Jamie Loftus’s Main Characters

The “Bed Intruder” song is an archetypal viral internet meme. First uploaded to YouTube in the summer of 2010, the video latched on to a notably incongruous moment in a local news segment about a serious incident — a home invasion and an attempted rape in a Huntsville, Alabama, low-income neighborhood — and turned it into a jaunty, upbeat season. If you were anywhere close to a computer monitor or television around that time, you might be familiar with the hook: “Hide your kids, hide your wife.” Those words came from Antoine Dodson, whose sister Kelly was the target of the break-in, and the song turned him into an overnight celebrity. Off the track’s virality, he went on to appear on morning shows, daytime TV talk shows, and even the BET Hip-Hop Awards. The song itself would appear on the Billboard 100, peaking at the 87th spot that year.

As we should be familiar with by now, online fame, let alone fame more broadly, tends to exhibit a flattening effect, and as “Bed Intruder” solidified into a canonical internet artifact, the full circumstances that produced the viral moment largely faded into the background. Meanwhile, the fact that the song’s popularity is grounded at least in part within a certain sense of gawking at Black poverty continues to leave a strange taste in the mouth. Yet that wasn’t quite a straightforward instance of internet virality purely screwing over its subject. Schmoyoho, the quartet of white creators that produced the song, structured the profit-sharing arrangement such that Dodson received an equal split of the money generated by the song’s virality. As a direct result, the phenomenon changed his, and the Dodsons’, life. (By the way, the people behind Schmoyoho — brothers Michael, Andrew, and Evan Gregory, along with Sarah Fullen — are still hard at work making things for the internet; you might’ve heard the Corn Kid song that popped off on TikTok not too long ago.)

All of which is to say, there was, and remains, a lot going on with the “Bed Intruder” as a digital artifact, a reminder that beneath any cultural moment, produced on the internet or otherwise, lies oodles of details worth parsing over.

Dodson, “Bed Intruder,” and everything that happened afterward serves as the opening story for Sixteenth Minute (of Fame), a new weekly series that comes from the writer, comedian, and podcaster Jamie Loftus. Responsible for some of the truly great limited audio series of the past few years (My Year in Mensa, Lolita Podcast, Ghost Church), and typically found co-hosting The Bechdel Cast with Caitlin Durante when she’s not performing stand-up or writing for television, this project sees Loftus revisiting “Main Characters of the Internet” from the past; that is, people who were once swept up by the heat of internet virality for one reason or another. Antoine Dodson, who nowadays goes by Kevin, features heavily in the first episode, where we hear him talk through his experience living through the cycle of viral fame and what happened to him after. He’s a complicated person, and true to form, Loftus gives him the space to speak from within his own complications. But Loftus, paying close attention to the unspoken context of the story, also repeatedly brings us back to a salient question: Where was Kelly in all this? She attends to that question in the second portion of the show’s premiere two-parter; I’ll leave you to check that out for yourself.

It’s a strong start for a podcast that originally came about as a secondary measure. Loftus had been working on another show that didn’t end up coming out (“for all these really stressful reasons,” she noted) when she and her producer, Sophie Rae Lichterman, started kicking around ideas for a lighter project. That’s when she started thinking about a show revisiting “Main Characters of the Internet,” though the premise struck her as too obvious; surely someone’s done this podcast before. Turns out, that’s not the case.

“There have been individual profiles,” she said. “But in terms of tracking people down and building out an empathetic portrait of internet anthropology, that hadn’t happened yet.” So, after a year waiting to see if anybody was going to pursue the idea, Loftus went ahead and did it herself. Dodson’s story was among the first that she was interested in pursuing; it also turned out to be among the first episodes that meaningfully came together for the show. But owing to Loftus’s own experience on the internet, there are plenty others on her target list. Among the subjects listeners should expect in the episodes to come: the Dress, the woman everyone yelled at for drinking coffee in her garden with her husband, the Black TikTok strike of 2021, curvy wife guy, that one guy who ate 400 rotisserie chickens. Also: “I was joking about this the other day, but the No. 1 request I get, and the episode I fear the most, is ‘Bean Dad.’ So I’m trying to avoid doing that for as long as the listener base will allow it.”

Between Sixteenth Minutes (of Fame) and The Lonely Island Podcast, we seem to be in a minor boom time for millennial internet micro-histories in podcasting. In theory, Loftus should have an ever-replenishing roster of targets, given the all-pervasive nature of the internet, but there’s something about the notion of an “Internet Main Character” that seems specifically bounded to the millennial and young Gen-X experience. After all, life on the internet today moves so quickly that characters come and go in the blink of an eye, so much so that there’s only so much time a person’s virality can be codified in collective memory. It’s not impossible to have “Main Characters” these days — see: Corn Kid once again, the online universe as curated by Rusty Foster’s Today in Tabs — but there’s just a different tenor to the ones who came out before, say, 2016. That’s my guestimation, anyway. I’m old.

It’s been a strange stretch for Loftus, as it has been for so many other people in the creative industries. She published a book last year, Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs, and had a blast staging a live tour around the release. “Seeing everyone come out for it, I couldn’t ask for more,” said Loftus. But she returned from her travels to an entertainment business rocked by overlapping Hollywood strikes, which ground a good deal of her work to a halt. Combined with everything that’s been happening in the podcast world, along with everything happening everywhere else, the past year or so hasn’t been the smoothest for a person in the business of making interesting stuff.

Nevertheless, she’s keeping busy. She recently finished her first novel — about “objective sexuals,” specifically an architect who cheats on her husband with the building she’s designing — that’s been in the works for about two years (“we’ll see if people are still publishing books,” she quipped), and she continues to poke around for opportunities to make the things she wants to make.

“It’s a weird time to be making anything. No one really knows what to do,” she said. “I feel tremendously lucky to still be working in podcasting with the amount of creative freedom I have. I’m still trying to find ways to discover new angles, feel excited, and have fun talking to people. Which is what I’m always wanting to do, and I’ll do it for as long as it’s allowed.”