Jonny Wanzer has lofty goals.
The 34-year-old Burlingtonian is a social media content creator and political humorist whose self-described “unorthodox activism” and “brash delivery” come across in fast-paced and flashy videos.
“I try to tell people that the goal of my videos are 51% to educate people, 49% vanity,” Wanzer said. “Because I’m a comedian, and I want people to watch me.”
Wanzer has achieved Vermont-scale virality with numerous videos, the most well-known perhaps being his “Old North End Anthem” music video. Increasingly, his vulgar, profanity-laced commentaries address serious local issues such as police conduct, the rental market and crime. He maintains a sharp comedic edge, using parody, impersonations and even a puppet made in the likeness of Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger — a frequent target.
Former city councilor Ed Adrian described Wanzer as the political scene’s “modern-day court jester.”
“He’s tapped into a zeitgeist and this interest in these topics in Burlington and made them digestible to different groups of people, depending on what you’re willing to watch in a five-minute, 10-minute video,” Adrian said. “For better or for worse, we’ve become a culture that needs to be entertained sometimes in order to receive a message or to receive the news.”
Wanzer is ready to capitalize on that. “One of the main reasons why I do it is to educate people, to get to the people that would not take the time with traditional media, because I think traditional media fails in that regard,” he said.
That is the audience Wanzer seeks as he looks to leverage his popularity into a “gonzo media” collective. His vision: John Oliver “but on a local level.”
An iPhone and some duct tape
Born to a single mother, Wanzer grew up around Chittenden and Franklin counties. By the time he graduated from South Burlington High School, he was playing a lot of music and “dying to leave” Vermont.
He spent several years traveling the country — New York City, Seattle, San Francisco and other cities. “I was just moving around to experience new places, see what music scenes were poppin’ off, and experience different people and cultures that were absent from Vermont,” Wanzer said. “It was a blast and a culture shock, and a lot of my current left-leaning ideals spawned from my experiences in these cities.”
Wanzer returned to Vermont in 2012 and worked a variety of jobs, including a five-year stint at Dealer.com, all while pursuing a “pipe dream of being a rock star and making music.”
Those aspirations eventually led him into the world of videos and social media.
In 2019, Wanzer was trying to find a way to “reinvent” his music after accepting that industry changes had placed more pressure on artists to build their own audiences. He was working on an album about being a “townie” and wanted to release a music video to accompany the first single. When his search for collaborators came up short, he decided to do it himself.
“All I had was my iPhone and mic stands. And I was like, well, what can I do from this?”
Wanzer put up a blanket in front of a closet and duct-taped his phone to the mic stand. The setup reminded him of a public-access television set. “I’ve always found public access to be really funny. So I was like, OK, I’ll make it so it looks like a show that would be on, like, like, PBS or VPT or whatever.”
He then went about editing, using stock software from Apple, and adding jokes and local references. After releasing that first video, he said, it felt like he finally had his own space to be creative.
Wanzer’s next idea was a series of fake commercials for “businesses that never asked for them.” The first few promoted Price Chopper, the University Mall and Cumberland Farms. They were succinct out of necessity — at the time, Instagram, which was his main platform, permitted videos of only one minute or shorter, Wanzer said.
On his way to work at Dealer.com, Wanzer would often pass by the so-called “pit” left by the then-stalled redevelopment project at the former downtown mall. The pit was often in the news, and Wanzer noticed two major groups at odds over the proposed development.
“And I was, like, wouldn’t it be funny if there was a third group of people that just loved (the pit) and advocated for it?” he said.
The resulting video — about wanting to preserve the pit as a dirt bike track with a Taco Bell — received far more attention than his previous work. Wanzer uses multiple platforms, but on YouTube alone, the video has racked up more than 4,800 views.
Afterward, Wanzer tried to identify why it succeeded. “There was an underlying social aspect to it, like a political aspect that was just kind of, like, I’m exposing both sides and how stupid this whole thing is, with this heavy emphasis on satire, and that was what was resonating with people.”
From that point, Wanzer stuck with making videos about Burlington that at times were parodies of local tourism guides. Gradually he started to lean into politics, putting his own satirical spin on the local news.
Season two
Wanzer’s Old North End apartment doubles as his video studio. The walls of his bright, cozy living room are decorated with vinyl records, and video games occupy a shelf. In the next room, a green blanket hangs in a small alcove in front of lights and a camera on a tripod. A small editing suite is set up across the room.
Wanzer likes to differentiate his videos by “seasons.” After his success lampooning “the pit,” he upgraded his equipment, studied other content creators and started to shoot for what he called “local gonzo media.”
He honed a distinctive style — one that is quite calculated, he explained, and geared toward his cardinal rule: Always hold the viewer’s attention. The informational comedy format is influenced by shows — among others, “The Daily Show” and “Last Week Tonight.”
“I feel like I’m kind of taking that format into the next era. And there’s a ton of content creators doing the same with different ways, but I feel like this is the next evolution of that.”
Wanzer describes a video from November 2020 called “Burlington Police Part One” as the start of “season two” and the “genesis of modern Jonny Wanzer videos.” The video dives into former police chief Brandon Del Pozo’s resignation amid a social media scandal. Part two of the police videos follows with a look at the Battery Park protests against the Burlington Police Department.
Wanzer said he considers himself “outsider left” on the political spectrum, characterizing his beliefs as “75% socialist, 25% libertarian.” In his videos, he frequently pokes fun at his own leftist perspective while also calling out the other side.
In this new phase, Wanzer began to get much more topical. He admitted that his content sometimes contained errors, and around this time, viewers started reaching out to correct the record. Wanzer said he started to feel a responsibility to do more research and began conducting interviews and writing out the informational sections before rewriting in his typical narration style and finding places to insert humor.
“I’m doing the footwork of a journalist, which is crazy,” he said. “Because I’ve always just considered myself a comedian.”
But at times it is difficult to discern what is fact and fiction in Wanzer’s work, and he doesn’t always seem keen to set the record straight.
During the opening of his first police video, Wanzer dejectedly explains that Weinberger’s office served him a cease-and-desist letter for “slandering his actions throughout the past year.” The defeated tone turns out to be a ruse, and Wanzer quickly turns defiant, ripping up the letter on camera, and citing the First Amendment and parody law.
But according to Samantha Sheehan, a spokesperson for Weinberger’s office, the city never sent such a letter, and “the mayor’s office has had no correspondence” with Wanzer.
Wanzer declined to address the mayor’s denial or to further discuss the letter.
He has continued to wade into quasi-journalistic commentary, addressing topics ranging from Burlington’s rental market woes to an examination of whether crime was really up in the city. He invested big in lampooning Weinberger, spending $600 to commission a puppet modeled after the mayor. He also broke with his short format for a 41-minute video blasting the University of Vermont about a host of topics, including budget cuts and its handling of sexual assault cases. (The university did not respond to a request for comment.)
As Wanzer worked his way through more topics, he was never afraid to share his opinions about officials or local institutions. But those subjects have proven much more reluctant to speak about Wanzer. VTDigger reached out to several people and institutions for this story, most of whom did not respond to requests for comment.
During this phase, Wanzer swapped his duct-taped iPhone for better cameras and lighting. He also started using a cast of performers and began posting on TikTok, which now provides the majority of his views.
But as the videos spread on social media, Wanzer has lost his relative anonymity around town.
Wanzer acknowledges that recognition is what he’s after — “because it’s people validating my art.” And he said he has tried to be open and to have conversations with anyone who stops him.
But it can sometimes cross a line.
Particularly as his videos have grown more political, Wanzer said he’s had to deal with frequent arguments at bars and has even had people pull over in their cars to threaten him.
“People have this weird parasocial relationship with me where they’ve spent hours with me on videos or years following me so they see me in public and they will just beeline it to me and just interrupt anything that I’m doing,” Wanzer said. “I think that has been really hard to get used to.”
Wanzer also noted that people are sometimes surprised by his off-camera demeanor.
In person, Wanzer is talkative and uses plenty of hand gestures, but he’s calm and speaks much more softly than he does in videos — and uses less profanity than viewers of his videos might expect.
“When I’m in front of the camera, I turn it up to 11. I’m a little bit wack here. But in real life I’m pretty collected, calm, you know? And even if I’m going crazy on camera, those are my actual opinions and stuff like that. But I’m a lot more sane and so people expect me to be that character.”
Building a business
The videos are now Wanzer’s full-time job. His ambitions have grown and, through a production company that he formed, he is working to translate the popularity of his videos into developing a “gonzo media” collective that he hopes will feature a roster of other creators.
His channel is supported mainly through Patreon subscriptions but he also sells merchandise and takes on occasional sponsorships, such as videos he made for late-night Burlington staple Kountry Kart Deli or for an album by the band Guster.
He has a contract with a streaming service called Means TV, which syndicates his videos. Wanzer described the company as being an “anti-capitalist Netflix” but said the arrangement provides only a fraction of his funding.
According to Wanzer, he has received numerous offers from potential investors but resisted all of them until recently, when a friend of his, whom he declined to name, became his first investor. Wanzer said he keeps creative control with the relationship, but the added support will help him expand.
“He doesn’t really care about making a lot of money or making the money back at this point,” Wanzer said about his investor. “He really just wants to help me get my voice and word out. He wants my information to get to as many people as possible, so I kind of lucked out with that situation.”
Wanzer said when other potential investors had approached him, they had only “dollar signs in their eyes.”
Wanzer was particularly upbeat about a project called “Off the Rails,” which he described as a documentary project that chronicles oddball Vermont events such as local wrestling and monster truck shows, presented through a comedic lens. Three recent UVM graduates are making it, with Wanzer serving as the executive producer. The first episode will air on Wanzer’s channel sometime in the coming months before being spun off to its own channel.
In addition to providing the funding, Wanzer said his role is “to make sure that these videos are edited and presented in a way that really makes them shine.”
Wanzer is also working with someone making a serious documentary about homelessness and housing programs from the perspective of someone who has lived through them.
“There’s no comedy, and I love that too. Because my dream is mostly comedy stuff but I’ve always wanted to produce something that’s just serious and well documented.”
As for Wanzer’s own videos, he’s in the middle of a series criticizing the University of Vermont Medical Center over issues with nurses and unions. Hospital spokesperson Annie Mackin said in an email that “the false characterizations of the UVM Medical Center and our teams in these videos are disappointing.”
Even as he makes moves to expand, Wanzer will keep one thing constant with his skewering takes on Burlington issues: He’ll keep the jokes coming, quickly. One every three lines.
“Because when it starts to get too boring, then I break it up with a non sequitur joke,” he said. “It keeps those people engaged. And honestly, it’s the way that I like to consume stuff, too.”
