The Most Honest Channel On YouTube Started As Way To Troll Pedophiles
Schnöölehelettelettö1. It's an expletive of sorts2, for when hunters in the Swedish village of Körbärspåskiten3 spot a moose. Or at least that's what Carl "Kalle" Rövsenap4 — the mind behind the bizarre YouTube channel of the same name — tells me.
For a little over two years the 27-year-old classical music teacher has been churning out experimental videos with titles like "Pickled herring sliding up a cut straw attached to a half potato," "Toothbrush stuck in closet door," and his most popular creation, "Waffle falling over." In the context of brands and media outlets striving to soak up as many errant clicks as possible with headlines that pander and over-promise, the fact that these videos deliver precisely what they describe is refreshing.
Most of Carl's videos are short — on average, ten to twenty seconds — although some, like "Carrot in shoe" are well over an hour long. Others push boundaries with their specificity, like the misophonic "Hitting mug with toothbrush 5208 times." The conceptual anti-humor of the channel isn't lost on Carl.
"There is so much shit on the Internet, that I decided 'Hey I'm going to make even much more shit and see if I can get views too,' and I did," he told me over Facebook message in mid-August. "My videos were meant to be like John Cage's work of YouTube: a mix of shit and nothing. After time has passed… I now see my videos as art. It's my gift to the Earth."5
Carl's lofty description of his work raises some suspicion, suspicions that are multiplied by a no-result Google search on his town, dead ends on his name, and no available translation for the word "Schnöölehelettelettö." Carl explained this away by stating that his village speaks a lesser-used dialect of Swedish6, an answer which is not outside the realm of possibility.
The Schnöölehelettelettö channel was not always intended as experimental art, although the only evidence to the contrary exists in the earliest comments on Carl's first few videos. The comments came from members of 4Chan, a website Carl describes as, "filled with child porn and puppies getting killed and people meeting up to buy drugs." So he combined the necessity of a viewership with his desire to inconvenience a website he hated.
"I hid the link and said it was child porn, then when the pedos went to check it out it was food falling over," Carl said. After a while, trolling lost its luster. "I got bored and didn't want to see all the crap at 4Chan anymore so I gave up. I didn't really do much to my channel until someone posted on Reddit and my waffle falling over got viral."
Now the Schnöölehelettelettö channel has over 20,000 subscribers, millions of views and a small army of commenters who are willing to share in the joke and be trolled by short videos of an anonymous man throwing a rock at other rocks — a formula he's unwilling to compromise, even if it means never reaching the notoriety of HowToBasic. "All the good support and the funny comments made me keep doing it. I might reveal myself one day, or not. But I think the content of my schnool channel will stay the same."
According to Twitter user @Olaf this is entirely made up
It was described as 'a positive swear word.' If that seems like a linguistic anomaly, Carl also went on to say 'Swedish is a stupid and complicated language!'
@Olaf claims this is Swedish for 'Cherry-on-the-turd'
@Olaf also claims that Rovsenap is Swedish for 'Assmustard'. It's difficult to know where the trolling begins or ends
All quotes from Carl edited for clarity. Facebook messenger is not the ideal platform for proper spelling and complete sentences.
Granted, Wikipedia is not the ideal source, but the page for the Swedish language states: 'Many of the genuine rural dialects, such as those of Orsa in Dalarna or Närpes in Österbotten, have very distinct phonetic and grammatical features, such as plural forms of verbs or archaic case inflections. These dialects can be near-incomprehensible to a majority of Swedes.'
