In a content-ravenous ecosystem where YouTube home pages everywhere are flooded with hacky celebrity impressions and lazy bits (“This is my impression of a dude who’s mad all the timeâ€), writer/performer Blake Rosier and director Justin Arbabi have restored my faith in the simple character piece.
For more than four uninterrupted minutes, Rosier just riffs as an all-too-familiar frat star. There’s no real game or narrative, beyond an incongruous endorsement of celibacy that comes more than a minute in, and that’s what’ great about it. That absence of a lazer focus that most modern comedy demands is what distinguishes Frat Promo. We’re just along for the ride with this character who is so realized, from the way he dresses, to the way he speaks and moves and compulsively hocks loogies on the ground, that we don’t need more. His lacrosse-star flow and bargain barrel Kings jersey captures us from moment one.
We’re reminded that, in this age of quantity over quality, high art can still be born from nuanced character work. Perhaps there’s more to this world than doing a really spot on McConaughey, after all. Thank Damien for that.
Luke is a writer/director for CollegeHumor and a watcher of many web videos. Send him yours @LKellyClyne.