Chris Crocker
Chris Crocker
Christopher Darren Cunningham (born December 7, 1987), better known by the stage name Chris Crocker, is an American Internet celebrity, blogger, songwriter, recording artist and former YouTuber and pornographic film actor. Crocker gained fame in September 2007 from his viral video "Leave Britney Alone!", in which he tearfully defended pop singer Britney Spears' comeback performance at the MTV Video Music Awards; his video received over four million views in two days. The video gained international media attention, hundreds of parodies, along with criticism for Crocker.Producing and acting in his own videos, Crocker is a self-described edutainer. In almost all of his adolescent works, he presents himself as an openly gay and effeminate Southerner in a "small-minded town" in the Bible Belt. Using "Crocker" as a stage name, he kept his exact location private due to safety concerns and death threats in response to his YouTube and Myspace video blogs and profile until he was no longer a teenager. According to his Myspace profile, Crocker lived in Los Angeles as of January 2008. In May 2010, he returned home to Tennessee, and now travels to Los Angeles for business. Crocker's work consists mainly of short-form, self-directed monologues shot in his grandparents' home. As of October 2010, his videos had received a combined 50 million plays on MySpace, and his vlog channel on YouTube was the 100th-most viewed of all time in all categories, with over 205 million video views, before Crocker closed his YouTube account in September 2015. Crocker's detractors and critics have accused him of narcissism, melodramatics, histrionics, and using Spears' personal shortcomings to bolster his own fame. Others have accused Crocker of acting in the "Leave Britney Alone!" video, although he insisted it was genuine on a September 2007 appearance on Maury Povich's Maury show. In 2014, Queerty stated that with Crocker's thousands of Facebook and Twitter followers, he is "one of those self-invented social media icons".