This Week In Web Videos: B1G Ten Trash Talk

There’s like one month a year when I don’t feel like a total misfit: late July/early August. Hockey fans have forgotten all about the Cup, we’re weeks and weeks past the NBA Finals, and Sunday afternoon football is a distant fleck. Sure, baseball’s happening but, as long as you don’t live across the street from Yankees Stadium or the Green Giant, few people seem to give a fly ball fuck and, if they do, they’re comparatively quiet about it. This is my time. It’s when I feel good about humanity, about our collective ability to discuss things other than balls being thrown for money. But bliss is fleeting and – come September – all my faith is bulldozed by chatter of fantasy leagues and who’s team sucks and “Fuck you, dude, no fucking chance in hell this year!” and so on and so forth. Again, I’m reminded how little I fit in with a society that worships, WORSHIPS the physical achievements of people they’ll never meet. Am I a downer? Maybe, but that realization doesn’t make me any more attuned to our national obsession with sports. It doesn’t make me feel any less out of place. What it does do is make me appreciate comedy from folks who seem to feel similarly perplexed.

I absolutely love Rita Chin’s B1G Ten Trash Talk, not just because it appeals to my personal sense of otherness, but because it executes a simple premise in a properly reflective way, a way that makes me realize the intellectually elitist things I choose to care about – like school rankings and graduate programs – are as arbitrary as having a terrible day because a 22-year-old missed a slap shot. In a world of so many meaningless divisions, it sometimes takes pieces like Chin’s to remind us that our most fervent opinions are all equally useless.

Luke is a writer for CollegeHumor and a watcher of many web videos. Send him yours @LKellyClyne.

This Week In Web Videos: B1G Ten Trash Talk