You're Invited TV
I co-founded You're Invited TV with Bryan Powell. It is still up at youtube.com/YoureInvitedTV, on indefinite hiatus, and it never grew into anything substantial.
I am going to write about it anyway, because it explains more about this record than most of the things that did work.
What we made
Sketches. Skits. Parodies. Mockumentaries. Talk shows. Music videos.
No single format and no particular discipline about it — whatever seemed funny that month. Which is both why it was fun and probably why it never became a thing. Audiences find you through repetition, and we were constitutionally incapable of doing the same bit twice.
It was a scene project
The part I am still glad about: we used the San Antonio comedy and music community, deliberately.
We pulled in local performers. We promoted local shows. The point was partly to make something and partly to be in something — to be a working part of a scene rather than an observer of it.
San Antonio is not a town where a scene maintains itself. There is no machine. If a night exists, it is because somebody booked it, promoted it, and showed up to run it. We wanted to be among the people doing that, and for a while we were.
What it taught me
Production, from the inside. Writing a sketch, shooting it, cutting it, putting it out, watching it do nothing. That full loop, repeatedly, is an education you cannot get any other way. It is why I now have strong opinions about pacing and why I am comfortable directing my own videos.
Comedy is a craft, not a mood. Same lesson stand-up taught me, from the other direction. A bit works or it does not, and the edit is where most of it is decided.
Making things with your friends is the actual reward. Nothing came of it. I would do it again tomorrow.
It is all still there
Years of sketches, parodies, mockumentaries and talk shows, made with the San Antonio comedy and music community. Nobody watched most of it. It holds up better than it has any right to.
Watch on YouTubeWhy it is on this website
Because a decade of work is mostly made of things that did not go anywhere, and a biography that lists only the parts that worked is a lie by omission.
You're Invited TV did not take off. Season three of a TV show I worked on never came out. I bombed at stand-up for years. Those are not the inspiring parts. They are most of the parts.
And the video for “Sauce That” just won Best Comedy at a festival in Los Angeles, which did not come out of nowhere. It came out of about fifteen years of making funny things that nobody watched.