Cause I've Got A Blank Cup Baby,

#me when men speak to me

john mulaney and pancakes

ok SO john mulaney has a new live show on the netflicks (the comeback kid) and i was lucky enough to see him do this act live in milwaukee this summer!!! but the recorded show is missing something special

so summer in milwaukee is known for being like. comically humid. disgustingly, oppressively humid. ‘can’t tell the difference between being downtown and being literally submerged in lake michigan’ humid

and poor john mulaney was wearing a nice-looking but also very warm suit. so once about every 10-20 minutes he would pause whatever spiel he was on, wipe his forehead, flutter his jacket about, regret his fashion choices and ask what was wrong with us that we don’t properly air condition our venues

about halfway through the show, a woman in one of the front rows stood up and started to walk out so in classic mulaney fashion he razzed her that she couldn’t take the heat either and asked her to bring him a pepsi - she didn’t break stride (i would try to play it cool too if over a thousand people were suddenly watching me get razzed by mulaney)

as soon as she was out of the theatre, he turned his mic off and started yelling to those of us who were still in there

“okay guys, we’re going to play a little prank on her! can everyone hear me? WE’RE GOING TO PLAY A PRANK! at some point later in the show i’m going to say ‘you know what they say in milwaukee!!’ and you’re all going to wave your arm around like this’ - he jauntily waved his arm with his first finger outstretched, like an 80 year old man doing the charleston - ‘and you will all shout ‘gimme some PANcakes!!!’’

we did a few rehearsals of this until he was satisfied, and he turned his mic back on and continued with his act

a few minutes later the woman walked back through the theatre but passed her row, walked all the way up to the stage, and set a can of pepsi at mulaney’s feet. he stopped, mouth agape for a moment and touched his chest. ‘is this really for me?’ he asked. ‘did i ask you for pepsi? i have no idea why i would do that, i hate pepsi.’ he thanked her sincerely several times, and when she turned his back to him to return to her seat, he made frantic ‘kill’ motions across his throat to signal to us that the prank was off

he continued to lament the heat for the rest of his act, eventually lost the jacket and drank the gifted pepsi, grimacing cartoonishly every time. at the very end of the night he thanked us for being a great audience, thanked the woman in particular for her kindness, and triumphantly said ‘BECAUSE YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY IN MILWAUKEE!!!’ and 1 very generous women was hopelessly confused when 1299 people shouted ‘GIMME SOME PANCAKES!!!!!’

It still surprises me at how few people have seen Freak of the Week, and I love sharing it with friends because of the inevitable, “How the hell have I never seen this?” look of awe drawn out on their face.

And man, it really is gorgeous.

Directed by Juanjo Guarnido, it took the team about a year of hard work to hammer out this bloody masterpiece (which you can learn about in his video here) using a combination of 3D animation with the power of college interns  skill of a team of artists to painstakingly re-draw the 3D elements they wanted in 2D frame-by-frame, not to mention the post processing and… everything else.

 Even though it came out in 2014, it doesn’t seem to have ever garnered the attention it truly deserves.

I really wanna drive this point home, so to give you an idea, Ghost by Mystery Skulls, animated by MysteryBen27 has 18,147,263 views.   Freak of the Week has only 2,271,121 views at the time I’m writing this.  That’s fucking depressing for something so … phenomenal.  I want more of this, and hell, maybe you do too.  But we’re not going to see anymore simply because the right people haven’t seen it.  In fact, it failed to reach a respectable level of Internet Popularity®, Juanjo himself even described it in the comments section as having ruined him because of how little attention it got.  

So if you’re reading this and you’ve got some connections with a TV network or something, consider pulling some strings to get this video spoon-fed to the masses, because people ought to see this.  I’m sure Juanjo would be all too happy to oblige.  And hell, if you wanna buy the art book, you can get the link here for about $50.

Now, maybe you recognize the former Disney animator Juanjo Guarnido for his other work: Blacksad.

Which is a comic set in the late 1950′s about a hardboiled private investigator published originally by Dark Horse Comics that does… y’know, the …

… noir investigator …

… aloof ladies man…

… badass …

… detective story thing.

That I haven’t yet read but I TOTALLY NEED TO.  

Look,

I guess I’m bringing up Freak of the Week because I was reading the comment section and, man, it kinda got me down.  

Some of the best things things out there just haven’t been seen by the right people, I guess.  But I suppose it’s also a depressing statement on the culture of the internet that the video makes.

What was your most smoothest moment?

Oh I can’t choose. I always smoothly make a fool of myself while talking to literally anyone I’m infatuated with.

*randomly materializes out of a murder of crows with a slurpee in my hand* hey guys what’s up?

Do you ever eat popcorn out of the palm of your own hand with such ardent desperation that you feel like both a wild horse and the gentle schoolgirl feeding it treats to gain its affection