TikTok's Musings of a Crouton is chaotic-hilarious
TikTok's Musings of a Crouton is chaotic-hilarious
"I went on this rant in the parking lot of the BJs and I talked about how life is a scam, existence is a scam."
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, from Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci.🧩
Greetings! Kate begins a well-deserved week off today—her first break since we launched this newsletter in March. But as an “essential” worker among internet guides, Embedded will be posting through it. We’re honored to have Michelle Santiago Cortés, an internet and youth culture reporter, join us as a special guest blogger. Michelle will be contributing a few posts in the coming weeks, starting with this one. Enjoy! —Nick
Sara Nahusenay first appeared on my TikTok For You Page the day she went viral. I was startled—Nahusenay’s energy was deranged, like someone shouting conspiracy theories on the street. Frankly, I was scared to swipe away. But she was also hilarious. Her followers, who say she looks like Miss Grotke from Recess, place her in the Joanne The Scammer school of internet humor, which is absurd yet realistic and innocent but chaotic.
Nahusenay, 22, is best known on TikTok as Musings of a Crouton, and in a lot of ways, she is a “traditional” content creator. She is a comedian and performer with a degree in English and national ranking in speech and debate. Before she went viral and pivoted to TikTok full-time, she was working a commission-based sales job that had her on her feet in business attire, harassing customers at strip malls and megastores about their energy providers. Her second day on the job (when she had about 5,000 TikTok followers) was already unbearable: “I was in my car driving back home—I was fuming and I had to let my energy out, but I didn’t want to start talking trash about my job because it’s unprofessional and also, I’d get fired. So I basically went on this stream-of-consciousness rant in the parking lot of the BJs and I talked about how life is a scam, existence is a scam.”
The Twitter and TikTok creator-to-paid comedian pipeline is ... backed up. Every few weeks the internet rallies around some out-of-work actress with really funny bits, but only a rare few are able to parlay that popularity into steady income through writers rooms, acting gigs, or sponsorships. They don’t all get to be the next Issa Rae, Ziwe, or Meg Stalter. But Nahusenay, who first went viral in late July, is happy to report that she is in some very exciting talks, and her name might soon appear in the credits of your favorite talk show.
The raw material for Nahusenay's jokes is, quite simply, the absolute mind-numbing drudgery of everyday life. And chaotic as it is, her humor sometimes comes across as out-of-touch or even cruel (in a good way). In her first viral TikTok, a flying bug briefly interrupts her monologue. She kills it and turns to the camera to tell viewers not to be sad for the bug, “because she was on private property and she deserved to die.”
Nahusenay was partly inspired by an SNL sketch that includes the line, “cats are the croutons on the salad of life.” “That’s what I want to be,” she tells me over Google Meet. “I want to be the crouton on the salad of life. That little respite that you get as you’re trudging through shit. That hint of carb, maybe some garlic.”
Upgrade to read Nahusenay talk about anti-authenticity, how “chaotic” is the new “random,” and about seeking other sources of income when your PG-13 jokes collide with TikTok’s Community Guidelines. —Michelle Santiago Cortés