My Weekend as a 28-Year-Old in Chicago

My Weekend as a 28-Year-Old in Chicago is a satirical video created by American comedian Mike Schwanke, under the pseudonym Judd Crud. It was published on August 29, 2022, on TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram. A parody of "day in the life" vlogs, the video walks through the events of an imagined weekend of Schwanke's life in Chicago, Illinois, growing increasingly unrealistic as the video progresses.
Upon its release, the video quickly achieved viral status, amassing over 6.5 million views on Twitter alone in two days. It was met with widespread acclaim from critics, with some calling it one of the greatest TikTok videos of all time.
Background and production
Mike Schwanke, known online as Judd Crud, grew up in Appleton, Wisconsin, and cofounded the absurdist horror sketch comedy troupe Phantasmagoria while living in Denver. In spring 2022, Schwanke moved to Chicago with two other members of the troupe, which they renamed Crud, and continued making videos to entertain their friends back in Denver. Schwanke explained in an interview with The Daily Dot: "I don't usually do parodies like that, but I was surprised that I hadn't seen a decent one yet. I think those videos are already kind of parodies of themselves because some of these people are living kind of insane lives to begin with." David Mack of BuzzFeed News called the video a "pitch-perfect parody," describing it as "the TikTok equivalent of semantic satiation, that phenomenon where if you say a word enough times, it loses all meaning and sounds ridiculous."
In a review for Mubi Notebook, Dylan Adamson analyzed the video's contents, enumerating its 142 cuts in 135 seconds, 27 different people, and 19 different restaurants and bars, concluding that "the satire of My Weekend as a 28-Year-Old in Chicago is subtle, a dimly dawning impression rather than the onslaught suggested by these eye-popping formal and content statistics."<ref name="mubi" />

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu