LA is obsessed with an anonymous, mall-loving internet comedian

Earlier this year, I was sitting at my desk when the ground began rattling. The bookshelves above my head rumbled, shuddering for a few long seconds before ceasing. Was it a substantial earthquake, or had an 18-wheeler just shaken the earth as it drove past my place?

Looking for confirmation, I instinctively passed the usual breaking news suspects. I didn’t confer with the Los Angeles Times QuakeBot, nor did I Google “LA earthquake” or turn to a place like X, where people often post about feeling seismic activity. Instead, I opened up Instagram and typed in “Americana at Brand Memes.” 

To be clear, this deeply esoteric LA account is indeed a meme forum that name-checks and often pokes fun at Glendale’s ostentatious outdoor mall of the same name. But as I’d suspected, the meme account had already confirmed that the shake was, indeed, an earthquake through a signature cheeky post: Two buttons, mimicking the “I Voted” stickers, that read “I felt the earthquake” and “I did not feel the earthquake.” Underneath the post, Angelenos had littered the comment section with similar stories as mine: “The first thing I did after the shaking stopped was refresh this page,” wrote one commenter.

The meme page doesn’t just weigh in on natural disasters. Through a flurry of painstakingly curated memes making the rounds in the zeitgeist and original posts alike, Americana at Brand Memes takes aim at Los Angeles tropes and granular insights that will cause residents, both newcomers and lifers, to cackle. The account will pair, say, a screenshot of Taylor Swift and Blake Lively agape at a football play with the chaotically stressful signage of the 110 freeway in Downtown LA, a horror many Angeleno drivers can relate to. Or it’ll take Justin Timberlake’s mug shot, wherein he stares directly at the camera with bloodshot eyes, overlaid with the caption: “Me after lying to the Din Tai Fung host that my entire party is here,” a nod to the famously busy dumpling outpost’s rules. The page will also nod to national news, albeit with a uniquely LA spin on it all. 

“Everybody who has even passing interest or passion about Los Angeles” follows the page, says Evan Lovett, a lifelong Angeleno who runs the video series “L.A. in a Minute.” To Lovett, the page is “a good barometer of how people feel” about happenings in and around the city. Although there are plenty of accounts that recommend new and unsung locales in Los Angeles, or absurd “overheard” conversations throughout the city, nothing quite like Americana at Brand Memes exists in LA, at least right now.

“There’s a lot of accounts that post memes, but they have a very high batting average,” Lovett says. “It keeps you coming back.”

Boasting nearly 100,000 followers, Americana at Brand Memes has become something bigger than simply a place to joke around about Los Angeles’ many infuriating and endearing quirks. Five years on since it began, the s—tposting meme account has become a ubiquitous source of commentary about issues that matter to people making their way in LA.

“The person who runs it has the finger on the pulse of Los Angeles and comes with the right tone and direction, whether it’s fires, earthquakes, floods or positive stuff,” Lovett adds. “Los Angeles really is a funny city; there’s so many things that are hilarious, for better or for worse. [The page] totally does a great job of capturing all the tropes, all the cliches, all the stereotypes. 

“Like, listen, there are elements of truth there. And they do a good job of lightheartedly poking fun at that, or celebrating it, or celebrating it in a humorous way.”

A meme maestro rises

In a fitting turn, the meme maestro behind Americana at Brand Memes grew up “in and around Los Angeles,” he tells me over the phone. But that’s as much as he’ll say, preferring to keep up his anonymity. 

Unlike other meme destinations, where the person running them is often as much a part of the show as the posts themselves, the admin behind this popular account has never revealed themselves to the public. (Some of his close friends know, he tells SFGATE, but he keeps it pretty locked down.) To give you a sense of the commitment: This guy showed up in a tip-to-tail disguise to KCRW’s studio and altered his voice for the ensuing on-air conversation. 

The admin — who goes by “Mr. Glen Dale,” a nod to the neighborhood where he resides — agreed to a rare interview. SFGATE was happy to help him keep the secret going. “I think it’s funnier that there’s no paper trail,” he says. “And it’s just fun to let the stuff I create have the spotlight.”

A comedy writer who’s currently unemployed in the bleak post-writers strike Hollywood landscape, Dale didn’t go into creating the meme account as an extended bit. Back in 2019, he found himself wandering over to his local mall in Glendale, the Americana at Brand, several times a week despite the fact that he hates shopping. While standing there perusing the opulent fountain and watching passersby, “I had all of these thoughts that I wanted to make fun of, but there was, like, no obvious avenue to do that,” he says. 

The meme page grew from that feeling and became a tightly focused destination dedicated to lovingly razzing the mall. He chose it specifically because the luxury brand is “humorless,” he says. Notably, he does not bear the same affinity for developer and former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso’s other outdoor mall, the Grove: “Every time I have to go there, it feels like a chore. And it doesn’t feel as oasis-like.” Like any typical Angeleno, he finds parking there to be a pain. 

After he had built up a modest following over about nine months for his playful jabs about the mall and the culture surrounding it, COVID-19 hit. Americana at Brand, along with everything else, shuttered. To Dale, it seemed “out of touch to make fun of the mall that no one can go to.” He then had a thought: What if he gradually expanded the page, to “see what people will tolerate” in terms of coverage? 

Dale started pulling on classic tropes that he’d clocked since childhood, such as terrible intersections and how far Angelenos are willing to drive across town, and started slowly expanding the page’s reach. He thought back to the hyper-niche Facebook meme pages he had become obsessed with, such as one catered to movie theater employees, and modeled it as a parody of those. “It would be people who worked at a movie theater who would just share memes back and forth that were inscrutable to me, making fun of customers,” he says. “… I was always very interested in these very niche groups that only existed for each other.”

With this expanded focus, Americana at Brand Memes exploded. “That’s when the account really took off, was when I started making fun of LA at large, and the culture and people,” he says. “And I saw like, ‘Oh, there’s a lot of potential here of what I could do.’”

Dale is careful to note that he is not a social media professional. By his own admission, his personal account is “so bad, if I get like three likes on a post, I feel like I’ve won.” But this is not a persona, he adds. The humor therein is very much stemming from himself, and what he finds funny. What binds every single one of the memes is Dale’s own voice, like three Spider-Men pointing fingers at each other.

“The account is me,” he says. “Like, when I say people in LA are wearing big coats and are complaining that it’s cold, it’s because I’m wearing a big coat and I’m complaining that it’s cold.”

Great LA moments

Although Dale hasn’t shied away from poking fun at the mall it draws its name from — and Dale was critical of Caruso himself during his failed 2022 mayoral run — the Americana at Brand organization has never told him to cut it out. “Every morning I wake up thinking it’s going to come,” Dale laughs. 

But in a bizarre twist, early into starting his account, Americana at Brand reached out to him over Instagram and invited him to coffee.

“Here we go,” Dale thought. “They’re going to hand deliver the cease-and-desist letter to me, or they’re going to try and hire me to run their social media.” He showed up, “sweating bullets,” albeit not in a disguise. (“I went as myself, because I was like, ‘Are they going to serve me? I’m going to feel stupid if I’m wearing an outfit,’” he says.) It ended up being what he describes as a “very low-stakes coffee,” and nothing came out of that meeting. “I left being like, ‘Was that some sort of mind game they were playing?’”

For the time being, the meme account remains intact, name and all. In the five years since its inception, it’s evolved from specialized commentary about a mall to a place that weighs in on the likes of historic heat waves and the forthcoming Olympics. But Dale bristles against the implication that people are perhaps coming to him to contextualize what’s going on in LA.

“I can’t think that people are counting on me for one thing or another,” Dale says. “Like, that stresses me out.” He insists that it comes from a yearning for a collective experience, such as the old days of earthquake Twitter. “It’s a great LA moment, when an earthquake hits and we all go to the same place,” he says. Since that outlet no longer exists in the same way, he’s taken it upon himself to create that space online. Yet by doing so, he has undeniably created a communal destination for Angelenos to laugh, commiserate and occasionally learn something.

Dale also believes that the internet, partially due to the monetization of social networks, has increasingly become a place where “creativity is not valued anymore.” He ultimately views the page as an outlet to create new modes of expression, however silly they may be. 

To Dale, what’s made the page resonate with so many people stems from the specificity of his memes, combined with the speed at which he posts them. Lovett of LA in a Minute adds that the meme page’s lighthearted approach, which, crucially, is never mean-spirited, manages to thread a very complex needle. “They encapsulate what being in LA is about, holding up a mirror to it and letting ourselves kind of laugh,” Lovett adds.

Lately, Dale finds himself at what he calls a fork in the road: Whether to expand Americana at Brand Memes into an empire or to keep its growth slow and methodical. When the Dodgers recently won the World Series, the meme page revealed its first merch drop: a riff on the blue Dodgers hat, with the A spelling out “Americana at Brand Memes.” Dale was resistant to the idea for a long time because he feared what might happen when he monetized an account that had long existed purely for fun. He viewed the drop as a “beta test” to see if people would buy the hats (they did). 

Dale would like to do more merch drops down the line, but only if he has a great idea. Which is how he seems to be approaching everything in the future. When I ask him if he’s considered doing more communal events, such as live comedy shows, he seems conflicted: “I’m not fully closing the door on it, but … I want to wait until I have the perfect idea.” His worry, he says, comes from seeing other accounts “go too big, too fast and flame out.” 

To him, the longevity of the page is paramount. So is sharing jokes and information that will be a boon to Angelenos, such as the locally known parking hack around the Americana at Brand (parking at the nearby Galleria and walking over.) He follows that hack himself, save for the other day, when he decided to treat himself by parking at the actual Americana at Brand and getting the first hour validated.

Then, he lost the ticket and was slapped with a $30 fee, the all-day rate. He managed to talk them down to half that, but Dale wondered if he should reveal himself to the parking attendants to wheedle them down even more: “I did have a moment where, like, should I say, ‘Do you know who I am?’”