MICHAEL Buckley is the Great White Hope of YouTube.
Thirty-three years old, based in the middle of nowhere in Connecticut, freshly signed to an HBO development deal – and now it’s the last day at his “What do you do for work-work?” day job, ever.
The man is doing handstands. Literally.
“I’m not an actor who stood in line for auditions,” says the superquick-talking, shotgun-laughter-firing Internet sensation behind the “What the Buck” comedy show on YouTube, which is right after Miley Cyrus in terms of popularity (he’s at 257,547 subscribers; she’s at 257,648).
MORE: Buckley Picks His Video Faves
Starting today, he is one of 10 top Web celebrities who will be featured in a new online HBOlab series (a unit of HBO) called “Hooking Up,” which brings together the biggest self-made stars on the Internet at hookingupshow.com.
“I made my own path from scratch, and I take great pride in that,” Buckley says of his always over-the-top celeb-skewering show, which includes the occasional Miley Cyrus-challenging, Internet-wide dance battle. “It’s not like people are on YouTube looking for a 30-year-old gay guy. They’re looking for women with breasts and cat videos.”
Which might explain how most people arrive at his most popular video ever – viewed more than 8 million times – which consists of him freaking out and shrieking as he watches an infamous porn video involving two girls and a cup.
“Buck is someone you couldn’t write if you tried,” explains James Bozzi, the marketing director at Live Nation, the concert promotion company where Buckley is now packing up his final things and the marquee out front reads, “GOOD LUCK BUCK.”
“It’s not a character you play,” Bozzi continues. “It’s not like Sean Hayes playing a gay guy on ‘Will & Grace.’ Look at Buck’s office. It’s like a comic book exploded in there. It’s like a kaleidoscope of insanity.”
Buckley’s work space is now mostly empty. Once peppered with Wonder Woman, “Charlie’s Angels,” “Evita” and “I Love Lucy” images, what remains is his symbolic “Mary Tyler Moore”-esque oversized silver “M” and a door covered in well-wishing notes, such as “Scarecrow, I think I will miss you most of all.”
Although compared to Perez Hilton by The Hollywood Reporter’s Reel Pop blog and called by Gawker “The Breathless Gossip Vlogger Who Will Replace Us All,” Buckley says of his snarkaholic celebrity trashing: “I don’t want to ruin anyone’s life. I just enjoy being silly.”
His silliness has real ramifications, however. Several subscribers have actually posted their own “responses” in which they write that they never used to like gay people.
Until they watched Buckley.
Inside the small room where he records his videos – with a slab of cloth in the background in lieu of a professional green screen, a $2,000 Canon GL2 video camera and a stack of black-and-white head shots – Buckley has recorded more than 400 episodes of his show.
“His work ethic is just unbelievable,” observes Fran Shea, general manager of HBOlab.
Buckley, she says, reminds her of another insatiably ambitious young talent she worked with years ago.
“I ran E! for the first nine years in programming, and that’s the kind of work ethic that I saw in Greg Kinnear,” she says. “Greg would come in with a million ideas – and an ability to get them done.”
As Buckley stands in the hallway of the Live Nation offices surrounded by huge black-and-white photos of celebs from Chris Rock to Jerry Seinfeld to Robin Williams, his now former colleague Bozzi says, “We’re going to have to put a picture of Buck on these walls soon.”
Buckley just poses and postures as a camera snaps him.
“I watch ‘Top Model.’ ,” he says, grinning widely. “Smile with your eyes. Don’t waste the magic.”
mstadtmiller@nypost.com