Object Details
- McLaughlin, Rhett James
- Description
- Blindfold used by Rhett McLaughlin in YouTube videos including the Good Mythical Morning series. The blindfold is made of fabric, with a green woven cotton base with beige felt eyebrow shapes sewn on. The blindfold has a white twill tape sewn edge, shaggy brown fleece on the back side, and an elastic fabric headband.
- The Rhett & Link videos usually conform to a familiar YouTube format, with two performers sitting next to each other at a table with a microphone in between. The duo frequently don cloth blindfolds while conducting taste tests, with segments running the gamut from gross out foods to Rhett and Link guessing what fast food brand they’re eating. The blindfolds were made and sent to Rhett and Link by a fan named Megan Wolfe, and were first used on Sep 11, 2014 on Good Mythical Morning Season 6 Episode 43.
- Rhett & Link are among the most popular and influential entertainers to have built their careers on the YouTube streaming platform. Rhett & Link call themselves “Intertainers,” and have earned millions of followers and dollars in a 15+ year career producing social media content, in the process building a profitable media company, Mythical Entertainment. Forbes has called them “YouTube’s grand old men and as two of the platform’s most consistently lucrative stars,” and the duo has been staples of Forbes’ top-earning YouTubers list, appearing every year since its debut in 2015.
- Rhett James McLaughlin (born in Macon, Georgia October 11, 1977) and Charles Lincoln "Link" Neal III (born in Durham, North Carolina June 1, 1978) met while attending elementary school together in Buies Creek, North Carolina, where they became fast friends and creative partners on school projects. Both evangelical Christians, they joined a Christian punk rock band called The Wax Paper Dogz, and performed in comedy sketches for a religious organization, Cru, while in college at North Carolina State University. The duo began posting comedy and music videos on YouTube in 2006, first as part of a Christian ministry for Cru and then independently, without religious content, on their channel Rhett and Link.
- The duo’s flagship talk/variety show Good Mythical Morning launched in 2012, and has aired more than 2,500 episodes, becoming “the internet’s most popular daily talk show,” with over 9 billion views and 18.6 million subscribers as of February 2024. In each roughly 12-minute episode of the series, Rhett announces a topic, with Link adding “Let’s talk about that!” and the duo will explore the theme with trivia, taste tests, skill challenges, product reviews, games, trivia questions, and conversation, sometimes with special guests. The most popular videos feature Rhett and Link eating extreme foods like the world’s hottest pepper or a scorpion, investigating television game show cheaters and amazing optical illusions, and testing the limits of deep frying and making popsicles and ice cream sandwiches. The duo have a friendly rapport, goading each other with supportive and comic banter and overcoming challenges with a sophomoric yet charming lack of shame or embarrassment. Their everyman appeal, fun-filled hijinks, and seemingly unlimited imagination and budget for novelty draws on historical precedent including entertainers like illusionists, contortionists, vaudeville comics, radio and television variety jokesters, children’s television “playhouse” programs, late night television hosts, and the gross-out humor of cable series like Jackass.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- 2014
- ID Number
- 2024.0104.02
- accession number
- 2024.0104
- catalog number
- 2024.0104.02
- Object Name
- blindfold
- Physical Description
- fabric (overall material)
- Measurements
- overall: 1/2 in x 10 in x 3 1/2 in; 1.27 cm x 25.4 cm x 8.89 cm
- place made
- United States: Arizona, Phoenix
- See more items in
- Culture and the Arts: Entertainment
- Popular Entertainment
- National Museum of American History
- associated subject
- social media
- Comedy
- Record ID
- nmah_2038829
- GUID (Link to Original Record)
- https://n2t.net/ark:/65665/ng4084070db-b985-420d-8d84-7f231b16dbc9
