Jenny Nicholson

The Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel was a 100,000-square-foot, $5,000-a-bed immersive theme-park experience that opened in March 2022 and closed twenty months later, having become one of the more spectacular failures in modern Disney history. Jenny Nicholson visited it. She made a four-hour video. The four-hour video about the failed hotel has, as of this issue going to press, more views than the hotel had visitors. There is a thesis in there somewhere about what survives the algorithm and what doesn’t, and the thesis is: Jenny Nicholson does.

The Galactic Starcruiser video is the obvious entry point but it is also the late-stage Nicholson, the form fully matured. The earlier work — the Bronies essay, the Cats (2019) review, the entire trilogy of videos about the JonBenét Ramsey murder — is the apprenticeship. The form is consistent across all of it: Nicholson identifies a piece of culture that is sincere, enormous, and absurd, and then she describes it. Slowly. With an absolute deadpan. With the specificity of someone who actually went and looked. The comedy is in the mismatch between the calm, methodical voice and the cumulative ridiculousness of what she is calmly, methodically describing.

What She Does Extraordinarily Well

The first thing is research. Nicholson does not parachute into a topic; she lives in it for months. The Star Wars hotel video contains every detail of every meal, every rehearsed line of every cast member, every prop, every disappointment. She has receipts. She has photos. She has the hotel-issue paper menu and she has read it. The comedy is built on this foundation and could not exist without it: when she observes that the wine list contained a bottle described as having “notes of Endor,” the joke works because we trust she is not making this up. Most YouTube comedy asks you to trust the comedian’s bit. Nicholson asks you to trust her notes.

The second thing is structure. A four-hour video should be unwatchable. The Galactic Starcruiser one is — and we say this without exaggeration — paced like a feature film. There are act breaks. There are running gags that are seeded in hour one and pay off in hour three. There is a moment, around the two-hour-forty mark, where the entire video pivots from comic disappointment into something genuinely sad, and the pivot is earned because she has spent the previous two hours being funny enough to buy the right to break your heart. This is a thing essayists do. It is not a thing comedians on YouTube usually attempt.

Jenny Nicholson is what happens when a stand-up comedian is replaced by a research librarian and the research librarian turns out to be funnier.

The third thing is voice. Nicholson speaks in a register that is both very young and very dry — a sort of early-2010s Tumblr cadence aged into something more melancholy. The voice has not changed materially in seven years and we suspect it never will. It is the voice of someone who has been disappointed by the things she loves and refuses to stop loving them. This is, we would argue, the only correct emotional position from which to make criticism, comic or otherwise, on the internet today.

Where She Falls Short

Output. Nicholson posts roughly one major video per year. That is a fact, not a complaint, but it is a fact that affects the score. A channel that uploads once a year cannot serve as a regular comedy diet; it serves as an event. We score Consistency at 65, which is very low, and we are at peace with this — but it does mean she scores a hair below the channels with comparable quality and steadier output. The Galactic Starcruiser video is more important than ten of most other channels’ total annual production, but the algorithm doesn’t care, and arguably neither should we.

The other limitation is range. Nicholson is brilliant on theme parks, brilliant on franchise media, brilliant on niche fandom — but she has never quite expanded out of the cultural-detritus lane. There is no political Nicholson video. There is no Nicholson video about labour. We are not asking for one, exactly. But the limit of the project is that it is a project: an investigation into the specific phenomenon of mass culture sold as personal experience. Inside that lane, she is unmatched. Outside it, we don’t know.

The verdict. Nicholson is the proof of concept that long-form video essay comedy can survive — that the form is alive, that there is an audience for it, that the algorithm does not have to be obeyed. The Star Wars hotel video is, if we are honest with ourselves, the single most important YouTube comedy artefact of the 2020s so far. ESSENTIAL is correct. Top 50 entry at #9, with a note in the editorial section about the Consistency drag.