Meet the most hilarious people ever to lose their jobs, friends, livelihoods, and their dignity—all for your personal amusement

FRAMED The stars of YouTube didn't choose to be famous

The following is an excerpt from the March/April issue of Radar, on newsstands now. To get a risk-free copy of the print magazine delivered to your doorstep, click here!

Marylynn Aminrazavi was happy. She was on vacation. Decked out in beach casual—oversized white T-shirt, colorful beach towel, hair in a bun—she leaned back in a chair by the Atlantic Ocean, put on her daughter's iPod, and closed her eyes. Lost in the music, she began to sing along. Loudly.

The song was Boyz II Men's "I'll Make Love to You." Aminrazavi's thin, nasal warble—not to mention her physique (she looks like your mom)—was clearly never intended for mid-90s R&B sex-pop. The resulting scene was comic gold: A 46-year-old suburban mother of two, blissfully unaware, belting out "I'll make love to you / Like you want me to" to the dozens of beachgoers around her.

In April 2003, as if the life of a doughy teenager named Ghyslain weren't hard enough, one of his fellow students found his videotape, digitized it, and placed the clip online. Since then, the "STAR WARS Kid" has been viewed 900 million timesHad someone not had the presence of mind to capture the moment with a digital camera, it would have been lost forever. For one minute and 13 seconds of screen time, Aminrazavi sings with disarming sincerity, until the laughter of those around her finally overcomes the insulation of her iPod earbuds.

Warily, she opens her eyes. Waves of fear and shock ripple across her face as she spots the camera and realizes that her internal reverie has, in fact, been quite public. Mortified, she hides her eyes, erupts into laughter, and apologizes to her neighbors on the beach: "I'm so embarrassed."

BOYZ II MOM Marylynn Aminrazavi in "Singing on the Beach"

It was only the beginning. The video, recorded in July 2005, made its way onto YouTube bearing the title "Singing on the Beach." In October of last year, Good Morning America featured it on the air as a YouTube video of the week. Since then, it has been viewed 1.3 million times and ranks as one of the site's most-viewed comedy clips of all time. More than 3,000 people have left comments, many along the lines of, "fake singing white fat typical american bitch, shut the fuck up and eat some burgers."

"Now I know how Paris Hilton feels," says Aminrazavi, who works for a health-care firm in Northern Virginia and is studying to become a nurse practitioner. "That's one of my worst moments. It's really bizarre and embarrassing. Every time I go to class, people start singing 'I'll Make Love to You.'" Her husband is a teacher, and his students have seen the clip. At a work meeting shortly after the video took off, her coworkers flashed copies of a Boyz II Men CD. Prior to becoming one of its most sought-after celebrities, Aminrazavi had never heard of YouTube. Asked during a telephone interview what she'd like to say to the person behind her public humiliation, Aminrazavi replies, "I'm going to smack him as soon as I get off the phone."

The quick-witted auteur who captured her indiscretion was her 14-year-old son, Arya. "He's having a good time with it," says Aminrazavi, who has endured the humiliation with a smile so that the teen—who aspires to work in film one day—can get some attention for his other YouTube videos. After GMA featured the clip, Arya watched with glee as the hits rolled in. "He was watching and said, 'Oh, Mom, it's 1,000; now it's 2,000,'" Aminrazavi says. "I was dying."

When Time magazine named "You" as its person of the year in 2006, it was a ham-handed attempt to salute "user-generated content" as the driving force behind Web 2.0. Last year MySpace and YouTube commanded $580 million and $1.6 billion, respectively, because regular folks participate in the grand techno-democratic experiment, baring their souls to the mindhive, each confessional post or exploding-Mentos video a bid for attention and celebrity. But there's a curious thing about the new Internet fame generators: The most wildly successful clips often feature unwilling participants. According to research by the Viral Factory, a marketing firm that specializes in viral videos, four of the top 10 most-watched online videos ever feature private or semi-private moments that were, like Aminrazavi's performance at the beach, never intended for a wide audience. Their protagonists are, by and large, regular people who woke up one morning to find that their lowest moments had been caught on camera and distributed to the snickering online hordes.

If you're not careful, you could be next.

Patient Zero of the phenomenon is an overweight 19-year-old Canadian named Ghyslain Raza. His journey toward global humiliation began in 2003, so predated the rise of YouTube, but the video—it's almost statistically impossible that you haven't seen it—is archived there for posterity. He is the Star Wars kid. In November 2002, while hanging out alone in the AV room at his Quebec high school, Raza videotaped himself imitating the martial arts moves of Darth Maul, using a long golf ball retriever for a light sabre. The performance is deadly serious. Raza's desperation to inhabit the body of a powerful, fearsome Jedi is palpable, and he pursues the clumsy swordplay with an abandon that can only be achieved by those confident of their privacy. Unfortunately for him, he left the videotape in the machine. In April 2003, as if the life of a doughy teenager named Ghyslain weren't hard enough, one of his fellow students found it, digitized it, and placed the clip online. Since then, it has been viewed 900 million times, according to the Viral Factory. It's difficult to think of anything else, ever, that 900 million people have seen.

THE FORCE IS AGAINST HIM Ghyslain Raza as the Star Wars Kid

Within months of the video's appearance on the Web, Raza and his parents filed a $200,000 lawsuit against the three classmates he accused of posting the video. According to documents filed in that case, which was settled last year for an undisclosed amount, the humiliation made school "unbearable" for Raza. His classmates would point at him and chant "Star Wars kid!" He was diagnosed with depression, and eventually dropped out and engaged the services of a private tutor. Aside from a few brief statements by e-mail in 2003, he has never spoken with reporters.

Raza soon found comrades in online ignominy. In early 2005, Gary Brolsma, then a 19-year-old Staples employee from Saddle Brook, New Jersey, exploded onto the Internet. According to what may or may not be a legitimate interview with him posted at a tribute website, garybrolsma.net, he became fascinated with a song called "Dragostea Din Tei," by the Romanian techno-pop band O-Zone. The song, whose title translates as "Love Among the Linden Leaves," is a catchy-yet-mournful, epically melodic anthem with a thump-thump bass line and a chorus that The Believer magazine describes as "in precisely the range that huge legions of drunk people can sing easily." That chorus goes like this: "Numa numa yay / Numa numa yay / Numa numa numa yay."

Brolsma thought it would be funny to sit at his webcam-equipped computer and lip-synch to "Dragostea Din Tei." He was right. In an impeccably choreographed performance, he becomes the song—bouncing his heavyset frame to the beat, waving his arms madly but precisely, and flawlessly registering every overwrought Romanian vocalization on his silly-putty face. The effect is sublime and hysterical—a fat kid from New Jersey executing this utterly alien-sounding, bizarrely memorable song with the confidence of a virtuoso. Thinking his friends might like to see the video, he posted it online. It has since been viewed more than 200 million times, according to the Viral Factory's top 10 tally. Brolsma tried to ride the wave of attention, appearing on Good Morning America, but ended up, according to the New York Times, "embarrassed," "moping around the house," and "shuttling back and forth" between his parents' house and work. He canceled a Today Show interview and stopped returning reporters' phone calls.