Context is Everything

When I originally wrote about Evan and Gareth's "Cop Nation" spoof, the post looked like this:

Yay! Sketch comedy writers Evan Mann and Gareth Reynolds, after years of toiling with internet shorts, finally get their own network show on the CW! Look for the ads in this clip from Gossip Girl. Be sure to watch to the end!

It seems that shortly after I saw this on their MySpace page, G4 featured the video on Attack of the Show so I got a lot of page views yesterday. One commenter said "Pretty sure that the whole thing was a sketch, and that you shouldn't be watching satire and tooting the horn at the same time."

I'm pretty sure anonymous knew I knew it was a satire of all those distracting "swipe" ads (and it is, obviously a spoof, not a real show, if you watch it through the end). But I don't think that's what he was complaining about. He was complaining about my setup.

The original description and set up on E&G's MySpace page was

These ads are getting out of hand!
Caught this on Gossip Girl the other night, WTF?!?!

With jokes, everyone thinks about the punchline. In this case, I belatedly realized, the description on Viddler and MySpace, was not just an intro but the setup for the joke. The video without the right context is not as funny, and their original setup is better than mine--which is why they are the comedy writers and I am not. In fact, my setup might just disappoint some E&G fans who might be looking forward to the Thursday night debut of Cop Nation--as a fan, I was getting ready to relapse into TV watching just for them, until I got halfway through.

Thanks to anonymous, I have since changed my original post and don't embed the video anymore, because it does take it out of context.

The creators have now posted the video on YouTube as well, and it looks like they are still tinkering with their setup--there, the intro is slightly different--better I think:

These ads are getting out of hand!
How ridiculous are all those mid-show promo ads for other tv shows?!

The Colbert Report got it's start as a fake ad on The Daily Show--let's hope Evan and Gareth get to do this show for real one day. Are you listening, CW?