The Joke That Kept Paying Her Bills

The question everyone kept asking about Bianca Heinicke—better known as Bibi, Germany’s most-watched YouTuber at her peak—wasn’t whether her debut single How It Is was bad. It was obviously bad. The question was whether she actually cared. Does she cry about it when the camera’s off? Does she lie awake wondering if she should have taken a different path entirely, sold cold cuts at a supermarket, lived a quiet life?

Probably not. Every parody, every pile-on, every comedian dunking on the track fed the algorithm and the bank account in equal measure. Attention is revenue at that scale, regardless of its direction. You can hate-watch someone to riches if you’re not careful, and a lot of people were not careful about Bibi.

Carolin Kebekus—Germany’s sharpest and crudest stand-up comedian, the kind whose pussy jokes make middle-aged Cologne housewives choke on their Prosecco—put her own parody of How It Is on public television, which is both a sign of how far the meme had spread and how deep it had burrowed into the cultural substrate. When state broadcasting picks up your internet shame, you’ve arrived somewhere, even if that somewhere is hard to name. Bibi, wherever she is, is probably fine. The money doesn’t care about the jokes.