Noted: A YouTube Series: ‘Real Actors Read Yelp Reviews’

“I ordered the broiled crab cakes and they were really good,” says Chris Kipiniak with the pained gravitas of a cuckold recounting his wife’s affair. He then recounts the stilted conversation with a manager who seemed “rushed.”

“I don’t think I’m going to eat there anymore,” Mr. Kipiniak concludes, fighting back sobs. “If the manager isn’t nice, then what does that say about the business you’re running, and the people in it?”

Another angry Yelp reviewer? Not exactly. Mr. Kipiniak is an actor from Manhattan, starring in a new YouTube series called “Real Actors Read Yelp Reviews.” It is part of an emerging video genre that mines the Web for raw material, and converts readers’ comments, Twitter posts and other user-generated content into comedy.

In the video, Mr. Kipiniak reads from a one-star review of the Stratford Diner in New Jersey that was posted on Yelp last year by a user with the name Dalia B. Uploaded last Friday, the video has generated 230,000-plus views, after being picked up by sites like Yahoo! News and Mashable.

The Atlantic called the videos (which take a bit of artistic license with the original material) “a review of Yelp itself — one that both celebrates and eviscerates the site’s particular brand of comically weaponized consumerism.”

In a phone interview, Mr. Kipiniak said the earnestness of the reviewer’s hurt feelings over such a trifle made it prime comedic fodder. “While it seems sort of absurd, the person left the review with no irony,” he said, laughing. “They didn’t find anything funny about it at all.”

The video was the brainchild of Joe Plummer, an actor from New York, who said the idea came when he and his wife, Natalie Markoff, saw a billboard for a restaurant they had been meaning to visit. He found the Yelp reviews and read them aloud while his wife drove.

“We had to pull the car over at one point, we were laughing so hard, just crying with laughter,” said Mr. Plummer, who runs Gotta Kid to Feed, a small production company in Manhattan that produced the video.

“There’s something about the promise of online anonymity, I guess, that allows people to just really go for it,” he said.

If traditional comedy is all timing, this new strand of Web comedy is all about context. Kevin Allocca, the manager of YouTube Trends, pointed to a recent skit on Jimmy Kimmel Live with celebrities like Kristen Stewart and Katy Perry reading nasty tweets about themselves. “Zooey Deschanel is overrated,” reads Zooey Deschanel.

(Not to complain here, but this idea goes back about a half-century; a mock-indignant Steve Allen read letters from seriously annoyed Daily News readers on his late-night show.)

“These little slices of our Web experience — social media posts, customer reviews — have become such a part of our daily lives that we can sit back and collectively laugh at the absurd elements of them if they’re presented in the right way,” Mr. Allocca wrote in an e-mail.

Mr. Plummer seems to have struck the right chord. In a second installation posted Monday, Therese Plummer, an actress who happens to be his sister, reads a glowing review of an Indian restaurant in Newport Beach, Calif. The Yelp review, posted in May by Nathan A. is enthusiastic, but takes some graphic turns.

“The food is fantastic and you will be thinking about your meal long after it’s over,” Ms. Plummer says, before describing “tender, moist pieces of dark meat chicken, smothered in this delicious sauce with tomatoes, honey, cardamom and what I’m assuming is a pound of laxatives.”

She awards the restaurant four stars, “minus one star for expensive biryani and for turning me into a human flame thrower.”