#5 – My Kevin Costner Impression

First up—at number five—is my debut story time video: My Kevin Costner Impression! It’s a story from my washed-up stand-up career about the time I got advice from an audience member to start using a Kevin Costner impression in my act.

#4 – Just Fall Asleep

At number four is my sketch from the summer, Just Fall Asleep! This video sees Don trying to fall asleep after a night out at karaoke. There’s just one problem: he can’t stop thinking about Lord of the Rings!

#3 – No Bathrooms

At number three is my first sketch of the year—No Bathrooms! In this video, Jay just bought a new house and he loves it! It may look a little out of his price range but he can afford it since there aren’t any bathrooms in it. No bathrooms. None at all.

#2 – Yuck! Who Wants The Crust?

My second most watched video is, Yuck! Who Wants The Crust? It’s a commercial satire with, Randy, who is here to convince the world that “Yuck!” is a fine product and shouldn’t be judged by its horrendous name.

#1 – I Kind Of Love This

Number one is I Kind Of Love This! In this commentary on social media, Theo has gone to a yard sale and picked up a neat little coin bank. After posting it online, he gets into an interesting conversation about it!

Watch the whole top 5 in a YouTube playlist »

Growing my YouTube channel has been my main creative endeavor for the past three years. (It hasn’t been three years since I released my first video but I was working on concepts well before that was finished.) I know in my heart that I’ve made some good videos, a few okay videos, and a couple of videos that I wish I had put a little more thought or passion into. After all that, I’m not where I thought I would be at this time in regard to how many subscribers I have (172 as of this writing). Some of that is that I don’t make catchy enough content (click bait) or long enough content (YouTube prioritizes “watch time” over every other metric). I make what I want to make and I don’t play to any algorithms. The thing that has me convinced that one day my channel could take off is that I do put effort into my videos, that I do think of them as art, and I know they’re not totally disposable like many videos out there. If someday I do get a “hit” then people might see that video and then see I have other videos and maybe decide that I’m worth subscribing to.

Knowing that getting my videos in front of people will eventually convince some of them to watch more of my videos and that that will ultimately convince some of them to subscribe to my channel, I’m left thinking about how to get that first video in front of people. (Marketing my videos, much like marketing for anything, is like half of the energy spent on a project.) I post a lot on social media. Reddit and Instagram are pretty good for promoting stuff. Twitter doesn’t seem to work for me. Facebook can be OK, depending on…actually, I don’t know how Facebook works but sometimes it treats me well. I have an email list. YouTube itself shows my video to some people but it can be hit or miss. Some of my comedy videos that take the shape of a commercial get secretly flagged as ads or as links to ads—despite no product actually being sold—and receive a form of shadow banning. I guess I should be flattered that they look enough like real ads to trick a robot but I’m too busy being annoyed at those videos’ low view counts.

The first deal with a devil I took to speed things up was to start “boosting” my videos on Facebook. This means paying Facebook to show posts to people as ads. I felt icky doing it. I felt icky giving Facebook money. I feel icky just being on Facebook most of the time. Unfortunately, it worked, so I kept doing it. I would drop $20 on a video and it would get some views. Good being the enemy of great, I kept doing it. Then, for some reason, the views started drying up. I don’t have an explanation for this other than I think Facebook might have been scamming me the whole time. I think I got a bunch of legitimate views but I also think some of the success was an illusion. I wasn’t gaining many subscribers through those views. Facebook also once rejected a “boosting” because I was addressing people based on personal information pertaining to a medical need. This video was about a fake product—ice cream that ridiculously contained medicine to help a person fall asleep. Again, tricking a robot but only to my own peril. I had to find a better solution.

This brings me to my second and current deal with a devil, Google Ads on YouTube. This might seem like a natural place for me to have started: why boost posts on Facebook when you can promote a video on YouTube itself? Well, firstly, I had worked with boosting posts on Facebook before on non-video projects. Facebook is fairly straightforward and I could do some loose targeting such as looking for people who “like” SNL and “like” Key & Peele. Secondly, people had me scared to use YouTube for promoting my videos. Certain blogs and parts of Reddit would call using Google Ads to grow a YouTube channel heresy. “Do better” is a common refrain, referring to Google Ads as a shortcut. They want people to build their channels “the right way.” It’s a bunch of nonsense but there were allegedly some scary repercussions: people will downvote your video for being an ad; no one will subscribe to a channel they got to from an ad; people will be so mean to you! I didn’t want people to be mean to me! So I did the Facebook “boosts” until I was burned one too many times.

I’m happy to report that Google Ads on YouTube has been working! It’s not the model I want to follow for the long haul and I wish I had more time/energy to put out videos more frequently. I desperately want to be at the point where I put out weekly videos and the algorithm can more naturally treat me better. For now though, I’m way up in views, watch time, and subscribers. I did not get all the “dislikes” that I was warned about. I wrote this blog post because I didn’t know how or where else to talk about this experience. I’m scared of the Redditors.

The video looks at one of these poor attempts at selling furniture from the perspective of the seemingly clueless seller. Maybe watching it will help you avoid some of these pitfalls, who knows? It could be more instructional than I had anticipated. Anyways, check it out and subscribe to the channel for more!

The sketch itself is what one might call a mapping sketch. It takes the familiar situation of being at a bar and having someone who turns out to be a stranger try to invade your friend group, then supposes what that would be like if it happened to a gettogether among friends over Zoom. I’m being a little fast and loose with this definition of mapping but I think it’s in the execution that makes it true. Anyways, it’s a fun and relatable sketch! And it’s not often I think of my stuff as relatable but here we are, two relatable sketches in a row by me.

So, where did the negativity come from? Well, the video was a pain in the ass to make. I recorded everyone separately and stitched it all together after combing through literal hours of footage for what amounts to 2-ish minute long video. But you know what? That’s OK. It’s a learning process and now I know, I really should have gotten everyone on the same Zoom call.

For more sketch comedy, be sure to subscribe to my channel on YouTube!

With most of my videos, I try to do at least one new thing during production (I have no real experience in filming or editing, creating these videos is how I’ve been teaching myself). A couple of big examples include using a green screen for Ballot of the Bands and filming something outdoors for the first time with Jesus’ Friend. While developing Zoom Wedding, I wanted to create a sketch where the main character was silent the entire time.

As an aside, since I didn’t plan on speaking much/at all in the video, I didn’t do my usual diligence in getting good quality audio. In fact, there was construction happening outside my apartment that day, normally cause for me to hold off on filming, but I thought I would just get the footage and delete out the audio. I did delete out the ambient noise while editing it but decided to add it all back in after the fact because it was strangely quiet, a more annoying experience than you might think. Also, fun fact, the one line I ultimately did say in the script is dubbed in after the fact and completely lip-synced because I didn’t get a good recording of it while filming. Now I know to always get that good audio, even if I don’t think I’ll need it. Anyways…

Over the years, from various sources, I’ve acquired my fair share of advice on writing comedy. I’m not going to disparage any of that advice because it was generally pretty good and I wouldn’t be where I am now if I hadn’t gotten it. That being said, I disregarded a lot of advice to make Zoom Wedding my way. To summarize the sketch, we follow a guy through the motions of realizing he’s got a wedding over Zoom to attend. It begins with him playing videogames, he get’s an alert on his phone, he prepares for the wedding, and then he logs onto the Zoom meeting. While there are some amusing mannerisms and a feeling of familiarity to what the character is experiencing, there’s nothing particularly funny or unusual for that first 90 seconds of the video. It’s mostly a lead up to the final moments. This is atypical in sketch comedy. Normally in that realm, the viewer knows what’s funny within the first 30-60 seconds and they get to see the funny thing happen a few more times. When creating videos for the internet, it’s even sooner. There’s TikToks and memes people have to get to, which just take a few seconds to understand. I decided to throw caution to the wind and hoped that people would come along for the ride. That didn’t come easy though.

When I first finished putting the video together, before I even uploaded it to YouTube, I didn’t have any faith that people would enjoy it. I was asking myself why I had wasted my time making it. I don’t like to waste my time and I did not feel great. I also have practically no self-confidence these days, so I can’t very well just drop something and not worry about it. In the end, I had nothing to worry about. I needed to trust my gut, I needed to remember that I kind of know what I’m doing, and—most importantly—I needed to get the naysayers out of my head.

In recognition of this first year ending, I created a video to showcase some of my best sketches in an award show-style format. If you haven’t seen all of my work up to this point, this is a good introduction with a few fan-favorites. If you have already seen all my sketches then check it out to reminisce and enjoy my experiment with a new video format.

P.S. If you enjoy my videos, please subscribe to the channel on YouTube. Every little bit helps me to grow the channel!

As 2020 began, before I even had a hint that every form of entertainment would be going digital, I had committed myself to working on my YouTube channel more. (This was only partly because the aforementioned Souvenir was not renewed for a third season. I saw potential in building up a YouTube channel whether that continued or not.) I originally planned to start putting out videos in October 2019 but as they say, the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. It took me a few months to get my shit together and, as it turns out, making these videos is hard work. That delay would shape how I would make videos for the next year…or so.

It was one year ago today, February 18th, 2020, that I made the trip to a playground near my apartment so I could film myself playing basketball for my first sketch, How Many Baskets?. It was a frigid, wintry morning; I wore thermal underwear underneath my street clothes. As an adamant rule-follower, I had to wait until school was out for February vacation as the basketball court is off-limits when school is in session. What a hassle that was to me at the time, children in school.

How Many Baskets? was was an idea I had been thinking about doing for several years and one day it just sort of clicked (in it, there’s a gag about an estimation jar which was the original pitch for the entire sketch). It was written as a sketch for multiple actors but I turned it into a sketch that I could act out all the lines by myself. I did this because I was, as usual, self-conscious of my abilities. I wasn’t a filmmaker, I didn’t know what was doing, and I didn’t want to waste anyone’s time with my inexperience. I figured I would do a couple of sketches by myself and then I could start asking people I knew to act in the stuff I was producing. The sketch was released March 4th, 2020. I wouldn’t have multiple actors in the same room for the foreseeable future.

I got to live blissfully with How Many Baskets? for the next week or so. I had put it out, it wasn’t terrible—some may even have said it was good—and everything was pleasant. Then the lockdowns began. I had just put out a sketch about a teacher, in a classroom, playing basketball. I felt weird. I probably didn’t need to feel that way, in the time since I’ve seen plenty of content based in the before-times, but that’s the way I felt. My mind was asking itself plenty of questions. What kinds of things do I write now? What’s appropriate? Will something I write make people sad by reminding them about a time when they were allowed to go and do whatever they wanted? Around this time and for the next few months, everyone was putting out a Covid-19 sketch and lot of them were bad. I didn’t want to join that party.

The next nine sketches go like this: me and my wife in a commercial parody (commercials still exist), me and my wife in our apartment (staying at home, everyone can relate), just me in a sketch about going to concerts (using a green screen so I could do something not in my apartment, I found this to be risqué), I’m in heaven (and filmed it in a park), a horror movie parody in a kitchen with mostly just me and some voice clips from a few friends, just me back in the park (originally I was going to have a mask dangling off my ear as I drank a beer, I don’t recall why that was cut), just me playing a guy in the 18th century, another commercial parody with mostly me and a cameo from a friend, and finally, one last sketch with just me in my apartment. Oh, and my next video, I think that’ll be just me as well…in my apartment. On the plus side, once life is back to normal-ish, I’ll have all the experience I ever needed without bothering my friends.

On the one hand, in a lot of the traditional ways I gauge how my comedy career is going, I was not at my peak in 2018. I only made one video I wasn’t very proud of and I wrote my last blog post of the year in April. I also performed in many fewer shows than I’m used to in all three of improv, sketch, and stand-up. I thought, “What a disaster!” when I started to think about writing a personal eulogy to 2018.

Then I started to think of the positives. In March, Emily Riggins and I started our podcast, TeaBD, and that had a very strong 2018 (with more to come, naturally). In August, I started performing stand-up again after a (very) long hiatus and sprinkled a few shows here and there over the course of the rest of the year. Finally, in October, I was asked to perform in the NYC Sketchfest and got to act in my first sketch show after another (very) long hiatus. That got me to sign up for a new sketch writing class over at the Magnet Theater to get my writing juices flowing again.

Last Wednesday, I hit up the Magnet Mixer for a little improv practice. On Thursday, TeaBD had it’s first episode of 2019 come out. On Friday, my indie improv team Jammy had our first show in months at the good old Triple Crown. Today I published this blog post.

I’m still not sure about 2018 but I’m probably being harder on it than it deserves. One thing I do know, is I’m going to try my best to have no regrets about 2019.

This blog has been a weird chore over the past couple of weeks because I’ve been procrastinating a lot with writing for it and I haven’t really had the best ideas. I think I’ve stressed myself out a bit with recording a separate podcast for these blog posts (no new episode this week, I’m writing what you’re currently reading by just free writing).

Today I realized I haven’t made a new video in MONTHS and I feel like I really need to do that. I’ll have to come up with an idea soon and I may have thought of something just typing this sentence. I always tell my wife, who is a photographer, that taking photos of anything is better than taking photos of nothing. It turns out writing for the sake of writing is good too. I probably don’t even need to publish this blog post (but I will anyways, as you’ve already seen).

What put me in this funk is that TeaBD is great but I really only kind of get to work on it for real once a week and I can only bask in it’s release for a day. Then I have a whole bunch of other days I try and think of ways to work on it. Sometimes I try and make graphics and sometimes I try and make us an intro song (did both of these things to no real end tonight because I’m only so-so at both). I also don’t get quite as hyped for my blog posts as I do for these podcast episodes. Maybe it’s because we haven’t had a bad episode yet but I do feel crummy about my blog posts from time to time.

I work a lot better when I don’t put an expectation on myself. I think that’s why I’m funnier doing improv than when I’m doing stand-up. Or why I think my podcasting is funnier than my blogging. Normally these blog posts take a lot of effort. (Tonight, that effort will be spent to not edit what I’m saying here, give you that RAW version of how I feel. And honestly, I can feel that I’m typing this whole thing in a different language than I normally use. When do I ever call myself “hyped” for something?)

I have no idea if this blog post is good for my blog. I feel like I have a tenuous relationship with anyone who regularly reads what I write. I’m not famous or anything, so I feel like I really need to make it worth it for people to bother reading. Then, that makes me feel whatever about it sometimes. Agh! What a mess. Well, just know that I wanted to get this off my chest and I’m better for writing this out. Hopefully this will motivate me to do more things.

I don’t know if this is an American thing or not—though I know we nearly eradicated our public transit systems because we all wanted to own our own cars. People feel in control while driving, even though they are still subject to the whims of the other drivers. This is a learned problem. A kid in the back seat of a car feels safe with their parents driving. They don’t need to be in control! I assume this is why people have an irrational fear of flying. They are not in control, despite the fact that flying is the safest way to travel.

Other instances of this include:

• Telling someone that a pen doesn’t work and then they have to scribble on a piece of paper to try and make the pen work.
• The impulse to help someone open a jar.
• People turning down help with a photo while taking a selfie.
• Insisting that someone is driving the worst way to get somewhere.
• Seeing someone struggling to open a bottle of wine and grabbing the bottle from them.

In my own way, only I’m allowed to have food near my computer. If I spill something all over my keyboard, I only have myself to blame. This feels analogous to always wanting to be the driver. At least if I’m driving, the accident is my fault. I feel like this might be a poor way to go through life. It takes a little getting used to, but it’s easier to relax on a bus ride or a flight than it is in a long car ride, no matter how much those first modes of transportation get mocked.