Joe Long wasn’t born in Pittsburgh, but you’d hardly know it. The newly-minted TikTok star was born in Huntsville, Ala. and moved to Pittsburgh at age 9. He went to Brashear High School and loved watching sketch comedy like Saturday Night Live and Mad TV as a teen. Now, he’s pursuing his own comedic endeavor that involves putting on a delightfully thick Pittsburgh accent — something you may have seen him do on social media.
Introducing Don and Deb
“I’ve always, ever since the Myspace days, made short videos with my friends, like when YouTube first came out,” Long tells Pittsburgh City Paper. More recently, though, Long is best known for his TikTok channel, @joelongtok, where his characters, Don and Deb, have gone viral in recent weeks.
Many call their back-and-forth soap opera-style story “The Yinz and the Restless.” Don is an unassuming roofer with an undying love for Deb, a woman who loves her “crahn and cokes” when out on the “tahn.” The skits often involve Don trying to get Deb to go “dahn the haus.” If you aren’t sure what that means, take a look at how Long uses the phrase in his videos, and you’ll eventually see why it’s such a big step for Deb.
“I’ve known Dons and Debs throughout my life, and they seem like such Pittsburgh names, so one day I just made a video,” Long says. “The first one was ‘Pittsburgh relationships be like’ and I didn’t even wear a wig yet.”
Long now wears a wig for his Deb character, but while filming this first Don and Deb video, it was just him with his glasses on for Don and off for Deb.
“I was like, ‘I guess I’ll make this a thing,’” he says. “Now there are people dressing up as Deb for Halloween and carving pumpkins with my sayings on them.”
Don and Deb also frequently talk about heading “dahn the lahnge.” Long explains that the lounge they’re referring to is a real place: the Boulevard Lounge in Brookline.
“That was my old bar back when I drank,” Long says. “I used to work in the kitchen there 15 years ago.”
Long recently visited the establishment, and the manager was grateful for all the newfound publicity. “She said they had people from Youngstown, Ohio come in for Wednesday Wing Night” — typically Don’s guys night “aht” while Deb laments never getting asked to attend.
Long recently did a TikTok ad for Primanti Bros. as Don and Deb. He currently has 416,000 TikTok followers and 23.4 million likes on his posts.
“It was always my dream ever since I was a little kid that I wanted to do something in the entertainment industry,” he says. “I thought maybe a comedic role in a movie or something like that, but I know it’s a lofty dream—now I’m kind of thinking maybe it’s possible, you know?”
Speaking Out on Mental Health and Addiction Struggles
Long’s road to fame was not an easy one. He has been open on his social media accounts about his struggles with mental health and addiction.
He says he was addicted to everything, “literally most of the drugs that exist.” He was what those in Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous call a “garbage can.”
“While I personally may be 100% sober, I’m an advocate for harm reduction and medically-assisted treatment,” he says. “I don’t knock anyone’s path; it’s about quality of life to me.”
Some of the first stories he would post on his TikTok were psychosis stories because Long is schizoaffective. “From 26 to 32, pretty much annually I would go into a psychosis,” he says. He was unmedicated and misdiagnosed from age 13 to 30.
“They thought I was just bipolar, but I’m actually schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type, so when you don’t address the schizophrenia aspect, you know you’re not taking the right meds,” he adds. “I needed an anti-psychotic.”
Now 37, Long is coming up on his five-year anniversary without a psychosis.
After getting his schizoaffective disorder controlled, Long struggled with agoraphobia. He says it stemmed from fear of backlash from things he said and did while in psychosis. Long was homeless for a period, including walking along the Pacific Coast Highway in California for six months.
“I was just wandering, literally sleeping in bushes and eating out of trash cans,” he says. “It gets really dark, and that’s why I take my meds. Even though I get some bad side effects, I have to take them. I’m not willing to risk it.”
One major side effect Long experiences is dystonia, a neurological disorder that can cause involuntary muscle contractions. “Your tongue twists in your mouth, your eyes roll back in your head, and it kind of looks like a seizure,” he says. “You’re totally conscious through it and it’s very painful but I only get it in my eyes, so like, I’ll just be blind for an hour.”
Through what Long calls his bad times, he met some of what he nicknamed “Earth angels,” or people who helped him out along the way. He specifically credited House of Hagar in Wheeling, W.Va., saying without them, he would have never received his proper diagnosis.
Long, who now lives with his mother, says that during the height of his struggles with agoraphobia, he only left his house about 20 to 25 times in four-and-a-half years.
“Overcoming my agoraphobia is my proudest accomplishment,” he says. “I couldn’t even step out in front of my house.”
Long used exposure therapy to work his way up to leaving his house for longer periods of time, visiting his grandmother who he hadn’t seen in 15 years, and then helping one of his sisters move. He was riddled with anxiety for the entire experience, he says, but still did it because it was for her.
“I mean it’s one thing if you want to be a homebody, but I’m a social person, so I was in hell. It wasn’t fun to me,” he says. “I was really struggling, which is why I started making videos.”
Celebrating His Newfound Fame
Long credits his sister with suggesting he hop on TikTok. Since then, he calls making his videos “therapeutic.” His two sisters are still encouraging him as he navigates his newfound fame, with one buying him a celebratory 400,000 followers shrimp lo mein with some candles in it, since Long isn’t a big fan of cake.
Despite having what he calls a “lifelong identity crisis” well into his 20s, now that Pittsburgh and TikTok are fully embracing him, Long finally feels like he’s right where he’s meant to be. “For many years, I always felt like the outcast because I’m not originally from here,” he says. “I don’t usually say yinz, I say y’all.”He’s been in Pittsburgh long enough now, though, that he finds himself slipping up and saying “haus” and “dahn” in conversations.
“It made me cry when I realized I was getting so much love, that’s all I ever wanted,” he says. “It’s crazy, I still feel like I’m in a dream.”
This article appears in Nov 13-19, 2024.
