Why I think he called the channel “Big Joel”

You might think it's just kinda self aggrandizing, like "The Great and Powerful Oz" or something.

I certainly thought so.

But his name isn't even Joel.

Then a while ago I thought: it's a pun for "Big Joke". And it all made sense, it all fit. It fit with the pattern of things on his channel that make my partially educated mind go "wait, is that postmodernism?". And sometimes "am I supposed to not take what he's saying seriously?".

Kind of the basic definition of post-modernism: the skepticism of grand narratives.

There we have the word grand, like big. What about narratives? Here we have a recent video that's actually very explicit about doubting narratives, see @16:24. Yes he really spent a whole bunch of time arguing his case to the audience, and then immediately after tells the audience that he himself doesn't buy the story he was just telling them [I'm not sure anyone in the comment section ever talks about this part].

Quote from 18:46 in his vid: "So, I told you a story about a story, and that story was a lie, a fiction.  And I really feel like, if I tried to tell you about the thing itself, Shane Dawson as a creator as I see him, my video here would be a lot more boring and repetitive". Note also "story about a story", which is what "meta-narrative" literally means. And at 21:02, he says: "I think we use narrative to tell ourselves about our lives, about the world around us and how we relate to it. And here, in the case of Shane Dawson, that narrative is revealed to be just a trick of the light, a mirage".

This is definitely very clear skepticism of "narratives".

I've also been told in a University course that some postmodernists have also written stuff that is like a parody of regular academic writing [the word "parody" is also used here, with nearby mentions of made up stories]. And I think it was done to, similarly, attempt to demonstrate the falseness of some people's "narratives".

Some more could be said, because I came up with this hypothesis before he even posted that video [and before i even took that course]. And there's stuff to say about these ideas about truth and stuff.

See also:


 * Various dimensions of communication that depart from "literally seriously true" etc., and this includes fiction and metaphor, but also humor.