My name’s Ike Butler and I’m grateful Shachar has allowed me to share Three Curious Things with you this week. I run a Chicago-based web design & development shop, and in my free time I mostly explore dumb ideas through short stories and existential doodles. I also try to seek out cool art made by others.
I think the through line, for my own projects and those that inspire me, is finding the fun through authenticity and humor, mixed with the technical chops to take it way too seriously. Ideas don’t need to be larger-than-life to be worth pursuing, and they don’t need a gazillion-dollar budget to catch my eye.
With that in mind, we’ll be taking a look at—and probably over-analyzing—a deck of cards, a self-help YouTuber, and a nonexistent Shakespeare play, all with the same core idea that makes them work: beneath their obvious playfulness, they are both earnest and honest with their audience.
1. Nothing happens. It’s hilarious.
Instagram-popular artist Pants Pants has a knack for drawing hilarious shenanigans and dopey moments in a scribbly, harder-than-it looks signature style. Full of monsters and cowboys and mundane moments at home with cute-ugly middle-aged men, his art has an odd focus on capturing the little joys and mishaps of life with childlike earnestness.
He lets silly moments take center stage, like an eight-panel drawing of a man struggling to stand from an ottoman, or a cowboy yelling at another as they sit around a fire (“Story time is OVER if yer not gonna do funny voices”). Recently he developed a full set of playing cards with countless jokes and easter eggs spread across the suits and numbers. Ace of Diamonds: a drawing of a magician who can’t find the right card. Eight of clubs: someone trying to impress eight birds by doing pull-ups on their branch. The result is a physical product that feels so custom and filled with “I-wish-I-thought-of-that” energy that I can’t believe it’s allowed to exist.
2. The anti-hustle productivity guy.
“Productivity YouTube” is full of mixed intentions for creators and contradictory feelings as a viewer. Sometimes I gravitate to this wormhole of the internet when I’m procrastinating (I get to act motivated without doing anything!) and I close my laptop feeling overwhelmed.
Struthless is a different story. Between borrowed footage and talking to the camera in a chill demeanor, this YouTube creator mostly demonstrates his big ideas by… holding up a notebook next to his face, of a scrappy page he clearly made with markers and colored pencils and tape. Rather than scale his production operations with the size of his channel, he’s maintained a resonant tone with his audience by proving that something doesn’t need to be perfect to put it out there. He’s real, honest, and clearly practices what he preaches, which makes his advice land that much harder.
3. A tale writ upon the instant.
At its best, watching great comedy being created and performed in real time is nothing short of magical. Like a bridge building itself as you’re walking across it. Improvised Shakespeare, with its mainstays in LA and Chicago, is my favorite of these shows.
Each performance, an ensemble in casual Ren Faire garb takes one audience suggestion—a title of a play that has never been written—and weaves it into a fully improvised Shakespearean masterpiece. As the actors speak in meter and rhyme, a story of unrequited love or royal power struggles unfolds in full farce. It leaves me laughing all the way out the door of the theater (coming from someone who sparknoted Hamlet in high school).
My curiosity is this: amidst the impressive monologues, grand declarations, and silly characters, the biggest laughs often come from moments of realness when the actor peeks out through the performance and says what the audience is thinking. The cast is practiced enough to do the entire show in rhyming couplets, but the show is enhanced when actors break the form with natural twenty-first century responses to ye olde Shakespearean emotional intensity.
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