All Hail GloZell Green

In a 2013 video, GloZell gets baptized in the Jordan River. “Can I sing?” she asks, as she walks into the same water in which Jesus once tread. She’s wearing her signature green lipstick and curly hair. Even the water surrounding her is green. It feels like kismet, a spiritual moment that stands out from the rest of her lengthy YouTube video discography.

The now 52-year-old comedian and viral sensation is quite literally the definition of a “YouTube legend.” We all remember where we were when we watched “The Cinnamon Challenge,” or hearing, “Is you okay? Is you? Good, cause I wanted to know!” blaring from the computer screen as GloZell was about to complete one of her many viral challenges. It was the nascent internet, and the Orlando-born comedian was at the forefront of it all.

“At first it was nobody,” she tells PAPER, now rocking long braids but still with her bright green lips and exuberant personality. “There was just a handful of folks filming themselves at the zoo or the ‘Charlie bit my finger’ thing, but in terms of people who were actively making content for YouTube, I was one of the first ones.”

For me and many others, it was “My Push Up Bra Will Help Me Get My Man” that first introduced us to the lovable character that is GloZell Green. I remember it like it was yesterday: making my dad come to the family computer room to show him the video, and us hysterically laughing at the part where she yells, “Ahhh, STAY ON YOUR SIDE!” In the video, Tracy Tina, one of Green’s personas at the time, films herself in the car en route to meet her man Peter at the park to get him back. She is on Cahuenga and Lankershim Blvd, right on the edge of Universal/Studio City — the hub of Hollywood that contained everything GloZell wanted to be a part of.

Born in the city that is most known for being home to Disney World (the "happiest place on Earth"), Green was always conditioned to the side of American media culture that was clean, colorful and family-friendly. Her father was a pharmacist and her mother was a music teacher, and though she originally wanted to follow in her father’s career footsteps, friends and family started pointing out how naturally funny GloZell was. She would perform standup comedy at church conferences and ended up getting a BFA in musical theatre from the University of Florida.

During this time, social media didn’t really exist. “Influencer” wasn’t a thing GloZell even could fathom, let alone know that she could become. For her, the path to success meant moving to LA, working as a standup comedian, and ultimately becoming known enough to get cast on a syndicated sitcom. But when the “Push Up Bra” video went viral, something clicked. “When YouTube came, I was like, this is it," she says." This is the vehicle I can create an audience with all by myself. They don’t care how old I am, how tall I am, how Black I am, they don’t care that I’m a female.”

As YouTube culture progressed, the fame and brand deals started coming. She even interviewed President Obama at the White House in 2015, becoming one of the first online personalities to do so. But like all the best online creators, there was a special type of humanity to GloZell that viewers could grab onto and that made her so watchable. In the Obama interview, she puts the crazy persona aside and opts for a more serious standpoint, touching on issues like racial profiling, relations with Cuba and cybersecurity. “That was a turning point,” she says. “Because up until then, I was the fool.” When GloZell brought her green lips and cinnamon bottle to the oval office, she proved that YouTubers weren’t just these amateur kids doing skits from their backyard. They could actually impact social and cultural development.

“I can go anywhere,” she says. “You don’t have to understand English to know that I’m dying on some cinnamon.” She’s right — there was always an evergreen nature to GloZell’s reactions and personas that was somehow able to transcend borders and generations.

If there was a Mount Rushmore of YouTube stars, GloZell’s face would be on it, along with maybe Trisha Paytas, Shane Dawson and Fred or Smosh. “Trisha has told me several times that I’m the reason why she started doing YouTube,” GloZell says. The two met in line at The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in the late 2000s, another important aspect of the GloZell Green story. If you go back to her oldest videos, you’ll find that her first hundred or so videos are interviews of people in line at The Tonight Show. This was her thing: going to the studio every afternoon in hopes of catching the eye of some producer who would put her on the show, a la Ross Matthews or comedians back in the day when Johnny Carson was the host. “I have begged,” GloZell says about that time when she was trying to make it in Hollywood. “I was like, ‘I can open up for you. Please.’”

Then, the writer’s strike of 2008 happened, and GloZell leaned into creating content solely for YouTube. It took off, and when they came back from the writer’s strike, she realized that she had already built enough of an audience to catapult herself to the moon. “That’s when people started recognizing me on the street,” she says. GloZell didn’t have to beg TV producers anymore to give her a shot, or do the strenuous LA standup circuit at all. She had become her own brand.

Nowadays, she revels in her trailblazer legacy. She tells me that she still gets recognized every day and carries around her signature green lipstick to put on for photos with fans. “It feels really good that I’m still in the game. People know who I am. I have the most recognizable lips in the world.” She gets invited to movie premieres, is a leader at her local church, has a line of CBD gummies and cinnamon and takes care of her daughter O’Zell. Having divorced her ex-husband and former manager, she’s trying to find love, too. “Maybe what’s next is a sort of Love Island type of thing for GloZell,” she tells me.

I can totally see it. GloZell has paved the way for the modern day influencer, and she is such a dynamic, rare type of content creator that there could be a whole Bachelorette-esque TV show centered around her where men have to compete for her love. “I’m ready to meet the right one,” she tells me. “They have to like green, though.”

Photos via YouTube