There's an area on this website that refers to my love for sketch comedy. Although my love for sketch comedy and making people laugh has existed since I was a kid, it didn't hit its full stride until I was a President of a club called FuquaVision when I was in business school at Duke. We had an expression/inside joke of "I have a great skit idea" which arose from the dozens of people you would come across in the halls at school that would pitch their funny ideas to you. The joke was that many had incredible ideas for skits but weren't willing to spend the time putting them together themselves. I understand this since most people did the "smart" thing and spent most of their time recruiting for their jobs after school. That, or their time away from schoolwork was spent relaxing and concentrating on aspects of their lives that let them escape from everyday stresses. However, for people like myself, spending inordinate amounts of time running a club A-Z and writing scripts for funny ideas was my way of letting go of the stresses of business school and doing something that I genuinely loved - and still do for that matter.
Alright, to the point of this post. I love my job and my life is going really well as far as I can tell. With that said, I still feel unfulfilled at times. The vacancy I feel is not having the time, money, or personnel to partake in one of the things I love most in the world - creating clever and funny (at least I think so) sketch comedy. I do find myself still writing a great deal in the scarce moment that I decide to stop working on work related things. Some ideas are ones that I've been kicking around for a number of years, while others serendipitous random thoughts or content that I see online that sparks an idea. For example, I am a huge fan of a few select sketch comedy groups that have a presence on youtube. In particular I have followed WKUK (Whitest Kids You Know), Key & Peele, and GoodNeighborStuff (Beck Bennet and Kyle Mooney are now on SNL) over the last several years. I love their brand of comedy and the scope in which they operate. It wasn't until the last year however that I found another group that has me wanting to scratch my sketch comedy itch more so recently than in the past. The group is a Norwegian comedy duo called Ylvis. For most of you, Ylvis probaly means nothing, but is the same group that created the global phenom "What Does the Fox Say?". Although I very much appreciate just about everything "What Does the Fox Say?" is, it is the other half-a-dozen videos Ylvis has (and that most have no idea exist) that I find to be incredibly fulfilling. Part of me wants to go through some of their other videos Pressure, Massachusettes, Stonehenge, and The Cabin to name a few, but instead I want to talk about one of their newer videos Trucker's Hitch and how it has me biting at the chomp to create sketch comedy again in my free-time.
If you haven't seen it yet, check out Trucker's Hitch below:
What I love about this video is the simplicity and execution. The production quality is fantastic - as are all of their videos - but it's the simplicity and innocence of the subject matter that is fantastic. One of my biggest qualms with SNL (Saturday Night Live) over the last two decades is that so much of their comedy is reliant on what I either find grotesque or simply not funny subject matter. I can't count how many of SNL's sketches have related to some sort of sex, drug or incest related matter. Personally I find this to be overplayed or just straight up dumb. There's hardly ever any substance or true comedy behind the sketch. There's no juxtaposition or meta layers of humor. Its either a family that french kisses each other for three and a half minutes or a sketch about how you can hide drugs in any vessel laying around. It's playing to the lowest common denominator at times and frankly I don't find that to be either very clever or funny.
So what do I do? I have this passion/hobby that I haven't truly participated in for a couple of years now that I desperately want to continue but no real way in which I can really execute. Do I start small and do something totally solo? Do I try and recruit new faces and people around the city I live in? Do I try to get the gang back together for a weekend and film something? Or do I do something else? I have more than enough ideas but don't know how to scratch this itch.
In an odd way I have become the inside joke and am calling to myself from the past and whispering, "I have a great skit idea...."
-Alex