A5 ATLANTA · 2011–2012 · CARDINAL & COMPANY
A barber bet you couldn't sit through a haircut without laughing. Chris Webber lost.
Laugh in Marcus Harvey's chair and the cut isn't free anymore. Your money goes to charity. It raised over $1,000 and turned a luxury barber into a comedian with tape.
The stakes
Marcus Harvey is two things at once, and neither one was helping the other: an established luxury barber, and an up-and-coming comedian with real talent and no platform.
He wanted to take the comedy somewhere. I had just hatched an advertising agency and wanted clients. Between us we had a chair, a story, and no money. That describes roughly every creator who has ever asked me for help since.
The hard part was never whether Marcus was funny. It’s that “trust me, he’s funny” is not a thing anybody can act on.
The move
Turn the chair into the format.
Cuttin’ Up with Marcus Harvey. A YouTube series built on one rule a stranger can repeat after hearing it once: sit in Marcus’s chair for a full haircut without laughing and the cut is free. Laugh, and you pay. Except the money goes to charity.
You cannot demonstrate that a barber is funny. You can, however, film people losing a bet to him, over and over, on camera. The audience isn’t asked to take anyone’s word for anything. They watch the evidence arrive one snort at a time.
And nobody in the chair is a plant, which is why it works. The stakes are real, they’re tiny, and they’re funny. That is the entire brief for anything that spreads.
The proof
No stills survive for this one. It was always moving pictures anyway, and the film is better than the frames would have been.
The receipts
NBA legend Chris Webber sat in the chair for the 2012 celebrity edition.
Twitter goes bananas. This is the first time we’ve ever seen a viral haircut go crazy online. Like, “who the hell just cut Chris Webber’s hair?”
The credit
Cardinal & Company. And Marcus, who did the actual hard part.
This case is on the site for one specific reader: the creator or small brand with something genuinely good and no way to prove it to anybody. That’s not a smaller version of the Delta problem. It’s a different problem, and this is the one that solves it.