What’s the worst that could go wrong during Jerma985’s next live stream in front of hundreds of thousands of internet strangers? “I get diarrhea and I can’t be a referee,” he said my box in a recent interview. twitch notorious online prankster pulls off his most elaborate stunt yet: refereeing a real baseball game in an unknown location between the fictional California Circus and the Maryland Magicians. But it doesn’t take long for Jerma to realize that peeing your pants isn’t the worst thing that can happen. “Maybe not. No. Thunder and lightning are probably the worst…or like a serious injury.” The internet star and his producer have been trying to make this happen for years, and a rain outage or medical emergency is one of the few things that ruins it could.
That’s because things getting out of hand is the point of a Jerma livestream. As with many Twitch appearances, viewers crave unexpected moments. The kind that can cause chat to lose its collective sanity, get cut off and shared again, and bubble up across the internet like lightning in a bottle. Almost exactly a year ago, Jerma caused such a sensation after attracting over a million Twitch viewers into his life-size Dollhouse‘ to take control of his life. The social media experiment was part The SimsPart The Truman Show, and had viewers wreak havoc on his imaginary life on a studio set, deciding when he ate, slept, used the bathroom, and more. It was a huge success and demonstrated Jerma’s talent for creating moments that feel authentic and spontaneous despite the incredibly constructed setting. Besides, he’s just a very funny guy.
What people know about Jerma is that it has gained popularity on YouTube Team Fortress 2 Videos in the early 2010s. In the second half of the decade, he switched to Twitch and streamed games like The Sims and Dark Souls. While he’s still regularly streaming new games and Just Chatting sessions, he’s since branched out into much more ambitious projects. In 2019, he held a live stream that let viewers into the Twitch chat play real carnival games by remote-controlled drones. In early 2021 he will went out into the desert and pretended to dig up a made-up trading card fad from the 1990s, then convinced his fans to join the charade and spread it across the internet. Then, earlier this year, he held a game show livestream to interview contestants to see who would replace him. An actor named Ryan Manuel, who played the character number 13, won and later streamed destiny 2 on Jerma’s twitch channel with 1 million followers. Above all, he thrives on the drama of making a long-term commitment.
“When the cameras came on during Dollhouse that first day, I was standing outside the house and looking at the front door and I knew it was all live and in my head I was like, ‘You have 15 hours of content in front of the door. Are you ready?’” Jerma said. “I had that moment, as well as that half-second of dread, of ‘I’ve got to keep this interesting for almost 20 hours straight for the next three days.'”
But today’s baseball game which goes live at 7:30 p.m. ET, has the potential to be his biggest show yet and the same pressures apply. “The same thing will happen if I’m behind the plate and about to call the first ball or shot of the game. And I’m sitting there thinking, ‘What the hell are we doing here?’” Jerma said. It will certainly be the most complex and expensive, and Jerma and his producer Jacob Komar say they spent months working to put it together. While Jerma was dreaming up the premise – refereeing a real baseball game between circus performers and magicians – Kom came alongar is the one trying to make the logistics make sense.
“We have real baseball players playing in this real baseball game,” Kom saidar said. “To find players who are willing to do this, this kind of fantastic show set in this alternate universe, and enough of them to make two teams to make it happen, and then match that with an available venue dates, that make sense for a streaming production schedule was a challenge.”
After being thwarted by Covid and subsequent delays in planning, they eventually locked down a location, onboarded sponsors and support staff, and fielded full teams. All that remains now is to execute the series of jokes that began spinning in Jerma’s head over two years ago. Although he does not want to spoil what is planned, he compares it with Leslie Nielsen’s referee intervened Naked Gun. Nielsen leans into the absurd, yet plays it utterly direct and reveals the innate stupidity of baseball’s theatrics. Jerma said that was basically the inspiration for his latest project.
“I really don’t even know what’s going to happen, really don’t,” he said. “I know we have things planned. I know there are certain gags I want to do, but there’s a lot of baseball to play and we just have to roll it and see how it goes.
The cast members involved are paid and informed of what’s going on, and there is some rehearsal, but Jerma stressed that the point of the show above all else is that it’s a real baseball game with both teams playing to win .
“I live for moments like this because it’s a challenge, isn’t it? It means we got this all together and it’s time to turn on the cameras, ‘Let’s go,’ and you guys have to go,” he said. “And there’s no ‘wait a second.’ No, you have to go, and you have a full, probably more than four, hour to fill here.”
Nathan Fielder’s new HBO show The sample captivated the audience for blurring the lines between what seems fake and what we want to believe is real. On the surface, it’s a reality TV show about helping everyday people prepare for life’s most unpredictable moments. Among them is a documentary about the making of a reality TV show edited into a dramedy. There is fiction on both ends, but the artifice required to travel from one to the other reveals something true, or at least compelling to watch.
Jerma’s work moves on a completely different, sometimes much more traditional level. At its core, it’s a standard live improv comedy about playing in front of a mass internet audience. However, a similar blurring of reality takes place, mutating the spectacle into something much more. The tension between the rehearsed and the unplanned goes both ways. Some of it has to be unscripted, so it could be any moment. It helps that Jerma has developed an online character that often vacillates between the mundane and the surreal. The result is Serpentine Fan Pages Documenting his streaming character’s lore “in universe” alongside the real one.
One thing that is clear, however, is how much work goes into generating each new Mega Event in the Jerma timeline. In many ways, it contradicts the very thing that makes twitch streaming such an attractive platform. As with reality TV before it, the cost is incredibly low, and a big personality can generate thousands of hours of content just by sitting in front of a camera and speaking. That doesn’t make the job easy, and my box and others have documented the heavy toll the Twitch content mill can take on its stars. However, it’s certainly less risky than potentially spending hundreds of thousands to put on a live show where the weather has the final say.
“It’s a lot of money, it’s a lot of work and it takes a lot of time and it can be scary,” Jerma said. He didn’t specify how much money, but it’s likely a lot more than Dollhouse, which was funded by Twitch and Coinbase, which in turn was a lot more than the $40,000 allegedly issued in his 2019 carnival stream. The bigger budget isn’t a payday either, he said. Instead, it’s the difference between being able to pull off everything the team came up with for a show and scrapping half of it in the weeks leading up to a gig.
“I don’t want to — I don’t like sitting here and putting myself on some kind of pedestal like, ‘Oh, what we’re doing is, oh my god, our stream here is so much better,’ because there’s an inherent risk and a lot of stress is.
At the same time, he sees a lot of potential in his antics for a new genre of livestream comedy, and possibly a proof of concept for other Twitch performers to gain more resources to experiment with. After all, the streaming wars between megacorporations like Amazon and Disney have proven that there’s an endless appetite for new content. Jerma’s shows are one of the clearest bridges between Twitch and the larger world of streaming entertainment.
“It’s a terrifying prospect for a lot of people, and I really wish in the future there would be more opportunities for people to tap into resources, do some fun things that they want to do and not have to worry about ‘how can I raise 50 grand to hire a bunch of people?’” he said. “I wish there were more tools and resources for content creators in general. I don’t know where it’s going, but I hope it keeps going in a good direction.”
