A Joyful Heart: Local comedian explodes into viral consciousness

A bald man in a blue shirt sits at the head of a conference table, surrounded by coworkers when a woman walks in. You hear her before you see her.

"Excuse me, is there a Craig in here? Craig!? Is that YOU? CRAIG?!" the woman says. Well, she doesn't actually say it. She belts it.

"Craig!? Happy birthday!"

This force of nature entering the room is Joy Brooker. If you know Joy Brooker -- and if you live in Cape Girardeau there is a good chance you do -- you know what's about to happen.

Brooker waddles into the vertical video frame, wearing some sort of red costume. Is that a tomato? An apple? A red velvet cupcake with sloppy icing? It's hard to tell.

"I have a singing telegram from your wife!" Brooker projects, her round face and dark brown eyes showing out of a mask that ends in a point that is beige for reasons yet unknown. The woman wearing the red whatever-it-is hands Craig a balloon shaped like a star. Joy Brooker then begins her routine. It starts with aggressive clapping then breaks into a customized version of the quirky 1992 hit, "I'm too sexy" by Right Said Fred.

The unsuspecting men and women around the table begin laughing at this surprise entrance. Craig cowers. He can't look. But he also can't not look. His face reddens, but not as loudly as the lopsided, oddly-sculpted material surrounding Brooker's body. One person leaves, Brooker would explain later. This isn't the meeting he signed up for.

The awkwardness of this thing that's happening, in a conference room of a call center, to the man at the head of the table, rekindles the shenanigans of "The Office", the kind of Jim Halpert's making. But a more accurate comparison might reflect the days of Chris Farley living in a van down by the river. Like Farley, Brooker projects loudness, visually and otherwise, as she reaches deep for the notes and delivery, clapping and dancing as she goes.

And while comparisons to the famous SNL skit may seem like hyperbole, more people watched Brooker loudly serenade a 50-year-old AT&T manager with Right Said Fred than people who watched Farley's original SNL act 30-plus years ago. Some 10.5 million people watched SNL weekly in 1991, according to thewrap.com.

Joy Brooker

Joy Brooker

By the time of this article's writing, Brooker's Cape Girardeau birthday surprise had been viewed 17.5 million times on Tiktok; 11 million times on Facebook and 1 million times on Instagram. Brooker's video will almost certainly surpass 30 million views collectively.

But it almost didn't happen at all.

TikTok, or at least the vitriol that lurks on the platform, had almost gotten the best of Cape Girardeau's comedic dynamo.

Social media can be as ugly as it is joyful.

Goals

Joy Brooker, now in her thirties, doesn't crave "going viral" in the way younger people crave it. Brooker understands, having gone viral before, that going viral for viral's sake doesn't pay any bills. To be successful as an influencer, you need a sustained audience and content worth selling. She is building just that.

Beyond an influencer, Brooker is a comedian. She has more than earned the distinction. She spent four years in Los Angeles doing stand-up comedy among other jobs. She experienced a fair amount of success in that area, but she shied away from the spotlight after immersing herself into the routine. She didn't always enjoy the stand-up culture, which was ultra-competitive. She didn't feel she fit in. She said she also bumped into a situation where she was being recruited by a business associate into the Church of Scientology. She ended up meeting someone through a friend, escaping what she disliked and feared about L.A., and moved to Sikeston, Missouri.

"People were wanting to make a series based off of me, but I was not in a place in my life where I could handle success, at all," Brooker said. "So I ran from it. To Sikeston, believe it or not. I needed an excuse to get out of California. It was a whole thing."

After leaving a relationship in Sikeston, Brooker moved to Cape Girardeau, where she has lived since. In 2019, she thought she'd try to earn a few extra bucks here and there with singing telegrams on Valentine's Day. Before she knew it, she was on Amazon picking out the gaudiest costume she could click her mouse on.

Too sexy

"You're too sexy for this job, too sexy for this job, too sexy, don't stop," she sings, adding a visceral growl to the low notes. Craig buries his face as Brooker pumps her arms back and forth, and wiggles her hips, which are still hidden underneath that thing Brooker is wearing. Wait, are those blue lightning bolts? And what's with the extra material coming off the side of her neck and shoulder?

She approaches Craig and rubs his head.

"You're too sexy for your hair, too sexy for your hair, that's why it's not there!"

This is sensory madness: a woman in an unidentifiable red costume, clapping and shaking her hips, while belting "Too Sexy" acapella inside a conference room, painted orange ... and a shiny star balloon floating at the table as a nice touch.

Craig, bald and blushing, has nowhere to hide. His smile stretches wide as he closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. Squeals of delight nearly match the strength of Brooker's voice. No telling how many of Brooker's 265,000 TikTok followers have the same reaction.

On a whim

Brooker decided to jump into the singing telegram gigs on a whim she calls "absurd." She had nurtured her talent in music and comedy -- she was traditionally trained as a singer in college and also knows how to play the piano and violin -- and she thought the telegrams were a simple way to capitalize on her abilities. Frankly, she could use some extra money. Her singing telegrams are reasonably priced, just $30 for some, depending on location, and she does them on the lunch hour of her regular job. But she thought bringing back the singing telegram from the 1980s and 1990s was a good way to connect with people beyond their screens. People need more person-to-person interactions, she said, in a day where most people are stuck to their phones and, well, watching viral videos. The telegram side hustle, bolstered by Facebook Live postings of her performances, started picking up, until the pandemic hit. That's about the time she started studying TikTok and other video platforms a bit more closely. She decided to post some of her old performances on the platforms, and they proved to be a hit on social media.

"I didn't expect that," Brooker said. "It's funny because it's their boss or whatever, and they get embarrassed and these are like inside jokes." But it turns out the world loved being in on them. Several of her early videos had more than a million views, and she knew she was on to something. Brooker's joy comes from performing in person and the memories made in the real world. The social media exposure is a really big bonus, financially, where different channels pay different rates on viewership. She's tinkered and studied the algorithms long enough to come up with a strategy on how to make the most of each telegram.

More recently, however, she strayed from the telegram bits and jumped into singing parodies of another type.

"I get a lot of TikTok videos in my feed of women complaining about men," she explained. "You can do video responses to comments. So I started responding to women's comments about their dating life with bad dating advice in the form of song. I saw a lot of comments saying 'don't settle for the bare minimum.' For some reason, I had the 'Bare Necessities' song from 'The Jungle Book' in my mind."

Brooker sang a silly parody on TikTok about putting up with the "bare minimum" from men, which got more than 2 million views. But it attracted ugly commentary and body shaming from men on the app.

"I wasn't wearing my costume, so you could see my face and my body," she said. "And a lot of the comments I got from men were just so mean. They were calling me Miss Piggy, called me a fat cow. It was just ruthless there for a couple weeks. It was rough. If I have the costume to hide behind, nobody is paying attention to my body. So that just welcomed a lot of negativity and hate. One guy said I needed to lose a chin or two."

Brooker slipped into a dark place for several weeks after the incident, pondering the idea of pulling back and not being seen anymore. She said she'd never cancel a telegram. She would do those no matter what, but there was nothing forcing her to put herself on social media to subject herself to body shaming and bullying.

But she decided to do it anyway. And that decision was met with an audience roughly the size of people who watch the NFL on a given week. Heart emojis all around.

"You're too sexy to be 50, too sexy to be 50, you're feeling so nifty," she sings. "You're a model, you know what I mean, you do a little turn on the catwalk. On the catwalk, on the catwalk, yeah, Craig, ya do ya little turn on the catwalk. ... Craig, you're too sexy to be 50."

Craig's friends erupt in applause. Brooker pats Craig on the shoulder, smiles big, and says, for the last time, "Happy birthday, Craig!"

Famous

With tens of millions of video views to her name, Joy Brooker just might be Cape Girardeau's most famous living resident.

She loves living in Cape Girardeau. It was only supposed to be a temporary stop. She had designs on moving to Nashville and pushing for an entertainment career there. After her breakup in Sikeston, Brooker found an apartment in Cape, then began meeting people.

I didn't expect to fall in love with Cape the way I did," she said. "Cape was only supposed to be a temporary stop. But I met some amazing people and plugged into the creative community here. And I just loved it so much that I stayed. I have a passion to help the community grow."

Brooker has been involved with the River City Players group and the arts council, raising funds and planning and participating in events. She loves going to the farmers market and enjoys hanging with friends at songwriter's night.

"I just realized how rich this community is. It's filled with people who care. This felt like home," she said. "People ask me 'Shy Cape, why Cape?' I don't know how to explain other than It just feels right."

Another mystery surrounding Brooker is, what's with the costume?

It turns out, the red blob of fabric that surrounds Brooker as she crashes workplaces is neither an apple nor a tomato. And those are not blue lightning bolts. They are veins. And the costume is a heart. Brooker's first telegram was for Valentine's Day.

She wanted something that went with the theme of the holiday. A heart, of course. But an anatomically correct one.

Which, in a literary way, seems appropriate. With each telegram, with each social media post, Brooker puts her heart on the line to be judged. For most, the end result is laughter. Some insist on attacks.

Judging by the millions soaking up her content, it appears that Brooker's costume is in the right place.