Give credit to Sanjaya Malakar. The teenager widely mocked during his recent “American Idol” run seems to be handling his fame with the kind of aplomb that could result in a lasting entertainment-industry career, if that’s what he decides is important to him.
The most recent example is a self-mocking, or possibly self-aggrandizing, video that’s up on Will Ferrell’s “Funny or Die” Web site (funnyordie.com).
In it, the kitsch superstar reveals that he’s really Bill Vendall, a 25-year-old art student, and “Sanjaya” is a character created for a performance art installation and “a symbol for the self-referencing nature of progressive evolution.”
It’s not the very best thing Ferrell’s fine site has come up with (see “The Landlord”), but it is smart enough to sell this good concept then end the bit. On “Saturday Night Live,” one suspects, the solid premise would have been padded to six or seven minutes of Maya Rudolph singing, Amy Poehler mugging for the camera and a sort of dissolute ending unrelated to the original idea.
The unfortunate thing about the Sanjaya video is that it wasn’t able to stick to its satirical guns. “Idol” fans, a group apparently not known for the appreciation of qualities such as subtlety and irony, took it seriously and raised a storm of Internet outrage over the “fraud” that had been perpetrated upon them. Real-world news crews reportedly visited Vendall’s school, the Rhode Island School of Design, to learn more about him.
Funnyordie posted Sanjaya as Sanjaya, in a follow-up video, restating the obvious, that it was all a joke.
Or was it?
