Eddy Burback

Eddy Burback ate at every Olive Garden in Manhattan, and then he ate at every Olive Garden in a single state, and then he visited every Bass Pro Shops in America, and now he is making videos that are essentially feature-length comic documentaries about the saddest fast-food restaurants in the country. He is, by any measure, the most ambitious of the post-Drew/Danny generation of YouTube commentators — and he has done the thing the older guard didn’t, which is leave the desk.

Burback came up in the Drew Gooden / Danny Gonzalez / Kurtis Conner ecosystem, started as a commentary YouTuber, and somewhere around 2022 quietly committed to a different project: real-world stunts framed as comic essays. The “I Spent a Week at Every Olive Garden” video was the breakthrough; “We Lived in Bass Pro Shops for 24 Hours” cemented it; the Buc-ee’s video confirmed he was building a body of work, not just doing a bit. He is what happens when a commentary YouTuber decides to actually go outside, and what he finds outside is the same thing the commentary YouTubers were already mocking, except now it is on camera and you cannot pretend you were just making it up.

What He Does Extraordinarily Well

The first thing is the deadpan. Burback’s camera presence is a man genuinely confused by what he is seeing, who has chosen to keep going. The sincerity of the confusion is the engine. When he sits in his fortieth Olive Garden of the day and the waitress asks how he’s doing, the joke is not the punchline he delivers; the joke is that the punchline is barely a punchline, and the confusion is real, and we are watching a man slowly realise that the experience he is documenting is genuinely, structurally, weirder than anything he could have written.

The second thing is editing patience. Burback sits in a moment for longer than he needs to, the way a documentary filmmaker would, and the unusual length is itself a comic gesture. There is a moment in the Bass Pro Shops video where he is alone on the artificial lake at 4am, having committed to sleeping there, and the camera holds on his face for a full eight seconds before he says anything. The eight seconds is the bit. The eight seconds is what nobody else on YouTube comedy is doing right now, because the algorithm does not understand the eight seconds.

Eddy Burback inherited the deadpan from Drew Gooden, the chaos from Danny Gonzalez, and the willingness to sleep in a Bass Pro Shops from his own peculiar conviction. The result is the most exciting comic documentarian on the platform.

Where He Falls Short

The output is uneven. Burback’s major projects are extraordinary; his shorter videos, the ones in between, are commentary-YouTuber-by-numbers — not bad, not memorable, made because the channel needs to keep the algorithm fed. The big stunts are 9/10. The filler is 6/10. We score Consistency at 70 to reflect this, which is generous, and only because the big stunts are so big they deserve grace for the in-between weeks.

The other thing is that the stunt format is, by its nature, exhausting. There is an upper limit to how many “I went to every X” videos he can make before the bit eats itself, and the closer he gets to that limit, the more we worry. The 2025 video about visiting every Cracker Barrel had moments where Burback himself looked depleted, and the audience could see it. The format requires an inexhaustible curiosity that no human actually possesses, and the camera tells the truth about that. He needs to evolve the framework before the framework wears him out, and we are not sure he has fully figured out what that evolution looks like.

The verdict. Burback is the most exciting comedy commentator on YouTube right now, full stop — but at 83, he sits one point below our current Top 50 entry threshold. We flag him as a watch-list channel: the next big stunt video, if it lands the way the Olive Garden one did, moves him into the Top 50 cleanly. EXCELLENT verdict, no Top 50 entry this issue, and a strong recommendation that he is the future of the genre, not its present.