Comedy trio takes ‘Beauty Shots’ at YouTube culture

Saturday night, three of Brooklyn’s drunkest comedians held court in the back of a bar and played videos from their upcoming webseries, “Beauty Shots” — of themselves getting hammered and trying to put on makeup.
The series is a take on this weird world we live in, where a few YouTube uploads about being a girl and doing makeup took Jenna Moury from being a bartender in Cambridge, Mass., to being Jenna Marbles, with a six-figure income and a billion views.
“I think YouTube’s bread and butter is female makeup tutorials or fashion tutorials,” Claire Downs, one of the three co-creators of Beauty Shots, said after the show. “I think as female comedians it’s our job to subvert what is on YouTube the most right now.”

In “Beauty Shots,” the trio of Downs, Anna Rose Roisman and Caroline Cotter start out their sessions soberly with quips and banter. They then begin doing shots of just about anything (Fireball was the primary liquor of choice (the company actually sent them T-shirts and gear)) and their makeup sessions begin to devolve: smokey eye starts to resemble Heath Ledger’s Joker; contouring spreads from cheeks to forehead to neck.

There’s so many products out there and videos on how to do these crazy things that it’s high time for someone to make fun of it in the way it deserves.

In one episode, seven shots deep, Roisman can be heard uttering, “It looks like you just wiped your ass on your face. We were prettier without that!”
Molly McDonnell was a member of the standing-room-only audience in the back of the Bedford Avenue bar Videology.
“Girls try so hard with the makeup and there’s so many products out there and videos on how to do these crazy things that it’s high time for someone to make fun of it in the way it deserves,” she said.
YouTube and its online cousin of distribution, social media, lower the barriers to entry for comics to have their material seen and heard. Aaron Kheifets, with his webseries, Mint, is one such comic. He opened the Beauty Shots event with a standup set, and was a guest in the Beauty Shots series.
“We’re sick of fucking network sitcoms that suck,” he said. “We all have a more specific, edgier sensibility than ‘Two and a Half Men’ or ‘Big Bang Theory.'”
Still, the internet is not a panacea to lame, middlebrow content. “YouTube can also be like a giant echo chamber where unless you have a hot girl or a celebrity in your video, you’re just like screaming into the void and no one will ever hear you,” Kheifets said.