One of the most undoubtedly famous creators on any social media platform is 5-Minute Crafts and their ability to numb the brain of anyone who watches their content. With 72.3 million subscribers on YouTube, 44.9 million followers on Instagram, 105.98 million followers on Facebook, and 8.5 million followers on TikTok, it is no surprise that they have essentially dominated the internet. For example, I cannot scroll through TikTok for more than thirty minutes without 5-Minute Crafts videos popping up on my for you page. And I don’t even follow them!
However, 5-Minute Crafts is not famous for the reasons one might think they are. Although they post many “crafty” videos, their videos are rarely taken seriously and endlessly memed and ridiculed. The reason 5-Minute Crafts is such a running joke on the internet is because their videos usually portray a very obvious or ridiculously unnecessary solution, then turn around and call it a “craft” or “life hack”. For example, I remember once seeing a video where they took a spoon and were trying to eat cereal with the bottom of it, and the “life hack” was to take a hammer and hammer the bottom in so the bottom was concave. Essentially, they were explaining how a spoon works.
But the most ironic part of 5-Minute Crafts is that although their videos take no time or effort, the internet still goes nuts for them. They will spend hours watching their videos and laughing at them, reposting them with sarcastic comments, funny reactions, or even corrections as to how to obviously fix the problem at hand. It’s gotten to the point where absolutely no one can tell if their account is a joke or not, but it doesn’t even matter because most treat it like a joke.
The reason this accounts’ popularity is so important is because it perfectly encapsulates Gen-Z’s humor, and explains why this happens so often with other ridiculously stupid accounts. Gen-Z as a whole likes to take random things, isolate them, and then draw attention to or slightly alter them. For example, some of the most popular videos on TikTok are people taking a song and showing a picture that goes with a personal interpretation of the lyrics.
This, as a whole, sums up the 5-Minute Crafts account. People generally won’t laugh super hard at the intent behind the videos, but will rather cry laughing at videos of other people making jokes out of certain aspects of the video. Take the example I mentioned before; the only reason I know of that spoon video is because someone did a duet with that video, made their voice high pitched, and meticulously picked it apart.
People like to say that Gen-Z’s humor is broken. But contrary to popular belief, it’s not broken, just simply random and pointless.