“Clip Cup” is a satire of clip shows, an inherently godforsaken genre dominated on TV by Tosh.0 and online by Ray William Johnson. They’ve just released their fourth episode, a “live” shoot at of the Catholic Loyola Marymount University.
The series is directed and co-written by Scott Gairdner, creator of the Sex Offender Shuffle, Pac Man: The Movie, Scott Meets Family Circus, and a lot of great Funny or Die work. Scott has a particular talent for arch parodies of pop-internet culture; his 2010 New Scott Gairdner video mocks the hyper, faux-cool style of popular YouTube vloggers.
The first clip felt like a solid one-off joke. But “Clip Cup” has four episodes so far, plus two spin-offs, and they’ve managed to advance the gag each time. And each time, the Funny or Die audience mostly didn’t get it. Let’s watch!
(The guy in the thumbnail is comedian Kyle Mooney, who’s also very funny and sometimes aphasic.)
Now it’s not totally fair to say FoD didn’t like it — while each episode gets more “die” votes than “funny”s, the top comments are usually positive and “fuck the haters”y.
The highlight of Episode 2 is the “man on the street” interviews — the content-free segments where a TV host quizzes “normal people” on slang, news or internet words, a genre I’ve wanted to see mocked ever since early Rocketboom:
Episode 3 is about saying words all funny and over-promotion of “transmedia”, which is a word you’re going to hear too much soon. It co-stars a very game Chris Hardwick, of the I-assume-not-horrible clip show Web Soup.
Episode 4, out last week, was shot on a college campus. It… parodies TV shows shot on college campuses.
The Flip Off is not a real movie, but Cup Stuff did make a fake trailer for it. They also made a rap video for Ridiculous Capone (a parody of Donald Glover’s hip-pop act Childish Gambino) using the actual classic Christian pop song “Our God Is an Awesome God”, and an episode of Dudes that parodies the burnout-bro sitcom Workaholics. (The viewers downvoted that one too.)
So that’s Clip Cup! A show made of intentionally bad creative decisions and actually-scannable QR codes that lead to unrelated pictures. I should have mentioned that earlier.
