Catching Up With Clark

If last week was some kind of game, Kirkland House junior Samuel B. Clark ’15 beat it. First off, he ran for and was elected Undergraduate Council president. Then, in an almost unprecedented act, he proceeded, alongside vice president-elect Gus A. Mayopoulos ’15, to announce his plans for resignation.

What may really stand out in Clark’s legacy, however, came the day before, when On Harvard Time released “Harvard Tours Yale: The Game 2013,” a video that instantly took Harvard, the Ivy League, and the whole country by storm.

Sometime between the hours of 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. on Monday, November 26, as I sat down to interview Clark, his viral video reached a new benchmark: one million YouTube views, surpassing (for now) Flyby’s well-known capital of Canada video. Here, Flyby presents the untold story of Clark’s sensational triumph.

BEHIND THE SCENES

Within 24 hours of its launching, the video was unavoidable. Emails, postings, and tweets circulated rapidly, and Clark became a walking celebrity.

As it turns out, Clark represents only a portion of the brains behind the video. Every year, On Harvard Time produces a “beat Yale” video preceding The Game. This year, the On Harvard Time producers and Clark wanted something a bit different.

So, three weekends ago, Clark and five On Harvard Time producers traveled to New Haven and spent an entire day walking around campus, researching historical facts and drafting complimentary jokes for each location.

The next morning they were ready.

“Starting at mid-afternoon we started advertising our tours,” Clark said. “We ended up giving three 30-45 minute tours. All of the footage [in the YouTube video] is spliced together from those three tours.”

Clark formulated a plan beforehand for countering any concerns from skeptical tour members.

“At the beginning, we told people, ‘We’re a completely brand new student led tour group which is why we’re going to have two cameras running this whole time for promotional purposes, so we can get ourselves up off our feet,’” Clark said.

“We did enough research, we did enough prep work, so that in between the jokes and underhanded jabs at Yale, we had plenty of real facts at every stop,” Clark said. “People didn’t think it was a fake tour. People maybe thought it was a fairly well executed real tour, with a tour guide who was maybe a little quirky and weird and off, but funny. But people did laugh at some of the jokes. People also uncomfortably paused at some of the jokes, and that was what we wanted.”

CELEBRITY STATUS

The video had accumulated half a million views by the start of Harvard-Yale weekend, with links on Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post, USA Today, and dozens of other websites, and Clark was quite the recognizable celebrity in New Haven during The Game.

“The most entertaining part by far was the reactions of drunk Yalies,” Clark said.  “Most of them were actually not hostile...it was a lot of walking past [people] and mumbling followed by, ‘It’s the video dude! It’s the big tour dude!’ [There were] people behind me at various lines, like at the porta potty, being like, ‘Hey can you give me a fake tour?’ to which I would respond, ‘I charge now’ or something like that.”

Clark recalled several instances of fans screaming upon seeing him, including a group of seemingly intoxicated women who took selfies with him on the streets of New Haven.

Clark could only point to one instance in which a Yale student actually gave him a difficult time. “I was trying to find out where [Nick Chapel] was in one of the residential colleges...and I went up to some guy and asked him...to which he very very sassily responded, ‘Well shouldn’t you know? Since you give these tours?’ But then the brilliant part about it was, I assume his girlfriend, maybe just a friend, punched him in the chest and said, ‘Be nice!’ and then told me exactly where it was. Which was awesome.”