The first Jenna Marbles YouTube video I watched was her first video to go viral: How To Trick People Into Thinking You’re Good Looking.
Jenna, her bleached blonde hair a mess and smeared in fake tan, tells the audience if they were born really ugly, like her, there are steps they can take to be good looking. Kind of.
YouTube was a very different platform in 2010, when this video was uploaded. The most popular videos at the time were comedy sketches, parodies, music videos and just general humour. One of the top videos that year was the viral Double Rainbow.
I was not an avid YouTube viewer. Like many others at the time, I was mostly using YouTube to watch videos shared by others. I watched the How To Trick People video after my sister showed it to me.
“I think you’ll find her really funny,” I remember her saying at the time.
The video had everything that would go on to make Jenna Marbles popular — jokes at her own expense, a weirdness that you couldn’t explain and an authenticity that could not be faked.
I kept watching her videos, usually when I was bored or was avoiding uni work. She posted a mixture of sketches, vlogs, stories, rants or just her sharing her thoughts about something. The videos usually featured her dog Marbles (the namesake of the channel), and later her Italian Greyhound Kermit.
Jenna was the ultimate cool girl; funny and approachable. She made no apologies for caring about superficial things like her hair, fake tan and makeup, but was also the best at making fun of herself and girls like her. She cared about what she looked like, but she was always willing to show herself unkempt and unmade-up for a video.
Sometimes she appeared on camera in pristine condition, hair and makeup immaculate. Other times she would have her glasses on, skin makeup-free and hair a mess.
She was genuine and real. But she was also entertaining and weird.
The authenticity and entertainment value started paying off. In 2013 she was the second most popular YouTuber. The New York Times ran a profile on her, calling her the most famous person you’ve never heard of.
I was watching her videos more regularly. Some of my favourites were her drunk activities; drunk painting, drunk makeup tutorials, drunk Christmas tree decorating. I loved all videos of her dogs, whether they were finger painting or she was showing how to mildly annoy them. She started reviewing bad apps and showing how much she sucked at video games.
Mashed in with her parodies, rants, songs and skits, her real life was put on display.
I watched her awkwardly hug her ex-boyfriend, drunk, as they told the audience they were still friends despite breaking up. I saw her draw her life, going through her journey to find out what she wanted to do. I watched as she slowly brought her new boyfriend, now fiancé, into her videos, eventually chastising the audience who did not want to accept him. She bought a mansion. She adopted a greyhound. She uploaded and then removed a video about adopting a fish, after her audience told her the tank was not good for it. She followed this up with a 40-minute apology video.
Through her videos, I watched Jenna go through her 20s and then the beginning of her 30s. She was still immature and entertaining, but her content changed. She stopped posting rants and did fewer skits and parodies. Her channel became the home of wholesome content, at least for me. She transformed herself into her dog; she turned herself into a chair; she dressed up as a toothbrush for halloween; she bought her dogs everything they touched.
While she posted weekly, I was only ever watching her videos at random intervals, usually binging them every month or so. But in 2017 I started waiting for her weekly uploads.
I thought that other YouTubers were starting to grow stale, but tp me, her videos were only getting better. She was still her same, authentic self, and had seemed to settle into her weirdness. She was older but embraced it, often reminding the audience through song that she was a thirty-three year old lady.
Suddenly, 2020 happened. In my country, Australia, we were still recovering from a horrific bushfire season. The pandemic was in full swing and most countries were in lockdown. In the US, mask-wearing protesters took to the streets in droves following the murder of George Floyd. Race and the plight of non-white people were the global topics of conversation.
I logged into Twitter and was surprised to see Jenna Marbles trending. Thinking it must be a new video I missed, I checked the tweets. Jenna Marbles announced she was quitting YouTube over blackface and racism allegations. I was shocked. Jenna Marbles racist? It didn’t make any sense.
I watched the announcement video in full (she has now removed the video). She spoke about a few past instances that she had been called out on. One was a parody of Nicki Minaj, and while she showed screenshots to prove she did not wear any dark makeup to do “blackface”, she accepted people were upset about it. There was another joke in a rap about Asians. She also addressed her own internalised misogyny in an old video discussing sluts, a video I remember watching.
She hid any videos she thought could cause upset. This included past parodies, old skits, and every “things girls or boys do” videos so as not to promote gender stereotypes. I realised, selfishly, that my favourite video of hers, “What girls do in the car”, would now be hidden.
I am not one to care too much about celebrities. I have actors and musicians I like, but have never fallen into the “Stan” category. I can watch celebrities come and go without as much as a sideways glance. But losing Jenna hit hard. I did not know how much I was relying on her regular videos for comfort, for reassurance.
I scoured the Internet for any mention of her. Any indication of when she might be back. But I found nothing. When I realised she was really gone, I cried. And I felt shame. Between the bushfires, the pandemic and riots following George Floyd, it already felt like the world was falling apart. So why did I feel the worst about Jenna leaving the Internet?
My reaction surprised myself. I had never had an obsession with Jenna and never really thought about her too much. But she posted a video almost every week for ten years. And I’d come to rely on that without realising it.
She was four years my senior and I watched her confidently laugh her way through her twenties and then thirties. She showed me that growing into an adult didn’t mean being boring, and there was no correct way to mature. Knowing she was there living her best life made me feel confident I could live mind.
I don’t know if Jenna will ever return to the Internet, and so I’ve adjusted to a post-Jenna world. I watch her old videos occasionally and keep up with her (now) finance Julien Solimita’s content. But there is a distant sadness with all of that. I know I’m trying to recapture something that I’ve lost, and it just isn’t the same.
