Jay Smooth Embracing or Mocking Ze Frank?

Has it really been a year and a half since Ze Frank ended his daily video show? Um, yeah, it has. Hip-hop blogger and radio personality Jay Smooth has been grouped with Frank more than once since starting his video blog Ill Doctrine, but it’s only in his most recent video (titled Vlogging is Stupid) that Smooth has declared his intention to use his vlog for the purpose of “conversating” with his viewers — much like Ze’s stated mission to make his show “a conversation between the host and the viewers of the program” — as opposed to just making “hit shows.”

But Smooth’s “hit shows” have almost always included meta references to the world of web video, in a way that is itself conversational. There’s Yes We Can, The George Carlin Remix, which highlights the utterly inoffensive non-message and total lack of threat to anything posed by the original Will.I.Am. version. There’s Amy Winehouse and the Ethics of Clowning People, in which Smooth starts out mocking the singer by constructing a “duet” between the slurry chanteuse and Brak from Space Ghost, then sort of apologizes for making fun of Winehouse and explains his internal conflict over caring about the well-being of his fellow humans and knowing that people are more likely to watch and enjoy his videos if they’re making fun of other people. Smooth then finally concludes that it’s OK to make fun of Amy Winehouse for being apparently drugged up because she’s turned being apparently drugged up into an essential element of the marketing of her music.  (The exception to this rule is something like Ill Doctrine Campaign Exclusive, in which Bruce Willis’ head is replaced by Hillary Clinton’s in a scene from Pulp Fiction; it has no place in this argument, but it’s awesome.)

Vlogging is Stupid, which premiered on Sept. 1, seems sincere in terms of Smooth’s sentiment, but there’s something unsettling about its slavish similarities to Ze, from the mid-sentence jump cuts to the very idea of taking a turn towards “just turn[ing] on the camera to have a conversation.” Is Smooth’s pledge to not worry about making “hit shows” just another way of getting a hit show out of mocking hit shows?