As you may or may not now, in the time since I've graduated from college, I've been waiting tables while trying to figure out some career direction. I wasted four years at Ball State, so it feels like I should be putting my Telecommunications Production / English double major toward something as opposed to a job that doesn't even require a GED, but I don't know what the hell I want to do, and at least for now waiting tables, drinking to excess, writing comedy, making cartoons, and gorging myself on TV shows on DVD has been more than enjoyable.
But then I discovered from random googling that Brian "Boom Goes the Dynamite" Collins is working as a reporter at the ABC affiliate in Waco, Texas. Brian went to Ball State and studied in the same department as me, and I realized that if he can get a "real" job in the field, I could easily do the same. While taking a shower I thought about being a reporter and all of the exciting and interesting people I would meet, the fascinating events I'd witness, and even the status of local celebrity, and I decided right then and there that reporting is what I truly want to do, even if it means moving far away to some random corner of the country.
Then out of curiosity I googled the average salary of a reporter. It comes out to something like this:
$26,000 for a daily newspaper
$22,880,for a weekly newspaper
$23,400 in radio
$21,840 in broadcast television
$25,012 in cable television.
My pathetic server job that anyone with a GED can get has broadcast television reporters beat by ten thousand fucking dollars. Then I thought about how many long hours I'd be working, staying up all night at the station editing and writing. I thought about how cultivating my own leads and sources and expecting me to find my own stories to cover is more responsibility than any sane boss would give me. I thought about how including any of my trademark creativity into my stories would immediately get me fired. I thought about how slow news days would probably make me resort to fucking making shit up about restaurants charging money for ice.
I thought about how many achingly dull and occasionally asinine stories about pig contests, book stores opening, and quiz bowl competitions I'd have to spend long hours putting together. I thought about how I already meet hundreds of local characters over the course of a week while waiting tables, and how torturous it is just to ask them what they want for dinner, and how talking to them and getting to know them would be even worse than the level of interaction my current job requires. I thought about how reporting for the Ball State Daily News blew so much ass that I quit after two weeks.
And then I thought to myself, "Back to square one on this career bullshit..."
1. As I write this, I'll be quitting my job 45 minutes from now, as I just got a new job. I'll go from making about $350 a week with no benefits to about $600 a week with full benefits. I guess that's a slight upgrade.
2. As the title screen says, this cartoon is a rehash of an old blog post where I made a bunch of "Rock out with your cock out" type jokes. As a matter of fact you'll find that virtually every episode of CSD contains a repeat or a modification of a joke I've previously come up with. I think this is true for most comedians. By my count the average comic comes up with about three original jokes over the entire course of their lives, and everything else is just some variation.
3. I fucking forgot to draw Gary's beard on the title screen again. Goddammit.
4. Speaking of that character, by some coincidence, everytime I make an episode that features Gary, he always ends up being the thumbnail. Fortunately, his hair is cooler than the brown mop that Corey has, and the six upright pubes that Murph rocks out, so it's okay, although I think the more unique images like the puking cat or Gary rubbing his dick on a phone would potentially attract more views.
5. I'm pretty sure the image I used for the baseball stadium is taken from Comercia Park in Detroit where the Tigers play. I was going to draw a bunch of other fans in the background but didn't bother since you only see the wide shot of all three characters for like 2 seconds anyway, and I didn't use an image of a crowded baseball game because I thought the cartoon characters next to real people would look weird. Not that it's a huge deal since sparsely attended baseball games are pretty common anyway since they play 162 of the fuckers every year.
6. Speaking of terrible baseball teams like the Tigers, I've noticed that black people tend to wear the hats of terrible teams more often than not. In my experience, the three most popular teams among black guys are the Detroit Tigers, Washington Nationals, and Kansas City Royals.
7. One time I went to a Major League Baseball message board and asked them why black people seem to be fans of terrible teams and the most telling response I got was, "Silly white boy. Black people don't wear hats because they're fans." Thank you for helping me with that.
8. Miller beers give me the shits. Really, really, really bad shits.
9. I might be off the mark here, but I think my mad MS Paint skillz are actually improving. I guess that would happen after making 11 cartoons, but that first shot where the seats overlap in front of the characters almost looks decent.
10. You can't tell because I always have a character standing in the way, but in the image that I frequently use for Corey's apartment, there's actually a tiny Asian kid wrapped up in a sleeping bag in the background.
I never thought I'd be one of those bloggers who talks about the news, but this one pissed me off enough that I had to say something.
This has got to be the biggest crock of shit I've heard in a while. No, I'm not saying it's a crock of shit that a restaurant would have the nerve to charge for ice, I'm saying it's a crock that news reporters would run with a story and not even bother to investigate it. I've waited tables, my dad is a bartender, and my sister has waited tables, bartended, and managed a restaurant, and we can all assure you that a drink on the rocks does indeed contain about 50% more alcohol, and that's what you're being charged for.
I also can't figure out why Morton's is being singled out when virtually every restaurant and bar on earth does the same. The person who made a big stink out of being charged the extra $2.50 was financial writer and investigative reporter Dan Dorfman. That's some pretty fucking good investigating there, especially since this entire story could be disproven by ordering a normal cocktail and a cocktail on the rocks and just fucking looking at them. Furthermore, how is it that this is the first time the 77-year old Dorfman has ever encountered a rocks charge? He's been legally old enough to drink at a bar for 56 years and this is the first fucking time he's ever noticed it?
I also love the righteous indignation in the reporter's voice when she says that Morton's charges $107 for a porterhouse steak, like they're a group of evil extortion artists who spring $107 bills ($109.50 if you count the rocks charge) on poor blue collar workers who just wanted a decent dinner. The customer base at Morton's is comprised of rich people who are perfectly okay with paying over $100 for a steak, you dipshits. The price of the steak is even printed on the goddamned menu. It's not like it's a dirty secret they're trying to hide. And it's all capped off with her smug dismissal of the restaurant's claims that they've charged for rocks for 12 years with a tone and look on her face that just screams, "These extortion artists are so full of shit that I won't even bother to see if they're telling the truth." Don't fucking go through the trouble of confirming if what they said was true or not, that's something a journalist might do.
I know it seems like I'm making way too big of a deal out of what is essentially a lazily assembled fluff piece, but think about it. Drinks on the rocks costing more because they have more alcohol is common knowledge to millions of people and has been standard practice at bars for years. If nobody at the news station can fucking get something that simple and well-known right, how can you trust anything they have to say?
A friend of mine was recently alerted to the existence of these cartoons I've been making over the past couple months, as well as another half dozen football-related videos I've made for my friends at the GameFAQs NFL board and bluntly asked me, "How the hell many videos do you make?" The answer is many. Very, very many. This is another one. Do note that this is the most recent video I've made, so I'm now up to date on this blog, so future videos will be posted here about once a week as opposed to the once every day or two we've been seeing lately. Anyways, 10 fast facts!
1. This episode was a complete bitch to draw. My way of drawing has all of the characters point their arms outward, which made it really hard to fit all four in the same frame. I eventually made it work, but this episode ended up being unique in a sense that it was a complete pain in the ass to make while all of the others were really fun.
2. This episode derives from a mild obsession I have with coming up with fake gay porn titles. My favorite movies on my Facebook profile consists of a list of a few dozen gay porn titles. Also, for my final project in my Advanced Audio class at Ball State I made a comedy album featuring a track entitled "Inside the Gay Porn Actor's Studio," which only existed as a flimsy excuse to rattle off about 40 more gay porn titles that I came up with.
3. To anyone who Googles the titles listed in this video: Save me the fucking grief of telling me if any of them are already titles of real gay porn flicks. I assure you I came up with these titles myself. That being said, I wouldn't be surprised if a gay porn producer came up with some of those same titles independently. The average human male makes approximately 4.6 dick jokes an hour. Assuming that statistic is inflated for a comedian like myself and a gay porn producer who distributes videos of dudes fucking each other for a living, it virtually becomes a mathematical certainty that they'll both create the same dick joke at some point.
4. I have the next two days off from work and I have no fucking clue what I'm going to do with them. I honestly have no idea whatsoever what normal people do with two days off every week. My plans for the next two days involve watching a few episodes of Boston Legal on DVD, eating some Georgia Chopped Pork at Famous Dave's, and getting the CV boot on my car replaced and that's it. I've managed to fill half of an afternoon. WHY THE HELL CAN'T I EVER FIGURE OUT WHAT NORMAL PEOPLE DO?!?!?!?!?
5. After my girlfriend saw this video she asked me if this was just an animated version of an old sketch I've already made because, in her words, "This sketch was just so you that I thought you'd already done it." Folks, at the age of 22 my comedy has already become so stagnant and predictable that my own girlfriend of two and a half years can't tell it apart from anything else I've done.
6. If you couldn't figure it out, the opening song gets quiet when the sketch starts because it's supposed to be playing on the stereo at the bachelor party.
7. Referring to myself as a butthorn's worst nightmare in the title sequence is a reference to Bulletproof, starring Gary Busey. Watch the opening sequence here to understand why I've been so obsessed with this movie for the last year.
8. Drawing this episode fucking sucked for the most part, but making those fake gay porn DVD covers was fun as hell, especially making the black dildo with helicopter propellers on it.
9. I've done a pretty good job so far in terms of keeping the voices of the characters at least somewhat discernibly different despite playing all of the characters myself, but I have a feeling I'll have no choice but to bring in a friend to record voices if I ever add a fifth main character.
10. It's almost impossible to make out from listening to the video, so here is what each of the characters are saying in the part where they're all shouting at once and trying to talk over each other:
Corey: Murph, I give you one task, I give you one simple task, and what do you do? You fuck it up. You fuck around, you fuck around, you fuck it up. I hate you so much. Why... Go fuck yourself, go fuck yourself.
Murph: Why are you always riding me, huh? Why are you always riding me? Why do you gotta be like that? Okay, I rented some gay porn. Sue me. I rented some gay porn, big deal.
Gary: Why can't I have a goddamn bachelor party like a normal person without you fucking freaks ruining it? It's ridiculous. (5 seconds of unintelligible stuttering)
Demetrius: Man, I don't even know how I can hang out with you people. You racist, you gay, you gay AND racist. Y'all a bunch of gay racists, and a bunch of crackers too.
None of it is particularly funny, but you were probably curious anyway.
It's another cartoon! This one's pretty funny! Ten facts! Go!
1. Crank: High Voltage is fucking awesome. Based on the box office numbers, nobody bothered to see it. Get the fuck to the theater and fix that problem now. In the first five minutes a man gets scraped off the road with a snow shovel, some asshole puts out a cigarette on another man's exposed heart, and Jason Statham anally rapes someone with a shotgun. And honestly, that's some of the mildest stuff in the movie.
2. The whole terrorism scenario comes from an old stand-up comedy bit I wrote a few years ago about being in spelling bees. It plays a lot better when it's actually being acted out and not just said by one guy.
3. That picture of the child with the insults printed in front of him is actually me at the age of 12.
4. I know that the turbans that the Arab terrorists are wearing are horrible. I tried cutting and pasting a yellowish, orangish turban from a picture of a Sikh onto them, but it looked awful, and it probably speaks to my ignorance that I would find Sikh and Arab turbans completely interchangeable. They actually looked like really preppy blond haircuts, so I colored them white and penciled in some ragged looking lines.
5. This video is obviously heavily based on my life, but I honestly wasn't really bullied or beaten up all that much, and especially not over the spelling bee. The only time I was ever teased really bad was when I was on the basketball and soccer teamss in 4th grade, and I've never had my ass kicked in my life, so as they tend to do in comedy, this was very exaggerated.
6. Last Wednesday I visited Muncie to see some of my Ball State friends, and apparently over the course of the night a girl was walking down the street carrying a case of beer, and a cop talked to her to ask about a string of break-ins in the area, and being under 21 she dropped the beer and ran into the house where I was hanging out, apparently believing that if you run away from the fucking police and get out of their sight for a second they'll forget they ever saw you and just leave.
They knock on the door, I answer, and a cop tells me that he isn't here to bust anyone for drinking, he just wants to talk to a girl that he described as Caucasian and probably wearing red, and he wants anyone close to that description to come out and talk to him. Being drunk at the time I immediately say, "The first thing I do when I show up at a party is immediately seek out all of the white girls too, so I know where you're coming from!" The cop actually laughed pretty hard.
7. When I tried to draw a hot chick, that was really the best I could do. All I could do was make her really short and wear pink. If it wasn't for the audio you really probably wouldn't even be able to tell that the abomination I drew was even a fucking woman at all.
8. I'm not really a music guy. I've already blown through almost my entire music collection with those intros. By episode 12 I'll definitely have to start repeating artists. I'm glad I got to use Bowie on a good episode though.
9. He anally rapes him with a fucking shotgun. Come on!
This is episode 8. I actually ended up having things to say when I tried doing a ten facts list, so I'll try that again and see if it works again, so here we go:
1. At first I tried to have the songs that play at the beginning have something to do with the plot or theme of the cartoon. The episode where Murph is raped by a seemingly friendly homeless man features the verse from Still Alive where the computer chick laments being destroyed by a friend. The episode about Murph undermining authority at airports features Fuck Tha Police. By this point I've completely given up on that and just pick a song that I think is cool. This one is Stickshifts and Safety Belts by Cake, whose entire library of songs is badass.
2. I'm watching the entire series of Wonder Showzen right now, and that show matches and completely surpasses Six Feet Under for the all-time record for biggest nosedive in quality midway through the series. How could a show with such a shit-yer-pants amazing first season suck so hard in its second?
3. SHEILA and BERNIE's names are written in all caps while Corey and Gary and written normally, because the computer system characters' names are supposed to be acronyms like MS-DOS. I never came up with what exactly they're supposed to stand for.
4. I am mortally terrified of the number five.
5. AHHH!!! HOLY SHIT!!
6. I did not notice until rewatching this episode just now that Gary's hairstyle on the title screen and in the actual episode are different.
7. In addition to Youtube I'm posting these episodes on Funny or Die. I didn't get the idea to post on that site until after this 8th episode was done, and I want to space things out instead of uploading them all at once, so I've only posted 2 episodes there so far. I point this out because my profile picture at FoD is the image of Gary rubbing his penis on the phone. FoD users are 6 episodes away from seeing that, and I'd imagine they're really confused by what they're seeing.
8. At a funeral yesterday, a woman came up to me and told me that when her grandson was in elementary school he followed my spelling bee victories and read my monthly entertainment column in the newspaper, and he's always looked up to me as a role model and he wants to follow in my footsteps. I told her I was flattered and asked how her grandson is doing. She told me that he doesn't really have any friends and the people at school see him as the "weird kid." He's following in my footsteps more than he'll ever know. I virtually guarantee you a CSD episode based on this will find its way to computers in the coming weeks.
9. This cartoon is actually a sketch I wrote about two years ago for the live-action sketch comedy group, and the audio files of the girlfriend were made at that time as well. Making live-action sketches, which involved pulling my hungover friends out of bed and propping them in front of a camera, renting and lugging around heavy fucking equipment, obsessively poring over frustrating details related to lighting and sound, and sitting in an editing booth for 8 hours straight, is a bit more involved than making these cartoons, which involves an hour of writing, an hour of recording, two hours of drawing pictures, and a half hour of editing. For that reason I didn't want to go through all the trouble unless I was sure that the idea for a sketch was really good. Since making these things is so much easier I'm okay with going through with an idea that potentially sucks, so I finally dusted this one off and put it together.
10. I will give almost a 100% guarantee we'll never see SHEILA again
1. I quit one of my jobs, bringing my weekly time at work from 60 hours to a mere 40. At the time that I put in my two weeks notice I had all of these grandiose plans for my free time such as trying to get a book published, writing and producing a movie, developing a TV series, putting forth tireless effort to get a new and fulfilling job, and filling some of my spare time with volunteer work, but my to do list ended up being nothing but lists of TV shows I've missed over the last 3 months that I want to catch up on. Denny Crane's antics sure as hilarious!
2. The song that plays at the beginning is "Wild Packs of Family Dogs" by Modest Mouse, which is lyrically balls-out fucking insane even by their standards.
3. Gears of Resistance is a combination of Gears of War for the Xbox 360 and Resistance: Fall of Man for the Playstation 3. The joke is that every fucking video game is about future space marines. A HA HA HA HA!!! IT IS SO FUNNY!!!
4. In the world of Crapstick Doodle, wearing anything besides black shoes, blue pants, and a sweater that bears the first letter of your name is punishable by waterboarding.
5. I originally planned this episode to take place during a zombie apocalypse with Corey and Murph trapped in a hallway with three zombies, two of which are white and one being black. Murph shoots the two white ones and then refuses to shoot the black one, explaining that he wants it to turn him black. I scrapped the idea because I have no goddamn clue how to draw action scenes.
6. My girlfriend and I should be closing on a home sometime in the next few weeks. The house was up on an estate sale, and my girlfriend made a ridiculous lowball offer that was $11,000 below the asking price and they actually accepted it. When we toured the place most of the dead guy's shit was still there, and the one thing that really caught my eye was Bad As I Wanna Be, the autobiography of Dennis Rodman. The cover shows Rodman sitting on a motorcycle naked with a basketball covering his junk. This is the first time I've said that I wished I had known someone better when they were alive and genuinely meant it.
7. I tried to post an image of the book cover, but I'm back home visiting my parents, and their computer only has Internet Explorer, which is a retarded vomit covered pile of cowshit and it won't let me put the image where I want to.
8. The censored image is a still from the disgusting 1980 horror film Cannibal Holocaust. I censored it because while I wasn't offended by it, the image was really too gross to belong anywhere near a video that's intended to be funny.
9. Doing all of the voices myself and lightly disguising them by changing the pitch started out as a stylistic choice, but for this video it went from a choice to necessary, because I don't have any black friends who would be willing to come in and record dialog for me.
10. I draw the characters slightly differently in each cartoon, and in this one it looks like Corey gained about 70 pounds from episode 5 to this one.
I think this is visually one of the better episodes. I also think the choice of music is done very well. Setting the titles to "Still Alive" from the video game Portal, and prominently using the Forrest Gump theme song were inspired. Despite that, I don't think I particularly like this episode.
Obviously the joke here is that the mysterious character is presented as some sort of inspiring and helpful Forrest Gump or Bagger Vance type character, only to find out that he's actually just a crazy rapist. I think my problem with this episode is that the joke relies on starting out as a pitch-perfect recreation of a sappy Hollywood emotional scene between two strangers. That's effectively ruined by the fact that the scene is (poorly) acted out by a couple of primitive-looking Microsoft Paint characters. The animation quality and nature of the video is too silly to begin with, and I think that undermines the joke.
However, one notable aspect of this video is that it's the first and so far only one that doesn't feature the Corey character. Corey is very close to my real first name, and that character's voice is my normal speaking voice. He's the only character where I don't put on some sort of wacky accent or digitally shift the pitch. In short, that character is obviously a surrogate for me. I think making a cartoon without Corey displays a certain degree of personal growth since this might be the first time in my life that I've ever recognized that there is a world outside of myself.
In a not too surprising development, I managed to find a way to incorporate the old footage of me getting hit in the face with a dildo into these cartoons. In this case they're presented as scenes from some sort of imaginary lowbrow public funded TV show. I think this episode is pretty good, as the characters are starting to be defined somewhat, the way live-action footage is included with the cartoon shows that I put a slight bit of work into the editing, and the writing is alright.
When I post these on my blog I find that I have a way harder time talking about them than I did with the live-action Ron Mexico sketches. I always seemed to have a story with the live-action sketches because shooting involved actually going out to a location with friends, having fun, coming up with ideas on the spot, and solving problems that come up. With these videos, the process is always the exact same: I write a script, I record the voices into a headset microphone, I draw a bunch of pictures on MS Paint, and I spend about 45 minutes turning the pictures into a slideshow set to the audio file.
There really isn't anything compelling going on here on any level. So far the most difficult problem I've had is shifting the voices enough so that they still all sound different without sounding too fucked up to understand. Also, sometimes I have sort of a hard time picking a song for the title screens at the beginning. This time I picked a goofy clip from a Jurassic 5 song. So yeah, it looks like I've got nothing. Sorry!
Nobody watches these videos. I think I really fucking need a new name for this videos. That might help. Here's episode 4:
I had fun making this one. I actually had the idea to put things inside glass eyes because I thought it would actually work. I don't really know anything about glass eyes or if you can put anything inside them, or if you can even pop them in and out at will, but if the answer to both of those question is yes, I'm almost 100% sure security wouldn't find whatever you put in there.
I think this one is funnier than the three that came before, partly because the writing is a little better, and because I included a lot more pictures to look at and tried to do at least a little more than simply cutting between the same two still shots of the characters. The quality of my drawing is shitty, as it will always be, but I like the pictures of the spiders. "Vamos a violacion" is Spanish for "we will rape you" according to Altavista's translator.
I'm sure you already know about this video, the comedy sketch that completely humiliates me from my spelling bee days. Well, I finally found the original Youtube video from the guys who actually made it. At the time that I write this, 97,189 people have laughed hysterically at what a fucking dork I was ten years ago. I wanted to take this opportunity to share with you some of the best comments from the always brilliant and insightful Youtube community:
"omg.. the third kid looks soo stupid.."
"How could the mother of the white boy be proud of him because he wiped semen off the microphone? That's fuckin' weird."
"hahaha nice hair"
"that's not funny,,its sickening telling a boy to suck your d..."
"The third contestant needs a new hair stylist. He's probably a target for teasing at school"
"this is probably one of the funniest shit ive seen on youtube "i beg your pardon, um can you please whipe my jizz off the microphone" *fat kid starts to pick at microphone* hahahahaha"
"he should have told the third kid the definition was get a fucking haircut little bitch"
"LOLOLOL when i saw the fast boy i knew something hilareous was coming"
"Funniest thing ever, and his mom is proud for wipin off da JIZZ. haha"
Thank god I can finally cross "Get ridiculed by tens of thousands of mentally retarded middle schoolers" off my list of things to do before I die. Better yet, I just found out that this video was featured on G4's Attack of the Show. I'm gonna go kill myself now.
I just finished making episode 7 of this project, and I think it's actually starting to head in a decent, funny direction. None of the videos have cracked 40 views yet, but I'm not really discouraged by that. I've more or less deliberately avoided telling anyone about this project or drawing attention to it in any way until I've got a handle of the characters and idea enough to make something that's consistently funny. I don't like to promote the crap out of my work unless I'm pretty sure that it's actually good. This blog is the only place I've even mentioned these cartoons, which doesn't really count as promoting it since only 2 or 3 people read this. Anyway, here's episode 3:
The language at the end is even more NSFW than normal for me, since it contains a Smurf crying out in orgasmic joy. In terms of how it looks, this one is a little boring since there really isn't much going on visually aside from close-ups of the characters speaking. The scene is mostly dialog from a scrapped movie script I was working on a couple months ago. Honestly, there isn't really much of anything else to say about this one. I'd say it's based on my efforts to get my book published, but since I never even made it to the point where I got to speak in person with an agent or publisher, and since it loses all basis in reality when the guy starts ass-raping a Smurf, that really isn't the case.
If you don't want to wait for me to post and talk about the next four episodes on the blog, you can check them all out at www.youtube.com/crapstickdoodle. In my opinion, episodes one, two, three (the one above), and six suck, while four, five, and seven are pretty funny. For the next few episodes I'm going to experiment with writing a story arc that spans 3 or 4 episodes, so enjoy these one-off episodes while I work on that.
