YouTube "Storytime" Clickbait Parodies

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About

YouTube "Storytime" Clickbait Parodies refers to a series of jokes and photoshops made to mock YouTube celebrities who make "StoryTime" videos, which feature YouTubers telling a dramatic story about their lives to the camera. In the jokes, posters make it appear as though the YouTubers embellish the stories about their lives in order to make content with dramatic clickbait titles.

Precursor

The style of the photoshop jokes is similar to Top 10 Anime List Parodies, in which photoshops made to looks like screenshots of YouTube videos pair still images with outlandish titles.

Origin

A typical "Storytime" video will feature a YouTuber telling a story about a dramatic experience in their life, such as "MURDERER AT SCHOOL | STORYTIME" (shown below), or "MY HAUNTED HOUSE STORYTIME | PARANORMAL ACTIVITY CAUGHT ON CAMERA + EVP."^[1]

Videos like these have been the target of mockery due to their dramatic nature and people doubting the veracity of the titles. One of the earliest known examples of a joke at "StoryTime" videos' expense came on October 8th, 2016, by Twitter user @drewistru,^[2] whose tweet has gained over 800 retweets and 1,700 likes as of December 20th (shown below).

Spread

Two months after @drewistru's tweet, the joke format began to spread in the middle of December, as more people began taking screengrabs of StoryTime videos and adding their own captions. The spread of the jokes on Twitter led to articles from Smosh,^[3] SelectAll,^[4] and Buzzfeed.^[5]