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The (quite) good luck of Bad Luck Brian

 
Tampa Bay Times
Published Jan. 9, 2015

The phone call came at 4 a.m. on Jan. 24, 2012. He was very much asleep.

Ring ring. Ring ring.

Actually, it vibrated, and because this is a story about the Internet and the way technology can change our lives, it's important to get the sound right.

Vibrate vibrate. Vibrate vibrate.

Kyle Craven slept. In his bedroom in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, he was just a 22-year-old a few months away from college graduation, ready to work at his father's construction company.

Vibrate vibrate. Vibrate vibrate.

The call went to voice mail. "Dude," his friend said, in the message Kyle would listen to the next morning, "I just made you Internet-famous."

• • •

Two years and eleven months later, Kyle is in bed again, missing a call. This time, it's from me.

As I have told many people, Kyle went to my high school. Or, as I explain it when I tell the story, Bad Luck Brian went to my high school.

If I get a blank stare in return, I pull out my phone and Google his picture. An Internet-famous face appears. It's a blond kid wearing a light blue polo shirt under a hideous red sweater vest, giving off the goofiest, braces-laced smile. Above and below his head are the large white block letters that turn the silly photo into a meme — a sort of one-panel cartoon in which the caption is rewritten over and over.

He is Bad Luck Brian. The way the meme Grumpy Cat is a symbol for being out of sorts, Kyle-as-Brian became a symbol for a stroke of hilarious bad luck:

"Goes surfing for the first time . . . hurricane."

"Receives note from crush . . . restraining order."

"Builds courage to send naked picture . . . sends to mom."

The first meme was posted to Reddit by Kyle's friend, Ian Davies. He took Kyle's ridiculous school photo, named it Bad Luck Brian (catchier than Bad Luck Kyle) and wrote "Takes driving test . . . gets first DUI."

For reasons they will never know, the meme took off. Before long, Bad Luck Brian was an Internet sensation. His face appeared on Facebook, blogs and advertisements. T-shirts with his photo were sold at Walmart and Hot Topic. Companies made Bad Luck Brian paperweights and Bad Luck Brian stuffed animals.

For three years, Kyle has been able to capitalize on his unexpected fame. On the Internet, three years is a long time. It's enough time to let something become part of your identity — even when the online fame begins to fade.

We're supposed to meet the day after Christmas, so I call him on the 24th to check in.

No answer.

The next day, he texts to say that he has the flu and had spent all day in bed. "Just my luck," he wrote.

• • •

Once he's feeling a little better, we meet at his house. From a bottom shelf, he pulls out a 2005-06 yearbook and flips to the black-and-white photos of the junior class. In the left corner of one page, there are two identical photos of Kyle. Neither has the goofy smile.

"Picture days were always fun days for me," he explains. He went to a thrift store to buy a plaid sweater vest. He went to the gym to line up for his photo. He rubbed his face to make it all red, squinted his eyes, puffed out his jaw and took what he thought was a pure genius photo.

The principal did not agree. The day the photos came out, she came up to him and said, "Picture retake day is tomorrow."

She knew the photo was a joke, as Kyle was a class clown. He purposefully butchered a rendition of Hanson's MMMBop at the talent show. He unwrapped packets of butter and threw them on the ceiling tiles of the cafeteria, so they would stick for a little while and fall into the hair of unsuspecting freshmen in the next lunch period.

"He was always kind of crazy," Ian Davies says.

Kyle and Ian scanned the ridiculous photo and saved it on their computers. Kyle went to retakes the next day. In retaliation, he convinced someone on the yearbook staff to put his photo on the page twice.

Today, his hair is shorter and the braces are gone. That's why it doesn't bother him that the Internet is making fun of his face. The awkwardness of the photo was intentional. Without contorting his jawline and his eyes, he's just Kyle. He rarely gets recognized by strangers.

The people who enjoy Bad Luck Brian on the Internet don't seem to mind. At conferences such as VidCon and Indy Pop Con, he takes photos with fans, and they tell him things like, "When my grandpa was really sick, I always looked at Bad Luck Brian photos to make me laugh." They thank him, as if he were the one writing and posting the memes.

He has been asked to let people use his photo for advertisements in Germany, Chile, Poland and Puerto Rico. Here, he has been part of ad campaigns for Volkswagen and RealPlayer. He estimates he's made between $15,000 and $20,000 off Bad Luck Brian in three years. "Not bad for doing basically nothing," he says.

At his real job, Kyle, now 25, tries to keep Bad Luck Brian out of it. Brian is the kind of guy who: "Plans his own birthday party . . . isn't invited." Kyle is the guy whose job is to build churches. That's what his father's construction company does. Kyle's a project manager, so he oversees the moving parts on building sites.

After a day at a half-finished church, he goes home and writes things he needs to do on the dry-erase boards in his office. And when his work is done, he gets on Reddit. If he scrolls for long enough, he always comes across the other version of himself.

• • •

There's no set course of action for what to do when a years-old picture of you gets mocked by millions of strangers. "My parents' reaction was, 'We've got to get them to take it down.' I had to explain it's not gonna work like that," said Griffin Kiritsy, the face of the College Freshman meme.

Kiritsy was photographed for a 2007 Reader's Digest story about technology use. In 2011, the photo of him wearing a backpack and a University of New Hampshire hoodie went viral with text overlays such as: "Puts dirty dishes in the sink . . . shocked to find them still there in the morning," and, "Takes one political science class . . . knows how to solve the world's problems."

Bad Luck Brian's course was inspired by the meme Overly Attached Girlfriend, which features a brunette named Laina Morris in a green shirt with her eyes bugging out. The meme was born out of a Justin Bieber parody video.

Morris, who has used her meme fame to try to find further web stardom, now has 1.2 million subscribers to her YouTube channel. One of her videos is "Overly Attached Girlfriend Meets Bad Luck Brian." Morris paid Kyle to fly out to Los Angeles and star in the video, where the two memes go on a date together. Another YouTube star, one of the Brothers Riedell, also appeared.

"They were telling me about how much money you can make off YouTube," Kyle said.

With the help of friends, he made videos that played out some of the most popular Bad Luck Brian memes, such as, "Doesn't forward a chain e-mail . . . dies." The first three videos got more than 150,000 views. The next eight didn't break 45,000. The monthly checks with his YouTube revenue were rarely more than $100.

The videos slowed down. His job building churches picked up. He got married. After a year, he stopped making videos almost entirely.

But as long as people keep sharing the picture, he'll keep encouraging it. "It's something to show my grandkids one day, right?" he said.