Last Friday, we reported on a man who looked like Justin Bieber eating a burrito like he was blowing a toothy raspberry on a neck pillow. Amidst the whirlwind of debate that followed—debate that included people attempting to defend a bizarre eating technique straight out of a Coneheads sketch—some wanted to point out, too, that the guy in the photo may not have even been Bieber himself.
Well, the burrito truthers have been vindicated, as it’s now been revealed that the entire thing, which introduced so much needless chaos to our world, was staged by a YouTube channel called Yes Theory.
The pranksters, simply trying to see if they could make a fake story go viral in the grand tradition of Nathan For You’s “hero pig” video, flew a Bieber lookalike named Brad Sousa to Los Angeles, bought him a wig and some new clothes, snapped some pictures of him mauling a burrito, and uploaded the results to Reddit. Then they sat back and watched their Frankstein’s Bieber spread across the internet, sowing tortilla-wrapped discord in his wake.
The best part of the video is their hitting on the right scenario to invent. They show one staging where Sousa-Bieber helps an old lady across the street, but decide to go with the classic realm of online food debates instead. Unused ideas revolved around biting directly into a Kit-Kat, something about pineapple on pizza, and banana-peeling methods.
Nowhere in the clip, though, do they show remorse for what they’ve wrought. Like all hubris-filled inventors, the creators thought only of if they could, but not if they should introduce to the world the concept of horizontal burrito eating. As mentioned in the original article, it never mattered whether the picture was actually Bieber. The connection with celebrity, real or fake, was enough to bend reality far enough that people actually entertained a debate they may otherwise have dismissed out of hand.
And now, even with the truth revealed, we still look forward to at least six months of goofballs posting photos of themselves annihilating their burritos from the side, tossing a fun hashtag on it, and sparing little to no thought for the centuries of progress that taught us through terrible experience that, no, burritos are not to be eaten that way.
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