Anatoly and the Great Fake-Weights Controversy

There is something wonderfully appropriate about the internet deciding that Anatoly uses fake weights. Vladimir Shmondenko, the Ukrainian powerlifter behind the world's most famous gym cleaner, has spent years making comedy out of people believing precisely that. He walks into a gym looking like somebody sent to clean the toilets, apologises for bothering enormous bodybuilders, picks up their barbells with absurd ease and watches their understanding of the universe collapse.

Now some people watching from home have reached the same conclusion as the victims of the joke: the weights must be fake.

There is an obvious problem with this theory. Anatoly himself keeps talking about fake weights. He has introduced videos around the joke, titled videos around fake weights and constructed entire routines around convincing gym-goers that weights are fake. In one video, the gag is that he tells large men that their weights look suspicious before casually lifting them. In another, he is supposedly "exposed" by a man who accuses him of using fake weights, whereupon Anatoly lifts the disputed bar and invites his accuser to have a go.

This would be a peculiar way to conduct a secret conspiracy.

Part of the confusion comes from bumper plates. Gym weights do not all have the dimensions of the old iron plates people remember from garage gyms. Bumper plates, particularly thick rubber varieties, can occupy a remarkable amount of bar while representing considerably less weight than an equivalent-looking stack of thin competition plates. Someone counting the apparent bulk rather than reading the plates can therefore arrive at heroic estimates of what Anatoly is lifting.

But "these plates look enormous" and "these plates are fake" are two very different propositions. Anatoly does not need to be secretly deadlifting 500 kilograms to make the joke work. He needs to be sufficiently strong to handle weights that the people around him find genuinely difficult while looking like a skinny cleaner who should be asking them to move the bar rather than picking it up himself.

That part is real enough. Shmondenko is not an actor who discovered a set of plastic plates. He is a competitive powerlifter who turned the peculiar mismatch between his appearance and his strength into a comedy career. Strip away the wig, glasses, cleaner's overalls and apologetic manner and the mystery becomes considerably less mysterious. You are watching a trained strength athlete pretending not to be one.

That does not mean every second of an Anatoly video should be treated as documentary footage from a hidden camera. These are produced comedy videos. They are edited, multiple locations can be combined, situations are arranged for maximum effect, and the cleaner is obviously a character. The famous mop itself is part of the act. Asking whether every reaction is completely spontaneous is a legitimate question. Asking whether Shmondenko possesses extraordinary strength is a rather easier one to answer.

Indeed, focusing obsessively on authenticity rather misses why the videos work. The real genius is comic timing.

Anatoly has developed one of the simplest comic characters on the internet. The enormous bodybuilder represents visual strength. Anatoly represents visual weakness. Everything follows from reversing those expectations. He approaches politely. He speaks in broken, deferential English. He wants only to clean. He apologises for "the bothering." Then, at exactly the right moment, he casually moves something that the enormous man beside him has been treating with considerable respect.

The mop is almost as important as the weights. Nobody expects the cleaner's equipment to be heavy. Anatoly handles it casually, gives it personality, moves around the gym as if the only thing troubling him is whether somebody's deadlift is preventing him from cleaning the floor. The joke accumulates because he never behaves like a man demonstrating strength. He behaves like a cleaner mildly inconvenienced by all these barbells lying around his workplace.

Even the floor sometimes joins the joke. He solemnly arrives to mop surfaces that scarcely require mopping, because realism was never the point. The cleaner is a comic device, just as Groucho Marx's cigar or Charlie Chaplin's cane was a comic device. We know we are watching a performance.

That is why the fake-weight controversy is so funny. Anatoly's entire career is built around the proposition that what you are seeing looks impossible. The man standing beside him thinks the bar must somehow be lighter. The viewer at home thinks the plates must be fake. Both have fallen into the same trap.

The secret is not that Anatoly has defeated physics. It is that most of us are surprisingly poor judges of strength from appearance. Bodybuilders train substantially for muscular development and appearance; powerlifters train specifically to move heavy loads. A relatively lean man with years of specialised training can therefore be vastly stronger than an unsuspecting observer expects him to be. Anatoly has turned that elementary fact into hundreds of variations on the same joke. And somehow the joke survives repetition.

We know what is coming. Anatoly approaches the biggest bloke in sight. The bloke looks puzzled. Anatoly asks to clean. Somebody warns him that the weight is very heavy. Anatoly apologises. He picks it up. Eyes widen. Somebody checks the plates. Anatoly looks innocent.

We have seen it before and we laugh again. That is the mark of a genuinely good comic routine. Nobody complains that Chaplin keeps walking strangely or that Mr Bean keeps misunderstanding ordinary situations. The repetition becomes part of the pleasure. With Anatoly we wait for the precise instant when some magnificent 120-kilogram specimen discovers that the tiny cleaner has just casually moved the bar he was psyching himself up to lift.

Perhaps some reactions are helped along. Perhaps some participants recognise him. Perhaps editing makes the encounters cleaner than reality. None of that changes the central joke, because Anatoly has never seriously presented these videos as scientific demonstrations conducted under competition conditions. They are comedy skits performed by a man who happens to be extraordinarily strong.

And the funniest evidence against the great fake-weight conspiracy may be Anatoly himself. He has spent years announcing the fake-weight joke before the audience can discover it, waving the suspicion in our faces and then constructing routines around it. He does not merely tolerate the accusation. He uses it as material.

The internet detectives announcing that they have finally discovered "fake weights" have therefore achieved something rather wonderful. They have become part of the Anatoly skit. Somewhere, the cleaner is still apologising for the bothering.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvkMVWnId2Y