Bomanizer's secret to success: 'be delusional'

Life is a stage, and few others understand that better than the reality TV-obsessed comedian Boman Martinez-Reid. Known on TikTok as "Bomanizer" — creator of the Kardashian parody series "The Bodashians" — Martinez-Reid has amassed over two million followers leaving viewers cackling at the unveiled absurdity, and has parlayed his social media success into a TV series, Made for TV With Boman Martinez-Reid. The show blends the idea of a reality show, sitcom and mockumentary into a quest for Martinez-Reid to find his reality TV genre.

If there was one thing that made him sure he'd make it in entertainment, Martinez-Reid says, it was his childhood Christmas dinners.

"My mom would put on the Anna Martinez Family Christmas show, and it was me, my cousins, my mom, and my aunt," he says. "We would do our version of Saturday Night Live, [with] skits that would sum up what happened that year."

The other thing that's helped propel his career forward is sheer delusion. It's something that Martinez-Reid says is a must-have if you want to make it in comedy.

"You have to be delusional," he says. "I cannot stress that enough. I made a reality TV show for myself [online] in grade 12."

As an aspiring actor, studying radio and television at Toronto Metropolitan University — instead of living in New York or Los Angeles — he felt like he was hitting an invisible wall. When COVID brought the world to a halt in 2020, Martinez-Reid saw an opportunity to find an audience. TikTok was the fastest-growing social media platform, and it looked like a way up and out. 

Still, finding what worked on TikTok was a process of trial and error. Scroll to the bottom of Martinez-Reid's feed, and you'll find his earliest sketches. He admits nobody really watched his early content, but that all changed when he watched an episode of Vanderpump Rules — a show famed for its constant, over-the-top bickering — with his friends.

"I was kind of watching this from an outsider's perspective, like, 'Oh my God, this is so dumb. Why are you guys watching this?'" Martinez-Reid says. "But then I was like, 'Wait maybe I could make a TikTok about how dumb these silly arguments are.'"

Martinez-Reid says initially, his sketches were meant to parody Vanderpump and the Real Housewives, a favourite of his. But the more he talked to his fans, the more they kept comparing his work to another reality blockbuster: Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

"I think that what I try to emulate in the Bodashians is that nothing happens, but everything happens," he says. "They have conversations that are so dull, but they're so funny. It's not even self-aware.They don't even know that they're funny."

When he realized what fans saw in his videos, he started studying Kardashian clips. 

"Then one day, Eden who's my best friend and who's in a lot of my videos, was like 'Why don't we just talk in a Kardashian voice," Martinez-Reid says. 

That choice, to emulate the Kardashians' distinctive cadence, opened up whole new opportunities for humour.

Martinez-Reid's parodies pushed him into stardom without an infrastructure. Brand deals and collaboration emails started to pour in. As did emails from Creative Artists Agency, more commonly known as CAA, who were interested in representing him. Initially, he thought he was getting emails from the auto club with the same initials. 

"In my head, CAA is car insurance in Canada," he says. "So I'm getting these car insurance emails, like, 'Hey, let's hop on a call' and I'm like, 'What do they want from me?" 

It wasn't until Kudzi Chikumbu, TikTok's Head of Creator Marketing, emailed Martinez-Reid explaining CAA was an American agency representing Beyoncé, Shohei Ohtani and Andrea Botez that Martinez-Reid took the emails seriously. 

"From then on I've not looked back," he says.

Martinez-Reid is also the executive producer of Made for TV, a series he describes as "stupid in the best possible way." 

"The premise is I test out different reality TV genres," he says. "Everybody watches TV and they think to themselves 'I could do that.' This is putting somebody in the driver's seat and saying, 'well, do it' and so we do those epic reality-TV challenges."

Even now the production is still a family affair: Boman's sister Alyssa and his friend Eden, mainstays in the Bodashian universe, are part of the show.

"This show as much as it is this scripted comedy, it's also kind of a reality show in the sense that, you do get a flavour of my real life and my real relationships," says Martinez-Reid.

Reality shows are inherently memeable. They get broken down into 30 second snippets, and become part of the broader language of the internet. Paris Hilton's "That's Hot," Tyra Bank's "We were all rooting for you" and even Kourntney's iconic "people are dying" line are now internet staples, known by people who've never seen the shows that birthed them. 

Martinez-Reid is crossing this Rubicon in reverse. He's pushing his parodies and memes back onto the TV screen, and turning his atomized TikToks into a full show. He's finally fulfilling what he knew he was meant to do: be a TV star. And, he's an executive producer to boot. It's something he says is "so petrifying, but also incredibly rewarding."

"We're all sitting in a room being like, 'We want this, we want that to happen,' and everything was in theory," said Martinez-Reid.  "After a year and a half of that the day comes when it's our first shoot day, and I realize I'm the guy that has to go do all of these things."

A new crop of Black Canadian comics are using social media to get around the industry's traditional gatekeepers. They're turning people's screens into their stage and redefining what Canadian comedy looks and sounds like. This is New Comedy Noir.