SC Alums Do...er..."Yes We McCain?"

[stevescholz]

If you've seen the Will.i.am song and video for Obama:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY

then you might enjoy this version for McCain, featuring many Second City alums:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gwqEneBKUs

[Miss Mason]

This is f-ing hilarious.

[Edison]

Simply brilliant. So well done, too. I hope that video gets a lot of hits and becomes viral.

[stevescholz]

It's definitely gone viral. The Huffington Post has it on their front page right now.

[Morehead]

I also cried after watching this.

[Arnie]

This is really well done. I feel like I could count the number of intentionally funny internet videos that I think are actually really good on one hand and this is one of them.

[Edison]

Newsperson; Mary Dixon has been doing a piece on the video this morning on WXRT.
She's playing snippets of it on the air, mentioning the SC connection as well as some names of the actors involved.

As of this writing the video has had almost 725,000 hits on YouTube.
The video was just posted on the 11th. 2 days ago.

Nice.

[stevescholz]

Chris Jones has a piece in his Chicago Tribune Theater Blog:

http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/the_theater_loop/2008/02/second-city.html


Second City alums ride John McCain video to fame, if not fortune

A group of Second City alumni have scored a colossal hit—actually, more than 550,000 hits in the last three days—with this satirical video about Republican candidate John McCain. The video, itself a spoof of the widely viewed, emotionally charged video promoting Barack Obama's presidential campaign, was posted on YouTube Monday and has become a phenomenon—at lightning speed.

CNN is taping an interview tomorrow with the creators. Both ABC News and MSNBC have been paying attention. A link appears on websites owned by everyone from The Washington Post to the Huffington Post. The thing took off very, very fast.

The McCain video was created by a group that includes such familiar Chicago comedy names as Andy Cobb (the director of the piece), Josh Funk, Nyima Funk, Marc Warzecha, Marc Evan Jackson and David Pompeii. All were recently part of Second City.

"Our approach," says Cobb, "is that this kind of inspirational political video is very much the gestalt right now. So we decided to figure out how to make fun of it."

The video was made in a day in the Funks' new apartment in Los Angeles. "It was the most ramshackle shoot you could imagine," Cobb says.

There's a bigger lesson here. In the old days, the ambitious sketch-comedy meister would leave Second City and audition for scouts for "Saturday Night Live" or similar shows. These days, you make a video and post it on YouTube. Otherwise, it's widely assumed you've got nothing worth showing. "People say, if your idea is so hot, why isn't it on the Internet?" Cobb says. "They don't look at you otherwise."

Not that the McCain spoof has paid anyone's rent. "You get all these hits and attention and you feel like a rock star," Cobb says. "But that doesn't necessarily translate into a big check."

Yet.

[Mike McKeown]

This video (and other similar parodies) has made it's way onto the homepage of CNN.com. Andy Cobb, Marc Warzecha and Dave Pompeii get some snippets of airtime.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/offbeat/2008/02/14/moos.obama.no.we.cant.cnn