Culture Shifters Oct. 21, 2024

Boman Martinez-Reid Has Expertly Spoofed The Kardashians And Won Over Millions Of Fans On TikTok

Written By Alexandra Niforos Photography by Tracy Nguyen

The actor and comedian has built a career satirizing reality TV, and he'll be the first to tell you it changed his life.

This profile is part of our Culture Shifters series, which highlights people who are changing the way we think about the world around us. To read about our other Culture Shifters, return to the list here .

Actor and comedian Boman Martinez-Reid will not hesitate to defend the industry of reality television.

At a Second City comedy show, he began a conversation with a nearby audience member who asked him about his show, Made for TV. When Martinez-Reid explained that it explores the medium of reality TV and its different iterations, she shot him a disgusted look.

She was like, Ew, I hate reality TV, and went on to say that people who are on reality TV shows are talentless and it takes nothing to go on those shows, Martinez-Reid told me. I said very kindly to her that there are so many talented people working tirelessly to create those shows so you can think it is effortless.

Reality TV is actually paramount to Martinez-Reids rise to internet stardom. You might know him as @Bomanizer, his social media alias that is responsible for 2.1 million followers on TikTok and almost half a million followers on Instagram . The 26-year-old creator started his TikTok account in late 2019, right on the cusp of the apps cultural explosion, and found his niche in just a few months. The actor-singer-comedian-producer-editor what cant he do? went viral in February 2020 by parodying reality TV and has been on a roll ever since.

I had this idea where I would take these mundane moments that are minor inconveniences and then spin them into these reality TV epics, which is what I still do now, he said. But I had that idea, and it kind of had never been done before, at least on TikTok, and I started going viral and it changed my life.

At the onset, his parodies were wide-ranging, mimicking breaking newscasts , prime-time 20/20 interviews , competition shows and the general theatrics of reality TV: confrontations, reunions and those dramatic beat drops. He is a talented impersonator, able to accurately capture the essence of any public personality and cultural moment. The parodies are so spot-on and comical that in editing his TikToks, he often keeps in clips showing him bursting into laughter mid-impersonation. In my favorite sketch, he mimics the vibe of get-ready-with-me videos as he fake-preps for Vogues Met Gala.