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This is a bi-weekly column about microcelebrities - the often accidental stars of the viral videos and jpegs crowding our inboxes.

Well, parents, with a heavy heart I must tell you that I know what your kids are watching on YouTube. It's not pretty, and no amount of Net Nannying can keep it out of your house. Mothers, fathers, guardians, let me introduce you to Fred.

Described by his creator as "a six-year-old with anger management issues," Fred is the invention of Lucas Cruikshank, a 15-year-old Nebraskan kid with a video camera, a penchant for broad theatrics and, crucially, editing equipment that allows him to speed up his own voice.

It may not sound like much of an arsenal, but consider this: Fred is in third place for total number of subscribers on YouTube, ahead of the Jonas Brothers and Universal Music. His most-viewed episode, "Fred Loses His Meds," has been viewed nine million times.

An episode posted last week, "Fred Auditions for a Play," has had roughly two million views to date. (To put it in perspective, in the last week of August, CSI: NY had roughly 1.1 million viewers in Canada, making it the third-most popular show on TV that week.)

Already, Zipit, a wireless messaging device brand, has approached him to hawk its product through the webcast; more endorsements are undoubtedly in the works.

And yet, it's doubtful that any sane adult could make it through an entire episode of Fred, even though they are no more than three minutes long. The humour seems to exist on a frequency that allows it to be metabolized solely by children; adults will hear only manic, heliumated shrieking.

Which may be one of the keys to his success. Ten-year-old Marlin Pearl's favourite thing about Fred is "probably his voice; it's really funny," says the fifth-grader from Ottawa. "He cracks me up so much." The first time she saw Fred, she says, she watched him for an hour solid. She memorizes Fred-speak, and watches three to five episodes a day.

"We imitate him all the time," Marlin says before reciting a Fred monologue verbatim. "Hey, it's Fred, and it's really nice out so I think I'm going to go out swimming later. My mom found me this really cool pool at the dump. It's really big and really deep. I think I might drown"

"I can't stand it," confessed Marlin's father, Sandy, of the show.

Lucas is wise to differences of opinion about Fred. "I actually hated Fred at first, and at one point wanted to kill him off," he said in an interview earlier this year with NewTeeVee. "So I sure understand why there are people who don't like Fred and find him annoying."

What redeems Fred is a certain amount of gravitas, as hard as it may be to detect on first viewing.

After making "Fred on Father's Day," which details Fred's feelings about his absentee father (who, his off-screen mother informs Fred is in the penitentiary), Lucas says, "I got tons of messages from kids saying they can relate to how Fred felt since he didn't have a dad with him on Father's Day."

So he's not just making 'em laugh. But how much of his resulting success is calculated and how much is accidental is hard to say. For someone whose charms appear to lie in his folksiness (he says he has no assistant, and his family helps him with the hundreds of e-mails and friend requests he gets), he clearly has higher aspirations. His comic inspirations include Ricky Gervais, Sacha Baron Cohen and Larry David. His manager, James Dolin of Sonesta Entertainment, tells me that Lucas (who, at 13, started a production company with his cousins) deliberately "set out to make Fred's YouTube the No. 1 Comedy Channel on YouTube." And it has, indeed, held the top spot frequently since its May launch.

In an e-mail to Lucas (who, I am told by his manager, is working on the next instalment of Fred), I ask if he would describe himself more as an average Midwestern kid, or someone who is unusually driven.

His answer comes back within minutes. "I didn't know there was an assumption that average Midwestern kids are not driven."

Well, not exactly: I think there used to be an assumption that kids, period, are not driven. No more.

Welcome to the YouTube era.