When she was growing up in Orlando, Fla., GloZell Green dreamed of being a tooth fairy. Her mom, a kindergarten teacher, had more pedestrian plans: She wanted her daughter to be a lawyer.
“‘You need to be something else because that doesn’t exist,’” Green recalls her mom saying. “Other people can only tell you what they know. She doesn’t know anybody that’s a tooth fairy. But I’m closer to a tooth fairy than I ever will be to a business lawyer person.”
If a tooth fairy’s job is to instill wonder in the young-at-heart — and give them a little something in return for believing — then Green may be the closest living thing. The YouTube personality and comedian has amassed a following of millions for her disarmingly over-the-top viral videos, silly characters, and uplifting persona. Her rise to online fame has earned her an interview with President Obama and “ambassador” status for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. She’s chronicled her struggles with infertility in her book and is now landing parts in films like DreamWorks Animations’ Trolls, out this month, in which she voices Grandma Rosiepuff. At 44, Green has constructed a vlogging mini-empire on little more than grit, green lipstick, and fairy dust.
It is her spirit of inclusiveness and sense of silliness that has earned her more than , making hers the , a notch ahead of Conan O’Brien’s Team Coco as of Nov. 1.
Her tagline says it all. At the beginning of most of her over-the-top online dares, Green shouts into the camera: “Hello! This is GloZell. Is you OK? Is you good? ‘Cause I want to know.” Her most famous video is (50 million views). Sometimes she’s in character as Tracy Tina as in 2008’s “” (25 million views).
“I wasn’t happy because I wasn’t being myself.”
But success was anything but sudden. In 2006, she was living in Los Angeles and doing open-mic stand-up. Her first marriage was failing, and her spirit, if not broken, was battered. “I realized early on that no matter how great or wonderful you are, there are going to be people who just don’t like you because you’re positive or mostly because they’re having a horrible life,” she says. “Trying to please them is just not going to work. I’ve tried that. Especially with my [first] husband. It just didn’t work out and I wasn’t happy because I wasn’t being myself. Sometimes those bad things show you exactly what you want.”
In Green’s case, what she wanted was to laugh — and make other people laugh. A friend suggested she attend a taping of The Tonight Show With Jay Leno for inspiration and solace. Something clicked. Green would go on to attend hundreds of Tonight Show tapings, documenting her obsession on a blog called . At first it was mostly text, but increasingly she added multimedia elements.
