‘The Funky Geezer’ talks about his success on TikTok — and the video that threatened it
In a weird and roundabout way, Woody Williams has Donald Trump to thank for making him famous.
When the pandemic forced the Charlotte artist/entertainer known as “The Funky Geezer” to stop going to NoDa to sell his paintings on the sidewalk, he suddenly found himself confined to his 750-square-foot house, with nothing to do but paint yet more funky works of art on canvas, play the guitar, brush up on his keyboard skills, and follow the news.
As fate would have it, among the stories in the news that kept catching his attention were the ones that revolved around President Trump’s seeming obsession with shutting down TikTok. Williams was a regular user of Facebook and Instagram, but to that point completely unfamiliar with the viral video app — which is owned by ByteDance, a company headquartered in China — that had become wildly successful with young people.
“I just heard it was a Chinese-based company and Trump didn’t like it ’cause he thought it had spyware built into it,” Williams recalls. “I said, ‘Well, let’s go see why he don’t like it.’ So ... I joined, and I had a ball watching (the videos). You can’t stop. It’s contagious. Had the red-eye special for two nights, and I said, ‘Let’s see. What could I do on here?’”
The answer turned out to be ... a lot. Of painting, of cranking out music with his keyboard and his guitars, and of just generally acting like a funny, funky old geezer.
Now, just over three months after creating his first TikTok video, Williams is among the Charlotte area’s most popular content creators on the platform, with his FunkyGeezerShow having racked up 2.7 million followers and counting. To put that number in perspective, that’s roughly the same number of followers that Super Bowl MVP Tom Brady, tennis megastar Serena Williams and global pop-music hitmaker Pitbull have on TikTok, combined.
Not bad for a guy who’s supposed to be retired.
Indeed, in 2014, after he had a little run — and a lot of fun — as a contestant on NBC’s “America’s Got Talent,” Woody Williams decided to hang up “The Funky Geezer,” which he’d created as a novelty-music act in his hometown of Charlotte about four years earlier. He says he felt like he was, quite literally (and rather ironically), getting too old for the Geezer.
Since un-retiring at the end of November, he’s enjoying a taste of fame that feels like it could last a lot longer than 15 minutes this time. And on TikTok, it feels like The Funky Geezer is just getting started.
We sat down with him recently to talk about the origins of his TikTok success, how much money he’s made since he broke big, the one video that got him into hot water, and his plans on the horizon.
Words of wisdom from Woody Williams
Williams posted his first TikTok video on Nov. 11, and it was a bit that was right in The Funky Geezer’s wheelhouse. “I just turned the radio on, and that cute little song by Jason Derulo was playing (2020’s “Savage Love”). So I turned it up, and I grabbed my walker, and I just started — like an old person — sort of wiggling to it, and then it got a little more vivid, and then I started doing my little walk-y thing.” By that, he means he started doing a cute little dance to match that cute little song, eventually jumping in the air and kicking his walker before leaving it altogether to continue doing what he calls “break-hip-dancing.” “And that’s all it was, one minute of that.”
Three days later, when he saw a “3m” stamped on the thumbnail for the video, he initially thought it was TikTok indicating the video’s file size. But someone then explained to him, “‘Those aren’t the megabytes of the video. Those are millions.’ I couldn’t keep up with all the comments. ... They just went on and on till your finger got numb. I said, ‘Wow, this kinda got outta hand.’”
Since then, he’s posted more than 270 videos over the past 14 weeks. Though there are also painting videos and cat videos and other silly non-music-related videos, the majority of the clips he posts have him playing bluesy guitar riffs (very well) while singing in a baritone voice that has shades of Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. Most get viewed hundreds of thousands of times, but several have climbed into the millions like that first one did. His top-viewed video? One he posted Dec. 29 of him using a kindly, almost baby-ish voice to introduce viewers to his new Fender Telecaster — one he’d just bought at Guitar Center and nicknamed “Butterscotch” — before abruptly launching into one of those bluesy riffs and belting out one of his original songs. “So it was juxtaposed,” Williams says, using the word he often uses to describe his Funky Geezer character. “Like dancing with a walker. I’m an old person doing things an old person is not supposed to be doing. ... It’s just like Buster Keaton said: ‘You set ’em up, set ’em up, set ’em up, then you double-cross ’em. You juxtapose.’ You do something they’re not expecting.” That Butterscotch video has been viewed 23.6 million times and still counting. In just the past few days, it’s gone up another 200,000 views.
There’s one video of his, however, that never was able to find any type of audience at all — thanks to TikTok’s censors. Williams says that in January, he and a friend set up a skit in his backyard in which Williams pretended to be an old person being mugged by an armed assailant played by his friend. “He says, ‘Give me your money!’ and I look at his gun and I say, ‘That’s a nice Ruger. How much you take for the gun?’ He says, ‘Uhhhh, gimme a thousand.’ So I give him a thousand dollars, and he gives me his gun. I walk off, but then I come back and point the gun at him and say, ‘Gimme the money!’ And I took my money back. Well, I didn’t put a disclaimer in there that this wasn’t real. You gotta put disclaimers in.” As a result, for two weeks in January, TikTok imposed on him what’s called a “shadowban,” which basically means Williams was penalized in a way that made it appear on his end like everything was normal — but in reality, during those two weeks, his content was being withheld from other TikTok users. He says once he figured out it was happening he appealed the decision, but “it’s bots that (ban you). It’s not real humans. So you can’t even reason with those guys.” The shadowban was lifted Jan. 27.
Meanwhile, something else noteworthy happened with his TikTok account in January. He started making money from it — not a lot; just a little — after he accepted an invitation to apply for TikTok’s Creator Fund, which the company set up last July to compensate high-volume influencers like Williams. He accepted the invitation. While TikTok has not explained exactly how it calculates payouts, Williams says he thinks he’s making about $40 per million views. He wasn’t paid for views already earned, but he says so far a total of about $1,000 has been loaded onto the FunkyGeezerShow Visa card mailed to him by TikTok. “So I doubled my estate,” he jokes.
And that’s not all. Williams also says his followers have put money into his virtual jar (there’s an option to accept donations on TikTok) to the tune of another $4,000 or so — enough to buy him a full new set of false teeth, which he showed off in a Jan. 29 video that garnered 1.7 million views. “I still don’t eat with ’em,” he says, now several weeks later. “I don’t wanna get ’em dirty.”
But contrary to what you might think, he doesn’t have any paid sponsorships yet. (That shout-out to Guitar Center in the Butterscotch video? It was a freebie. He just likes them, because they’ve always been good to him, he says.) “As part of the Creator Fund,” he says, “you can set your minimum for sponsors that want to attach their product to you. I’ve never filled out the form. And what would they attach to me, like, 5 Hour Energy or Geritol tonic or walkers? ... ‘Buy Polident. It keeps my teeth in.’”
By the way, the days of him being coy about his age are over. During the height of his first brush with fame — back when the local media was buzzing about his screen time on “America’s Got Talent,” in 2014 — Williams refused to give up his digits. He said then that his manager told him to always keep people guessing. (He’d often answer the how-old-are-you question like he did on the show: “I’m so old I remember when God said, ‘Let there be light’ — and I turned on the switch.”) Nowadays? He’ll tell you he’s 72 without batting an eyelash. He also won’t hesitate to tell you he’s feeling his age. “My eyes are getting bad. I can’t see,” Williams says. “So I gotta go out to the VA and get some better glasses.” Later in the day, he says, his hip will start aching, so he keeps a cane in his car. And that walker isn’t always just a prop. In fact, he recently took it to the DMV, “‘cause I figured I’d be standing there all day. When I got there, there was 40 people over in one line ... but when they saw me with a walker, they put me in this other line and I was in and out in three people. I said, ‘Wow, I just learned something else: I go in (with my walker) and I get out in two or three people.’“
Williams has come to another realization, too — that it’s always good to think before posting. A recent example: “I found out I wasn’t getting my (COVID vaccine) as soon as I thought I was, through the VA,” he says. “So I thought, I’m gonna contact my congressman. And I did. I sent a letter to my congressman. And then I said, ‘I oughtta put this up on TikTok and let 2 million people call his phone number.’ But then I thought, ‘Oh my God, he’d never be able to talk on that phone again.’ Two million people calling him up to ask ‘Why don’t you let him get his vaccine?’ He’d have to change his number. You have to think of the power of this thing. It’s like having your own television station.”
And soon, he’ll be treating viewers of his station to some greatest hits. Williams has been doing everything on TikTok so far from his smartphone, because his Windows desktop computer had stopped working properly. But he recently decided to get it refurbished, he says, and “it should be ready on the 16th. Then the other arm’s gonna come out from behind the back. I’m gonna show TikTok 10 years of stuff I’ve got. That thing is full of live shows and videos, soundtracks. Mixcraft 6 (a multi-track recording application), a video editor ... and just tons of shows and shows and I can crop any one minute out of a show, live show. I’ll keep ’em busy for the next five years.”
He’s also got some new — and hopefully not-too-dangerous — tricks up his sleeve. “I’m trying to learn the moonwalk now. And I’m slow at it. ... Guess if I speeded it up (i.e. changed the speed of the video using the TikTok app) it wouldn’t look too bad. Or, if you got some baby powder on your shoes and a slick floor,” Williams says, off-handedly suggesting giving it a shot in the atrium at the NoDa shopping center anchored by Amélie’s French Bakery & Café. “I was also thinking of getting two skateboards and strapping ’em on like roller skates, and just have it be where I’m skating with skateboards. Something a little freaky. I gotta master it, and I’m probably gonna get hurt,” he says, chuckling. When it’s suggested to him that this would put him in the category of people who put their safety at risk just for social-media likes, he responds: “Yeah, well, you know, I’ll heal fast. I’m not jumping over Niagara Falls or anything. I’d get me some elbow pads on and stuff, and a soft place to land. But it would be interesting to see if it would work.”
On top of that, fans may get yet another chance to see him on “America’s Got Talent.” Because of his TikTok fame, Williams says, the producers of NBC’s reality show have come knocking again. He says they suggested a Zoom audition, and that he countered with: “Well, go on YouTube, there’s 400 videos up there of me performing. Just pick out what you like. And so that’s where we are right now.”
As for what happened to retirement? Honestly, he says, this whole resurgence was a complete accident. But he says he’s having a lot of fun now, doing what so many others are doing because of the pandemic — that is, working from home, and enjoying life’s simple pleasures. “Like Gandhi said, ‘Live as if you were to die tomorrow.’ And anyway, I figure it’s just a flash in the pan. It’ll be over soon and people’ll get bored and they’ll go on to something else. So whatever. It was interesting while it lasted,” Williams says, pausing before adding this: “Inspire till you expire — that’s what I tell people.”
This story was originally published March 8, 2021 at 11:47 AM.
