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talking about comedy - what's so funny?

Torzelbaum

Torzelbaum

????? LV 13 HP 292/ 292
(he, him, his)
#10 $240 Worth of Pudding [Barry & LeVon] - The State

A rather silly, weird and absurd sketch where two men share their love for a large amount of pudding. But don't worry about where they got the money for that much pudding.

 
Torzelbaum

Torzelbaum

????? LV 13 HP 292/ 292
(he, him, his)
#9 priotities priorities in yu-gi-oh by SungWon "ProZD" Cho

ProZD is back and examining the oddly high stakes (among other things) that can occur in the anime for a CCG - children's card game.

 
Torzelbaum

Torzelbaum

????? LV 13 HP 292/ 292
(he, him, his)
I had thought of saving this until Halloween but I didn't want to wait that long and it is the spooky season so I still felt like it was appropriate.

#8 Guy Who Is About To Die In Space - Alasdair Beckett-King

When sci-fi* and horror intersect it often happens because scientists, businessmen or politicians (or some combination of them) become "so preoccupied with whether or not they could [do something], they don't stop to think if they should" do it.

*Or sometimes fantasy.

Situations like that and media that include them are what ABK is parodying and satirizing in this video.

(And on a side note: I think his videos are one of the rare few times when you do want to read the comments - especially for this one.)


[I really wish that thumbnail preview didn't ruin one of the surprises in the video. 😞 ]
 
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Torzelbaum

Torzelbaum

????? LV 13 HP 292/ 292
(he, him, his)
#7 TV detective vs tech guy - SungWon "ProZD" Cho

ProZD starts with the classic scene of the "street smart" detective not understanding the intense computer jargon of the techie and needing it reframed in layman's terms. But then ProZD takes it just a little bit farther.

 
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Kirin

Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
IMO that one's even funnier due to the fact that unlike most "hacker" jargon, he's actually using computer terms *correctly*, and ones that the nerd audience will understand immediately at that.
 
Torzelbaum

Torzelbaum

????? LV 13 HP 292/ 292
(he, him, his)
#6 Ten Percent Of U.S. High School Students Graduating Without Basic Object Permanence Skills - The Onion

The Onion News Network reports on one of the tragic failures of the American public education system.

 
Rascally Badger

Rascally Badger

El Capitan de la outro espacio
(He/Him)
I have recently been introduced to Philomena Cunk, and I can't stop watching everything I can on youtube.

 
Torzelbaum

Torzelbaum

????? LV 13 HP 292/ 292
(he, him, his)
jpfriction said:
Game shows are an easy button for SNL but I’m seldom terribly disappointed in them.
Click to expand...

Must be why they keep hitting that button so often - sometimes even reusing the exact same concept but with a few tweaks. Like they did for my next pick:

#5 What's That Name? - SNL [Season 36]

(Technically this did air before the version of the sketch that was my #21 choice. It's interesting how they have kept some of the exact same jokes/pieces but still mixed things up enough so that both of them still seem fresh and funny.)
 
Torzelbaum

Torzelbaum

????? LV 13 HP 292/ 292
(he, him, his)
#4 defective weaponry - SungWon "ProZD" Cho

This one is rather dumb and silly but I still love it despite that (or maybe because of that).

 
Torzelbaum

Torzelbaum

????? LV 13 HP 292/ 292
(he, him, his)
#3 Bookworm / Barry* Toink - The State

*Not the one who is with Levon

Upon seeing a guy engrossed in reading, Barry Toink (All American Cornerback) decides that he must know what name to call that guy. So he sets out to discover what that is all while trying to keep his temper under control.

What I find so funny about this sketch is that Barry is just so ridiculously serious and dramatic about his search and in his interactions with the other characters. And while the other characters aren't as serious as Barry they still are playing the scene straight.

I also love the Animal House-esque text blurbs at the end which tell us what happened to all/most of the characters (but I'm generally always a sucker for those especially when they're used for humor).

 
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Torzelbaum

Torzelbaum

????? LV 13 HP 292/ 292
(he, him, his)
#2 Every Haunted House Movie - Alasdair Beckett-King

Next is a seasonally relevant sketch where ABK creates a fake movie trailer to reductively satirize the haunted house sub-genre of horror movies. (And also to provide some social commentary.)

 
jpfriction

jpfriction

(He, Him)
Somebody mentioned Wes Anderson during an ostensibly horror themed movie discussion on a podcast I was listening to and it made me chuckle about the idea of a Wes Anderson horror movie. And then I remembered SNL did that already and it was great so here’s that:

 
Violentvixen

Violentvixen

(She/Her)
jpfriction said:
Somebody mentioned Wes Anderson during an ostensibly horror themed movie discussion on a podcast I was listening to and it made me chuckle about the idea of a Wes Anderson horror movie. And then I remembered SNL did that already and it was great so here’s that:

Click to expand...
That was good times.
 
Johnny Unusual

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
I remember seeing this as a kid. It was funny but also gross and freaked me out a bit because I was too young to parse how hilariously fakey it looked.
 
jpfriction

jpfriction

(He, Him)
SNL brought back David Pumpkins. I could maybe see getting a surprise laugh had I caught it live but calling the youtube video “David Pumpkins returns!!!” does it no favors.

They are struggling to get hosts this year. I legitimately have no idea who Jack Harlow is.

 
Purple

Purple

(She/Her)
jpfriction said:
SNL brought back David Pumpkins. I could maybe see getting a surprise laugh had I caught it live but calling the youtube video “David Pumpkins returns!!!” does it no favors.
Click to expand...
Oooooof. I get trying to milk it for all it's worth since, well, they're SNL, but even f they weren't it was the first actually funny sketch they'd had in like a decade or two, but the whole premise of the thing hinged on just being this baffling non-sequitur.

Like... OK I just wrote the closest thing to a workable script in my head while feeding my cat.
Same setup as the original with the elevator gimmick. Don't know why this is the one thing they actually changed because it weakens the implausibility of being behind every reveal. The ride passengers are unscripted and at the very least didn't get a rehearsal with the specifics laid out here, and are just gonna ad lib. On the third or fourth iteration you break from legit-ish reactions to someone finding the whole thing just weirdly hot as a curveball.

Have the first couple doors just be really sad portrayals of some horror flavor of the month to maybe not give away you're recycling this and it's just about the costumes/performances really being bad.

Then we spend the rest of the skit revealing Bones Malloy, some random guy in like, a super tight lime green tanktop and a duster with like, slacks. Every time he's holding a different prop and very clearly saying a catch phrase, neither of which is ever repeated or makes any sort of coherent sense. Like reveal 1, he's got a tommy gun and goes "It's me, Bones Malloy! Arrrrrrrrrr!" then next time he's got a garden hose and "Yo, it's gonna be a wild wild ride!" then like, 3D glasses and an NES zapper and "B-b-b-Bones Malloy's gonna send you to the BONE YARD!" and then only on the final reveal, sure, you have Tom Hanks come out in the suit with the backup dancers and the two hug and exchange some unintelligible private joke and ask about eachother's families, then mug at the camera, and that's it, you end the sketch there.

And that's it, that's your one follow-up. The returns diminish quick. You can MAYBE eek a third out in the future by having the same setup and then swerving into something else entirely to subvert those expectations but then you're done.
jpfriction said:
They are struggling to get hosts this year. I legitimately have no idea who Jack Harlow is.
Click to expand...
I'd say this is less "you're old" and more "no they just got some white rapper with two albums under his belt who got kinda popularish via tiktok." That's a pretty far cry from like, "here's Steve Martin" or whoever's got a big movie coming out that weekend to plug.
estragon said:
"i'm working on it" kills me every time
Click to expand...
This is very good as an Onion headline-only sort of thing but actually watching the video enough sadly got me thinking how ha ha, sure is funny how that's actually how the gatekeeping on that sort of surgery goes and they really will refuse to actually do it if they don't think there's gonna be this particular flavor of return on investment.
 
Torzelbaum

Torzelbaum

????? LV 13 HP 292/ 292
(he, him, his)
Another Youtube channel I like is Crackermilk which is a group of "Australian sketch comedians with a knack for the absurd." (And boy they aren't kidding.)

I feel like many of their videos might need a content / trigger warning (they do cover some sensitive / controversial topics) but damned if I know what to warn about.

Here are a couple of examples of their work:

 
Kirin

Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
I thought maybe we had a thread that was more about stand-up but I couldn’t find it so anyway…

Got to see John Oliver live last weekend and he was fantastic. Dude really knows how to work a (huge) audience. He did a mix of stuff that would fit in as a show extra (let’s talk about the fucked up history of the British royal family), local interest (that time a couple nukes were accidentally dropped on NC), and extremely embarrassing personal anecdotes. He actually had a fact wrong in the nuke story which about 10% of the audience immediately called him on, which he rolled with expertly and turned into a running gag for the rest of the night. Good stuff.
 
Vaeran

Vaeran

(GRUNTING)
(he/him)
John Mulaney's got a new(ish) standup special on Netflix ("Baby J") that deals extensively with his drug addiction, intervention and treatment. You wouldn't think it'd be easy to wring a lot of laughs out of a dark subject like that, but I found the whole thing both heartfelt and hilarious.
 
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