"On a recent Saturday night, the comedy community of both coasts gathered to fête Mitchell Stephen Fesh. At New York’s Upright Citizens Brigade, the bearded guest of honor sat amid a doting crowd to watch a tribute video to himself packed with stars from NBC’s Thursday night comedies: 30 Rock’s Jack McBrayer, Community’s Donald Glover, and The Office’s Ellie Kemper and Zach Woods (who plays Kathy Bates’s obsequious lackey). Woods applauded Fesh’s three-word name that “makes you sound like either an aristocrat or an assassin,” while Human Giant’s Rob Huebel and Paul Scheer taped themselves at UCB’s Los Angeles branch, amid a capacity crowd cheering Fesh’s name. And then came the Saturday Night Live encomiums: On came a video greeting from the cast’s Fred Armisen, Will Forte, Bobby Moynihan, Nasim Pedrad, Andy Samberg, and Jenny Slate — as well as the show’s writers, interns, and the actor Jude Law, who was hosting the show that very night. Fesh shook with excitement throughout the evening as the praise rolled in. But who was this mysterious Fesh, and why all the love?
To properly tell the legend of Fesh, we must go back to early February, when Chris Gethard, a UCB regular who has written for SNL and the Onion News Network (as well as a book called Weird New York), posted a video to YouTube called “Attn Sad Youth of America”: In it, he talked about how dark and lonely and confusing his youth was, and then he made an offer. If his depression resonated with anyone in his audience, he would like to fly that someone out to New York — “and for one night, at least one night, you will be a rock star. I will make sure that before you ever even arrive in New York City that everyone knows about you and what’s great about you and is psyched to see you here.” The first response came from Fesh. Plump, bespectacled, with his face framed by wild tufts of curly hair and a puffy cotton-candy beard, the 19-year-old community-college student and self-professed “huge, huge comedy nerd” from Maumee, Ohio, wrote via Facebook, “I’ve already written to you about a number of things, generally about being unhappy in Ohio and coming off as a jerk to people I look up to, which I feel includes you. Through my day-to-day life I’ve found it also includes people I don’t look up to or like, apparently. I don’t want to drag on, so, yeah, that sounds like me.” Gethard had his guest of honor, and once Fesh was alerted, he posted a video in which he said, his voice breaking, “This is I would say a thing on my bucket list; but I never put it on because I never thought it could happen."