You Have Never Heard of The Greatest YouTuber of All Time

On Kati Kelli, Princess of the Internet

This is my favorite video online. It is very short and it is very silly. There is not much too it. But I love it and probably account for, like, 10% of its total views. Because who hasn’t, at some point or another, made a video just like it? For nobody else, not even their future self.

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I discovered Kati Kelli through Jane Schoenbrun. They sent me an anthology of her work, Girl Internet Show, which they’d painstakingly stitched together alongside Kati’s husband Jordan Wippel. Jane had discovered her when assembling episodes of The Eyeslicer. I watched the film with 102-degree fever while living on my ex-boyfriend’s couch. I wanted a bedroom again so bad. I would live alone that year for the first and only time.

Over five years and five months, Kati Kelli posted fifty-five videos to her channel. She uploaded erratically, and her content varied wildly in length, subject, camera equipment. Each had a title like “Rich Bitch Morning Routine,” or “Fake Q&A,” or “Flavor Your Breasts Easily.” She is the only person ever on-screen (though she is often accompanied by dolls, wigs, masks); only a single video is filmed outside the confines of her home.

Her body of work, then, is a universe the size of a bedroom. Across videos, you notice when she’s redecorated, or moved. There is no parody or skit that lets you forget that this is a young woman fucking around, cross-pollinating the most private and public of spaces.

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A Kati Kelli video can be anything. She might be Marva The MILF, a horny, blonde, Beverly Hills housewife (Kati can do this thing where she makes her face both hyper-expressive and also frozen like it’s been through decades of sub-par Botox - a total physiological wonder). She might appear as Sensual Creature, a skeleton who harbors for interpretative dance and black-and-white-striped American Apparel long-sleeves. Or it might be “Kati” herself, in one of her dozen or so videos announcing, once again, that she will reinvent herself.

Even once the premise has been established, individual lines will catch you off guard. My personal favorite comes from one entitled Picking Up Chicks At Parties: “My mom died two days ago, while ironing this shirt. Can we cuddle now?”

The channel is vlogger camp, reminiscent of Ryan Trecartin, Cecelia Condit, and “A Shout Out From Tara and Raven.” All of her videos are scored to the kind of music you’d hear in a mid-budget JRPG. Predating the Capcut templates that codified the language of “weird” digital art, Kati Kelli’s editing is maximalist and polyrhythmic. Her face balloons into rounded pixels unexpectedly. Misspelled phrases flicker and spin in default typefaces. She is one of the few artists to approach 2010s Youtube aesthetics as a worthy canvas. Her choice of camera - whether she’s using a budget RED model or the lens on the back of an iPhone - is a deliberate and necessary texture of the work. When she makes ASMR, even as a joke, it’s good ASMR.

I hold so tenderly the knowledge that someone else was paying attention.

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Kati Kelli’s style is vaguely self-infantilizing. Her videos are contemporary outsider art; they play, at times, like a child for whom last vestige of rewarding make-believe is the MacBook Photo Booth. They are built to withstand mainstream dismissal.

But her satire is not casual or flimsy. She parodies whiteness, class drag, and a cruel, soul-rotting beauty fascism. She swiftly nails the way the digital landscape of the era eviscerated women despite its flimsy and superficial claims to the contrary.

Her work tips into mournful but never cynical. She clearly adores Marva, laments the cruelty In a video like “Drunk Beverly Hills Mom Dance,” she takes the time to add a .wav of a chihuahua barking in the background, spends over three minutes just dancing. It’s tender.

Kati Kelli does not see herself as outside of these things, or as subjects worthy of being belittled. The same as her character, she seeks personal ecstasy in cosmetic procedure, fashion, makeup. She is a girl, too, after all, and that’s a very slippery thing to be.

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Kati Kelli passed away in 2019. Despite the fact that I only encountered her work after her passing, it doesn’t feel like something I can discuss in past-tense. One day, we will be nostalgic for the 2010s Youtube milieu; and for as many ways as Kati’s channel broke formal ground, her work is already showing its age. I hate seeing the counter go up next to the viewpoint on each of her videos; the other number, the one that says “Posted 6 years ago,” then 7, 8…I am grateful, at least, that the videos have not been delisted or erased from the platform in some cold wipe. Selfishly, I wish I could put her in a movie, or something.

In 2022, it felt like the world was still catching up to Kati. In 2026, it feels like we’ve gone perpendicular. It’s unavoidable, mourning the type of video art she would have made on Instagram Reels and TikTok livestreams. It’s unavoidable, mourning her, a woman whose true self I have only glimpsed via the negative space of a digital collage.

Schoenbrun and Wippel conclude the compilation with Kati Kelli’s unreleased first film, Total Body Removal Surgery. It feels strange that someone’s debut short is also their magnum opus. Perhaps there is something appropriately bittersweet that it is publicly available, but not on her channel. Girl Internet Show is over, Kati Kelli is eternal.

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Beneath her final upload, user @APesquera, seemingly struck by a horrible premonition, commented:

“RIP Kati Kelli / Died young of paint poisoning from kissing too many pictures. / Had noodle hair AND noodle body. / Made pretty nice videos. / Her 300 real life followers don’t know where to go now.”

She replied: “Thanks :) I agree. My followers will also paint poison their lips if the love is true.”

Girl Internet Show will be released on Blu-Ray on May 26th, 2026 via Vinegar Syndrome. When the disc arrives, I will sleep with it on my bedside table.

love ya lots,

helmet girl xx