What I'm Watching: May 22, 2026

Reminder: I'm assembling a big fun roundup of your favorite funny internet videos. Send me your favorite sketches, short films, viral clips, or internet ephemera, with a few sentences or more about what they mean to you, and I'll include them in the piece. Thank you to everyone who's contributed so far.

Another reminder: check out the Humorism Evening Podcast! Episode one here and episode two here, and also on your preferred podcast platform.

With that out of the way, here's what I've been watching this week.

Galaxy Brain: How Dropout Beat Big Media by Being Weird (w/Sam Reich)

I really enjoyed this conversation between Dropout (formerly CollegeHumor) CEO Sam Reich and The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel. They get into Dropout’s approach to growing ideas from within, optimizing widescreen content for a vertical world, and staying competitive. ("Most people producing original content are doing it with an AVOD model, or an advertising model on YouTube, and most people who are doing the SVOD thing—meaning the subscription thing—are doing it with other people's content. We are making our own content and monetizing that with a subscription, which puts us in a little bit of a category unto ourselves.") Of particular interest to me were Reich’s thoughts on whether Dropout is an oppositional force to the anti-woke comedy movement:

Reich: I probably don't personally see it as quite that binary and I would be sad if I thought that Dropout didn't in its own way have permission to be edgy sometimes. I do think that there is a difference between creating comedy that feels sort of cutting-edge, to use a term that I like a little bit more than edgy, and punching down. We are in a moment that is scary enough politically that it’s hard to laugh at punching down. Listen, I grew up on a lot of that comedy, because it’s hard to avoid when you were a teenager in the ‘90s. And I was a huge Family Guy fan when it was on on the air, I’m not allergic to edgy comedy by any stretch of the imagination. But when a community of people is actually being threatened, to go after them feels real bad. There are comedians out there who are making this their thing, and part of the reason why they’re doing it is marketing, where they’re like, “By appealing to this, whatever this is, anti-woke right-wing group of people, I can sort of gather these fans in my space, these fans who are willing to spend money on me.” Their thing has more to do with anti-wokeness than it has to do with comedy, I would say. 

NEWSSLOP: Alex Goldman

Ella Yurman and Reid Pope are the creators, with Skylar Back, of Going Down with Ella Yurman, a live-streamed newscast-slash-variety show in the DIY tradition of The Chris Gethard Show and The Special Without Brett Davis. I’m a bit of a latecomer to the show—many people urged me to watch its public-access predecessor, Late Stage Live, but I have a tortured relationship with late night-style comedy—and I’ve been enjoying working my way through the backlog this week, which features interviews with some of my favorite journalists, like Sam Adler-Bell and Sophie Hurwitz. I’ve also enjoyed the show’s companion podcast, NEWSSLOP, especially this episode with the podcaster Alex Goldman, formerly of the great Reply All and currently of Hyperfixed. It’s an illuminating and I daresay resonant chat about the challenges of making independent media in our age of hyper-consolidation, where it’s increasingly impossible to earn money on the platforms that purport to empower independent creators:

Goldman: It’s not about conversion for these platforms. The algorithm doesn't reward people who might actually be interested in your product. It rewards people who want to just continue sharing the thing so that more eyeballs stay on their site.

Yurman: So these websites don't want to incentivize click-through because they want you to stay on their site. But then none of these websites have a functional way for creators to make money anymore. YouTube, you can't make money through AdSense anymore unless you're like Mr. Beast-sized. It's almost impossible to monetize on Instagram or TikTok directly in any sustainable way. These platforms, what do they think is going to happen when when the people using these platforms can’t sustainably—are we all supposed to be doing it for free, just for the love of the game, forever? 

[…]

Goldman: I truly have no idea. To me, it feels like it used to be that the organizations that were that were squeezing us, because they didn't have a lot of money going around, were like, “Well, do it for exposure." And now it's just just the platforms. The platforms have done an end-run around those those organizations because there's no money left in them. And they're like, "Yeah, just do it for exposure.”

A Bit Fruity: The Tucker Carlson Problem (with Naomi Klein)

I found a lot to chew on in Matt Bernstein’s conversation with Naomi Klein about the antiwar/anti-imperialist left’s embrace of Tucker Carlson, much of which I think is applicable to certain comedian-pundits whose anti-Trump commentary has earned them purchase on the left—I’m thinking chiefly of Dave Smith and Tim Dillon, here—even as they’ve preached straightforward white nationalism. 

Klein: Within the context of the movements that you and I have both been a part of and are a part of, I think that the people who are going, ‘Hey, maybe he's our great friend, and maybe maybe he's a great gift to these movements,’ or whatever, I think that's really a story of a failure of solidarity. I think when when solidarity fails, when multi-racial democracy fails, when internationalism fails as a promise of security, and we’re almost three years into a genocide that is ongoing, I think people start looking for strong men. They start looking for for the for their own bully, right? I think that that's what what Tucker maybe represents to some people. I think it's a sad story, right? I think it's a really sad story about the failure of solidarity and the vacuum that gets created when that happens. And it's a pattern that's repeated in history.

Eric Rahill's Tribute to Frank Sinatra

I'm a great fan of the comedian Eric Rahill, who appears in Peacock’s The Paper and the Conner O’Malley film Rap World, and whose finest work is as a Twitter wordsmith and front-cam artist: 

Last week Eternal Family, which sounds like a cult but is in fact a streaming platform, uploaded to YouTube its 2022 film Eric Rahill’s Tribute to Frank Sinatra, which follows Rahill as he visits Sinatra’s birthplace of Hoboken and performs a tribute concert for what looks to be nine or so people in a room. If you're already familiar with Rahill’s work, then I need say no more. If you don’t, then I’ll say that it’s for fans of Nathan Fielder, John Wilson, and Conner O’Malley, with this particular piece featuring a delightful cameo from a dancing cockatoo. 

Reveries: The Mind Prison

I'm also a great fan of the comedians Matt Barats and Anthony Oberbeck, whose work I’ve written about here:

What I love about Barats’ work is how much power he extracts from basic, human elements: his deadpan, his gaze, the way he’ll stumble on an interesting turn of phrase and repeat it over a series of sentences, like a motif in a piece of music, each time drawing more pleasure out of it. There’s a feeling of controlled chaos, an energy he alone has the means to harness. The same is true of his visual style. So much of Cash Cow is just Barats standing in front of the camera, yet he consistently fills his shots with images of sublime natural or architectural beauty, dwarfing himself beside immense features like the blue waves of Lake Erie, a towering Mormon church, daunting and humorless things that somehow turn out to be ideal scene partners.

And here:

A lot of short-form video comedy these days is unrelentingly energetic, with heightened performances and brisk direction and editing hurrying the viewer from beat to beat, joke to joke. It feels rare for something to go so forcefully in the other direction: to move slowly between a few inherently funny images, letting their potency grow as the viewer comes to apprehend them fully. The fly in a glass of milk. The corpse in a shimmering pool. The pool walled by evergreens, the man staring bleakly into a row of sunlit flowers. Pieces like this remind me that funny is not just a matter of jokes or game or character or plot, although it has all of those. Funny is also atmosphere, tone, mood, the manipulation of time, every little thing combining into a state of heightened consciousness toward the absurd—a whole infinitely greater than the sum of its parts.

My favorite is their collaboration Reveries, a trilogy of short films following a pair of drifters who narrate in a series of Deep Thoughts-esque musings. The latest installment of Reveries is currently streaming at NoBudge, and it’s just as wonderful as the first two. 

Patti Reviews Exotic Animals

For something else I’m working on, I’ve been revisiting Patti Harrison’s series of exotic animal reviews on the now-defunct streaming app Seriously TV. Here are some of my favorites: 

“It still hurts the whole community of people”: Bobbi Althoff and Sukihana on the Kevin Hart Roast

DL Hughley Responds to Big Jay Oakerson

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Just For Fun

Andrew Schulz thought the Iliad and the Odyssey were real:

Thank you as always for reading, and please share this with anyone you think would enjoy it.