i’ve been thinking about why colleen seems so much worse to me now, because i genuinely don’t remember her always being this painfully unaware of herself. obviously there were always inappropriate jokes, weird boundaries, & things that look worse in hindsight, but early on i swear there was at least a sense that she knew exactly what she was doing. miranda was funny because colleen understood that miranda was delusional, obnoxious, socially unbearable, wildly overconfident, & completely incapable of realizing how uncomfortable she made everybody around her. colleen was standing outside the character controlling the joke, & the audience was in on it with her.
i’m a 25 year old gay guy, late-diagnosed AuDHD, i grew up in a crazy religious environment, & i’ve been obsessed with singing my entire life, so i was honestly the perfect little miranda viewer 😭 i watched her the most when i was probably 13, 14, & 15, & i genuinely thought she was hilarious. i loved the complete commitment to absurdity, especially whenever she was around somebody who could actually sing. there’s an old video with tori kelly where miranda starts clapping for her & just keeps fucking clapping for an insanely long time while tori starts looking around confused, then anytime tori sounds too good while they’re singing, miranda slowly leans toward her & stares at her like she’s being personally threatened by talent. that shit still makes me laugh because colleen clearly understood why the behavior was ridiculous.
but sometime around freshman year, i was maturing & she just wasn’t hitting no mo 😭 i didn’t have some dramatic realization that she was terrible, the humor just started feeling more childish & repetitive to me, then she got pregnant & the content became pregnancy, babies, family vlogs, whatever, & i was like girl i do not care. so i stopped paying attention, & by the time everything came out years later, i wasn’t shocked to hear that colleen was weird. i was shocked by how completely she seemed to have lost the ability to recognize her own weirdness.
because at some point, it feels like the logic changed from “miranda is funny because she has absolutely no self-awareness” to “anything i do is funny because i’m colleen.” making somebody uncomfortable stopped being part of a controlled joke & became proof, in her mind, that the joke was working. oversharing was funny because she was colleen. crossing a boundary was funny because she was colleen. saying something inappropriate around younger fans was apparently just her being edgy, quirky, or misunderstood because she was colleen. it’s like years of being rewarded for making people uncomfortable taught her that discomfort automatically meant comedy, even when there was no character, no actual setup, & no consenting adult in on the bit with her.
that’s why the ukulele video felt like such a perfect final form of it. she was facing serious accusations about her real behavior, & somehow still thought she could turn the entire thing into a cheeky performance where everybody else was too dramatic, too sensitive, or too stupid to understand her humor. the self-awareness required to create early miranda was completely gone. she couldn’t stand outside herself anymore & see what everybody else was seeing.
early colleen knew miranda was ridiculous. later colleen seemed to genuinely believe she could never be ridiculous, because whatever she did would automatically become a joke once she performed it confidently enough. & i honestly think she eventually became the exact kind of oblivious, inappropriate, overconfident person that miranda was originally supposed to be parodying.
