(Photo courtesy of Immanuel Kelly) “Immanuel Kelly (Manny)”
Jesse Nguyen
Connector Editor
At UMass Lowell, there are many students with inspiring stories and exciting careers. One of them is Immanuel Kelly, also known as Manny and @mannythemann1 on Tik Tok and @mannythemanzz on Instagram. He currently has 81.8 million likes on Tik Tok, and in just 15 days, his account has grown from 700,000 to over 1.5 million followers.
Kelly is a 19-year-old freshman, planning on majoring in business. He primarily posts comedy skits of him at UMass Lowell campuses approaching students and acting like a bully from Disney Channel toward them, saying nonsensical, cringy and satirical punchlines. The editing style of his videos, the candid reactions of students and the cleverly written dialogue are the highlights of his videos.
Although Kelly experienced the most account growth from filming at UMass Lowell, he has been creating comedy-skit content since 2021, with the first appearance of his Disney Channel bully persona appearing in 2024. Kelly’s motivation in making this content comes from childhood, “I made my first skit when I was in fourth grade on my school iPad, and it was like a dancing video, and I showed my mom and she laughed so hard… it motivated me to just start making skits for my family throughout middle school and really start posting skits freshman year of my high school.” For a while, he didn’t have a following of any kind, but seeing people smile made him continue creating.
The nature of Kelly’s skits, walking up to strangers and acting like a character, requires a certain amount of confidence to pull off. This confidence didn’t come naturally for him however, and he had to put consistent work towards it, saying “I didn’t grow up with a lot of confidence at all… I really kept to myself for a very long time… even when I do [the skits] now, I get like little glimpses of what it was like to just say hi to someone… and saying hi was everything. I just kept training myself to increase my confidence more and more… I think something that really helped me was my acting class with my directing teacher, Mr. Grossman [Wellsley High School] he helped me so much.” Kelly partook in a play during his high school career, and that elevated his confidence and helped alleviate his fear of putting himself out there.
Because his skits involve working with strangers and getting candid reactions, there will be situations where people won’t play along. Kelly puts people’s privacy and comfortability at his utmost priority when creating content, saying “I immediately wave to the cameraman and be like ‘delete it, delete it.’ and I’ll go to the person and be like ‘All good we’re gonna delete that, sorry for bothering you. I hope you have a great day.’” He also intentionally tries to target people who aren’t doing much at the moment and avoids being disruptive to people doing things of importance. His skits usually last around 40 seconds as well. “Even if I had the idea that they might not want to be bothered, I don’t want to walk up to them.”
Kelly’s first skits only involved him and the students he was pranking, but recently his skits have gotten increasingly more complex with additional side characters. stories and dialogue, thanks to his creative process. In the morning, he goes through his ideas and circles the ones he likes the most. After his first couple of classes, he’ll start drafting the script. Kelly’s friends are often involved in his videos, and he organizes and choreographs everyone’s actions. The placement of the cameraman, the order everyone takes, and what everyone says is rehearsed and for Kelly, can be a multi-hour-long process.
Kelly getting recognized for his work feels like a dream come true for him, but he has faced some difficulties navigating college with the amount of attention he has on him. “A lot of people are very ingenuine, I would say when it comes to talking to me. And now it’s kind of like the friends that I’ve made so far into college will continue to probably be some of my only group of friends because now everyone I meet knows exactly who I am… my online persona is their first perception of me, so it’s hard to show the actual genuine side of me.”
Despite this, he does admire the UMass Lowell community, saying “A lot of people really do take a liking to others… I really do admire that about the school; it’s building an environment of people who are generally nice to others and will consider others… I feel like I’ve had a very good experience here.”
Although his social media career is booming, Kelly’s true motivation is to become an actor, a career he really resonated with in his senior year of high school. He’s currently looking at different acting agencies and is deciding which ones to sign with. “A lot of the stuff I post online is very satire, it’s very comedic, so it’s hard to tell that I suppose, but I do very much want to act and have acting gigs… Although I do like social media, I know for a fact my dream is to become an actor. I’m sure if I decided to keep building social media, it could work, but that is a very tiring thing… and I want to have an education obviously. So, my idea right now is that I keep posting on social media, but I do want to transition becoming an actor as soon as possible.”
