Origin
The video originated from a 36-year-old
Brazilian man, named Marco Fiorito, who describes himself as a "compulsive fetishist".
[4] Fiorito originally produced
foot fetish videos but soon moved on to
coprophagia. The film was produced by MFX-Video, one of several companies owned by Fiorito.
[4] Fiorito contends his films are legal in Brazil, but authorities in the
United States have branded some of his films as obscene and filed charges against Danilo Croce, a Brazilian lawyer living in Florida, listed as an officer of a company distributing Fiorito's films in the United States.
[4] Croce accepted a
plea bargain and was sentenced to 3 years of unsupervised probation and forfeiture of $98,000. Fiorito claimed he did not know his films were illegal in the United States and that his films often contained
chocolate instead of
feces to appease some of his actors who were willing to appear in scat films but not actually eat fecal matter.
[4]
The first frame in the 2 Girls 1 Cup video has the text "MFX 1209" and includes a
URL to mfxvideos.com, the website of Fiorito's MFX-Video, leading some in the media to believe the video is one of the many Croce had to surrender to the
Department of Justice but was somehow leaked in the process.
Reception Reactions
Part of what has facilitated 2 Girls 1 Cup's spread are the reactions it causes. Hundreds of videos exist on YouTube of users showing the original video to their friends and taping their reactions.
Joe Rogan, host of
NBC s
Fear Factor a show notorious for the disgusting things its contestants eat, had to turn away in a reaction video posted to his blog.
[8] A reaction video starring
Kermit the Frog proved very popular on the community-based popularity website
Digg.
[9] In January 2008,
Slate magazine documented the reaction video phenomenon with a slideshow featuring various reactions.
Parodies
The video has inspired several parodies, such as a short film by
singer and
comedian John Mayer to his blog entitled "2 Guys 1 Cup" where Mayer and Best Week Ever correspondent
Sherrod Small enjoy
Pinkberry Frozen yogurt in the same manner the women in the original enjoyed the fecal matter.Celebrity blogger
Perez Hilton also made a parody titled "1 Guy 1 Jar", which he posted to YouTube. Filmmakers Justin Roiland and Christian Le Guilloux made a 5-minute series called "2 Girls, 1 Cup: The Show" for the short film competition site,
Channel 101. It debuted in first place on January 27, 2008.
Media recognition
Many in the media have taken the video's popularity as a sign of society's declining
morals.The video was featured on
VH1's
Best Week Ever, where the video's existence and propagation was declared to cause "Moral Bankruptcy" to have the "Best Week Ever!"