Work Text:
im richard tozier im taking a goddamn break learn why HERE
The screen is pitch black, but the sound seems to be working. There’s a loud, irregular buzzing noise coming from somewhere outside of the room, and a man can be heard muttering to himself somewhere inside the room. He isn’t speaking loudly enough for his camera to clearly pick up the sound of his voice.
He moves closer, and suddenly his voice is understandable.
“What should I call this... Hang on.”
Something starts clicking in the background, accompanied by some angry whispering.
“Shit! Why did that button delete everything?”
Louder clicking, accompanied by a lot of mostly unintelligible Spanish-sounding swear words. The man realizes that his camera is pointing away from him and towards the wall, and flips it around with another mumbled curse to reveal his face.
He’s a relatively famous comedian named Richie Tozier, in case the video title hasn’t given it away. His face is no stranger to YouTube, given how often clips of his routines and comedy sketches wind up on the website. His name is no stranger to the YouTube algorithm, resulting in many of the aforementioned clips appearing in the ‘Reccomended’ section alongside John Mulaney specials and Taika Waititi interviews.
This video isn’t a sketch. There’s no routine for grief so debilitating that it prevents someone from doing their job. That much is clear immediately.
Richie looks like a mess. He hasn’t shaved for at least two days, hasn’t washed his hair for about twice as long, and his clothes look like they came straight off the chair laundry pile. His mouth is moving, but not to speak; he’s loudly chewing gum with his mouth half open, typing something on a keyboard that’s missing its E, S, and K keys. The blue light coming from the computer screen in front of him (but out of shot on the camera) illuminates Richie in the most unflattering way possible. He looks like shit.
“Shit! No, go back...” He presses the backspace key several times, but evidently it doesn’t work, because the Windows shutdown sound can be heard moments later. Richie sighs and looks into the camera like he’s on the Office. He doesn’t look like an actor on a television show about awkward workplace shenanigans, though. He looks like a very sad and defeated man trying to emulate the look of an actor on a television show about awkward workplace shenanigans.
And he knows it. He says as much.
“This isn’t gonna be a funny one, guys,” Richie announces, gesturing vaguely at the camera. He’s still staring into it. “There aren’t gonna be a lot of funnies for a while.”
Richie’s gaze drops down to his lap and a breath hisses out from between his clenched teeth for a solid twenty seconds. He begins chewing his gum again, just to have something to with himself. He’s at a loss for how to explain that his childhood (and, for two days, adulthood) crush/best friend just died. He smacks the back of neck in frustration, angrily muttering something in another language. Some people would know what the phrase means, but none of them would be rude enough to repeat it.
Richie sighs again and turns off the camera.
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this is not the pr channel anymore click HERE to find out what it is now
Richie is within view of the camera from the get-go this time, spinning counterclockwise on an office chair in the middle of what seems like it could be his kitchen. He’s pointing the camera at his face, holding it as he spins, so the background is just a blur right now. Richie’s face is barely in focus, because he keeps spinning into a bright ray of sunshine from an open window and back out again. He’s not giving the lens a chance to focus on him.
Richie doesn’t look like he cares about the camera’s state of focus. He looks marginally better than he did in the first video, which is a definite improvement. Baby steps.
He’s washed his hair since the last time, and his rumpled clothes look like they’ve been washed but not put through the dryer, and he’s definitely slept in them at least once. But at least they’re clean(ish). He still hasn’t shaved, and the stubble he’s been unintentionally cultivating can almost be called a beard now.
The last video was too dark to tell for sure, and this video is too out of focus to tell, but his eyes look slightly swollen, like he’s been crying frequently. The area around his eyes is definitely more red than it is in other photos of him. He’s been crying for sure.
Richie’s expression as he spins is thoughtful. He doesn’t say anything for a long time. The first two minutes of the video consist of Richie spinning on his office chair, the only change being the occasional switch of the direction he spins in.
“I’m not awake enough for this,” he mutters to himself. He stops spinning on the chair and scoots over the the kitchen counter to prop his feet up on a stool. He continues, “My manager wants me to delete that video I made two weeks ago and this is supposed to be an apology video.” He stares directly into the camera now, and this time he perfectly encapsulates the stare of someone on the Office.
“What the fuck am I supposed to be apologizing for? My childhood best friend literally fucking died and there wasn’t even a body to bury at the funeral because w– they couldn’t get him out in time and I ha—“
Richie’s steadily rising voice is cut off by the sound of his doorbell ringing. Without missing a beat, he screams, “Fuck off! Go find someone else to witness Jehovah!
“Where was I? Oh yeah, my apology.”
Richie sits upright in the office chair for this. Maybe he’ll actually try to make this sound sincere.
“I’m so deeply, heartily, and profoundly sorry that my comedy routines suck so much ass,” Richie deadpans. “I’m sorry for talking shit about women for no reason because that’s what writers think is funny nowadays.” He pauses, as if waiting for applause, but then he remembers that he’s recording a video, not preforming on a stage. He clears his throat.
“I don’t write my routines. I think the smart people already knew that. I mean, why would I have a girlfriend in the fi... No, that’s not even funny either. Damn.” Richie pauses to clear his throat again. “But that’s not what my jokes are actually like. Just wanted to get that out there.”
The video cuts off abruptly, without any warning from Richie. There are about seven seconds of black screen left on the video’s runtime, but nothing happens.
-
to get some actual information about what’s going on click HERE
Richie is on the bus this time. He’s recording on his smartphone, with the front camera looking up at his face from his lap. Out of view, two old women argue about what kind of dog their granddaughter has, and someone is singing a Halloween song so timelessly that it’s more like spoken word poetry than an actual song.
Richie doesn’t seem to know that his phone is recording him. He looks out the window, bopping his head slightly to the music he can hear from his airpods. Because of course Richie Tozier has airpods. His face is definitely in focus this time around, and... yep, his eyes are red-rimmed, probably from both lack of sleep and frequent crying. The main thing to focus on here is the airpods.
The bus stops, and Richie gets off. He sticks his phone into his back pocket with the screen facing inward, making it impossible to see where he’s going in the video. It’s still unclear whether he means to be taking a video in the first place.
“I don’t want any fucking Jesus,” he says loudly, although the sound of his voice is somewhat muffled because his phone is still facing the inside of his pocket. Someone yells back at him, and though their words are unintelligible, their tone is unmistakable.
“Fuck off,” Richie mutters, almost too quietly for his phone’s microphone to pick up.
He walks for three minutes, and as he travels farther and farther from the bus stop the harsh sounds of the city fade away to be replaced with the gentle roar of the sea. Richie pulls his phone out of his pocket and points the screen away from himself, at the ocean; he must’ve known his camera was recording the entire time. He clearly doesn’t know how to edit videos beyond splicing two clips together.
“That’s the only good thing about living in LA,” Richie says. “The Pacific Ocean and that sweet sweet Cali crack cocaine.” He turns his phone back around so his face is in view again. “So, some—no, you idiot, all—of you are wondering what the fuck I’ve been up to for the past three weeks. And the answer is, even I don’t know. My childhood best friend died and I’ve kind of been in shock and grieving my ass off for almost a month now. I also got dropped by my manager, so...not really sure when a show’ll be possible. Just pirate my other ones on YouTube if you haven’t been in person. I don’t care.”
He flips the phone back towards the ocean. “Holy shit, look at how big that barge is. That’s almost as long as my dick.
“Yeah. This YouTube thing looks promising because I can monetize videos and shit, so...stick around. There’s plenty more where this came from.”
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click HERE ignore the song in the background
Richie is once again perched on his tattered office chair, but this time the background looks like his balcony, or whatever the word is for the outdoor part of an apartment. The space that sticks out and usually has a lawn chair and maybe an umbrella. Nobody seems to know what those are called.
The first thing he says is, “Ignore the background music,” referring to the Scribblenauts soundtrack playing in the background. “I can’t form a coherent thought if this isn’t playing. I’ll try to figure out how to subtitle this one...I guess. I’ll try. Anyway.”
He spins around in the chair a few times. The music switches to another song, still from the Scribblenauts soundtrack. Richie bops his head to the beat for about a minute before he says anything else. He’s not looking at the camera in the slightest.
“Yeah. Nothing new’s happened in my life so far. My best friend is still...gone, hanging out with those sexy worms underground. I’ve been doing some translation work on the side, where somebody sends me a document and I put it into the language they want. I almost majored in linguistics, so I know what I’m doing. I changed my major because I found out that you need to know calculus to get a linguistics degree? What kind of bullshit is that? I firmly believe that every math problem I’ve done to date has shrunken my dick by a few meters.”
Richie spins around once more, then he stands up, walks over to the railing, and sits on it. His face is suddenly much clearer, for better or for worse. It’s been a long time since he shaved; his stubble can honestly be called a beard at this point. His eyes aren’t red this time, but the redness has just been replaced with dark circles. Everything else is pretty much the same. The sun glare makes it hard to see how greasy his hair is.
“I don’t really know what else is going on. I haven’t actually gone anywhere besides the grocery store in two weeks. Nothing cool is happening to me currently...” Richie’s eyes drift down to his lap and stare at the camera he’s holding. His head begins nodding in time with the music again, and his free hand starts to beat the rhythm out on his thigh. This goes on for about a minute, and he’s smiling a little when he says something else. Richie hasn’t smiled (yet) in any video he’s made besides this one.
“I remember one time Eddie and I were at the arcade,” he begins, “and we wanted to play some game, I can’t remember which one...Speed Fighter or something like that. It was a button-masher. There was no real skill involved. Y’know, the electronic equivalent of golf.”
Richie takes a deep breath, blows it out slowly, and continues, “Eddie knew it was ridiculous and I kind of did too, but I wanted to fucking win, man. And Eddie was winning by about like forty points, and the game counts points by the ones! How the fuck did he get so many points? I only had like negative seventeen.
“I was a little shit when I was a teenager, I’ll say that much. Sometimes I’m still amazed that I had any friends at all. Eddie called me Trashmouth and I called him Eds, because what’s more humiliating than being called by a short version of your name?” He slaps the palm of his free hand over his forehead for a moment. “Shit, that applies to me too...I dunno. I haven’t called myself Richard in like eighteen years.
“So I’m at the arcade playing a game against my best friend, okay, and I’m losing pathetically, so the cluster of worms that I call a brain comes up with a brilliant strategy to win. I’m not talking about the actual gameplay, ‘cause that was just hitting as many buttons as you could as fast as you possibly could. Anybody wanna guess what fifteen year old Richie Tozier’s genius winning move was?”
He pauses, looks around like he would on a stage, then says, “I congratulated him on how good he was and then I kissed him. I got like a million points while that happened since he was too surprised to keep hitting the buttons.”
Richie looks back down at the camera. “I’m fucking gay, y’all. Stop asking about my girlfriend in the comments.”
-
beard progress check
“...ently you’re supposed to plan things out before you film them? Who the fuck decided that? That sounds like something a carpentry channel would come up with. No offense to the old guy with the beard who made that PVC flute video. Carpentry is only valid if you can use it to annoy people. That’s why Jesus is so great! Wait, I’m Jewish, what the hell. What am I even saying? I haven’t been to anything religious since I moved out of my hometown. Aw shit, when did I turn the camera on?”
The screen has been black until this point, and Richie’s voice has been coming from far away. He’s only understandable because he’s been yelling this whole time.
He picks the camera up and points the lens in the general direction of his face, but his aim is off. He ends up positioning it so that only his forehead and eyes are visible.
“Check out my sweet new beard, man,” he laughs. “It’s almost long enough to qualify me as a sexy wizard.”
-
click here i promise you won’t regret it
He’s on the bus again, filming on his phone once more. Richie seems to enjoy taking the shittiest footage possible.
The subject of this bus video is a woman dressed as a pink turtle and a man wearing a neon orange morph suit sitting across from each other, hitting the woah back and forth. Richie’s wheezing laughter is the only sound the phone’s mic picks up.
When the woman gets off at her stop, Richie quickly moves into the seat she vacated. He and the morph suit guy commence hitting the woah in unison, without exchanging a single word between them.
The video is seven minutes long.
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i know about memes now
“I guess I should figure out how to tell what the fuck my camera is actually taking a video of,” Richie mumbles as he messes around with the settings of said camera. This time he’s showing all of his face, beard included.
Oh yeah, he’s definitely going the wizard route. Beard, check. Mustache, check. Hair starting to grow out and curl a little, check. Big-lensed glasses, check. General “I could do any thing at any time and you just have to deal with it” vibe, check. The comments are going to go positively wild.
“Okay, I think it’s recording my entire face this time.
“Check out this beard! Isn’t it neat? I for one am never shaving ever again, unless I get mistaken for a Dumbledora cosplayer or something. I never read Harry Potter because I was in college or something when it came out and I’m not a fucking nerd, okay? Gandalf is where it’s at.”
He runs a slightly unsteady hand through his beard a few times as he gathers his thoughts. Richie’s voice sounds shaky in this video, and he’s definitely noticed the tremor in his words by now. He’s focusing on his beard so that he can safely skirt around any mention of his dead friend.
“Anyway. Look at my sweet new beard.”
-
watch me recite the entire monty python fish license sketch
This video is seventeen minutes long. Six of them are devoted to Richie actually reciting the sketch. He talks about the best way to sneak into a movie theater in the 80s for the next eleven minutes. Compared to its predecessors, this one is pretty tame.
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i have no idea how to cook
“Okay,” Richie mutters, holding his phone out in front of him with the front camera recording, “here goes. My buddy Mike is coming over and I was supposed to pick out a good Mexican restaurant to go to, ‘cause a Mikey le gusta la comida mexicana, but I can’t fucking measure time without a digital clock and I wasn’t near my phone at all today and it’s—“ he glances up at a clock somewhere in the room “—it’s fucking seven thirty-six! He called me at five past nine in the morning! I’m gonna fucking kill myself, guys, I swear to god. I’m trying to make chicken fajitas like my ex-friend’s mamacita does but I don’t have any fucking chicken and—“
Something starts beeping in the background, probably an appliance’s timer or something else that’s food-related. Richie clearly knows what it is, because his face goes from ‘man who is slightly rushed for time’ to ‘man who has about three seconds before his entire evening goes to shit’. He half tosses, half places his phone onto the kitchen counter and dashes off to deal with whatever is happening. The video footage is of no help; his phone is recording the ceiling fan right now and the hiss of frying food in a nearby pan drowns out anything Richie says while he’s off camera.
After almost a minute goes by, Richie picks his phone back up and takes a video of the stove. He has one pan full of vegetables and another full of heavily seasoned something-that-looks-like-chicken-but-obviously-isn’t. Maybe it’s tofu. Maybe it’s pigeon meat.
“I’m trying to cook but I don’t fucking know how to cook, I just have ingredients because I don’t really feel like eating out or interacting with delivery guys...” His next words are lost in a loud clang from the nearby window. It startles Richie into dropping his phone onto the apartment floor. Miraculously, it continues recording.
Richie bends down to pick it up. His face breaks into a delighted smile when he sees that the thing didn’t turn off, and that there are (presumably) no bad cracks in the screen.
“Otterbox knows what they’re doing, man,” he quips. “That’s, like, the fifth time I’ve dropped this thing while I’ve been making these fucking fajitas.”
Richie sighs and uses a plastic fork to stir the veggie mixture around in the pan. He doesn’t say anything for a while.
From far away, a doorbell rings. Richie’s face goes from slightly stressed to panicked, and he ends the video without a farewell or an explanation.
-
i almost cried in this one click here you little sadists
Richie is sitting on the frost-covered ground this time. Behind him is a large elm tree, its branches casting light shadows over his face. The camera is in focus, almost painfully so; it’s almost possible to count the number of threads in the knitted cap that he’s wearing.
His forehead almost looks normal-sized with that hat on.
“Okay,” he says, and his voice is muffled by the wind blowing in the background. He’s filming this outside in the winter, after all. “Okay. Let’s do this.
“So, I started making this kind of a personal YouTube channel about seven or eight weeks ago, right after the death of a good friend of mine. In case you didn’t pay attention to my endless rambling about him, he was a risk analyst and he was my childhood crush and he was killed in a downright fucking awful way. That’s pretty much all that I’ve said so far.”
Richie sniffs; whether he’s reacting to allergies, the common cold, or his own emotions is anyone’s guess.
“I’m at his grave right now. I’m alone. He’s not here with me, ‘cause he’s... somewhere else. His body isn’t underneath his headstone. But my friends and I, we all chipped in and got Eds a nice marker. Y’know, it’s all spiffy and polished and there’s five bouquets layin’ around. He would’ve fucking hated it. ‘There’s germs in those flowers! You don’t know where the pollinators have been!’”
Richie smiles to himself and sniffs again.
“He was a hypochondriac. I was the kind of kid who could find dirt in a hospital. I mean, why were we even friends in the first place? I was such a loser as a kid, man, let me tell ya. I had no medication for literally any of my brain shit, so I just went wild and occasionally my parents would give me a lecture on good behavior. Eddie was like the total opposite of me. Except we were both huge fucking bastards, I’ll say that.
“He was my first crush,” Richie says softly. His voice switches from an amused tone to a saddened one fast enough to make it seem like the video was sped up, but it hasn’t been manipulated at all. The only thing Richie ever does to edit his videos is add subtitles.
“Oh man. I’m tearing up.” He turns to the gravestone. “See what you’re doing, you little shit?”
A crow caws loudly from the elm tree overhead, startling Richie into silence for all of ten seconds. That’s a long time in Richie’s world. It’s only ten seconds, though. He still has plenty more to say.
“Eddie would love the fact that I’m earning money by sharing footage of my mourning process for him. He’d love that. I’m doing this for him, not me. Somewhere upstairs Edward Spaguedward is looking at me thinking about how proud he is of my temporary livelihood.
“Oh! Almost forgot the reason for this one. So, this YouTube thing has always been a temporary thing. Y’know, just until I’m okay enough to be on stage again. That’s it. And—drumroll please—I’m coming back to the world of comedy. But this time I’m writing my own damn jokes and they’re gonna be two hundred percent sexier than before. Trust me.
“The problem before was that my ex-manager and his team of bozos were writing my jokes for me and none of them have any sense of timing or adventure or fun. Me, on the other hand, I’ve got a cocktail of mental illnesses and two neurodivergencies and about two months of heavy grieving under my belt, so I could make a billion dollars on relatable anecdotes alone. The point is that I’m back, baby! Trashmouth Tozier the fucking wizard is back!”
He stands up and blows a kiss to Eddie’s grave. He whispers something, but the words are too quiet for the camera to pick up.
“I’ll make you proud, Eds.”