Musings of a budding sketch group.

I've been thinking about what I feel sets us apart from the rest. I think we have a few things going for us, but I'll admit we still have a long way to go.


One thing that is setting us apart is our production rate of sketches. We have five done and by my count like five or so sketches in editing limbo. By the time we get those five done, we'll have five more ready to go and so on and so on. I'm thinking we can probably get into the high teens, early 20s before we have to take any kind of break to recharge and go back to just writing or anything. I like having that kind of quantity available where once we get our own actual website it will just be populated with enough content that people would actually have to come back again to just get up to date.

Quality wise, I'll admit that we're still working somewhat in the learning curve but I also think there's a distinct increase in quality which can be seen from week to week. Each time one of the directors shoots a sketch, they're learning a little bit more about this or that technical aspect, or how to work with the other cast members or how certain comedic flows are just supposed to go. We're improvising less, planning more and taking more and more pride in our work and I think it's really starting to show. I think that soon we can boast having not only a high number of sketches, but quality enough that we can set ourselves apart from just some other group of kids with a camera and pocket full of dreams.


I think right now we're in a good spot to be. Everyone is here for the time being, which means we have 5 people interested in directing, 6 solid actors and 7 people bringing at least one good idea to the table every week.

7 founding members of We Did It! and 7 founders of The Justice League. Coincidence? Probably. I'd like to think I'm a cooler one, like Batman, but I'm probably more like Hawkgirl...mostly useless and betrays everyone in season 2.

Personally I'd like to utilize this rare opportunity and maybe try to push our boundaries a bit and see what we can really do. I'd love to see one of our directors tackle some kind of music video with a local Austin band, or perhaps enter some kind of short film contest. Ideally we'd like to put together a full episode of our show, and I think having a performance by a local band or some other variety aspect would be just spectacular. We are all still learning and I think that while we're still all here and willing we should expand our comfort zone a bit and take on a new challenge and walk away with a new experience.

But what do I know? I'll best be remembered for writing Fart Parliament and that's if everything goes according to plan.

Don't ask me how....BUT

It took most of my cunning, a few people got hurt, and I can't go back to New Mexico but I got our sellin' baby.

The perfect crime

It's low quality, and we might need to give free shipping and handling but, and I can't stress this enough, we should not offer a refund.


I'm going to lay low for a few days.

Pizazz 4 Anthony's Post

THE BABY gonna be a hot item so make sure you get an ebay account for when we sell it. It's incubatin' right now.

MERCHANDISING!

I know it's early days yet, but if the response to BONK is anything to go by, then we are going to be fucking huge soon. So with our imminent success in mind, I can't help but cast my eye towards the kind of paraphenalia/memoribilia that you the audience can't wait to get your well manicured, if suspicious smelling, hands on. Here is what I've come up with so far:

1. KNIVES! Just big knives. Big sharp knives. Each knife comes with an engraving on the handle of your favorite WE DID IT! character, like "The guy from BONK" and "The little girl from BONK" and the always popular "The silver haired lady from BONK".

2. Autographed Grapes! A set of grapes, each one autographed by one of the founding members of WE DID IT!. Comes with a carrying case where you can arrange your grapes in order from most favorite member down to Bob. Please do not eat these grapes or get them near children as we will be using lead based paints and inks on these delicious, juicy grapes.

3. Underwear! Our old underwear. The underwear that we can't bring ourselves to put on anymore. JESUS WEPT, we can't stand having this crunchy cloth on our bodies, but you'll love having these keepsakes hanging over your fire place or as a conversation starters on your coffee table. Comes in boxers, briefs, boxer briefs, thongs, edible, chain mail, and commando. As a fun game, try to match the underwear to the people. (HINT: Mine are the extremely huge ones)

4. A BABY! shhhhhhhhh......just let it happen.

I am dizzy from the thought of all the money we will make. I am excited by the vengeance this money will allow me. I am saddened by all of the innocents who will suffer in the process.

But them's the breaks.

Two pictures, both alike in dignity, in fair WE DID IT! where we lay our scene

Here is a fun internet meme I discovered on the riff trax blog: http://blog.rifftrax.com/




1) Your album cover is the third image on this page.
2) Your band name is the article title at the top of this page.
3) Your album title is the last 4 or 5 words from the last quote on this page.







This was my result:














For the life of me I can't even begin to imagine what kind of music would be on this album. The closest I can come up with is that it is a latin ballad concept album where a young boy asks his parents permission to marry his sister and the various misadventures the ensue.





Also, this picture either proves that God does exist, or he doesn't exist:



















YOU DECIDE!

We Did Not Do It

Betty Boop did, in 1936. The only explanation I can come up with for this is that in twenty years, Anthony gets a sexy operation, Bob invents a time machine, and Sean sends them back to spread our misanthropic humor to the people who needed it most: the denizens of the Great Depression.

The plot, in case you lazy bastards didn't follow the links: While Betty Boop is away, the kittens get into mischief. Will Pudgy the Pup take the blame as usual?

Another treasure from the IMDB page is the ominously titled recommendation: Bimbo's Initiation.

Unauthorized Animalographies

In an effort for you the reader to better understand what kind of people you are dealing with, I have taken it upon myself to write short animalographies about each member of WE DID IT!. What is an animalography? That question has two answers:



1. It is the revelation of a person's personality through comparison to an animal, whether real or imagined. For example:



Flash Gordon is like a penguin that can fly, he is a miracle.



2. Nothing. It is a nonsense term invented by a cheap and petty individual for the sole purpose of mocking his friends. For example:



Nick Reed is like a hag fish, don't get too close or you will be covered in goo.



That's pretty straightforward I think, now let us to it:



Robert Musseman is like a cat, he does whatever he wants and shits all over your house.


Sean Mccoy is like a puppy with a knife, a tragedy waiting to happen.


These days Nick Grant is like the Dodo, can't find him anywhere.

Michael Harrison is like a bonobo chimp with a machine gun, at first you fear for your life then you start to wonder why that chimp is fucking that machine gun.

Phil Rigney is like a sloth, a calming presence while in the trees, but when sprawled out across your living room floor you freak out and throw rocks at it.

Sean Hardaway is like a Koala Bear, asleep a lot and off his head on eucalyptus and you just want to squeeze him.

As for me, I'm not an animal so much as a mold or a fungus, you know you've made bad decisions in life when you find me in your house.

What a waste of time. Your time. You can't have it back.

Everyone is against me, I am against everyone

As the unanimously elected Hero of We Did It, I have decided to fart in this blog with my rancid misanthropic thoughts.

Whenever I am acting, I imagine that I am the sole survivor of an ancient, omniscient race long gone from this universe we know and love. I was left behind to watch over humanity and eventually lead a sketch comedy group to the gates of heaven, where we may rule over Earth and fart upon fartless heathens.

I just discovered that I am out of antibacterial hand soap. As a result, microscopic fecal matter is being spread all over Sean McCoy's keyboard as I type this up. Yes, I took a break from my transcendental writing to poop.

Back to the point, my superior acting hales from the fact that I am better than any living person on this planet.

And I might have a hygiene problem. Poop particles.

REVEALED: A VISION

If I were to tell you that all of your dreams have already come true and are simply waiting for you to find them, would you believe me?

Let me tell you about my dream. My dream was about a music video where a bunch of relatively attractive dudes with cool hair cuts and positive attitudes jump around and push eachother and just generally have a good time all over the place and interspersed between this footage are shots of a shirtless young man, who is part of that other group of young men and is identified easily as the one with the best hair cut and the cleanest looks, droning an unrequited love song in a monotone and then breaking into a high pitched electronicaly aided whine and then there are bagpipers and bagpipes.

This was something I knew the world needed. I've known this since I was a child. I thought it was up to me to bring this vision to life, and I was going to use the resources of WE DID IT! to make it happen, but the Universe beat me to it:



So you see, all great works have already happened and it is up to us to find them and not actually do or make anything of value. Though I must say that if I had had the chance to bring my full vision to life, the young men would probably have pushed and shoved eachother a bit more.

Our new persona

Did you see our new blog?!



I think that is definitely an image that captures who we are and what we do.


This guy is totally like one of the guys here at We Did It. He's artistic and creative (his guitar), he is very very thin, and he's got awesome hair. Totally us. In fact I'd go so far as to say the dude might actually be Michael Harrison.



I really like this girl. She likes Chinese food and also the number 82. I like that it says "lucky" under her, cuz that reminds me of Chinese luck, and also cuz you might GET lucky with a girl like that you know what I mean? I really enjoy her nipples.


This girl is the yin to the other girls yang. She's got dark hair, she's less slutty looking, and she's reading a book. Can you see the rubix cube? That means she got the brains. If you look really hard you can see she's got a little shot glass down there... does it have sake in it? I bet so! Her shirt is really cool. She is holding her legs in a position that implies a lot about her, and I really enjoy that.


Here's where our new mascot image really works for me. Look at this little dog! He's got some tea in a cup next to him. Does he belong to the dude or to one of the girls, or both?

Or do they belong to him

I could totally see this happening.

So I had this dream last night, where most of the cast of We Did It! was all hanging around and getting ready for bed. Someone asked me to pass a blanket, and I did it with my new telekinetic powers. The thing is though, I was trying to show them off because no one else can move things with their mind. This, of course, backfired on me because I underestimated how lame my power was and how critical everyone else would be.

I could only move relatively light things, and only if I really concentrated on it. I had to get in just the right stance, and move my hands in the path I wanted the object to move. It was a lot like how a Jedi might move something large, like a starship, only I was moving blankets at speeds so slow it would have been faster for Sean to just get his own damn blanket.

Anthony, Sean and Bob tore me a new one. I didn't never want to move things with my mind again.

Great bunch of guys, my friends.

We are lice. OFFICIAL!

So it turns out that this blog is lice. This blog is to the internet what tiny blood sucking vermnin are to a human head. In order to get rid of us you would need a special sort of computer shampoo to choke the life out of our parasitic bodies and an e-comb to remove our minature corpses from the dandruff covered skull of the information super highway. At least, that is what myspace thinks of us.

I tried to link this blog from my myspace blog so that my friends that don't all come from the same suburb of Dallas could find it. But myspace stepped in and severed the link and replaced it a page that explained that the page the link would take you to is like lice and if you went there you would get lice all over you. This seemed to me to be an unfair characterization.

Sure, if you were to physically meet any one member of WE DID IT!, chances are that you would end up with some sort of parasite or fungus or STD or.........anything really. We're not clean people and we never said we were. Our floors are sticky, our feet stink, we have open wounds, and our cat has shit hanging off of its ass at all times. We're fucking gross. But just because we're toxic in the real world doesn't mean our blog has or is cooties.

Wait a second....cooties......of course! Myspace likes us but doesn't know how to show it. Being such a large social networking system and taking to account the average intelligence of a dedicated myspace user, it is perfectly logical to assume that myspace has gained conciousness but has the intelligence of a first grader! That's why it's abusing us, it wants to go out with us!

Well myspace, I wish you just would have asked instead of playing these childish games. Speaking for all the members of WE DID IT!, I would just like to say that there is no god damn way in hell we would ever go out with you. You're teeth are fucked, you smell like hobo pants, and you're fat in all the wrong places. Also, if we're lice then you're the oozing herpes sore on the upper lip of the internet and the crabs in the crotch of humanity.

HORROR MOVIE MUSIC

When we finally start to release our sketches, you will notice a great many of them have a very sinister tone. The reason for this is that a great many of the members of WE DID IT! are very sinister people who enjoy sinister movies with sinister music. Though Sean Hardaway is the expert on this area, I have discovered a very good youtube series that counts down the fifteen greatest horror movie themes and I would like to share some of my favorites from that list with you. Through this music I hope you better understand what kind of people you are dealing with. Also, it's just good music.



Here is the link to the playlist: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=9A0D029C8CDF6E18




















If you haven't seen these movies, you should. Though I can't vouch for "Deep Red" because I haven't seen it and "Cannibal Holocaust" is the only movie that physically and psychicaly harmed me. I am not joking. If you don't like it when movies make you want to kill yourself, don't watch "Cannibal Holocaust". I watched it with two friends and when it was over we had to hug eachother and promise never to speak of the experience again. Yes, I just broke that promise, but you have to understand that promises mean nothing to me and someday I will betray you.

CELTIC WOMAN

Do you watch PBS? Ever? 

I hardly ever watch it, but somehow, half of the time I've spent watching it, CELTIC WOMAN has been on.

CELTIC WOMAN (thx McCoy I'm rippin' off ur format)

my fave is the right most one the one in the middle scares the shit out of me

CELTIC WOMAN is bonkers to me. I can't fathom it. But this other blogger can-

"Little known fact about me: I LOVE Celtic music in all forms. I’ve been fairly obsessive about it since I was 11. Celtic Woman came to town last night and I went with my sister-in-law. Dude, can I just say…. well, I really don’t know what to say. It was indescribable. Of course they are beautiful, and really talented, and the set was super cool, but I was really excited and amazed by how awesome their band was, particularly the percussionists. So awesome. And really, I can’t say enough about the violinist. She rocks my world."

She's a fiddler. She fiddles. Fiddle.

If you google search for "celtic woman band" and click this picture, you'll find the blogger I just quoted. I was trying to find a picture of the beefcake who plays the chimes for CELTIC WOMAN. They have all these beefcakes playing instruments in the background. It was so funny to me when the beefcake dude flourished his hand against the chimes that if I was drinking milk it would have sprayed out my nose in addition to my ears and eye holes.

If you think maybe CELTIC WOMAN is for you either because you're curious or because you just love this kind of shit, search for CELTIC WOMAN on youtube. Here I'll do it for you-

This is my favorite song by CELTIC WOMAN. Be sure to look out for the beefcakes who play percussion. It's bonkers to me. I love her dress, and the way she moves as though the spirit of Ireland has taken hold of her. I love how clean she looks, and how clean the performances by everyone are, as well as the large stage and elaborate lights. To me this is the REAL IRELAND. THIS IS WHAT ALL OF IT IS ABOUT. HARDSHIPS AND POTATOES AND DRUNKENNESS AND FAERIES AND BLARNEY STONES. 

Anthony told me the other night he thought there was someone out there who probably saved all year so they could buy tickets to CELTIC WOMAN, and I think that's true. If that's true, I think We Did It might have a chance. There's gotta be someone out there who thinks some of the shit we're gonna do is funny. Actually wait a second, if CELTIC WOMAN is so popular, that means there are a lot of people out there who will despise us.

All I know is I now want to have a sketch called "Isle of Hope", or maybe "Peninsula of Dream", or maybe "A Sugar Cookie with Fucking Googly Eyes Glued Onto It"

EMERGENCY, EMERGENCY
I FOUND A PHOTO OF THOSE PERCUSSIONIST DUDES

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLLOL

Why are we doing it?

A person who finds themselves in a situation where they are forced, either through violence or emotional manipulation, to watch one of our "sketches" inevitably asks one question:Why are a bunch of scumbags and pre-rapists filming little videos ,that at best can be generously described as masturbatory, and forcing friend(s) and loved one(s) to watch them?

BECAUSE WE WANT TO MAKE PEOPLE LAUGH GOD. DAMN! IT?


We also have two other main goals:

1. Make lots of money.

and

2. Eat all of that money.


Smaller, subsidiary goals include but are not limited to:

A.Victory over the sun

B.Having a bunch of differently colored soaps that you can't use prominently displayed in our bathrooms, preferably in a sort of hanging nest or sea shell shaped tray

C.Fingerless gloves. ALWAYS.

D.Hot and savory meats on demand

E.Hugs whenever we want them, and more importantly, whenever we need them

F.Harm our enemies

G.Get kids to smoke

H.Keep the darkness at bay


Also, we just don't want to be bored anymore. So we will bore others.

They had me going until the end.

I think so far the most challenging aspect of writing a sketch has been giving it an ending. With a sketch, your main objective is to tell a joke, but you're not doing it in a traditional way. With a simple joke, you just tell it and the ending is the punchline, everyone laughs and you move on. Even with stand up you basically just go from subject to subject until you're done and 90% of comics will just say "That's my time" and give a wave before walking away from the stage. In a sketch you really can't do that. The only way to walk away would be to tell the joke, and just cut to the next thing. Some people can get away with that, like Robot Chicken on Adult Swim. Those sketches tend to work so well like that because it's just a quick 5-30 second clip of a robot having sex with a washing machine. Live action performances take more than that usually.


Anthony can really end a sketch well. He gives a twist at the end, or a final joke or at least some form of closure where you can clearly see that you've reached the end. I haven't found out how to do that yet. Now most of my sketches just kind of abruptly end once I've said everything that I can say on the subject. I first noticed this while trying to find some way of ending a sketch I was working on called "Breakdance Boss" which was basically about this company that makes all of it's major decisions based on the ability of workers to breakdance. One of the problems with it, besides not having anyone who can dance, was that there was no real ending for it. The best I could come up with was that after a training montage one of the employees dances so well, he gives off a blinding golden light and that cuts to everyone drinking scotch and smoking cigars and counting money.

This came up again after seeing how Sean had chosen to end one of the dramatic readings of pop songs. I had never really considered it ending any other way than it just cutting to whatever came next. I really can't be doing that though, just forgetting the ending once the joke has been told. It's something that is going to make my sketch creation process more complicated as I not only have to ask myself if this is something we can film with our current resources, but is this something that I can write and ending for?

So now I have to approach each sketch and ask myself:
1) Is this actually funny? Is it just a dumb gag, or is it an actually good joke?
2) Is there a solid ending here somewhere? Can I give a final joke at the end, or does it just need to end wherever I can find a place to end it?
3) Can we actually film this? Are the props, location and technical elements things we can do on a budget of "whatever you're willing to shell out for it"?
4) Has this been done before? Did I make this up, or did I actually see this on Kids in the Hall 10 years ago and forget about it until now?

And there's probably more that I'm just not thinking about right now.

It can be quite the complicated process, to say the least. It's been fun so far though, so there's that. Hopefully we can start getting these out there and on youtube, which will only excite us all more to do as much as we can for the show.