What Pretending to Be Crazy Looks Like

About

What Pretending To Be Crazy Looks Like is a viral video from the JCS Criminal Psychology YouTube channel that became the subject of confusion online as YouTube began recommending it to a massive number of people, resulting in numerous posts asking if the video had been recommended to others on social media in late May and early June 2021.

Origin

On May 26th, 2021, the YouTube channel JCS – Criminal Psychology posted a video titled, "What pretending to be crazy looks like" (shown below). The video studies how criminals try to act insane when being interrogated over major crimes. The video uses interrogation footage from a number of cases to illustrate this, most notably footage from Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz' interrogation. The video gained over 30 million views in a week.

Spread

Shortly after the video was released, users across social media began posting wondering why it was being recommended to them, suggesting it was being recommended to everyone. Notably, on May 31st, Twitter^[2] user @kheslime posted a screenshot of the video's thumbnail captioned, "this video in yall recommended too?" garnering over 99,200 likes and 8,900 retweets in three days (shown below). Many commenters under the video confirmed that it was in their recommended videos tab, some saying they noticed it only after reading the tweet.

The screenshot was shared numerous times across Twitter, Instagram and Facebook^[1] over the course of the next three days as more users questioned why it was appearing in everyone's YouTube recommendations. YouTubers^[4][5] also began making reactions to the video, some garnering a significant number of views (examples shown below, left and right).

On June 3rd, the post was shared as an image macro on Instagram^[3] page memezar, garnering over 250,000 likes in four hours (shown below).

Related Memes

Is X in The Room with Us Right Now?

Is X in The Room with Us Right Now? is a phrasal template that uses sarcasm to mimic a phrase that's typically asked by a psychologist or therapist to their patients. Memes pairing the phrase with stock images of mental health professionals have existed since at least 2018 on Twitter and Instagram in which users replace what's "in the room" for humorous effect. In 2021, the snowclone phrase began to be associated with a viral video of the Parkland shooter being interrogated, known as What Pretending To Be Crazy Looks Like, despite the sentence never being spoken in the original interview. The line is often used to mock conspiracy theorists or fear-mongers.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References