The enduring truths of “My Weekend as a 28-year-old in Chicago”

This is Judd Crud’s weekend as a 28-year-old living in Chicago: He started his day off with a Guru energy drink and making his bed. It was mental awareness day at work, so he went to brunch with Lizzie and had a few drinks. Then he and Devlin kayaked the Chicago River. (It was actually pretty dope!) Priscilla had never been to the Field Museum, so they had to check it out, then get some scrumptious tacos, vibes, and margarita towers at El Paraíso. Got a new transmission for his 4Runner, then chilled a little. Saw Bill Maher at the Chicago Theatre (bro crushed it!), then met up with Lindsey Jacobellis and her sister, Malmo, for tequila shots and . . . another marg tower. Then they went to Rind for stuffed pineapple and snow crab and—

Make it deep enough into Crud’s weekend, and a dog will float. He’ll introduce a girlfriend, wife, and husband in rapid succession. There are more marg towers than buildings, and Pilsen has a Trader Joe’s. 

When Crud made the video in the summer of 2022, people across the country were deep into making up for time lost in lockdown—and showcasing it online via “My Weekend in [Location]” videos. One of the first to go viral was by Codey James, a Manhattan-based influencer who starts his weekend getting the day off from Reddit (“for mental health”), followed by three days of drinking, clubbing, shopping, getting tattooed, and name-dropping, which he describes with a sleepy nonchalance that evokes the perfect veneer of self-satisfied humility. That video hit in May, and within weeks, there were legions more parodying his excess and feigned modesty. For Chicagoans, Crud’s parody, “My Weekend as a 28-year-old in Chicago,” has endured well past the trend.

When the clip first blew up, Crud had only been living in the city for four months, and he hadn’t made many videos for social media. Crud grew up in Appleton, Wisconsin, and studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before taking a job at a stem cell research facility in Denver. Lab life was lonely, so he got into the sketch comedy scene to make friends. He ended up cofounding a troupe called Phantasmagoria, which trafficked in bizarre-o comedy with elements of horror. The troupe would, for example, put on a “normal” performance interrupted by a cult that held everyone hostage, or appear on TikTok as tumorous Teletubbies called Gabbagooblins. In spring of 2022, he moved to Chicago with two of his Phantasmagoria buddies and renamed the troupe Crud. He started making comedy videos to entertain his friends in Denver, never hoping for or expecting anything to come of it, but two years on, his phone becomes unusable every few months from notifications announcing “My Weekend” is having another viral moment.

Lots of Chicagoans made parodies that summer, including videographer and Logan Square resident Jake Karlson. He describes his day—smoking blunts, playing video games, hanging with his girlfriend—with the same delighted monotone of the original, but instead of rolling past bespoke storefronts, a walk through his neighborhood includes just an errant glove and broken glass. “The vibes are immaculate,” he says while entering a sterile coffee shop where everything is beige and concrete except for a guy with a mullet making lattes. Karlson is an avid appreciator of documentaries and enjoys the plasticity of self-documenting that social media engenders. People can present their lives as “real” as reality TV. When James’s New York weekend surfaced in his Instagram reels, Karlson thought, “This is a beautiful work of art.”

“People consume influencer culture even as we know it’s a stupid, fake, unsustainable lifestyle,” he says. He’s fascinated by how people learn to present themselves online in ways that can seem aspirational and inspire inadequacy, so his parody laughs at the hyperconsumptive narcissism of the original while celebrating his own life’s banality.

Crud’s leans into the hyperconsumptive narcissism so hard that it often takes people a second to get the joke. (The first time I saw it, I turned it off after about 30 seconds because it was everything I hate about social media, but so many people were laughing about it on Twitter, I went back and watched through the end.) Only about 20 percent of his video—which clocks in at just over two minutes—is original footage. The rest is an amalgam of others’ TikToks and video scraps hiding on Crud’s phone, which he pieced together to create a weekend that gradually unravels into several plots, each with its own cast of characters, amounting to more than a week’s worth of activities that increasingly defy space, time, and logic. (Did I mention the floating dog?)

“The dog is a very Lynchian omen that strange things are afoot in the video,” explains artist and North Center resident Carmilla Morrell. “And should you continue on past this sighting, you’ll come to understand the sort of nightmarish world of friends and marg towers that this guy lives in on a day-to-day basis. Like, does he ever truly get rest?”

The video is quirky and funny, but it’s outlived the posting trend that sparked it because of its truths and artistry. It represents someone who “seems” to have a very full life but is spending so much time finding and documenting photogenic or provocative experiences—“content”—that they can never actually live it. They’re just appearing to live. Crud floods viewers with so many names—people, places, activities—that they wash together to become more like tones than unique pieces of information. At the same time, Morrell notes, “My Weekend” is like a social media version of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). In Chicago, time and access can become alluringly flexible for certain privileged, charming white guys. About two months ago, Morrell exalted the video’s layers of cinematic wisdom by creating a fake Letterboxd entry for it. The meme also went viral.

Writer Grace Robins-Somerville lived in Chicago last summer on a brief stint between her native New York and grad school in smalltown North Carolina. To her, the video doesn’t capture anything about Chicago so much as the go-go-go pace of city life, which
she misses.

“I was actually in Chicago, like, two weeks ago for my friend’s wedding,” she says. “We were running around all weekend, and that was the joke: Everyone was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m feeling very “My-Weekend-as-a-28-year-old-in-Chicago.”’ And we would just randomly be like, ‘Then I had another marg tower.’ ‘Then I just chilled for a bit.’ ‘It was actually pretty dope!’ It’s never not applicable.”

Marg towers might be the crown jewel of Crud’s video. They’re the influencer’s champagne tower: visual signifiers of a certain opulence and leisure denied to most. Interestingly, a new world record for the largest champagne tower was set just six months before Crud’s video dropped, almost like a harbinger for conspicuous consumption as the American wealth gap continues growing. But unlike his character in “My Weekend,” the real Crud has never had a marg tower—he doesn’t even like margaritas. 

“I saw them pop up on the grid and thought, ‘This is so extravagant and stupid and beautiful,’” Crud explains. He admits “My Weekend” is making fun of American lifestyle culture, but he’s also making fun of himself. 

“When I first moved here in 2022 . . . after a couple years of not eating at restaurants or being at bars, I found myself more aware that that is a large part of what I do, especially since moving to Chicago. In Denver, there were a lot more activities to do outside, but here I just felt like me and my friends were constantly going to restaurants and concerts and just cramming as much into a night as humanly possible. . . . Maybe we’ve just lost a lot of our old forms of community, so we’ve become more concerned with communal experience.” 

Being familiar with and able to relate to or appreciate the same video as thousands of others online can be a communal experience, too. In the first months after “My Weekend” took off, Crud tried to replicate its success, but he quickly found it self-defeating. He was trying too hard, wanting it too much. “My Weekend” was a throwaway video designed to make his friends laugh, and that’s what he’s sticking to now: making things he knows his friends will find funny. If others find them funny, too? Great! But that’s not the goal. Crud’s not living for a digital audience. He’s just a 30-year-old living day by day in Chicago.