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.

## His Jordan Peterson video

His video "The Wasteland of Jordan Peterson" has many related ideas. It even mentions postmodernism!

* [16:55] "nothing makes me fit to this task" [of making videos on his channel] "there's no Big Reason I should be doing it"
* [20:17] "I'm not the ghoul of despair, here to take [his] hopes from him" [this, and other times he says things like this in his videos, is somewhat in contrast to the time he was streaming and said "I like taking things away from people". Of course, he doesn't preserve recordings of his streams on his Twitch channel, so you won't find this clip, and I can't show it to you. Which is fitting][EDIT: more recently he has released a video disagreeing with people's interpretations of the movie 300, and near the end he acknowledges that he is kinda destroying something they liked (their own interpretations) and he says @ 32:29 "i want it to cost you"]
* oh no, JP is the "science police"!...but then...he's wrong about the science...but...what he says is still "captivating" [similar to the point he swerves away from in his Aladdin video, we don't really care how the logic of the movie works, we don't care how nonsensical it is, "this tells us something about ourselves" [18:44]. the joke here being that it's pretty clear what he's implying this tells us about ourselves (that we're not these perfect truth-detectors or whatever), but then (probably to be meta) he explicitly instead of explicitly stating what he was implying, he explicitly says something else (it's just "power" that doesn't need or want a coherent explanation)]

## See also:

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