Well, I've completely neglected this blog for two and a half months now, and I should come back to it because I really don't work hard enough on comedy writing and this might inspire me to bust ass again. I spend a lot of time doing work for class, and by the time I'm done all I want to do is drink beer and watch Friday Night Lights on DVD. I know I need to put my nose to the grindstone and work my ass off if I ever want to get anywhere in the comedy business, but dammit, after going to class then coming home and analyzing Shakespeare for four straight hours, all I really want to do is get drunk and find out if Matt Saracen and Julie get back together, dammit! Anyways, here's one of my older sketches that I made last March.
This, as you might have guessed, is the sequel to Smoke Stoppers, which is widely regarded as the best sketch I've ever made. This sequel also represents the biggest triumph in my extremely short sketch comedy career, because in March this video was featured nationally on Collegehumor.com and was selected as one of the staff picks that went on the front page for about a week. You can find it here and read the 100+ comments that their idiot users. left.
According to Wikipedia, Collegehumor.com gets 8 million unique visitors a month, so while I have absolutely no idea how many people have seen the sketch, I'm thinking that 100,000 would be an absolute bare minimum.
What I find so odd about the video getting featured on the national page is that I don't even fucking like it. I submitted the Boardwalk Hotel video, the One Missed Call parody, and the original Smoke Stoppers, all of which are way funnier than this video, to College Humor and they rejected those. Although this sketch has some pretty awesome lines, I really feel like it strains too hard for shock value to be funny. After I made this sketch I watched it and felt like the little kid who runs into a room full of grown-ups and says "poopy" trying to shock them. I also didn't like that they named the video "College Students Face Mortality". It's not exactly an eye-catching name that screams "HILARIOUS COMEDY SKETCH!!!" With a title that makes it sound like the video is a bunch of pretentious philosophy students ruminating on the inevitability of death, I think the probability of people slicking on a link to it is a lot lower than it could be.
Although I'm obviously not a fan of this video, there are some lines that I like. "The only thing women have to contribute to society is holes" is a clear winner. One night at a party I had the displeasure of being in the same room as this girl who was about the dumbest I've ever met. As soon as she walked out I remarked, "If you're a girl who's that fucking stupid, pretty much the only thing you have to contribute to society is holes". I wrote it down and then I decided to do a sequel to Smoke Stoppers pretty much just as an excuse to work that line in somehow.
As for all the lines that are like "Insert my meat and retreat" and "rape it and escape it," those are written in a public forum type setting. Usually on a Friday night, me and Carter (the guy wearing the Giants shirt) will have a drunken brainstorming session with anyone else present at our fraternity house and we'll come up with lines until I've got about 12 that are really funny. We've recently had a third one where I came up with a whole bunch more, and since Smoke Stoppers is pretty much the only thing I've done that has gotten any sort of significant reaction out of the rest of the world, a third installment has become inevitable.
No comments:
Post a Comment