Thomas Ridgewell -- better known as YouTube comedy creator TomSka -- used to suck. "I started doing comics, but I couldn't draw," says Ridgewell. "I wasn't talented enough to match the perfectionist inside me, so I just had to keep it really minimalist. I'm not made for the art life. I'm too impatient. And talentless." (His message for aspiring filmmakers? You suck, too.)
The funny thing? TomSka's self-confessed rudimentary art style, paired with his off-kilter comedy, took off -- the first "ASDF Movie", which premiered in 2007, now has more than 50 million views. Ridgewell's comedy channel, which marries animation and live comedy, is now one of the most successful on YouTube, with more than 3.8 million subscribers.
Now, he's revisiting the series that kicked off his success with a book,Art Is Dead (out now). To mark its release, and his appearance at WIRED 2015: Next Generation, TomSka sat down with WIRED to discuss its genesis, his creative process, and YouTube's growing influence on mainstream media.
**WIRED: How did the book happen?**TomSka: It's all the rage to do books with YouTubers now, isn't it? So naturally I just found myself in one of those meetings. And it was sort of: what could you offer to the world of literature? The ASDF animations were originally comics, so I thought: what if I brought that back? That would be an opportunity to do something actually artistically viable, in a sense.
**The comics go back to the beginning of TomSka.**Yeah. It was about the turn of the millennium when I first saw a flash animation online. That was my moment of realization of what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I didn't really watch TV, I didn't care about movies, I just wanted to make videos for the internet.
So I started making animations in Microsoft Powerpoint (because apparently that's how I thought it was done back then) then I started doing Flash, then video sharing kicked off around 2005. But I'd had almost a decade of prior knowledge of what kind of humour worked online, so I was equipped to take a lot of these jokes and do the first “ASDF Movie", which kicked things off.
What**'s challenging about doing a book vs doing video?**One of the weird things about the book is that I've never felt more of an artist than with this book. I actually feel like I'm proud of myself for writing. And I guess the one thing that makes the book art to me is the lack of compromise. I've actually been able to make the jokes I want to make. I reel myself back a little bit, but there's some really intense stuff in there.
There**'s a couple of suicide jokes.**Oh, there's plenty of suicide jokes. I love suicide jokes. But to me, that makes it something to be proud of.
**Do people react to that? Do people call you out?**I'm always adapting to people's opinions, and to getting called out. I've had to draw a bit of a line. But the way I see it is I should be able to justify every creative comedic decision I do or make. One of the ways I do that is I look at everything I do and say, I ask myself two questions. Would Jesus make this child molester joke? No: the first is ‘what is the message I'm sending out here?' Is it going to reinforce any negative stereotypes, is it going to encourage bullying, is it going to belittle the suffering of a person? And two: what would the effect of people replicating this idea or joke be?
**What does a working day look like, and how has that changed?**I really haven't matured at all. I don't know what a working day looks like, because they're all completely different. I run my own company, so I make sure I don't start until 10. But sometimes I won't start until a couple of hours late, but I'll be working until midnight. It's madness. But the ideas come when the ideas come. The only time I've written really really bad stuff is when I've forced myself to work, when there wasn't anything there. Sometimes I'll write my most successful joke of the year on the train or on the toilet or something. I'm always on. That's the unifying factor. I don't know what relaxing is. I don't relax, I just procrastinate.
A lot of the discussion of YouTubers revolves around Vloggers and screaming teenage fans. How is it to run a business, and be a creator, when a lot of the dialogue around**‘YouTubers****' is that?**The mainstream media is still distracted by a lot of factors, like ‘Ooh, Beatlemania!' And ‘you can make money out of your bedroom!?' That's the oldest profession, that's always been true. [Laughs] One of the biggest problems is there's this desire to put a YouTuber in a box, where that's like saying “What does a TVer get up to?" You have YouTubers who are closer to a mainstream idea of a celebrity, where they are doing appearances and make-up lines, but then you also have narrative content creators.
It's hard to say what binds them all. The terror of becoming irrelevant -- I'd say that's it, because we are slaves to the algorithm and the numbers. All it takes is one bad video or a month off, maybe, and suddenly you are forgotten. So that's scary. I've seen so many people disappear. I'm one of the few YouTubers, at least in the UK, who has been going since 2007. There's only a few of us left, to be honest. It's this weird thing. And the more it happens, the more you're like: when's it going to be me? So that's nerve racking.
**How do you not out about that?**I'm always freaking out. I'm never not freaking out.
Since 2013 when WIRED did a cover story with you and other UK creators, we**'ve seen web series like High Maintance getting picked up by HBO, *Broad City...*****How has the conversation between YouTube and mainstream media changed?**I think it's very validating whenever the industry bleeds through to other mediums, because it means we can't be ignored any more. When YouTubers get trashy magazines like Oh My Vlog! or something, I think that's brilliant, because it's validating the industry. It's saying: this is enough of a thing that we're going to sell a magazine about these things. And when people are doing movies and evolving into huge stuff, it shows that we're kind of awesome. Or it's awesome. And the book -- the fact we can wind up in bookshops is a bit mad.
It**'s interesting that a lot of creators still aspire to movies or TV.**I mean, traditional media does have a lot to offer. It has an amazing array of talent -- not just your friends who did drama in secondary school. And they have budgets. Unless we're doing a branded sponsored deal, I do things out of my own pocket -- and I'm running a loss at about 80 percent of my content, because I need to keep the channel afloat and alive. I never wanted to do the traditional media thing. I've always turned my nose up at TV, because it's always ‘we want to put TomSka the YouTuber on TV'. I don't want that: I want Thomas Ridgewell the writer to be writing a TV show.
**What'****s the future for you?**I'd like to do another book, based on the things which work on my second YouTube channel -- me being more open, giving advice. Warning people: don't be like me! I'd like to host a radio show. It would be the TomSka show -- it would be ska music.
**We'****d listen to that.**I'd be telling jokes and listening to Ska music. I wanted to do that on Radio 1, but apparently it's “not mainstream". It's not. It's dead. It's a completely dead genre.
Art Is Dead: The ASDF book by Thomas*“TomSka**" Ridgewell (Sphere) is out now.*
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
