Jonathan Charles Cozart (born April 26, 1992), also known by his online alias Paint, is an American YouTube personality, musician, and comedian. As of November 2024, his main YouTube channel has 4.54 million subscribers.
His YouTube channel "Paint", an account gifted to him by his brother,[6] was created on December 27, 2005, and has over 4.63 million subscribers as of May 2023. Cozart's career in video started in middle school as a way to avoid writing papers, offering to make videos instead, and he continued this through high school.[7]
On July 17, 2011, Cozart uploaded "Harry Potter in 99 Seconds", which quickly became a viral video, with 61 million views as of November 2022.
Cozart grew his audience on YouTube with his Disney parody videos, which place Disney Princesses into modern circumstances through a cappella layering of his own voice to supply the music. "After Ever After" was uploaded in 2013, and has amassed 94 million views as of November 2022. "After Ever After 2" was released in 2014 and "After Ever After 3" was released in 2018.[8] He then went on hiatus after November of that year, but returned in October 2020 with the video "If Trump Was In Hamilton."
Live shows
In 2015, Cozart performed his own one-man show, "Laughter Ever After", at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. His live performance of musical comedy was well-reviewed by attendees, stating, "Jon Cozart delights with his witty, heartfelt music."[9]
Cozart joined fellow YouTube musicians Dodie Clark, Tessa Violet, and Rusty Clanton in 2016 for selected shows of the small and intimate Transatlantic Tour along the east coast.[10]
Other work
Cozart hosted the 7th Streamy Awards on September 26, 2017. His hosting turn was described as "vicious" by Newsweek, and the show included a musical number in which Cozart compared nominee Jake Paul to then-U.S. President Donald Trump.[11] Cozart described his approach as satirizing the perceived "hypocrisy of the new media industry."[12]
Cozart played the role of Donny Meadows in the 2020 web series Wayward Guide for the Untrained Eye, and the role of the bard Diedrich Knickerbocker in Shipwrecked Comedy's 2022 web series Headless: A Sleepy Hollow Story.[13]
^Jensen, Clare; Buckner, Kennan (August 2013). "Prodigy for Parodies"(PDF). Cy-Fair Magazine. p. 40. Archived(PDF) from the original on December 12, 2017. Retrieved December 11, 2017.
^"Twitter". mobile.twitter.com. Archived from the original on March 2, 2021. Retrieved July 27, 2020.