My New Haircut

About

My New Haircut is a viral video created by Brett Tietjen, featuring himself as a stereotypical “broski” livin’ da vida loca with his boys in Staten Island, NY. In the original clip, Brett spikes his hair up with the stiffest gel around, drinks about a dozen Jager bombs and gets super pumped on bros’ night out with his boys who all have the same haircut.

Origin

The original video was uploaded by mca1018 via Youtube on June 10th, 2007. The background music used in this video is the 1984 hit single “Sunglasses at Night”^[1] by Corey Hart. Since its debut on YouTube in 2007, “My New Haircut” has been viewed nearly 30 million times and spawned over 354 fan-inspired parodies.

Spread

The YouTube video went viral two months later, racking up over 800,000 views by year’s end. But more impressive than the view count was the quickly growing collection of video response parodies. The first video response came a few days after the video took off. Titled “We Don’t Need a New Haircut,” it shows a group of “surfers” doing their own version of Brett’s rant. From there, the multi-cultural parodies continued on YouTube^[2], not only with other new haircuts, but to showcase new things in general, like new cars or labcoats.

Search Interest

Notable Examples

Asian Edition:

Redneck Biker Edition:

Senior Citizen Edition:

Impact

Following up on the success of the initial video, YouTuber mca1018 created a sequel called “Return of the Broski” and made other videos featuring the Broski’s friend, Vinny the Chin. In March, 2010, Variety Magazine^[3] reported that producer Scott Mednick had secured the rights to make “My New Haircut” into a movie.

My New Haircut: “Vinny the Chin”

Vinny the Chin goes to the “My New Haircut” party

Controversy

In January of 2008, 1 month after MNH made several sites top videos of 2007, Virginia Heffernan published a story for the New York Times about her discovery of the following video:

External References

^[1] YouTube – Sunglasses at Night

^[2] YouTube – Search Results: My New Haircut

^[3] Variety – Scott Mednick gets ‘Haircut’

^[4] New York Times – Covers Credit & My New Hair Cut