Shane Dawson

Biography

Shane Lee Yaw (born July 19, 1988), known online as Shane Dawson, is an American YouTuber, actor, filmmaker, comedian, writer, and musician. He began making videos in 2008 at age 19 and garnered over 500 million views in the following two years. His early work consisted mainly of comedy sketches featuring original characters, celebrity impersonations, and pop-culture satire; some impressions later drew criticism for offensive content, including racial stereotypes. He has released six original songs such as "Superluv!" and numerous parodies, and has appeared in films including Smiley (2012), Not Cool (2014), and Internet Famous (2016).

Dawson expanded into podcasting with Shane and Friends (2013), which ran for 140 episodes over four years, and began discussing conspiracy theories on his channel in 2015. In 2017 he released a docu-series reconciling with his absent father and later created series profiling figures such as Jeffree Star; The Beautiful World of Jeffree Star (2019–2020) garnered over 130 million views. He is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, I Hate Myselfie (2015) and It Gets Worse (2016). In June 2020 YouTube suspended monetization on his channels and his books were pulled from shelves following public backlash; he returned to YouTube on October 7, 2021.

Wikipedia contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Excerpt, formatting adapted