I realized recently that I have over 400 videos on my YouTube channel, representing the last 8 freaking years of my life.

Yes, I uploaded my very first video on August 4, 2008.

Here it is, and while not mine, it is freaking hilarious.

It’s the kind of comedy that is so unique that it defies definition. Why is this man man saying the word “chicken” over and over again while switching between slides featuring the same word over and over again so goddamned funny?

Is it the fact that chicken is a funny word? It has the famous comedy K sound in it. Is it the calm, dull, everyday way the author of this “article” says the word? Or is it (post-modernism warning) because by making the content silly and repetitive, it draws attention to the delivery method and mocks it?

Probably all of that and more.

My first original  video on Aug 11 of that same year :

I had so much fun making those vids.

And yes, that’s the first one, even though it’s the 5th in a series. The previous ones were uploaded to my other YouTube channel, which got nuked because I kept ignoring trademarked content warnings.

Yeah, it was dumb.

Music’s by me, too. Damn, I be funky fresh. Oh, and I never liked doing the captions for the pictures in the slideshows in text. It’s too clumsy. Comedy is all about that ignition point where the joke comes together, and boom, laffs. But having caption and content be on different slides makes that nearly impossible.

Then I discovered a magic site called XtraNormal, and I ended up making things like this :

Don’t worry, you didn’t just have a negative brain event. It’s simply what happens when I say “What happens if I really let my inner lunatic loose, and tap directly into the roaring spinning exploding star of my maniac creativity?

Now you know the answer.

Then I tried to think of what would sound the most hilarious in the dead-robot voice of Xtranormal actors, and I came up with this :

But as you can see, I then had to somehow dig myself out of the racist hole I had dug, and that was not easy. Had to make a pretty big leap out of the box.

This one is the closest I have to something normal :

I love that I used the British voice for that.

Then there was the stuff I did with a bunch of fellow nutbars who called themselves The Mobeus Society. Like this gem :

I wrote the skit, directed it, and edited it. Because I am multi-talented! Looking at it now, I am surprised at how good it looks considering how none of us knew what the hell were were doing. And hey, it’s something that I wrote.

Not sure I will include it in the demo reel for my TV writer resume, but still.

Then I decided it was time to get back into doing a video a day. I had done it once before, with “the 30 30”, thirty days of posting at least 30 seconds of video a day, which, as it turns out, is an absurdly short amount of video.

So the second time, I decided to double down :

And at first, a lot of my videos were “talkers”, where all I did was stare at the camera and talk about whatever subject was on my mind at the time.

Here is a representative sample :

Potentially interesting stuff… for a podcast, maybe. But not exactly a new sensation in video entertainment. Still, I often did those talks off the top of my head with no script or teleprompter, and that takes some form of talent.

I particularly like that one because it’s me striking out at the anti-religious bigots and other pseudo-intellectual neckbeard bullies who somehow have deluded themselves into thinking they are somehow better than all the religious sheeple.

Fuck you, You’re just as superstitious as the rest of us.

I got a little more ambitious with my Don’t Say That series :

Riffing on a simple setup. It’s a great, high density form of comedy. My inspiration came from A) funny list articles, but moreso B) one of my favorite games from Whose Line Is It Anyway?, the British one.

Oh, and I can’t stress this enough : I am NOT naked in that video. It’s just summer and I am wearing nothing but shorts.

Then I decided to do funny fake phonecalls from celebrities, with the celebrity voices provided by my collection of audio clips from movies and TV.

I have no idea if that is funny to literally anybody else but me, but I sure had a lot of fun pretending that I was the guy who had celebrities calling him all the time. And I find the way I build my comments around the audio clips I had quite funny.

Inspiration : something Robin Williams did in Good Morning Vietnam.

Then I really got ambitious and decided to have fun adding my own silly comments as a loose form of re-dubbing to a clip from a foreign movie.

Warning : the following is chock full o’ penises.

 

Well that’s it for the first two Youtube pages of my videos, starting with the oldest. It’s been a fun look back for me, as well as an excuse to look for whatever might actually be usable in my future as a comedy writer.

I honestly don’t think I will find anything much because the point of the project was to give me a daily activity that let me express myself besides this blog. So while some of the vides you will see in the future are impressive for something done by one dude, a computer, and a camcorder, and I definitely learned all I know about video editing while doing them. And I will always be grateful for that.

But there is a world of difference between “Impressive considering… ” and actually depressive, because for one, nobody gives a fuck about the first one.

You either deliver or you don’t. And that’s the bottom line, folks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.