Escaping the Depths of the Internet

DEPTHS OF WIKIPEDIA, The Regent Theater, Los Angeles, October 5, 2023.

I like the Instagram account Depths of Wikipedia. It’s a curation of the best the internet has to offer: funny, interesting, poetic, and often strangely profound. The account is a portal to the online margins, where the peculiar and arbitrary meet—for example, look no further than a Wikipedia list of sexually active popes. I’m not alone in my admiration. The account, curated by Annie Rauwerda, has earned 1.2 million followers. She has built a tiny empire of baffling digital detritus.

However, Instagram accounts are not meant to be experienced in real life. They exist on our phones for a reason. They’re certainly not comedy shows, despite Annie Rauwerda’s valiant effort to pass off a meandering PowerPoint as one big meta-joke at her show Depths of Wikipedia Live at the Regent on October 5.

At the top of the show, Rauwerda explained that Depths of Wikipedia began as a “gimmick account in 2020” due to her exploration of the dark corners of Wikipedia while dealing with existential pandemic-induced boredom. She then launched into charming facts about Los Angeles, as cited on Wikipedia: “L.A. has been out of water since 1900.” She recounted the absurd origin story of Griffith Park’s name: a man who shot his wife in the eye. (The man next to me was loudly reciting the tale to his date, simultaneously with Rauwerda—perhaps to prove that he already knew it. The last time I was around so many thirtysomething know-it-alls in one room, I was getting an MFA in Vermont.)

I’m a stand-up comedian, so I’m unfairly cynical and unforgiving about comedy shows, but I regard PowerPoints as lazy prop comedy. Being well-versed in wacky and obscure deep internet trivia is not intrinsically a point of view. At one point, Rauwerda announced that 80 percent of Wikipedia page editors are male, most of them white. Her audience giggled: most of them male, most of them white. She joked that the success of Wikipedia can be chalked up to one thing: “People cannot help but correct other people on the internet.” She then invited eager audience members onstage to participate in trivia to prove her right. At the end of the show, she beckoned her guitar-playing handsome boyfriend onstage to join her for a song about Wikipedia titled “My Favorite Links.” (Congrats on bagging a singer-songwriter boyfriend, truly!)

The show culminated with a live simulation of dissociating on Instagram. Nothing that was mentioned—no freaky image, no fact, no anecdote—amounted to a memorable point. Despite this, Rauwerda came across as likable, intelligent, and ambitious onstage. It’s hard not to respect her enthusiasm and curiosity. I was tempted to stick around after the show to chat with her—to say what? I don’t know. At her best, her schtick echoed the HBO documentary series How To with John Wilson, which affectionately studies the interior lives of strangers. The difference is that John Wilson has a tender and poignant story to tell; Rauwerda has screenshots and relatively little to say about them.

Every day, I desperately try to escape the internet. I look for ways to untether myself from the person I pretend to be on Instagram. It feels increasingly difficult to divorce ourselves from our online avatars. Everything is an intricate reference to the internet—our movies, our taste, even our sex lives. Art about the internet is punishingly boring. Live shows about our online proclivities depress me—hasn’t the internet taken enough from us already? Most times I’m at an event, I’m simply thrilled not to be on my phone, scrolling on Instagram.

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Photo by contributor.

LARB Short Take live event reviews are published in partnership with the nonprofit Online Journalism Project and the Independent Review Crew.