Just hear those sleigh bells jingling
Ring-ting-tingling too
Come on, it’s lovely weather
For a sleigh ride together with you
Outside the snow is falling
And friends are calling, “Yoo hooâ€
You know the song: “Sleigh Ride†by Leroy Anderson. Now, imagine that someone misheard and sang that last couplet as “Outside the snow is falling, the girls are calling, ‘Woo hoo.’†It’d be unremarkable at best, right?
Now, imagine that the man who misheard and sang the lyric was comedian and writer Craig Rowin, because it was. What came next was nothing short of incredibly annoying … and then it kept going and became magical.
You see, Rowin sang “The girls are calling, ‘Woo hoo’†once on Instagram, and then again and again every day for an entire fucking year. Except he wasn’t just regurgitating multiple — and uniquely incorrect — versions of the lyric (sometimes he sang “The girls are calling, ‘Yoo hoo’â€) in settings that ranged from his couch to airport terminals — no, that would be … a waste of time. Instead, he layered in a cadre of guest appearances (from the likes of Abbi Jacobson, D’Arcy Carden, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, Thomas Middleditch, and Tay Zonday of “Chocolate Rainâ€). In each 15-second clip, he let loyal viewers in on the catastrophic effect that his silly little experiment was having on his day-to-day existence and that of the world around him. In short, he made it a gigantic waste of time and harnessed incredible, stupid beauty in the process.
Now, this tangled Instagram narrative is available to the viewing public for the first time as a complete compilation — all one-and-a-half hours of it. We invite you to turn off your brains and stare, mouth agape, as Rowin demonstrates both the fall and reincarnation of single-bit comedy as we know it.
And you thought taking a photo of yourselves every day for a year was compelling. Pssh.
Luke is executive producer at Big Breakfast and a watcher of many web videos. Send him yours @LKellyClyne.