Cera is this generation’s Buster Keaton.  He doesn’t have the same performance style; he’s not as funny. But that’s not the point. Cera, like Keaton, is a comedian with no “outside.”

I just…I can’t. I understand what this blogger is trying to get at, but isn’t the obvious conclusion that both Cera and Keaton are/were performers who manage/d to unify their on-screen and public/publicized personalities in order to generate business for their careers? It’s not like there was nothing there to Keaton’s personality, that he was some kind of sad clown persona—far from it, if you dig into his filmography and the critical writing on his career, not to mention his personal life.

Obviously, the focus of the article is not to compare the two men in terms of quality of their careers, but, c’mon. I’m a fan of Michael Cera but Buster Keaton was one of the greatest filmmakers of all-time. He was a comedian, actor, stuntman, singer, dancer, writer, director, and cameraman. And a multifaceted performer whose career spanned nearly every form of media in the first half of the 20th century—vaudeville, silent film, talkies, shorts, features, television, commercials, print ads, and educational films—across a fifty year career.

The article ends with the conclusion that:

But in the contemporary star environment, there’s no such thing as not being interested in someone’s extra-textual persona.  You can’t just do a few talk shows and call it good.  Extratextuals — making viral videos, doing off-kilter promotions — are just as, if not more, crucial in publicizing a movie as any trailer or billboard or interview.  Stars are no longer contracted to the studios, but the current film environment is precarious and unstable; someone like Cera (and his films) will only thrive if he can keep up the consistency and basically provide sequels of himself, on-screen and off.

This makes no sense to me. Is this writer totally unaware of the Michael Cera backlash, the same backlash which contributed to Scott Pilgrim’s pitiful box office gross? If anything, there’s been a cooling off on the Cera hate now that he has 1) endorsed the Arrested Development movie (no doubt because of his recent string of disappointing film returns), 2) appeared in Scott Pilgrim, which has/will have a huge cult following, plus Scott is different enough from his previous characters and the film is good enough to distract you from Cera if you hate him, and 3) Prancing Cera, maybe the definitive indication of Cera’s new-found re-acceptance into Internet (and widespread) media culture.

A note on Prancing Cera: anyone who becomes a meme garners affection, even if it was begun as a form of ridicule. Memes represent a chance for the individual meme creator to channel their own ideas, personality, and experiences onto (in this case) a pop culture figure. In that way, the celebrity enters the collective consciousness not as what they are (or what they have packaged themselves as, e.g., Cera: awkward teen who gets the girl), but as a malleable, populist figure. He can be inserted into almost any conceivable fandom, catchphrase or cultural phenomenon, not as Michael Cera: star of Superbad, but as Prancing Cera: plaything of the wicked and wild Internet Legion. Fear us, Cera, we control your destiny.