Celebrity look-alike contests are part of a glorious tradition

Timothée Chalamet, Paul Mescal, Zendaya — the celebrity look-alike contests sweeping the US and the UK seem to be more than just a weekend fad. Despite sporadic attendance and skeptical media coverage, the events keep happening, sometimes with repeat contests for various celebrities in different cities. Disappointed by the lack of Jack Schlossberg look-alikes in New York? Not to worry, the ultimate Schlossberg doppelgänger might get their chance to shine in Washington, DC, this weekend.

Why now, you might ask? What weird burble in the zeitgeist has somehow manifested in lines of identical Chalamets? Is it that we can’t get enough of Hollywood “it” boys? Is it that, as a society, we’re tiring of lives lived primarily online? Is it that we’re all thirsty for more fun, low-stake events that are free and open to the public?

I turned to a Zayn Malik look-alike contest attendee for answers. “I was probably just going to stay home, but I was like, no, some divine spirit is calling me to this look-alike contest,” Natalie Miller, a social producer from Bushwick, told me. Miller and a friend attended the contest last Sunday in Maria Hernandez Park.

The winner, 29-year-old Shiv Patel, seemed prepared for glory; he told Brooklyn Mag the win “adds to my lore.” Naturally, Miller got a photo.

However tongue-in-cheek the events and the participants might be, the glee they’re producing is real. “Everyone was just having such a good time, and it was 30 minutes, but it was just the best part of everyone’s day,” Miller said.

It’s been a minute since the public took to the streets for fun reasons. While flash mobs of the early 2010s quickly got deemed cringe, viral dance memes of the mid-‘10s often resulted in injuries, and the past few years of Pokémon Go may have inadvertently aided our dystopian nightmare, these look-alike contests seem, so far, to be wholly banal. (Well, notwithstanding that one guy who got arrested.)

“[T]he timothee chalamet lookalike competition just shows that the people yearn for weird town events like we live in gilmore girls,” as one viral post put it.

Indeed, there’s plenty of precedent for precisely this type of quirky celebration. This moment harks back to an era well before the internet, when people were arguably considerably more bored and desperate for entertainment — or, as Jeremy O. Harris put it, “Great Depression era coded.”

In other words, we might be seeking refuge from our current reality in wholesome, mindless community spectator events. Historian and folklorist Matthew Algeo noted to Vox that such crazes historically spring up amid times of intense technological and social change — changes that necessarily create public anxiety and a longing for community and simple entertainment.

“We think of the Great Depression as an economic event, but it was also a psychological event,” Algeo said. “We’re going through a psychological event right now. There’s a hunger for diversion.”

Algeo is the author of Pedestrianism, about the massively popular walking contests of the 1870s and ’80s, in which crowds would fill huge stadiums, including Madison Square Garden, to watch other people walk around in circles for hours.

“People are looking for new and interesting forms of entertainment,” Algeo said, “something that everybody can relate to.” As for what the spectators get out of it, Algeo admitted that, as interesting entertainment goes, walking competitions and look-alike contests are “a little like watching paint dry.” He suggested one reason people turn out for the events is that they “get a perverse joy in watching other people putting themselves out there in public.” While ironic glee could certainly be one factor, Miller suggests a purer motivation.

“It honestly felt like a One Direction meet and greet,” Miller, a longtime Directioner, told me. “I was so nervous going up to [Patel]. It’s just so fun to experience that joy again.”

One might assume that the primary appeal of these look-alike contests would be to the fandoms of those specific celebrities, but that isn’t the case; Miller said she was pleasantly surprised at the way most people in attendance at the Zayn contest seemed to be locals rather than fans. “It felt like a local community gathering and it was just so joyous,” Miller said of the crowd. Algeo told me the local community appeal is understandable.

“It reminds me of how famous walker Edward Payson Weston would go to these small towns and do these challenges where he would walk 100 miles in 24 hours in somebody’s barn,” Algeo said. “Everybody had to come out and see it because it was live entertainment, and that really brought communities together. This is kind of the same thing. It gives people a reason to get out of their houses and share an experience with other people, in real time and in real life.” He also compared the current craze to flagpole-sitting of the ’20s and ’30s, when the public would go gawk at other humans sitting, where else, atop flagpoles.

“It sounds silly, but I think the fact that it’s silly might make it all the more appealing to people,” Algeo said. “Especially in this day and age, with everything so intense and polarized and fractured. It’s hard to summon a lot of negative emotions about a celebrity look-alike contest.” Thinking back to the Depression, it probably doesn’t hurt that in the current age of inflation, these events are free.

There’s also perhaps a little bit of stunt myth-making afoot. The flagpole-sitting craze began because a theater hired a Hollywood stuntman named Shipwreck Kelly to sit atop a flagpole to promote a new film. From there, the trend went viral. Likewise, the look-alike contests might have been born out of self-promotion as much as wholesome community fun. The organizer of the first look-alike contest, the Timothée Chalamet competition famously attended by Timothée Chalamet himself, is Anthony Po, a New York-based YouTuber with nearly 2 million followers tuning in to his stunt videos, which range from sneaking into cults to manufacturing paranormal sightings. He swiftly moved on from the look-alike contest uproar to planning his next big event: a boxing match between his alter-ego, Cheeseball Man, and a mysterious newcomer named Cornhead Killer.

Still, it would seem that, so far, Cornhead Killer has nothing on Sunday in the park with Zayns.

“It’s objectively so funny to see a bunch of people standing in a straight line that all look really similar,” Miller assured me.

Miller’s giddy joy in congregating with her fellow Directioners and fellow Bushwick community members would seem to support Algeo’s hypothesis that, in the end, “people just like to watch other people do things.”

“No matter what they’re doing, there’s probably any human activity you could get a crowd for.”