Show #1 --- "Peace on Earth, Goodwill Toward Ernie Keebler"
Hospitality
AARON: Oh boy. When this first aired, I lost a lot of respect from a lot of people. What to say about this one....well, it was my brother's idea. I asked him for an idea that was completely ridiculous and he suggested some sort of bar where a guy comes in and bellies up and asks for a drink and gets nails and motor oil and stuff. I liked that idea, but didn't want it to be a bar, but some guy that was just really annoying in his hospitality, but at the end it turned out that it was normal hospitality to his guest, he was just watching disgusting TV. I wrote a script, but I lost it, so we shot it from memory. Basically, I wanted to do a skit where I could pound on Dustin's head while sitting on his shoulders, and this was the only way I could get to that point.
ANDY: We shot this on November 25th, 2000. We know because you can see a calendar sitting on Aaron's TV. The show was finished in.. December? A whole month later? We were slow. Anyway, I thought this skit was pretty good but overall sort of long. We tried to keep future skits under 6 minutes. Touchdown, eatin' cake.
DUSTIN: Actually, I think we finished the show in January. Now Andy and Aaron can hit me for knowing too much. This was one of the first halfway organized things we did, and I remember thinking that we might actually be able to pull off a show. Then I found out that we would never be more than halfway organized...but we pull off shows anyway. And for Aaron's information, I enjoyed him sitting on my shoulders and pounding on my head probably more than he did.
Kite Guy
AARON: Dustin and Isaac and I went to shoot our first thing ever, and we stopped halfway to the library for some reason. I think Dustin was out of breath. So we went to this tree that happened to have a kite in it, and just winged a scene totally. I didn't think we'd ever use it, and I don't know why we did. The getting the shoe stuck part was not planned. It just happened. The rest was just Dustin filming me trying to get my shoe down with my other shoe, which got stuck later. So I used a juice bottle to get that shoe down. Isaac ended up climbing the tree and getting it down with a 20-foot limb that we had to break off (but don't tell DPS, 'cause I'll deny it). The kite is still there, a whole year later. I just saw it a couple weeks ago. FUN FACT: We were trying to get my shoe down for over 40 minutes. I was barefoot for a half hour.
ANDY: I remember running into you guys after you taped it. You said you had just taped the funniest random thing ever. I thought it tied the whole show together pretty well.
DUSTIN: I had to leave before Aaron got his shoe. I was convinced that it would be stuck up there forever and that he would probably lose his other shoe in the process. Incidentally, the last time I looked, the kite was still in the tree.
Wipe Guy
ANDY: If I remember correctly, Wipe Guy came about from a movie called "Silverwings." The movie has about 38 wipes in it. We thought it would be funny to do a skit where some guy is walking around campus and gets "wiped" around from one place to another, and he has no control over it. The "Don't Do Coke" was just some graphic that Dustin put in because he thought it was funny.
AARON: Yeah, it was Dustin who put that in, wasn't it? I should have known that if we had him edit a skit he would queer it up in some way. But it ended up being a pretty funny ending to an otherwise dull skit. I think it's one of Meyers' favorite skits though. That's why he's on the show now. He brown-nosed his way in. One more thing about this skit, I think that at this point (as well as with Sea Breeze) we decided that the show was not going to be an attempt at real humor, just our own made-up brand of humor (with some idiocy mixed in).
ANDY: I was just proud that we used a tripod.
AARON: We did?
DUSTIN: I threw out "Don't Do Coke" as a stupid idea when Aaron and I were sitting in the edit bay. Aaron said "Yes." We did it.
Sea Breeze
ANDY: Sea Breeze was our attempt at chroma-key. We shot the morons against a green wall, then inserted footage of a rumbling bus stop behind them. We inserted sounds of bombs going off because we thought it was funny to juxtapose the war sounds and background with the Oxymorons standing around casually. Originally, we were going to do something way different. I don't remember what. It's called Sea Breeze because that was the name of the song playing.
AARON: I originally had the idea in my mind of us standing at a bus stop and there being an earthquake and no one noticing. But then we found some bomb sound effects and some plane sounds that really added to it. FUN FACT: I was telling Dustin how much the Kansas City Chiefs sucked and dissing Isaac's Vikings in the skit.
ANDY: When we shot this, we didn't know Cody and Isaac very well, so we didn't know if they thought this would be very funny. Actually, we didn't really care too much whether they did or not but it turns out they liked it. So that's a good thing. When people watch the show they might think the skits are just a bunch of in-jokes.. actually, there are no jokes to get, usually. Like with this skit.
DUSTIN: We showed this skit to the (then) ISU9 management team when we proposed the show. It worried them....
Cell Phone
ANDY: This skit is based on Dustin McDonough's pathetic cell phone plan. He pays $20 a month for 60 minutes. Yep. Sixty minutes a month. That's two minutes a day, folks. Less on gladiator months like December and August. Anyway, we just thought it would be funny if some guy had a pathetic tin can for a cell phone but it had a bunch of awesome features like voice mail, voice activation, hands-free activation, etc.
AARON: Oh yeah, Dustin did have some ideas for the show, back in the day. No wait, you're right. It wasn't Dustin's idea, it was our idea based on how pathetic Dustin's phone plan really is. I should have known. FUN FACTS: The color in this skit turned out so poorly that we put a sepia color filter on it so no one would know. The music bed is Chet Atkins' rendition of "Brazil." Copyright infringement city --- a harbinger of what was to come. The ending was pure Cody. We just let him go, and it's him ad-libbing it like a champ. The only direction he was given was to "make a lot of Jans-faces."
DUSTIN: My cell phone sucks.
Pre-bar Woodsie
ANDY: This was all you guys.
AARON: We were just putting bars on the camera, and saying "bars" in weird voices. We happened to do it while Woodsie was there, talking about weather graphics or something.
ANDY: This skit is pure Oxy. It makes no sense. "Your first installment" implies there will be more. In the words of Moe, "wha?"
AARON: Every time we put bars on the camera, we still say "bars" in weird voices. Andy, are we stupid?
ANDY: Bars.
DUSTIN: I have a password on a website based on this skit. Can't say much more or you'd know my password...
Study Time
AARON: This was one of the very few skits that Andy hasn't shot -- he was doing something stupid at the time, I'm sure. We had originally gone to shoot this skit once before, but Cody never showed up, and we just didn't feel like doing it. So we went onto central campus and shot Kite Guy. This was in late September or early October of 2000. All we had for lights was a little Frezzi, and I forgot to white balance a few times. We could have edited this skit a little better, but I remember being so incredibly angry when it was deleted after it was nearly finished and we had to do it over again. After that, I didn't want to do a show at all, so I tried my best to get kicked off. FUN FACT: I miss the Ryne Sandberg shirt I was wearing in the skit.
ANDY: It's true, he was really mad when it got deleted. I wasn't there, but I heard stories from other people about him throwing everything that was in the edit bay out the door and against the wall. He declared he was quitting the show several times, I don't remember why he joined back. We probably just got him a Three Musketeers or something.
AARON: Today's equivalent to Three Musketeers: Snyder's of Hanover Dill Pickle Chips.
ANDY: NO!
DUSTIN: The skit was deleted from the computer on the day after the presidential election. I remember Aaron laying on the floor of the edit bay--extremely angry--and suddenly asking "When's the election?" I informed him that it was the day before.
Sans Jans
AARON: This one was all Andy. I remember getting a phone call from him and he said "I have an Oxy idea." How many times has that phrase been uttered now?
ANDY: This idea came out of nowhere. It was late at night and I was trying to think of a skit we could do. I guess for some reason I was thinking of names and the phrase "Sans Jans" popped into my head. The rest was history.
The Interview
ANDY: This idea was based on imagining a job interview where the guy being interviewed didn't pay attention at all until the very end, where the boss says "that's probably the most important question I have for you in this interview." We didn't have names for the guys when we were reading through the script, and out of nowhere, Aaron comes up with the names "Billings" and "Spivey." We didn't think much of it, and we never really planned on continuing these characters, but we just kept coming up with situations for them to fall into, that we made it a re-occurring skit. We're going to do at least one more 30-minute episode of "Billings and Spivey," and hopefully more. By the way, the graphic "Don't Mess With Texas" was put on by me as a joke at the end, not meaning for it to stay. When I showed Aaron the finished skit with the graphic, Aaron laughed so hard that we decided to leave it.
AARON: We discussed this idea when we first met in the Memorial Union to eat and talk about doing a show. I thought it would be similar to Conan O'Brien's "Staring Contests" with Andy Richter, where a lot of weird stuff goes on in the background. I didn't really know (apparently) what Andy had in mind exactly, and it turned out to be a better (and more original) idea. I called Andy after work one night and he said he had it done, so I came in at like midnight and met him at the editing bay and we watched what he had done, and I just died when I saw "Don't Mess With Texas." He said, "The end could be changed, I just put that on there because I didn't know how to end it." In reply, I think I said, "We're doin' it."
DUSTIN: Look for a shot from this skit hidden in the "Billings & Spivey" sitcom.
That Ain't Water
AARON: I don't know what we were even doing in the summer of 2000 when Andy just said, "Say something funny," as he was drinking a bottle of water. I said, "That ain't water." He spit the water out, as he would have no matter what I would have said, but every time we drank water after that, we did the same exact thing. It was funny....then.
ANDY: This isn't one of our best skits. But, hey. Where else can you see Cody putting a jar full of nails in his mouth? Oh wait.. Hospitality skit.
AARON: What's up with us having Cody stuff his mouth with random items in my kitchen?
DUSTIN: I wasn't around for this, but I did try to add music to the final edited version. It was better without music...glad you know that.
Broken Spines
ANDY: "Broken Spines," aka "Animal House Ending," came about because of those stupid endings on movies like Animal House and Unbreakable where they put title cards on top of the characters saying what happened to them at the end of the movie. It was totally unnecessary at the end of Unbreakable and it kind of made me mad, so I wanted to do a skit where you saw what happened to the characters after a totally inane scene. The broken spines thing was ad-libbed and we worked it in as a twist in the end.
AARON: Unbreakable's ending was very disappointing. I thought that the second I saw it. You shouldn't end a movie with text, unless the text is just epilogue. You can't tell a whole story that would have been cool to see on screen and expect the audience to be satisfied. If I wanted to read a book, I would just--oh wait, I would never want that.
DUSTIN: Laughing is hard. Especially when you have a heart of stone.
All content copyright oxymorons 2001.