World’s Dumbest (and other Meetinghouse Productions projects)

TruTV PRESENTS: WORLD’S DUMBEST

In 2012 and 2013, I was a staff writer on the television series TruTV Presents: World’s Dumbest. If you’ve never seen it, the premise was simple: people would send us video clips of themselves, their friends, or random people on the street doing stupid things. We (the writing staff) would write comedy sketches and jokes making fun of the clips. Those sketches and jokes were then performed by the cast, which included such comedy heavyweights as Gilbert Gottfried, Mike O’Gorman, Mike Britt, Judy Gold, Jared Logan, and Rachel Feinstein.

I have a writing credit on 15 episodes of the show. Each episode of the show was “themed,” which means that the clips we received would be bunched together by theme. Each episode that involved clips of bar fights and street brawls was titled (in the opening credits for that episode) World’s Dumbest Brawlers. Each episode that contained clips of racing enthusiasts and biker gangs was called World’s Dumbest Motorheads. Each episode that involved clips of late-night infomercials for terrible, barely-marketable inventions and gadgets was called World’s Dumbest Inventions. (Actually, whenever we did an invention-themed episode, the show’s title changed from World’s Dumbest to World’s Smartest, as in, World’s Smartest Inventions.) You get the idea.

This is a World’s Dumbest Inventions sketch that I wrote (and ACTED in!) which lampoons an actual, real-life invention called the “Ostrich Pillow,” supposedly created to help people take naps. I figured that the mafia might use the Ostrich Pillow to make it LOOK like people were taking naps, when in reality they were taking DIRT naps. Hence this sketch:

 

In this blog post, I wrote about what it was like working on World’s Dumbest. Specifically, I wrote about the time I played a piece of furniture in a comedy sketch on the show (and yes, it was a sketch that I also wrote).

And immediately below, you can see screen-grabs from two of the comedy sketches I wrote for World’s Dumbest. In the image on the top, you can see Chris Fairbanks as Gollum (in a sketch from World’s Dumbest Performers #16). And in the image on the bottom, you can see Sean Donnelly as a homeless man and Kevin McCaffrey as Clark Kent (in a sketch from World’s Dumbest Pranksters #3). I tried to work my own nerdy obsessions – like The Lord of the Rings and Superman – into as many of the comedy sketches as possible.

REAL MALE ESCORTS OF MANHATTAN

World’s Dumbest was produced (and packaged) by Meetinghouse Productions. So I was a staff writer on World’s Dumbest, but also I was a staff writer for Meetinghouse in general. While at Meetinghouse, I also developed programming for other TV- and web-based series. For example, in 2013 I co-wrote and co-directed the pilot episode of the comedic webseries The Real Male Escorts of Manhattan (a parody of reality shows like Real Housewives), which you can see via the following link. My fellow World’s Dumbest writer Jonathan Blitt was my co-writer and co-director on the Real Male Escorts pilot. Just FYI, the RME pilot is probably NSFW. (Wow, did I put enough acronyms in that sentence?) The music video at the end is inspired by my love of pop music. Enjoy:

When the Real Male Escorts pilot launched, Jonathan Blitt and I were interviewed by the pop culture website Forces of Geek, and in that interview, we talked about what it was like to shoot the pilot, as well as our respective careers. You can check out the interview here:

Hey! Check out this picture of (from left to right) Jonathan Blitt, yours truly, and production assistant Bennett Kleinman, from when all three of us appeared together in a comedy sketch on World’s Dumbest:

Now be honest: doesn’t looking at that picture brighten up your day just a little bit?

And before you go, you should definitely check out the closing credits from World’s Smartest Inventions #11:

 

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