One night last June, the three friends Ben Bayouth, Christian Heuer, and Adam Aseraf, brought their robotic puppet, a talking basketball named Old Ball, to a bar in Studio City to shoot content for his Instagram page.
Their earliest posts were short desk pieces shot at Bayouth’s home studio and consisted of Old Ball yelling lukewarm NBA takes (“Tyrese Haliburton is actually Superman!!!”) at the camera in an exaggerated Noo Yawk accent. It wasn’t funny or edgy. More importantly, no one cared. The posts weren’t garnering much attention or engagement So they decided to take Old Ball out among the people.
Soon, OB, as his handlers call him, was on Hollywood Boulevard, interrupting a rap video shoot, doing improv comedy bits with bystanders, and drawing a crowd. “Within three minutes," Aseraf tells Complex, “it was clear that people were super enamored with it.”
It became the first @oldballshow post with more than a million views.
The quest for virality brought them to Bayouth’s favorite watering hole on a Thursday night, where they were immediately kicked out for filming inside the bar. (Though it feels like the world is crawling with content creators, the practice has not been fully absorbed into the fabric of society, thankfully.) Luckily for the crew, they took Old Ball and their cameras into the parking lot just as a group of Gen Z kids rolled up. Like the throng on Hollywood Blvd., they all had a kinetic reaction to Old Ball.
“Where were you born at, OB?” someone hollered.
“A factory, where do you think,” OB snapped. “Probably China, to be honest.”
“In a non-weird way, I keep wanting to touch you,” confessed Lucas, a Vincent Chase lookalike with tousled hair and a kempt beard.
“You should hold him!” Aseraf exclaimed, handing him over.
A sense of wonder then washed over Lucas’ face as he cradled the puppet. “You could see it in his eyes,” Aseraf recalls. “He genuinely thought Old Ball was an actual talking basketball.”
OB broke the ice. “Hey, how’s it going man?”
“Jesus Christ!”
Lucas was a little freaked out, which is understandable. Old Ball is a remote control talking robot with the skin of a basketball wrapped around it. If that sounds grotesque, it’s because he kinda is. Old Ball is hideous, yet mesmerizing. He’s made of silicone and unsettling to the touch, rubbery and soft, and once you see him—the worn, leathery dermis, deeply wrinkled brow, and creepy roving eyes—you can’t unsee it.
Lucas stammered. “Bro, it keeps, like… If he’s talking to me, the eyes go like this.”
Without missing a beat, Old Ball cracked, “Yeah, that’s because I can see you—with my eyes.” He then rotated his mechanical eyes toward the camera.
“Take it! Take it! Take it! Take it!,” Lucas cried, pushing OB away from him.
On the surface, the interaction felt simple. It’s just a guy reacting to a talking basketball. So when they posted the clip, they didn’t think it would perform. “But after watching it a thousand times, Lucas’ reaction is perfect,” Aseraf says. “It’s this perfect mix of awe and joy.”
The clip ended up doing around 100 million views, bringing them one step closer to owning the algorithm.
How does one succeed as a content creator in 2026? How do you stand out when the competition is anyone doing comedy online, from the latest Druski video to a nostalgia IG account posting 30-year-old clips of George Carlin?
Grabbing users’ attention is just the first step. After that happens, once you’ve compelled someone to stop scrolling, you have to earn a repeat audience. There’s no foolproof cheat code for it. But there are trends that can be studied to determine the difference between a post that earns 300K views and one that gets 3,000. Old Ball’s creators have noticed some patterns. The more natural the interaction with Old Ball feels, the better. There has to be a strong hook at the beginning of the clip. Behind-the-scenes posts also seem to deliver numbers. From there, it’s a matter of doing it again and again until you’ve built a reliable, preferably, massive following that can be monetized in some form.
The Old Ball team is learning about this on the fly as they make the transition from comedy writers to content creators on IG. The account, which didn’t exist a year ago, recently crossed 200 million views and 800K followers. Old Ball has appeared on Subway Takes and Access Hollywood, collaborated with the NBA at the Emirates Cup and All-Star Weekend, and in videos with the Golden State Warriors, Los Angeles Clippers, and Miami Heat. They’ve also filmed with DJ Khaled, IShowSpeed and The Rizzler, and were featured in a segment with Ken Jeong during ESPN’s coverage of the Duke-North Carolina game on March 7.
In one way, OB’s budding popularity shouldn’t come as a surprise. The puppet is designed to make users stop mid-scroll. “He looks insane,” Heuer says.
“Ugly/beautiful is our aesthetic,” Aseraf adds.
He compares Old Ball to E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, another aesthetically unpleasant creature who’s beautiful on the inside. But whereas E.T. was childlike, gentle, and curious, Old Ball exudes “Lower East Side Unc energy”—he’s that cranky, curmudgeonly old head on the sidelines who’s not in the game but can’t stop yapping about it in a gruff, sarcastic tone, while armed with one-liners and his deft comic timing.
“I used to dream about being in the league and now I’m merch stacked like produce,” Old Ball mutters in a post featuring the Golden State Warriors signing a rack of basketballs. “Might as well be a cantaloupe at Ralph’s.”
Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog was an inspiration, as were the Muppets, and Lil Penny, the wisecracking Chris Rock-voiced alter ego of Penny Hardaway.
The three friends, who met about a decade ago through Funny or Die, the comedy website founded by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, had wanted to collaborate on a project for some time; Heuer was a creative producer, while Bayouth and Aseraf were freelance writers submitting sketches. As hoops fans, they settled on Heuer’s concept of a talking basketball puppet early on. They sensed a void in the sports marketplace for something wholesome and funny, a PG-13 character that feels fresh but familiar. And they’ve landed on something. Old Ball oozes nostalgia both in design and tone. He could’ve existed in the 1980s or worked alongside Nike’s Kobe and LeBron Christmas puppet campaign from the late 2000s.
They came into this project aware of the fact that the best sports comedies—Happy Gilmore, Major League, Ted Lasso, are some of their favorites—are not focused on the game itself. “It’s always rooted in character,” Bayouth says. “People’s first instinct is to ask Old Ball for basketball advice or try to extract knowledge of the game from him. But we’re much more interested in the character comedy. Whether it’s jokes we write for Old Ball or how we approach collabs with players, we’re almost never coming at it from a stats-and-percentages angle.”
The encounters with the public are filmed on an iPhone. There are no lights, no set dressing. Bayouth, who designed Old Ball, is also his voice and puppeteer. (Aseraf occasionally subs in to voice OB.) He operates the puppet with a remote control transmitter typically used for drones. And though he arrives for each excursion with pre-written jokes, he’s been improvising the bulk of the material lately.
Once they’re done filming, it's on to the edit, which is where the magic happens. Though they’ve posted 125 times, this part of the process is a combination of fuzzy instinct and guess work. They experiment with different cuts for different platforms (what’s best for Instagram might not work on TikTok) and utilize tools like Instagram Trial Reels, a posting feature that lets creators share content with non-followers, allowing them to gauge audience response and perfect a clip before uploading it to their main feed.
“We’re pretty precious about what’s on the grid,” Heuer says. “But we never adhere to best practices. We genuinely try to make videos we think are hilarious. We don’t have a ton of metrics or spreadsheets or anything like that. Obviously, we look at stuff. We care and want videos to perform… So it’s kind of a push and pull. We’ll do some for the algorithm, but then we’ll also just put out fun clips that we like.”
They owe some of their success to the proliferation of AI slop across social media platforms, which has carved out a space for something like Old Ball, a product of countless hours of human labor and real craftsmanship. Bayouth started drawing designs of Old Ball last spring and built him over a period of six weeks with a team of artists and sculptors, a process that was captured in a BTS post. There are currently four Old Ball puppets—two performance balls and two “stunt balls” in case a video calls for Old Ball to be handled in a way that might cause “injury” like a slam dunk.
“We’re like the organic food in a store selling all GMO stuff,” Bayouth says.
There’s also the growing connection between the audience and the character. According to his origin story, Old Ball was blacklisted from the NBA after his first game. Michael Jordan blamed OB for his 9-for-35 shooting performance in Game 4 of the 1997 Eastern Conference Finals and banished him to a shed, where he remained for nearly three decades. Now Old Ball is out and getting acclimated to an unfamiliar world.
Future plans involve setting up a dream meeting between OB and MJ. They’ve also introduced new characters to the Old Ball Universe, a football and a soccer ball, even though it feels a bit premature. But with the World Cup in the Americas this summer, there’s a window of opportunity to expand. A sports version of the Muppets has always been their North Star. Whether that idea lives solely on Instagram or expands into a 22-minute pilot or movie is yet to be determined.
If Old Ball’s creators had their way, he’d become the comedic mascot of the sport and they’d all quit their day jobs to work with him full time. For now though, OId Ball remains their side hustle.
“This thing doesn’t have to take over the world,” Heuer says. “We feel like we’ve already found our lane. We’re going to stick to it and have a blast building it out.”