HIGH SCIENCE: Zack Poitras and I made a weed comedy show for the Discovery Channel (which, thanks to corporate mergers you can now also watch on MAX)! Zack and I have been best buds for a while now (we officiated each other's weddings!) and we both love science and comedy so when the opportunity came up to pitch a "late night science comedy show for stoned people" to The Discovery Channel we were stoked. We set out to make a science show for adults, something that really showcased and honored all the work scientists do to learn about the world around us and then communicate that stuff in a way that was fun and mind-blowing. We challenged ourselves to try to not just spit out fun facts but to use our dumb framing of "getting high" on topics to really break down bigger, meatier concepts. I think my favorite feedback on the show has been "it's really funny but also I really learned stuff." Good, yes, learn stuff.
I think from the get go we knew this was a special project because every time we added new collaborators the show just got cooler and more awesome and everyone would get more and more excited about it. Key among them was John Boswell who did a ton of the graphics and original music for the show. He has this amazing youtube channel and has a similar passion for science and making cool shit for humanity. Oh yeah, and we got god damn Paul Bettany to voice our bong! I'll never forget watching the first cut with his voice in it and feeling the whole thing click into place.
Thanks to them, our incredible director Olney Atwell and a small but insanely talented team I think we succeeded in making something that feels pretty new and cool and I'm very proud of it.
I think from the get go we knew this was a special project because every time we added new collaborators the show just got cooler and more awesome and everyone would get more and more excited about it. Key among them was John Boswell who did a ton of the graphics and original music for the show. He has this amazing youtube channel and has a similar passion for science and making cool shit for humanity. Oh yeah, and we got god damn Paul Bettany to voice our bong! I'll never forget watching the first cut with his voice in it and feeling the whole thing click into place.
Thanks to them, our incredible director Olney Atwell and a small but insanely talented team I think we succeeded in making something that feels pretty new and cool and I'm very proud of it.
BLOOD WEED: Dan Abramson and I co-wrote and directed this 10-part audio fiction series for Audible. We did a lot of research into the cannabis industry and Russian prison and mob culture and sorta fused that with a fun weed, tech world adventure story about redemption and making your father proud and if people can ever truly change. It has an amazing cast and really great original music. We even got a great write up in High Times!
If you like this you may also like Dan's series I helped him on for Spotify called The Last Degree of Kevin Bacon. It's also very funny.
If you like this you may also like Dan's series I helped him on for Spotify called The Last Degree of Kevin Bacon. It's also very funny.
SMARTR: I made this scripted audio show with Sam West and Chris Sartinsky. We set out to make a bigger, narrative version of the tech satire work we were doing with Smart Pipe and For-Profit Online University. The opportunity came up to do it as a scripted podcast with Team Coco thanks to their creative director Matt Powers. They let us do whatever we wanted and we really tried to stick to the tone and style we had been developing from The Onion and our Adult Swim infomercials.
Sam did an amazing job as Noa Lukas, really our whole cast was fantastic. Unfortunately doing it that way also meant it was paywalled for like 3 years in a failed tech start up's audio app. Which is fitting I guess. But it's all coming out for free now on all podcast apps! Even though this first came out in late 2019, I think so much of the tech mindset shit we were making fun of holds true. Re-listening to it I can't believe how much of the AI and crypto stuff we got right. It's a dense, hilarious show that contains some of the best writing I think we've done. I also love how we produced it, our awesome sound editor Dan Leone helped us make everything feel real by always recording as much as we could "on location" which helps so much.
Sam did an amazing job as Noa Lukas, really our whole cast was fantastic. Unfortunately doing it that way also meant it was paywalled for like 3 years in a failed tech start up's audio app. Which is fitting I guess. But it's all coming out for free now on all podcast apps! Even though this first came out in late 2019, I think so much of the tech mindset shit we were making fun of holds true. Re-listening to it I can't believe how much of the AI and crypto stuff we got right. It's a dense, hilarious show that contains some of the best writing I think we've done. I also love how we produced it, our awesome sound editor Dan Leone helped us make everything feel real by always recording as much as we could "on location" which helps so much.
ADULT SWIM INFOMERCIALS: After Onion Digital Studios ended, myself and the other writers tried to stick together and keep making things. We got the chance thanks to Becca Kinskey and Jon Stern at Abominable, a production company in Los Angeles. Becca had seen Sex House and our other work and they asked us to pitch some infomercials for Adult Swim since they were producing a big slate of them. We pitched For-Profit Online University and then we wrote is and made it. It really came out so great! Adult Swim liked it then we made Smart Pipe and Book of Christ.
In retrospect, it's really amazing and lucky we got to keep making things at all and really special that our first work after The Onion came out so well. The tech satire ones hold up insanely well and we tried to turn them into their own series but I think at the time doing a satire of tech how we wanted didn't seem relevant to people (people still liked big tech then). A lot of those ideas got turned into Smartr a few years later.
In retrospect, it's really amazing and lucky we got to keep making things at all and really special that our first work after The Onion came out so well. The tech satire ones hold up insanely well and we tried to turn them into their own series but I think at the time doing a satire of tech how we wanted didn't seem relevant to people (people still liked big tech then). A lot of those ideas got turned into Smartr a few years later.
Pitch is an app I created with a developer named Yin Zhu and a designer named Brad Mahler. I don't think I've ever had or will have an experience quite like this and if I'm honest I'm probably still processing the whole thing but for a while there I was the CEO of a tech company. It was a really really cool app, I pitched it when I was a writer at Funny or Die and they gave me the resources to make it. It was basically a joke writing app, it was designed for comedy writers to go to write jokes anonymously and then other writers would upvote the best ones. We then made it so places like Funny or Die or other brands could buy they jokes the liked right from the app. I wanted to make an app dedicated to helping people get good at writing jokes but without all the bullshit and baggage of doing that on social media.
It was invite only which helped make it not a cesspool and not totally impossible to moderate. We also had this cool "dupe detector" that let you know if someone else had pitched a joke similar to yours. I think in total our writers got paid out over $100,000 using the thing! A lot of that was $10 and $25 bucks at a time for one liners and jokes on little lists we would make. We had a few thousand users and the thing ran for like 4 or 5 years. There is a lot to say about it and maybe you reading this were one of the people who got to use it. I hope it was a good experience for you. It's hard to get more 2010's than running a tech company, even a tiny one, so I'm grateful for the experience, it really gave me insight into making tech products and how hard it is to run a business.
It's really complicated making a tech product for creative people. I think the biggest lessons I learned were that: The things that do well on a tech platform are the things that do well on that platform. It was really cool that we made Pitch to be a marketplace where brands and publishers could buy jokes from Pitch and put them elsewhere, but the truth was Pitch was always funniest when you were on Pitch, pitching with a bunch of other writers. I think this is broadly true of all other platforms. Twitter posts work best on Twitter. TikToks are best on TikTok, YouTubes are best on YouTube.
I wish I could have figured out how to make a version of Pitch that made money and let people joke around on Pitch. But maybe that wasn't really possible? I dunno. If you ever see me and you made some money on Pitch let me know!
It was invite only which helped make it not a cesspool and not totally impossible to moderate. We also had this cool "dupe detector" that let you know if someone else had pitched a joke similar to yours. I think in total our writers got paid out over $100,000 using the thing! A lot of that was $10 and $25 bucks at a time for one liners and jokes on little lists we would make. We had a few thousand users and the thing ran for like 4 or 5 years. There is a lot to say about it and maybe you reading this were one of the people who got to use it. I hope it was a good experience for you. It's hard to get more 2010's than running a tech company, even a tiny one, so I'm grateful for the experience, it really gave me insight into making tech products and how hard it is to run a business.
It's really complicated making a tech product for creative people. I think the biggest lessons I learned were that: The things that do well on a tech platform are the things that do well on that platform. It was really cool that we made Pitch to be a marketplace where brands and publishers could buy jokes from Pitch and put them elsewhere, but the truth was Pitch was always funniest when you were on Pitch, pitching with a bunch of other writers. I think this is broadly true of all other platforms. Twitter posts work best on Twitter. TikToks are best on TikTok, YouTubes are best on YouTube.
I wish I could have figured out how to make a version of Pitch that made money and let people joke around on Pitch. But maybe that wasn't really possible? I dunno. If you ever see me and you made some money on Pitch let me know!
MOVIE CRAM: I did a ton of stuff at UCB in New York from 2008 - 2017. I improvised on Harold Night for like 5 years, I taught sketch classes but I think the best thing I did was run a show called Sketch Cram with my friends Zack Poitras, Benjamin Apple, Georgie Aldaco, Matt Mayer and Brandon Gulya. Every month we invited a bunch of writers and actors from the UCB community and made a sketch show in a day. We didn't come up with the Sketch Cram concept but I do think we brought our own thing to it and we did come up with the best thing we ever did with the Cram, MOVIE CRAM.
For a few years in a row there we would get like hundreds of writers, performers, directors, musicians and artists together to make a feature length film in 24 hours. It was incredible to get so many people to work together on a thing. I think it was only possible because the UCB community was so strong and talented and easy to dip into. Like organizing and doing something like this seems insane, and it was, but also it was totally doable then. If you watch the movies we made after they are fun but I think they have the kind of "had to be there" quality. The three movie cram screening shows I think are the best shows I ever did and saw at UCB. You can find the movies online but the link there goes to a New York Times write up of the 2nd one. Also I am positive we broke the World Record for making a feature film but we never got our shit together to submit it right to Guinness. That shit's for sell outs anyway.
For a few years in a row there we would get like hundreds of writers, performers, directors, musicians and artists together to make a feature length film in 24 hours. It was incredible to get so many people to work together on a thing. I think it was only possible because the UCB community was so strong and talented and easy to dip into. Like organizing and doing something like this seems insane, and it was, but also it was totally doable then. If you watch the movies we made after they are fun but I think they have the kind of "had to be there" quality. The three movie cram screening shows I think are the best shows I ever did and saw at UCB. You can find the movies online but the link there goes to a New York Times write up of the 2nd one. Also I am positive we broke the World Record for making a feature film but we never got our shit together to submit it right to Guinness. That shit's for sell outs anyway.
Sex House was the best thing I made during my time at The Onion and I say that knowing that I was really lucky to be part of a very special time there. As The Onion News Network New York era was ending my friend Baratunde Thurston somehow helped The Onion score a million dollar grant from YouTube. They gave a bunch of those out to a bunch of independent producers as part of a plan to bring higher quality video content to YouTube. The whole program was a bust and YouTube changed their algorithm mid-way so the videos they were paying for weren't being served as much as videos that ultimately radicalized a generation of young men to vote for Donald Trump, but, before that, we got a million bucks to make like 10 hours of new original Onion videos. We used it as a chance to expand what The Onion tone and voice could be outside of news. We made a lot of cool shit but Sex House was the biggest in terms of view count and cult status (though I've been heartened to see more people embrace Porkin' Across America in recent years and I have a soft spot for the series I directed Dr. Good).
Onion News Network Head Writer Carol Kolb originally pitched Sex House and it was on a list of ideas we liked but when we did a brainstorming session on it to decide if it had legs we started riffing on the whole descent of the producers giving them bananas and the bananas rotting so they have flies everywhere so they give them frogs to eat the flies and then sex house gets infested with frogs. Once we had that I think we all knew there was something there.
The whole thing was a very collaborative writing effort but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the first and final episodes basically came out fully formed from Chris Sartinsky in a way that almost never happens in Onion projects. We usually do like 20 drafts of everything but he kinda locked those two in. Geoff Haggerty directed it beautifully and my understanding is the location basically already existed looking like that. Some guy's apartment in Chicago that just was Sex House. Always wondered about that guy.
As we wrote it, the themes and ideas were influenced by what was happening to The Onion itself at the time. The New York office we were writing in was being dismantled and closed down. I think we felt a little like the denizens of Sex House, being forced to write something funny as the institution we were writing for was being destroyed. We were having a writing meeting once and some people came in to take the tables we were meeting at because they had just been sold to an office a few floors up. We lifted our lap tops up and they took the table. Jacobin wrote a review of Sex House when it came out about how it was really about labor and the plight of the worker and I remember thinking "oh wow, they just totally understood what we were trying to communicate" which is dumb since that's the point of writing but I think it had never totally clicked like that for me before. It was really gratifying.
Making this was definitely an outgrowth of the typical Onion video process (which itself was an adaptation of the famously grueling Onion headline writing process) but I think we also came up with some cool ways to make that also work with a narrative structure. That way of working informed a ton of our projects after. Anyway, I will always remember the feeling after we wrote this when we handed the script to our producer. I remember thinking I truly had no idea if it could work or if it was even really like anything else. But the magic of The Onion at that time was that they totally trusted the writers and everyone worked so hard to make it real. Geoff Haggerty directed it and the whole cast was just amazing.
Onion News Network Head Writer Carol Kolb originally pitched Sex House and it was on a list of ideas we liked but when we did a brainstorming session on it to decide if it had legs we started riffing on the whole descent of the producers giving them bananas and the bananas rotting so they have flies everywhere so they give them frogs to eat the flies and then sex house gets infested with frogs. Once we had that I think we all knew there was something there.
The whole thing was a very collaborative writing effort but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the first and final episodes basically came out fully formed from Chris Sartinsky in a way that almost never happens in Onion projects. We usually do like 20 drafts of everything but he kinda locked those two in. Geoff Haggerty directed it beautifully and my understanding is the location basically already existed looking like that. Some guy's apartment in Chicago that just was Sex House. Always wondered about that guy.
As we wrote it, the themes and ideas were influenced by what was happening to The Onion itself at the time. The New York office we were writing in was being dismantled and closed down. I think we felt a little like the denizens of Sex House, being forced to write something funny as the institution we were writing for was being destroyed. We were having a writing meeting once and some people came in to take the tables we were meeting at because they had just been sold to an office a few floors up. We lifted our lap tops up and they took the table. Jacobin wrote a review of Sex House when it came out about how it was really about labor and the plight of the worker and I remember thinking "oh wow, they just totally understood what we were trying to communicate" which is dumb since that's the point of writing but I think it had never totally clicked like that for me before. It was really gratifying.
Making this was definitely an outgrowth of the typical Onion video process (which itself was an adaptation of the famously grueling Onion headline writing process) but I think we also came up with some cool ways to make that also work with a narrative structure. That way of working informed a ton of our projects after. Anyway, I will always remember the feeling after we wrote this when we handed the script to our producer. I remember thinking I truly had no idea if it could work or if it was even really like anything else. But the magic of The Onion at that time was that they totally trusted the writers and everyone worked so hard to make it real. Geoff Haggerty directed it and the whole cast was just amazing.