Booneville's Tre Welch, known as 'juicecupbox' is a TikTok sensation with mom and friend

Perhaps the most extraordinary element about the incredible success of the videos Tre Welch shoots with his mother, Lorenda Welch, and her best friend, Shelly Cleveland, is how unextraordinary they are.

There's no slick editing or post-production effects. Rarely are they overdubbed with pop music (unless the trio is dancing). Mostly, scripting seems to be nonexistent.

It's just the three of them cutting up, pulling pranks and laughing hysterically. In other words, just being themselves.

That's why people love them. A lot of people.

'It's just raw comedy'

Tre's videos, uploaded to TikTok and other social media platforms under the handle "juicecupbox" have garnered hundreds of thousands of followers. His main TikTok account alone has more than 1.5 million followers, and his alternate account, which features slightly different but similar content, has nearly a million.

Describing the content of Tre, Lorenda and Shelly's videos wouldn't come close to showcasing what makes them so popular. Although some play into common TikTok trends, many are just unedited interactions among the three of them.

"Ninety-five percent of the time, it's just raw comedy," Tre, 31, says.

Sandwiched between Lorenda and Shelly, both 58, on a small bench inside his Booneville home, Tre nods to his mother and begins to laugh. There seems to be a lot of that in this household. And yelling. In fact, the two seem to come hand-in-hand.

"You see, what he does … he doesn't even ask permission," Shelly says. Her thick Southern accent — "country" might be a more accurate descriptor — fills the room. "If someone walks in the house, he just starts taping them."

Both Tre and Lorenda confirm this.

"As she comes through the door, I'm recording," he says of Lorenda, who's already giving him an exaggerated cutting look. "I might say something … and then, bam, we've got content."

"He'll surprise me," Lorenda says. "He'll just want my natural reaction to things."

Tre's laughing again.

"I love catching her when she gets off work," he says. "She's in a mood … That's the perfect time."

Shelly's laugh … more of a cackle, really … fills the room again. It drowns out everything else.

"Lots of times, we're really not in the mood for it, but he gets us anyway," she says, pretending to be offended, which elicits even more laughter. "He's slick. We don't know that he's recording, and we end up saying something that we shouldn't say."

"I like to keep 'em young," Tre says once the room settles down. "Pranks … jump scare them …"

"Getting up real close on our wrinkles," Shelly adds.

That kind of interplay is what's grown their fanbase. Lorenda is somewhat reserved; Shelly is always loud, always rambunctious; and Tre's personality falls somewhere in the middle, allowing him to act as an instigator who spurs the others to react and interact.

In one recent upload, Shelly and Lorenda are sitting together, watching a video on a phone. Dressed alike in low-cut halter tops, pink sequined jackets with matching cowboy hats and white boots below short skirts, the two don't seem to notice Tre is filming them.

Off-camera, he pipes up.

"You know, y'all can go to jail if you go out like that?" he says.

They look up, surprised. Shelly exhales vape smoke.

"I didn't know you were recording us," she says. Tre begins to laugh. Lorenda seems unfazed by all of it.

"Going to jail for what?" Shelly continues without missing a beat. "Looking too good?"

Seconds later, Lorenda is buttoning her jacket. Shelly chastises her.

"I'm covering all of this up," Lorenda says.

Shelly asks why, repeating that they can't be taken to jail, no matter how outrageously they're dressed.

"What would be the charge?" she asks.

Lorenda shrugs.

"Prostituting, I guess."

That does it. All three of them break down into fits of laughter.

Many of their videos go something like that — just improvised back-and-forth.

"Everything's just kind of off the rip," Tre says of their videos. "I don't have to plan nothing with them; they're just naturally funny.

"Some things, I will plan out if I know that it will be a good fit for the three of us," he says. "I'll put some planning into it, but after we get so far into the video, I'll just tell them to do whatever they want to do. We don't follow the full script."

"If he planned it, it wouldn't be funny," Shelly says.

That natural banter among the three of them is arguably the key to their appeal. Everyone — at least in the South — knows someone like Shelly or like Lorenda. They feel like friends, even to strangers.

'It's everywhere we go'

The trio's distinct personalities and growing popularity have made them easy to spot when in public, and because the style of videos they shoot are so down-to-earth, their fans seem to feel an innate familiarity with them.

Although there's an element of over-the-top performance to their videos, the trio is essentially famous for being who they are. People think they know them personally, even if they don't.

It's not uncommon for fans to approach them in Walmart, in Ross, at a Mississippi State ballgame — anywhere in public.

"It's everywhere we go," Tre says. "They handle it better than I do. If I'm running to Walmart to get groceries, I want to run in there and get out. I don't want to be in there for three hours because I'm talking."

That's not a problem for Shelly and Lorenda, who seem to thrive on the attention, even if they both find it a bit strange.

"They always want to take a picture," Shelly says. "I had a woman start crying when she saw me in Walmart. I was like, 'Lord, I am not Elvis.'"

Once, at a gas station, a fan asked Tre to sign the only thing she had available to her: a box of chicken.

No doubt, as their social media presence continues to grow, the trio will find themselves in that situation — well, maybe not that exact situation, but similar ones — more and more. They're looking at ways to build their brands and expand their presence beyond social media.

Tre recently acquired a manager out of Atlanta, which he's hoping will help take his creative output and oversized personality to an even broader audience.

For now, however, the three of them seem to take great joy in just being around each other, cracking jokes, dancing, dressing up (and not going to jail for it), pulling pranks and laughing hysterically. It's a joy that's clearly shared by many, many others.

"There's something about the three of us together," Shelly says, looking over at Tre and Lorenda.

She says she and Lorenda have tried to make videos on their own, but it's missing some crucial element to the chemistry.

"He brings it out of us," she says of Tre. "They want us together. They don't want just me, or just Lorenda. It's a package deal. There's something about the three of us together that makes it work."