Brad Baudray is mad at the Internet.
Better known as Scumbag Dad, Podray is a comedian who has channeled his seemingly boundless creative energy into nearly every form of media. He has done short videos, long videos, music, cooking shows, and even dentistry.
The videos, from which Podray gets his pseudonym from the series Scumbag Dad, give a first-person look at a child of the worst dad in the world. Under the guise of spending family days abroad, the scumbag father, played by Baudray, makes his son an accomplice in drug deals, human trafficking, and murder.
The videos are awesome and very funny. But his relentless approach to Scumbag Dad never paid off. Apparently, social networking sites like Tik TokAnd YouTube and Instagram don’t help creators and prefer slow work.
bucking directions
“I see people with little or no creative skills who are willing to lie and acquire large platforms for their dishonest content,” says Baudray.
Podray is annoyed by the lack of work other creators put into fake content, and that only motivation is to increase views and potential earnings. Realizing that he shouldn’t look like a gift in his mouth, he sticks to the same kind of mindless content.
To see how little work people put into reaction videos—videos in which people overlay their interaction with someone else’s content—Podray began experimenting with reaction videos.
“I’m a little stupid for doing that,” says Baudray.
To clarify, Podray’s attempt at reaction is a satire of hypothesis metaphysics. He will film himself interacting with a video. But it’s not a video. It just happens to be next to him and is being filmed by a second camera. Then, the “original” video would come out and Podray and the other content creator would get into a fight. All of this was captured by a third camera.
sounds puzzling? It makes more sense in motion and speaks to Podray’s tireless approach to creativity.
Even when criticizing someone else’s lazy content, anything with less than three cameras, a big narrative, and sudden, inexplicable violence simply won’t do it.
But this is just the beginning of Podray’s world of satire.
Another style of video he likes to poke fun at is ‘Rich Vs. Really Rich series. In these videos, the rich man is usually shown to be rude to someone in customer service, only for a very rich man to shower him with kindness.
“When someone creates a trend or a series like this, what they’re doing is they’re creating their own world, where, like, every day the rich guy you know gets insulted by the really rich guy because they don’t understand kindness,” says Baudray.
“I tried to explore, for example, what other elements of this trend are like this world,” he adds.
While the original creators of this series maintain their scripts, Podray is transforming. In recent editions of his Rich Vs. Really Rich skits begin to make his rich persona question the reality in which he lives.
“Have we done this before?” We’re at Rich Vs. Simulate a really rich person,” Baudray asks himself in one video.
Browsing through Podray’s feeds, there are almost endless examples of him following various internet trends and finding ways to break them.
Are any of the original creators bothered with him for doing this?
We’ve had contact at this point. Baudray said when I asked him about Nicholas Crown, the original creator of Rich Vs. Really rich series.
Fight against Internet manipulation
What frustrates Baudray most are tendencies that turn acts of kindness into a business, or lies to viewers to sell a product.
“A lot of Internet users are fairly young and somewhat impressionable,” he says. “I really have a lot of aversions to all the easy saccharine content that gets posted on YouTube. I hate the idea that morality should be rewarded.”
Podray refers to videos in which the creators ask strangers for money and then reward these strangers with huge sums of money.
“On a superficial level, it’s a nice story because they were charitable and rewarding. But they forgot that this is the exception to this situation. In a way, it’s a bad shame.”
To satirize these types of videos, Podray has made equivalents with his own dark twists. In one, the charitable person is not rewarded with money but with a used needle. In another film, Podray poses as a homeless man available to use in other people’s TikTok videos for leverage.
Podray demonstrated how easy it is to create manipulative content with an experiment he conducted at Drake University. Satiating charity videos of people going to strangers and offering them money or the option to double the amount and offer it to the next person, he recruited students to participate in a fake version of the video.
He claimed to the students that although the video was shot semi-obviously, it would collect views. He was right. The video has over 3 million views on TikTok.
The real dad behind Scumbag Dad
Using his humor to break up trends wasn’t where Baudray expected him to be in life. By almost any measure, it’s not typical Internet influencer.
In his forties, Baudray lives in Iowa with his wife Hannah and young child and works full time as an orthodontist. His career in comedy began when he formed the pirate rap band Captain Dan and The Scurvy Crew with his best friend from dental school.
After a few years of growing success with the band, the band went on to America’s Got Talent. It was seeing how staged and manipulative reality TV was that Podray initially began to question the industry. A failed bid for Masterchef followed and Podray is now committed to his career in comedy and music.
He has since released around 40 albums and his videos have scored millions of songs. And while he’s gaining more and more followers with his parodies, his heart doesn’t really lie in wait.
The true essence of what Baudray is all about is his own scumbag dad a series. For years, he worked on a long Scumbag Dad narrative as his actions slowly unravel over his innocent child.
But before he could complete the narrative arc, he had mysteriously plotted his Scumbag Dad persona, his content began getting banned from platforms and his channels demonized.
“I was really building a message and I just couldn’t make it happen,” Baudray sighed. “I started blocking all the time. So I had to cut the series.”
Any use of blood or violence will delete the video. References to the drug must be completely skewed so that its content is not removed. Baudray realized that the platforms through which he had grown famous were no longer willing to accommodate his dark creativity.
Using multiple locations, intricate stories and a plethora of acting, Scumbag Dad was by far Podray’s most involved series. He’s the one I love the most too, relishing the chance to film silly plots with his friends.
He still makes Scumbag Dad videos, but they no longer appear as part of a longer story in the same way. It’s Podray’s passion project, but for now, making his version of “easy” content is what’s getting views. It’s Podray’s Scumbag Dad origin story.
Originally posted 2022-12-17 14:18:46.