Collegiate Times

With all of the drama and attention surrounding the “Lance Diamond, Frat Star” video on YouTube, I have to say, I don’t really get it. I can’t seem to understand why this video is popular and even why he felt the need to post it in the first place. Maybe my sense of humor is just lacking, I don’t know.

The video wasn’t particularly hilarious, there were no incredible stunts, no demonstrations of incredible, undiscovered talent, and no one was saying anything horribly offensive or controversial. All this video consists of is a kind of funny, but naive and mistaken, college freshman acting like an idiot. But as college students, aren’t we used to that by now?

However, Lance Diamond did post the video and no one had the sense to ignore it. And it is only mildly popular. Before Lance made the video private, it had around 60,000 hits. That isn’t even in the same league as Rebecca Black’s video for her song “Friday,” which has millions.

Then, Anderson Cooper had to go and make what should have been a Virginia Tech fad national news by mocking Diamond’s video on a section of his show called “The RidicuList.” I understand the video was stupid, but really, was that necessary?

So, in light of the circumstances, I sincerely hope that Diamond and Cooper have learned their lesson, that being: Think before you speak (or post). Both Diamond and Cooper made some serious judgment mistakes in this situation, and they both could learn a lot from them.

Diamond made some pretty unreasonable, unsupported assertions in his video — most of them concerning his desire to sue Rainbow Shops and Sperry Top-Sider because his feet hurt after wearing their products. He also felt the need to assert his dad “runs the world,” and he had to miss class because he could not walk to get there. 

I will give him this — there were some funny portions of his video. His line about the fact that he could have gotten 120 McChicken sandwiches from McDonald’s for the amount money he spent on the shoes in question made me laugh. And his line about the ramen noodles his parents got him that he had to eat raw was pretty funny too — and he gets bonus points for eating raw ramen.

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A version of this article appeared in the Sep 23 issue of the Collegiate Times.