The greatest YouTube video ever made

It wasn't even really a YouTube video, which is part of why it's so great

All of social media arguably peaked on July 19, 2009. That was the day Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz posted their wedding procession video to YouTube. For many of us fortunate to have come of age before social media was ubiquitous with the Internet, the JK Wedding Entrance Dance was among the earliest “you have to check this out” videos we can remember on the platform. YouTube had launched three years before and there had already been a handful of shorts that made the rounds—Charlie Bit My Finger, the black people screaming about the leprechaun, the UF kid getting tased as John Kerry mumbled awkwardly on stage, the mini-mall thing—but the wedding video is probably the first one that most of us can recall sort of driving the news cycle for a bit. It was a full-fledged five-megapixel media sensation.

That was pretty much it for YouTube—everything has been downhill since then, and not the good kind of downhill. It’s not hard to figure out why. Like every other social media platform, YouTube is presently a vehicle not for interesting, entertaining and/or informative things to watch and read; it’s a vehicle for “viral content,” videos tailor-made to check a very short list of neurological buttons designed to trick your brain into thinking it desperately wants to consume a product. There’s a reason that the videos made by most YouTube “creators” all look the same, loaded with ugly garish primary colors and jarring right angles like a setpiece from a Tim Burton movie; there’s a reason that when you’re on the site you constantly see an endless thumbnail list featuring what the writer Joe Veix calls “YouTube Face;” there’s a reason you’re always, always half-certain that the latest viral video of some crazy hijinx or unbelievable situation is completely scripted and meticulously manufactured by someone with a ton of sponsor cash to blow. That’s what YouTube is now.

This is like 90% of YouTube now and it is truly, truly awful.

The JK Wedding Entrance Dance is not like that. It was not intended to be like that. The bridal party reportedly rehearsed the whole fantastic lineup for just ninety minutes the day before the wedding; many of them allegedly had to be cajoled into doing it. After it went viral, its creators confirmed that they never intended to upload it to YouTube; it was recorded just for kicks, and then after a few weeks the father of the bride asked the newlyweds to upload the video to this nascent new video-sharing service so that extended family could see it. That’s how you know this thing was old-school: Someone’s dad is responsible for getting it uploaded to the Internet just so that it could be shared with grandmothers and uncles. Nobody cared about ending up on Today or Good Morning America or getting an influencer deal or whatever. It was just a good time, captured for fun on a camcorder, then uploaded so that other people could watch it and experience a bit of the good time by proxy.

That sort of pre-TikTokian technological innocence is part of what makes the video so special—that kind of happy abandon is essentially nonexistent on today’s Internet—though the plainly unaffected fun and joy everyone had doing it is also part of it, too, right down to the bride gleefully dancing down the aisle to meet her groom on their wedding day, every inch a Shulamite, the five-minute feature essentially the Song of Songs set to Chris Brown. The obvious love and affection that informs the whole thing (if there were any doubt, it’s worth pointing out that the bride and groom are still married and have three children) is underscored by the fact that the two refused to try and execute any sort of awkward pivot from viral video stars to reality celebrities. They have revealed that they turned down “all sorts of offers” in the wake of their fame, including book deals and celebrity wedding invitations, propositions that surely would have earned them some quick, easy cash had they accepted. ("We made the decision to cut it off,” the bride laconically noted some years later). When he heard that Washington intended to return to his farm after the Revolution, King George III is reputed to have said: “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.” It is not easy to walk away from attention, celebrity, vogue, power, influence. Those things are profoundly alluring for obvious reasons. You can only really reject all of that if there’s something more appealing waiting for you at home, like, you know, a husband or wife who’s already making your life as good as it can possibly be.

Those days are past. Everyone, now, is performing for the algorithm; everyone is competing for the same lame, rotten scraps of scripted viral fame, and they are doing it by standing on the shoulders of the scant few unscripted giants that came before them. The JK Wedding Entrance Dance, then, is in effect both the source and the summit of YouTube’s dazzle and grandeur: It established the viral Internet video medium as a potent and affective genre, and it constituted what was effectively the apex of that genre, the last and greatest entry in the canon. I can recall, just a month or two after the video blew up, seeing a national network news report on a “new viral video” in which a mother and son did a highly complex, choreographed dance at the son’s wedding; I remember thinking, “Oh, they just saw the JK wedding video and they wanted to go viral too.” That’s really kind of how it’s been for the past 13 years.

All of which is to say, to those aspiring YouTube stars looking to upload the next great viral video: Don’t. Just stop. This is a cheap medium and its glory days have long since passed. Stop chasing after shares and clicks. If you want to find happiness, true and abiding happiness, do this: Go out, find someone to whom you’re attracted, get married, make lots of babies, and lead a good and simple and rewarding life. I promise you you’ll find more indelible joy and fulfillment in five minutes of that than you ever will in any amount of YouTube fame. Everything on social media has already been done before, but your own precious life remains a wonderfully open book. Don’t waste time slaving for the former.