Austin's Zach Anner becomes Internet star with Oprah tryout

Internet celebrity has yet to transform Austin's Zach Anner into a diva.

"I hope not," he joked as we chatted on the phone last week. "I do wear a lot of sparkly dresses, though, so I don't know what that qualifies me as."

Jokes aside, it's easy to imagine the charismatic, 25-year-old Anner with an entourage — and it's not even hard to picture him with a congregation.

Anner, a former University of Texas student and filmmaker who has cerebral palsy ("the sexiest of the palsies," he says) has, practically overnight, become an Internet phenomenon — as a result of a video he entered in a bid to win his own talk show on OWN, Oprah Winfrey's upcoming cable network.

In the submission, the self-described "wheelchair-bound lady magnet" reveals rejected themes for his show — cooking, fashion, fitness (rolling on the ground, legs in the air, he insists, "this isn't yoga, I'm just putting on pants") — before landing on a travelogue.

He uploaded the video and headed out on a June 12 trip to Six Flags in Arlington. He discovered upon his return that a link to his video had made it to the top of Reddit.com, a website where people can post links for others to vote up or down. When he went to bed, he had 8,000 votes on the Oprah site. His brother's girlfriend called in the middle of the night to let him know his vote count had climbed to 40,000.

Anner said he had almost fallen off of the Titan roller coaster earlier in the day, but the response to his video was an even bigger shock. "I was like, ‘Did I really die on that roller coaster? Is this one of those movies where I'm in limbo and I have to choose to go to heaven through, like, accepting this or something?' "

By the middle of last week, the video had garnered well more than 2.5 million votes on the contest website (myown.oprah.com/audition), more than 1 million more than his nearest competitor. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Anner's self-deprecating charm generated thousands of comments from inspired new fans; online mentions by Time Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, New York Magazine, Movieline and Perez Hilton's blog; and, perhaps most surprisingly, attention from musician John Mayer, who offered to write and perform a theme song for Anner's show.

Anner spent his childhood in Buffalo, N.Y., growing up in a family he describes as "hilarious. That was kind of our language — making each other laugh." He credits his brother with a more "awkward and sharp" sense of humor than his own and goes on about his drama teacher mother and his father, who used to make "really ridiculous videos" in the '80s for public access television.

That talent definitely has been passed on to Anner, whose YouTube page is littered with ridiculous videos, many from his tenure as a reporter for the Texas Student Television sketch comedy program, "That's Awesome!" In one, he attends a Bill Clinton book-signing and asks the former president how he intends to save the trees with a book that's so long. In another, he somehow persuades actor Dennis Quaid to portray the female half of an English couple bickering about finances and alcohol usage.

Anner says he's always tried to use comedy to connect with others.

"Humor, I feel, sort of opens doors for people and ... forces them to look at you in a different light," he explains. Anner is fairly realistic about how he's looked at. Though I find the yoga portion of his Oprah video to be hysterical, I could easily see some people being offended by it.

"When I make fun of myself, it's not making fun of people with disabilities," Anner explains. "I'm just pointing out, you know, we've all got these things that are different about us." He laments that people feel they have to tiptoe around his disability. "It's OK to see the chair first; don't pretend that you don't see it. And then, get to know the person and the chair really becomes so much less important."

If Anner wins this round of the contest — and he seems like a shoo-in — he'll be flown to Los Angeles to audition for a spot alongside nine other hopefuls in a reality show to determine the grand-prize winner.