By Bree Reyes |Staff Writer|

Two students from CSUSB and California State Polytechnic University, Pomona(Cal Poly) are the creators behind TheCrazyGorilla, a YouTube comedy channel with over eight million views and 60,000 subscribers.
Twenty-year-old Anthony Nguyen created the channel TheCrazyGorilla on Aug. 7, 2009 with a friend who had a gorilla costume, and since then has uploaded more than 150 videos.

“We were wondering what we could do with this gorilla costume,” said Nguyen. “So we did what anyone else would do; we made a video with the gorilla costume, and then that’s how history was made,” he continued.

“The first video, a parody of Selena Gomez’s song ‘Magic,’ did not receive many views, but by the third video, ‘How to Get a Shuffle Girl’ this particular video received 5,000 views within its first week of being uploaded to YouTube,” according to Nguyen.

The comedy channel uploads two to five minute parodies and skits based on experiences life as well as observing the content of some of their favorite YouTube channels.

While they plan their videos with outlines and rough drafts of scripts, most of their acting is improvised.

“I realized we were starting to get big when I was in high school, people would come up to me and say ‘Hey that was a cool video yesterday’ and I didn’t even know they watched my videos,” said Nguyen,

Ramon Guzman, 21, officially joined the team of TheCrazyGorilla after regularly helping Nguyen with the channel’s videos when they were in high school.

“He asked me to help out and I didn’t really know what he was doing,” said Guzman.

“Every now and then he would ask me to help him with a video, then two years ago he asked me to help him out with videos for a month, and after that month he asked me if I wanted to become a part of the team and I said yes,” he added.

Both Guzman and Nguyen were born and raised in San Bernardino and graduated from Cajon High School.

They moved on to CSUSB, with Guzman attending San Bernardino Valley College for two years before transferring to CSUSB as a marketing major, while Nguyen attended CSUSB for two years before transferring to Cal Poly Pomona as an accounting major.

The success of TheCrazyGorilla created many opportunities for the duo, including a contract with the YouTube comedy channel FLAMA, recording videos at YouTube Space, and collaborating with YouTube stars like TravieBASED, JRMun0z, and Krystaalized.

“I think the best part about what we do and how we do comedy is that we’re walking a fine line,” said Nguyen. “It can be controversial but it could still be funny so it’s not really bad since were doing comedy. You can kind of expand your jokes.”

One of their goals for the channel is to collaborate with their biggest inspiration.

“The goal is to collaborate with Timothy DeLaGhetto,” said Nguyen. “He’s been our inspiration since day one, so to be able to collaborate with him would be awesome.”

For long-term goals, the duo hopes that TheCrazyGorilla will one day turn into its own comedy community.

“I want this channel to blow up and have totally different creators and each creator have their own kind of style, all on one channel,” said Nguyen.

“It would start with us and then expand.” he continued.

TheCrazyGorilla uploads new videos on their YouTube channel every Thursday at www.youtube.com/thecrazygorilla.

They can also be found on their vlog channel TheCrazyGorillaLife as well as Facebook (TheCrazyGorilla Productions), Twitter (@TheCrazyGorilla), Tumblr (thecrazygorilla), and Instagram (@thecrazygorilla).