September 24: Doppelganger Week

It was the first week of February. On that Monday, I noticed a few profiles on Facebook with a unique look. My friends were posting pictures of celebrities instead of themselves. On Tuesday, this trend continued and I saw more celebrity profile pictures. By Wednesday, I discovered I was in the midst of a phenomenon called Doppelganger Week. Find a picture of a celebrity that you resemble and post it as your picture for one week.

I don't know how it was created or even why, but I do know that it was pretty fun to see the celebrity lookalikes throughout the week and beyond. I had to get in on this new fad, but who was I supposed to pick as my doppelganger? I have received so many comparisons while growing up that I didn't even know where to begin.

I ended up going with Woody from Toy Story because I hadn't seen many cartoon doppelgangers and I wanted to be different, but I could have gone in so many different directions. I've been told I look like Jim Carrey, "Weird Al" Yankovic, Jimmy Neutron, Bob Saget, Steve Carell, a professional golfer by the name of Skip Kendall, Stephen Colbert, and Hugh Jackman. Just within the last week, I've been told Daniel Tosh and Ben Quayle (son of Dan). I'm sure I'm missing a few, but you get the point.

I know what you're thinking. Hugh Jackman? Don't flatter yourself, Roesler! Trust me, I'm not making this stuff up. Up until last night, I had never heard of this Ben Quayle character, but a guest at the bar pointed it out and pulled up a picture of him on his iPhone. Out of the eleven names above, I believe Quayle gets the honor of looking the most like me. I wouldn't go as far as calling him my identical twin, but he's definitely closer than someone like Yankovic.

I'm sure most of these references were made based off the way I acted at the time. I'm a pretty eccentric and hyper guy. I tend to run around with an unprecedented amount of energy and enthusiasm so I can understand the Jim Carrey comparison. I'm not big on the political or current events scenes, so I don't know where Colbert comes from. "Weird Al?" I was a big fan in high school, but I don't look anything like him. Saget and Carell? Jackman? Before this post, I had only seen one picture of Kendall and it was a black and white, small newspaper picture of him in his follow through swing.

The one thing I share with all of these names? Brown hair. That's it. I see myself every day and the people making the comparisons sometimes see me once and never again. They're making snap judgments so it's easier to make comparisons. Whatever it is that they see in me, every new comparison just makes me feel like I have the most generic face of all time.