Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty
You are excused for not knowing who the Try Guys are. I will proudly admit to my own ignorance, minutes before being assigned this story. But there are millions more who have adored them—for years—to the point of white-hot obsession and, now, heartbreak.
The YouTube collective, featuring thirty-somethings Keith Habersberger, Ned Fulmer, Zach Kornfeld, and Eugene Lee Yang, came together in 2014. (They started making videos on BuzzFeed of all places, back when the site was still in the business of YouTube and meme content.) The group was designed to be an oppressively earnest, personality-driven content outfit. They specialized in the sort of soft-boy, Jackass-lite stunts designed to rake in oodles of clicks from passively online Facebook liberals—The Try Guys Experience Labor Contraction Simulations, The Try Guys Eat Everything At KFC, The Try Guys Sit Down With Beto O’Rourke—which thrived in the post-Trump cultural confusion.
While they split off from BuzzFeed in 2018 to go independent, the Try Guys’ tone didn’t change. In general, I think a good analog for their overall vibe is the way Joss Whedon sweatily performed his feminism in the mid-2000s. That comparison is going to become very apt, very soon.