Totally Sketch Hits the Web’s Sweet Spot For Comedy

Totally Sketch, a weekly series of comedy videos running on YouTube, lives by one creed: making comedy that’s funny. Which honestly is a tall order for a series producing a new sketch weekly — after all, it’s hard enough to make one good sketch, let alone one good sketch every seven days. But executive producer and Mahalo Daily alumni Michael Gallagher may have struck the winning combination, consistently hitting that sweet spot of topical relevance, professional execution and borderline offensiveness with each piece.

While there’s no real unifying element to each video (even the cast features a lot of turnover), the bulk of their product is tightly edited and perfectly targeted to appeal to online viewers. Sometimes this is because the series focuses on Internet memes like Keyboard Cat, and sometimes this is because the series makes crude jokes about abortion. Many of these sketches aren’t exactly ground-breaking in their originality (they’ve done the often-used retro 50s sketch, not to mention mocking the perhaps over-mocked Sham-Wow infomercial. But their takes on these concepts are fresh, and executed perfectly for web audiences.

They’ve even branched out into creating interactive games using YouTube’s annotations feature — including an an Interactive Dad piece intended for orphans on Father’s Day, which is well-executed and pretty funny…until, that is, you think about what it’s actually like to be without a father on Father’s Day. And let’s not mention the fact that as clever as the E! True Hollywood Story take on Keyboard Cat is, it takes on a tragic dimension when you consider that Fatso, the kitty merrily tickling the ivories, did actually pass away recently. DON’T YOU HAVE ANY FEELINGS, TOTALLY SKETCH? OR IS THERE ONLY A GOOGLE TEXT AD WHERE YOUR HEART SHOULD BE?

But the last thing the web is is politically correct — which is just another thing that Gallagher and his team seem to understand. And it’s paid off with videos regularly scoring hundreds of thousands of hits and over 5,000 YouTube subscribers since February 2009. It helps that the cast I mentioned above often scores cameos from high-profile webelebrities like Tay Zonday and former Mahalo Daily host Leah D’Emilio. Honestly, the best part about Totally Sketch as a series is that you never know what you’re going to get — but it’ll definitely be funny.