Paige Ginn Is the Slapstick Heroine That Vine Needs

Last May, on the day of her graduation, Ginn paced in unison with her classmates towards her high school principal, just moments away from collecting her scroll. Shortly before reaching the podium, she deliberately tripped herself up, throwing herself onto the auditorium floor as the squeaks of the freshly varnished surface and the sharp intake of breath from students and parents echoed off the gym walls. For most high schoolers, a moment like this would be locked away in the "Never Live It Down" section of their memory, never to be spoken of again.

Ginn, on the other hand, looks back on it with glee: "It was probably even worse because I was the class president that year," she says from her new home in San Diego. "I don't even know why anyone voted for me!"

Like any self-respecting millennial, Ginn uploaded the excruciating moment onto her Vine account for her classmates to watch, inadvertently racking up a cool 1.3 million views in the process. Every internet trend worth talking about—from the #RunningManChallenge to dabbing—has found its footing on the ridiculously popular, six-second video sharing site. Since its launch in 2013, Viners have latched on to—and popularized—these internet fads, much to the delight of their obsessive and adoring fans.

But Ginn's videos surpass the rehashed memes and dance trends often spotted on Vine. Instead, she crafts comedy from the mundanity of everyday life; purposely tripping over supermarket display stands or faceplanting on the beach. Her accompanying trademark is to lie like a dead weight until somebody finally comes to help her out. Paige Ginn falls on her ass for your pleasure, simply so you don't have to.

The internet's tendency to thieve and repost other people's videos worked in her favour. Eventually, Ginn's six-second vignettes of embarrassment began to spread quickly, the likes and followers on her social accounts growing with them.

"I'm still kind of tripping out about the whole situation," she admits, mentioning a few 'out there' moments. She's already grabbed the retweet endorsement of Snoop Dogg, and later in the year she starts work on her first comedy film, Airplane Mode. "I never thought in a million years [that] I could get so many opportunities just from falling down in public!"

Her words reflect the disbelief shared by the vast majority of those who have inadvertently found themselves caught up in the 'internet celebrity' boom. She's the latest in a long line of "Damn Daniels" and "Alex from Targets"—a regular girl who has built her Instagram presence by mixing holiday selfies in Honduras with videos of performing a 200m dash in Walmart.

" I think people enjoy what I do because I'm a girl who can make a complete fool out of herself," she guesses. "And there aren't very many girls who [do that]." She has a point. As widespread and genderless as Vine's appeal seems to be, the number of men engaged in slapstick comedy vastly outweighs the number of women in the game.

In 2016, when girls on Snapchat are more likely to emulate glamorous Calabasas girls like Kylie Jenner, young women are less likely to encounter someone as proudly gawky as Paige Ginn. She's reminiscent of the conventionally pretty and yet clumsy Disney Channel doyennes of the early 2000s; a kind of Lizzie McGuire of our time.

I asked Paige what she thought about the lack of women who share her love of slapstick. "Honestly," she says with a slight pause, "I think guys are just a little more outgoing than most girls—but maybe I shouldn't be saying that!" She claims to follow in the "weirdo" footsteps of a family of seven siblings, of which she's the youngest. The fact that she is closest with her similarly-aged brother says a lot about the fact that she's veered away from a more eloquent of entertainment.

But that doesn't mean that Paige is complacent when it comes to gross men ogling her in public. Over 385,000 people saw the clip entitled "If anyone is ever staring at you just zoom in on their face with the front facing camera," in which she shamelessly turns the camera on to a man glaring at her from across the bar, forcing him to awkwardly look away and pretend like nothing had happened.

"I think girls just need to loosen up a little," she says when I ask if she has any advice for girls who feel awkward in those sort of situations. "Whenever a guy stares at me, I start staring back and doing [other] weird things—usually [they end up] being the ones who get creeped out!"

Watch: Magaret Cho on Power Bottoms and Surviving Bullshit

Thanks to their whole-hearted embracing of the simple, humiliating things in life, Ginn's videos have been labeled "an art form" by many. But there are, as expected, a handful of cynics too. Haters leave comments on her videos labelling her "disrespectful" and "childish" for making a mess that retail workers working on minimum wage are left to clean up, with one even suggesting that Ginn should "go fall on some dick."

The social media controversy doesn't phase her. "It's so funny to me," she explains. "I didn't mean for any of this to happen. I grew up wanting to do this so I could make people laugh and now I'm pissing people off, too."

She pauses for a second. "Oh well," she shrugs, "what can ya do?"