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STUNT TROUBLE Mark A. Hicks as Afroninja

The logic of collective ridicule is, at bottom, inscrutable. Yes, "Star Wars Kid" is funny, but why did Raza's sweaty, awkward gyrations snowball into a global cultural touchstone rather than die after a few forwarded e-mails in Canada? Why did Aminrazavi's careless sing-along catch fire? Why, of all things, "Numa Numa" (as Brolsma's dance has been dubbed)? It is as though the fickle gods plucked these sad souls at random to have some fun with them. After Raza and Brolsma, the floodgates opened, and virtually every week has seen another private error or foolish moment datacast to the world. You could get in an argument with a stranger on a bus. Or you could disastrously try your hand as a sportscaster on a college station. Or you could accidentally shoot yourself. With 780 million camera phones sold worldwide in the last two years, no one is safe from senseless and random ridicule. The surveillance state we've been fretting about for so many years has snuck up on us. But it's not concerned with political control. It just wants to see people screw up.

One of its reluctant stars is called Afroninja. He stands, relaxed and confident, in what looks like an empty office with a drop cloth hung on the rear wall, clad in a loose-fitting martial-arts outfit and holding a pair of nunchucks in each hand. He looks at the camera, offers a teeth-baring snarl, and launches his body comfortably into a backflip.

"The toughest thing was when my family saw it," says Hicks of the Afroninja video. "To lose respect with them, which is what it felt like—that was tough"He doesn't land it. His feet sail over his head gracefully, but halfway through the maneuver his body stops, pauses momentarily, and plummets downward, face-first. People gasp. As if following some instinctual mandate to save face, the clearly woozy Afroninja gets up, flails his nunchucks, and careens off camera to the sound of an upended table.

The clip lasts 15 seconds. The slapstick of the doomed backflip is flawless, and the hopeless attempt to redeem it is downright Chaplinesque. Here is this man with a self-important swagger attempting to appear fearsome and adroit, and instead he looks like a fool. People find this sort of thing funny. When "Afroninja" was posted, it was viewed 80 million times—placing it roughly on par with the final episode of Cheers in terms of audience. According to the Viral Factory, the video ranks ninth among the most-watched online clips ever. Somewhere, as it metastasized across the Internet, someone came up with the moniker. It stuck.

Afroninja's real name is Mark A. Hicks. He's a seasoned and successful Los Angeles-based stuntman with credits in more than 40 films and 60 commercials. He served as stunt-double to Chris Tucker in the Rush Hour films, and won the Best Fight category at the 2002 World Stunt Awards. The infamous clip was from Hicks's July 2004 audition to appear in a Nike commercial called "Chamber of Fear" with LeBron James.

Six weeks after the audition, Hicks learned that, despite an 18-year career spent climbing the Hollywood ladder, it was his errant kung fu move that made him a star. He was breaking for a midnight dinner on the Los Angeles set of xXx: State of the Union when a friend called.

"She was cracking up," Hicks says. "She said, 'I just saw your audition on Jay Leno.'" The chinny late-night comic had gone to the online well for material, and he'd found "Afroninja."

"See, that's a true athlete," Leno said. "I like how he tries to save it, like, 'Maybe I can pull this off—whoa!'"

Hicks had no idea until Leno's airing of the clip that it had lived beyond the audition room. "I was sick to my stomach," Hicks says. "I couldn't eat. Because I've fought all my life to gain credibility and respect."

Among the many ironies of Hicks's unwilling and unbidden transformation into Afroninja is the fact that he got the part. What actually happened in the audition is this: It was a second callback for Hicks, to a casting agency he'd worked with many times before. He'd just returned from a shoot in Hong Kong and was jet-lagged. "I just missed," he says. His chin and nose hit the floor, after which point his memory is a bit fuzzy. "I was pretty much out on my feet at that point. I think I bumped into a tray on a table. They asked me if I was okay. I apologized, got up, dusted myself off, got a drink of water, went back and jumped up, kicked the ceiling, and did a 360-degree spinning hook." Hicks knew that every gymnast screws up a move now and again, and that the casting agency and other stuntmen waiting outside the audition room viewed him as a professional. He shook off the gaffe and left confident he would book the job. "I knew I was better than anyone else there," he says.

But to Leno's audience, and to the tens of millions who would eventually watch "Afroninja" on YouTube and dozens of other video sites, he was a joke. "LOL poor idiot," wrote one YouTube commentor. "U R very stealthy and stupid dumbass ha ha," wrote another. "Dis man is a failure," wrote a third.

It was devastating. His usually frenetic work pace slackened, Hicks says, because people in Hollywood recognized him as Afroninja and didn't want to risk hiring him to do complicated and dangerous stunt work. "It hurt my credibility with people who didn't know my skill level," he says. "I heard it from everyone. Every stunt person, assistant director, stunt coordinator—even the directors and the producers—were coming to me and saying, 'You're the Afroninja.' I think I was not considered for a lot of things because I was portrayed as a goofball. Respect is huge in the stunt world, especially for an African American, because the industry idea of what a stuntman should be is a good ol' boy."

Even Chris Tucker seems to have abandoned him. "They're doing Rush Hour III," says Hicks, "and I'm not in it. I think that's a direct result of this video." He doesn't know who is responsible for first posting it online, but he assumes it was someone affiliated with the agency that created the ad, which he declines to name (Advertising Age credits it to Wieden and Kennedy). He and his lawyer discussed tracking down and suing the culprit, but eventually the idea was dropped. "I just sort of endured it," he says with a sigh. "The audacity that someone would put this out on the Internet without regard to me, that just blew me away. I wanted to kill the guy."

Hicks has enough perspective to understand that "Afroninja" is funny. "It has a certain magic to it," he says. "I think every now and then everything just comes together—the timing, the cool approach, the Buckwheat-looking hair. The whole thing was perfect." And he doesn't really mind the people who recognize him on the street. What is hard, he says, is knowing that people close to him—his colleagues, his loved ones—saw him, for that 15 seconds, as a fool. "The toughest thing was when my family saw it," he says. "I do a lot of things for my family, and I make more money than anyone in my family. To lose respect with them, which is what it felt like—that was tough." When his wife saw it, he says, he threw a chair at the wall.

"People like to look at people being humiliated," says Mike Parker, the lead project coordinator for eBaum's World, a schlock-joke site that hosts hundreds of look-at-this-jackass videos submitted by viewers. (The site was an early popularizer of "Afroninja"; the fungibility of digital video is such that popular clips get seeded from sites like eBaum's World to YouTube and back again.)

The site claims one million visitors a day and $10 million per year in revenue. Eric Bauman, who founded it in 1998 as a 17-year-old high-school student in Rochester, New York, first gained publicity by posting an audio clip of one of his high-school teachers, Mrs. Barnes, ranting and raving after Bauman and his friends had driven her to hysterics in class. Parker says Barnes suffered "physical problems" and "mental problems" as a result of the clip's popularity.

The closest thing Parker can cite to a guiding principle of what makes a humiliating video globally hilarious is that people like to see how others behave when they think no one's watching. "One of the things that makes it viral is that it's people being caught off guard," he says. "Completely off guard. They're doing their thing, thinking no one's going to see it, and now, boom! It's everywhere."

GROWING PAINS Miracle Jackson

Parker doesn't have much of a conscience when it comes to the resonance of that boom in the lives of people who have been caught unawares. "It's tough," he says. "That's the business we're in. But you do feel for these people. Eric feels for his teacher. He feels sorry for what he did, but he doesn't regret it." As an example of the line eBaum's World won't cross, Parker cites the video of an overweight seventh-grader named Miracle Jackson captured at a school talent show. During her anemic, comically low-energy dance act, the crowd first laughs and then begins facetiously cheering her on. "The school asked us to take it down," Parker says. "I think we did." As of this writing, "Introducing Miracle Jackson: Watch Her Unbelievable Dance Moves!" can still be seen at eBaum's World. On YouTube, it's been viewed more than 60,000 times.

Bauman's "prank" on Barnes indicates an emerging facet of YouTube humiliation—the tactic of deliberately provoking a teacher or coworker into a rage for the express purpose of posting the resulting drama online. A search for "screaming teacher" turns up dozens of clips on the site. The most celebrated case involved an as-yet-unnamed teacher in Quebec whose class goaded him into an outburst in November. The 32-year veteran, who specialized in teaching kids with discipline problems, went on stress leave after the video hit YouTube. Though it has since been taken down at the request of the school—which banned camera phones after the incident—it has sparked a wider, global debate about the wisdom of allowing cell phones in class. Quebec is now considering banning them in schools throughout the province, and Scotland's largest teachers' union called for barring them from classrooms in December.