On the internet, staying relevant is all about pivoting. Trends come and go, and often, the influencers who started those trends go right along with them. When times change, you either pivot or get left behind.
Few content creators understand that better than Ray William Johnson, who posted his first video to YouTube in 2009. Since then, his channel has gone through more transformations than Optimus Prime. He first gained popularity with Equals Three (sometimes stylized as “=3”), a long-running series where he adds snarky commentary to viral clips—skateboarding fails, dogs who can’t roll over, all the hot topics of 2009.
After Equals Three came several sketch comedy series, including Booze Lightyear, Comedians On, and Top 6. Then came the Sunday Stories era, where Johnson switched from scripted comedy to weekly vlogs with his girlfriend, Kelly (now wife, as of 2022). The most recent pivot came around four years ago, where Johnson transitioned to true crime videos.
Johnson’s efforts to stay on top of current trends haven’t been in vain. From 2011 to 2013, he was the most subscribed-to channel on YouTube, and his current weekly videos earn hundreds of thousands of views. But if you’re up on your YouTube history, you may know that it isn’t just his business savvy that has made him successful.
In the early 2010s, Johnson became notorious for his “edgy” humor, meaning he made crude, sexual jokes and constantly towed the line of what’s considered offensive. He’s cleaned up his act a bit in the past few years—likely because he knows that what passed as acceptable in 2012 definitely would not pass in 2026—but for many, the name “Ray William Johnson” is synonymous with racism, misogyny, and all-around bad taste.
Johnson may not be the YouTube powerhouse that he was back in the day, but that doesn’t mean he’s disappeared completely. In fact, he’s made it very clear he intends to stick around for a long, long time.
Ray William Johnson’s cleanest series is Sunday Stories, his weekly vlogs that he posted from around 2017 to 2018. In these videos, he spends time with Kelly and their friends, goes to Disneyland, decorates for Christmas, and lets viewers in on his daily life. These videos aren’t completely clean; they contain some foul language, and Johnson makes the occasional crude joke, but they’re much cleaner than other content on the channel.
Some Sunday Stories videos even include positive messaging, such as one 2017 vlog called “Be Afraid to Fail.” In this video, Johnson tells his viewers that failing is how you improve, and you shouldn’t let fear of failure stop you from trying new things. Kelly sums this up by saying “you either win or learn.”
Positive messaging continues into Svperhvman, a series of videos posted in 2020, in which Johnson discusses self-improvement topics like building confidence, managing anxiety and increasing productivity. Many of his tips are practical (if you struggle with anxiety, try cutting back on caffeine), but others are important reminders of things that are often easy to forget (you’re alive and people love you, and that alone is worth celebrating). Like Sunday Stories, these videos still contain some language and crude humor, so they’re not safe. But the series is a welcome reprieve from the majority of Johnson’s content, which is about as far from safe as you can get.
Speaking of that very unsafe content …
Ray William Johnson built his YouTube empire using humor just offensive enough to get peoples’ attention. His most popular video, an episode of Equals Three from 2009, opens with a video of a teenage girl breaking a trampoline. Johnson jokes that “from this point on, her friends will refer to her as ‘That Fat Girl That Broke The Trampoline.’” A series of scripted sketches titled “Was That Sexist?”, “Was That Racist?” and so on are little more than compilations of jokes that are indeed sexist, racist and so on.
Many of Johnson’s videos also lean heavily on crude sexual humor. In one sketch, a group of businessmen use graphic language and thinly-veiled euphemisms to describe female genitalia. Another sketch is called “Sex Questions You Don’t Want To Ask,” and…well, the title pretty much speaks for itself (as does the sequel, cleverly titled “Sex Questions You Don’t Want To Ask #2”).
Of course, these videos were all made over a decade ago, back when Johnson would surely argue that people were less sensitive than they are today. But his current content is still rife with issues. In his true-crime series, Johnson describes the acts of some of history’s worst criminals, such as Richard Ramirez, a serial killer and sex offender with more than a dozen victims. Now that many social media platforms have cracked down on harmful language, Johnson uses YouTube-friendly wording while describing these crimes (“gun” becomes “pew-pew,” “kill” becomes “un-alive,” “sexual assault” becomes “SA”), but no amount of childish language could make the assault and murder of a 9-year-old girl any easier to stomach.
What’s most curious about Johnson’s shift to true crime content, though, is that he doesn’t seem to have anything profound to say about it at all. Unlike his Svperhvman videos, there are no positive messages, no themes, no takeaways for viewers to consider. He spends 8 minutes summarizing the situation, cracks a few jokes, and then … video over, see you next week.
In Johnson’s channel description, he calls himself a “storyteller,” but his current content feels more like skimming a Wikipedia page than hearing a well-crafted story. If anything, it just seems like an attempt to cash in on the recent true-crime craze. To stay relevant, you need to pivot, remember?
YouTube, and arguably the internet as a whole, would not be what it is today without Ray William Johnson—though that’s not necessarily a good thing. Still, he’s outlived many of his peers in early-YouTube stardom, largely because of his ability to follow a trend. From sketch comedy to vlogs to true crime, there’s no format he won’t adapt to stay on top of the algorithm.
In recent years, that has meant sacrificing his controversial style of comedy, but his channel still includes thousands of sketches and Equals Three videos to peruse. If you do, you’ll find foul language, graphic sexual comedy, and humor ranging from tasteless to offensive. His current content may not push the boundaries of comedy quite so far, but it still deals with violent and upsetting crimes without saying anything worthwhile about them.
Ray William Johnson is undoubtably one of the founding fathers of YouTube, and in a way, it’s impressive that he’s kept his channel active since 2009. But after nearly 20 years of pivoting from one trend to another, the question has to be raised: When does it become one pivot too many?
Lauren Cook is serving as a 2021 summer intern for the Parenting and Youth department at Focus on the Family. She is studying film and screenwriting at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. You can get her talking for hours about anything from Star Wars to her family to how Inception was the best movie of the 2010s. But more than anything, she’s passionate about showing how every form of art in some way reflects the Gospel. Coffee is a close second.
