A StarKid Is Born - NYTimes.com During a recent comedy show in Lower Manhattan, Joe Moses impersonated Eminem, chanted "I believe in love" and did a sketch about a guy who dances to Miley Cyrus. And he killed. That's partly because many of the hundred or so people in the audience were Joe Moses groupies, wearing "Joe Moses One-Man Showses" hoodies and panda hats, a homage to his favorite animal. "You may not know this, but I'm actually famous," Moses announced, pausing for effect, "on the Internet." Two hours later, a bouncer turned him away from a downtown bar. "It's like "Hannah Montana," " Moses says. Two worlds. In the real world, Moses is a bartender who lives in Williamsburg. But on the Internet, it's a different story. He is an original member of Team StarKid, a troupe of two dozen former University of Michigan theater students whose hilarious "Harry Potter" parody, "A Very Potter Musical," turned them into viral stars in 2009. Moses played an overenunciating Severus Snape, complete with a clenched jaw and a black wig. The troupe hit three of the medium's erogenous zones - singing, good-looking young people and Potter nerddom. Fans love StarKid, he explains, because like "Glee," it proves that musical-theater success "is not impossible." Most of StarKid's members graduated in 2010, and some opened a theater company in Chicago. But Moses, who graduated a year earlier, decided to go out on his own. He moved to New York to put on a one-man show that mixes new sketches with Snape reprisals. To boost his solo Internet fame, he and his co-host, J. D. Durkin, constantly replenish the video sketches on Moses's YouTube channel (39,000 subscribers) and interact with Twitter followers (around 41,000). As a result, fans speculate on Tumblr about whom he's dating or fantasize about spending a day at the zoo with him (that panda obsession). Since Moses began performing in August, nearly every show has sold out. But being Internet famous isn't easy. One night, as he was tending bar, a fanatic Internet follower realized who he was and flipped out. "That's what people don't understand," Moses says. By the time you see somebody on TV, they're making enough money to just work on TV. But when you see somebody on YouTube, those are really passion projects. Name: Joe Moses Street Cred: Original member of the YouTube musical-theater maestros Team StarKid Total StarKid YouTube Video Views: More than 111 million Number of Accents in Repertory: 12 (not including Cockney) Day Job: Bartender Weirdest Fan Comment on Tumblr: "I would not do things to Ryan Gosling that I would do to this sexy. . . ." Meditations on Internet Fame: "If I'm lucky enough to have people interested in what I'm saying, I should be saying something good."