Thursday, May 1, 2008

Meet the Facebloke

Meet the Facebloke is a self-explanatory comedy short by the comedy group Idiots of Ants, which was featured on BBC Three's The Wall. The suit-and-tie-loving group formed after the 2006 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, when three Birmingham University Idiots (Andrew Spiers, James Wrighton and Benjamin Wilson) joined with London stand-up comic Elliott Tiney.

Idiots of Ants explain origin of their name to thelondonpaper:
Elliott wanted to be Idiot Savants , which is incredibly pretentious – "we are idiot geniuses" – and Jimmy misheard it and said: "Idiots of ants?" It's just a silly name.
The sillily-named group strives to portray a return to a more classic sketch comedy style, and already has a litany of impressive-sounding credits to its name. Besides working with actual directors and agents, Idiots of Ants also worked on the climate-change campaign Global Cool writing environmental sketches starring Heather Graham, Sienna Miller and Tony Blair.

Meet the Facebloke is tragically mis-labeled on YouTube (they call the sketch "Facebook in Reality" which is three notches less clever and 100% less United Kingdom-ey). Oh mislabeling. It reminds me of the good ol' Napster days when you downloaded what you thought was "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and instead got "Orinoco Flow." ... I mean what? I don't download things. Ever. What's an mp3 file? I digress.

Meet the Facebloke is reminiscent of Current TV's protracted animation Social Networking Wars and College Humor's magnum opus, the Internet Commenter Business Meeting sketch. But it is markedly better than Social Networking Wars because of its judicious editing. Idiot of Ants could have gone on and on about all the crazy Facebook features like tagging, virtual gifts, chat, 3rd party applications, application spam, etc., but that would have been ultra-boring. Like this list. And this blag entry. Baaaaaaah. Sorry. Just cut to the chase and watch the video already!

Interblags to Books update:
You can now buy a piece of Interwebs printed on dead trees: Kottke alerts us that fellow celebri-bloggers Dooce and Cory Doctorow (from Boing Boing) released their books.

(From Mefi, Laughing Squid, Underwire)

3 comments:

wibbleyhead said...

"Meet the Facebloke" isn't exactly descriptive - which is what titles have to be to do well on social media sites.

W. E. B. Du Blag said...

The original title, Meet the Facebloke, doesn't appear to be descriptive at face value. But the portmanteau is actually perfect: it spoofs Facebook, and joins that word with "bloke." Which, because of the letters B, O and K, works much better than "guy."

Just like "Idiot of Ants" it sounds like the original phrase, only humorously mispronounced. Much more satisfying than a straight "here's this funny video about twenty-something guys who spend way too much time on the Interwebs." I think it could have done well with the original title, but now it's been linked to all hell with the mis-labeled title. Whatever, I can't believe I wrote so much about this already. Thanks for commenting!

jsos said...
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