle-eastern situation, how many times Bush’s administration completely changed their strategy (and stated that they hadn’t changed it at all), why the embargo on North Korea was only giving the rich more power, and exactly how many rights United States citizens had left

By no means were his topics low-hanging fruit.

In one episode he showed how deception in evolution could be used to explain, “given the complexities of the human brain, [how we developed] a conscious mind that could be so [incredibly] stupid?”

He encouraged us to follow through with our ideas because if we convince ourselves we don't have the time or resources to do them right, we’ll just glamorize them in our mind and never act on them. He warned us that we could get addicted to keeping those ideas like some kind of 'Brain Crack'.

Ze explained the theory that your brain has the ability to synthesize happiness to bring you back up to your baseline regardless of the circumstance that you find yourself stuck in; the stress and anxiety that you feel when you think that you have a choice does matter. It makes you less happy. He concluded by telling us to, “toss that receipt”.

He taught us how to “bust your cycle”, where you “take one aspect of your life that's more or less constant and purposely bust it” to “experience the world in a very different way” and get a sense of elation and new possibility.

The Show didn’t stop there either, ZeFrank constantly came up with vaguely on-topic short songs to go with some episodes. My favorite is “Hind-sight is 20/20”.

ZeFrank involved his viewers in lots of challenges, including the Earth Sandwich, the “I knows me some ugly MySpace showdown”, RunningFool’s “Human Baton” relay across the United States, the MySpace adoption program, the vacuum cleaner dress up, viewer-created song remixes and videos for Ray, and finally the "power move quack attack" where Sports Racers pitted their Power Moves against one another.

Sadly, Friday March 17^th was the final episode of The Show. ZeFrank closed most shows with the line, “this is ZeFrank thinking… so you don’t have to.” Well, as we say goodbye to one of the most beloved characters in the internet community, I guess we’re going to have to start thinking for ourselves.

The Final Episode