Favorite Sketches

Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! 😄

The song for this post is OYAHYTT, by The Coup feat. Lakeith Stanfield.

Someone on Facebook asked recently what their friends' favorite sketches were, that they re-watch over and over again. I have a few.

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This is from The Colbert Report, which I'll always, forever and ever, stan for as being better than The Daily Show:

If you've watched decisions get made at a company before, the words in that letter just spear you.

Joad Cressbeckler

Joad Cressbeckler is a personality invented by The Onion News Network playing the same game as Colbert: making fun of what cable news had become in the late aughts and early 10's. The character was introduced in the run-up of the 2008 campaign here, and got a bit more mileage here and here. The performance peaked after he got his own cable news show:

To truly appreciate the writing and performance, I dare anyone to watch Joad Cressbeckler and try to deliver his lines back to him. It's fun!

Like a lot of things of that era, it can hurt to watch now if you think too hard about it. The moral failings of the large-C Conservative movement in this country didn't happen overnight.

FOOTBALL

This one has a bit more of a set-up phase, and absolutely lands the dismount.

Early Clickhole

Clickhole is a spinoff of The Onion, with the tagline "All Content Deserves to Go Viral." While Colbert and Onion News Network came about to criticize cable news, ClickHole was prescient and critical about online media, a world where everything had to be made bite-sized and shareable. For context, it came about when Upworthy raised a ton of VC for its famous clickbait headlines, and BuzzFeed was eating the internet with listicles.

The most general-purpose Clickhole I'd recommend is this one, referencing the cottage industry of "divine tourism" books like Colton Burpo:

But I've got many of them closer to my heart. This one makes me feel more than most things that are designed to make me feel:

And I've yet to find anyone else in the real world who appreciates this one as much as me. If you love this one too, please, let's hang out, I'm very lonely.