How’s it going? Sorry to hear you have gonorrhoea again - hope it’s not the drug-resistant kind.
Things are OK with me. I didn’t do much stand-up in January but I did lose a couple of roast battles, which was fun.
As a way of processing the Justin Roiland scandal, I made this fake Rick & Morty episode using old episodes and AI voices (plus the voice talent of Carly Lindon-Forrester):
Even before I thought to put a clickbait thumbnail on it, this popped off on YouTube (three days after I put it up) and now has over 500,000 views, which is gratifying. People mainly seem to like it (apart from the angry dumb people who think it’s real).
I’m almost halfway to the magic 1000 subscribers that would let me monetise the channel - although since this video is full of copyrighted content, I couldn’t monetise it anyway, and if I did try to make money on YouTube I would inevitably fall foul of some kind of community guidelines. I have already had a video on this channel taken down for “glorifying terrorism”. Weirdly, that doesn’t seem to leave a permanent mark on the channel’s record - if you glorify terrorism, they just take the video down and let you carry on, unless you do it again. YouTube’s policy is that you can glorify terrorism a little bit, for a treat.
I put the same video on Instagram and TikTok and it went nowhere. I can see from the YouTube analytics that almost all the traffic comes from YouTube recommending the video to people as they browse, so it isn’t a ‘viral’ video in the sense that people were recommending it to each other; it’s all down to the inscrutable whims of the algorithm.
I read somewhere that the reason so many people put audio podcasts (or visually boring video podcasts where it’s just ugly people in a home studio) on YouTube is because of the potential to find a bigger audience through internal recommendations, whereas platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify hardly do anything to promote your content. Worth bearing in mind if you do a podcast.
Gig dates
I had a couple more confirmed gigs this month that I booked through GigGag, but the venue just cancelled them both :( Let me know if you run a night I could do in Feb.
Tuesday February 7th: Backyard Comedy Knockout, Bethnal Green - I’m not going to get far in this, so don’t bother coming.
Saturday February 11th: Poster Comedy, Stoke Newington - https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/poster-comedy-club-london-tickets-528572383227
Saturday February 18th: Monkey Business, Chalk Farm - the 5:30 show at Heroica Live: https://www.wegottickets.com/monkeybusiness
Thursday February 23rd: Bulletproof, PLYMOUTH - I agreed to do this because I confused Plymouth with Portsmouth. Please tell your friends/relatives in Devon about this gig.
Tuesday February 28th: Rats Comedy Night, Kings Cross - https://dice.fm/event/vbar6-rats-comedy-night-28th-feb-central-station-london-tickets?lng=en
Links round-up
Do You Want Cancel Culture to Exist? - Freddie deBoer on the people who whine that “cancel culture doesn’t exist” when somebody who has been publicly shamed (somewhat justifiably in Louis CK’s case, but let’s not forget that this happens to people who did nothing wrong like Al Franken, Justine Sacco and James Gunn) doesn’t end up dying in the gutter.
It seems a lot like Andrew Tate is a rapist as well as forcing women to be cam girls, but the British police couldn’t be bothered prosecuting. Just in case you still believe his bullshit excuses about ‘consensual roleplay’. Maybe if the criminal justice system worked swiftly and reliably against actual sex offenders, we wouldn’t have developed a culture of getting people fired for jokes.
My roast battle against Helen K. For context for the first thing I say, she was late coming up to the stage and I asked her whether it was a long flight from Moscow.
A second Rick & Morty edit I made. Only has 1.5K views after three days, which is good otherwise I’d probably keep spending hours making these to make a pointless internet number go up.
I hope with more eyes on the channel, more people see this weird fake advert I made starring Marina Joy, which I’m fairly pleased with but didn’t get much traffic. I’m planning to make more live action content later this year.
Here I am on the Comedy Nutters podcast talking about Prince Harry’s autobiography, Rick & Morty and Velma.
Armored Commander II is a cute little retro styled rogue-like game where you can micromanage the crew of a WW2 tank. Despite the retro style keyboard-driven interface, it’s pretty easy to play
while you’re on a pointless work call. I recommend turning off the ‘fate points’ mechanic and reducing the campaign length for the longer campaigns. (Steam)
M3GAN is a pretty fun and creepy AI horror film, still in cinemas or on Bittorrent.
Deadstream is a comedy horror about a disgraced YouTuber doing a stunt where he stays the night at a haunted house. (Shudder)