On July 11, 1804, Vice President Aaron Burr and former secretary of state Alexander Hamilton faced off in a duel in Weehawken, New Jersey, because they were big wah-wah crybabies who couldn’t just pretend to be nice in person and then bad-mouth each other in secret like real adults. More than two centuries later — after Burr killed Hamilton, and Lin Manuel-Miranda revived him — two other men faced off in a new kind of duel on Mercer Street in Manhattan, one based on content creation rather than on revenge.
A video posted by FuckJerry creative director Guy Blelloch, captioned “The most intense fight I’ve ever seen,” shows two men repeatedly and passionately giving each other the finger, while one of them walks across the street. The clip quickly went viral. So far, it’s been retweeted over 52,000 times, and liked over 169,000 times.
But, like the Loch Ness Monster and the Bieber Burrito episode, the Millennial Duelers were fake. The video was conceived and staged by Blelloch and his co-worker at FuckJerry, Chris Thompson (though, as Blelloch clarified on the phone to the Cut, the video was made for himself, and not for Jerry Media).
Blelloch told the Cut that he and Thompson filmed the video last Friday. He said he didn’t expect it to go this viral. He makes a lot of short videos like this, which he describes as “Mr. Bean on Instagram,” but none of them have gotten as much attention as the middle-finger fight.
I can’t wait to see the Broadway adaptation.
