Olde English Looks Back at ‘The Food Rap’

Splitsider is thrilled to offer our first digital download, The Exquisite Corpse Project, a fantastic film from the former members of legendary sketch group Olde English. I recently sat down with the guys to look through some of their classic Olde English sketches. First off, the group looked back at one of it’s earliest videos, made while all the members were students at Bard College.

Raphael: I would like to talk about an old one first. This one is old, but I think it holds up in a fun way and I think it says a lot about the group.

Ben: I’m so nervous right now.

Raphael: And that is The Food Rap.

Chioke: Oh, I love that one.

Caleb: That was our second show ever, I think.

Raphael: It was part of a live show. All our sketches were originally made for live shows when we first started, and we’d incoporate videos into them. And the idea behind the sketch was, we’re gonna have two rappers come out on stage in the multi-purpose room at Bard College. They’re gonna do a little rap, then they’re gonna say, “Hey, I’m hungry. Let’s get out of here.” And they were gonna walk down the halls of the multi-purpose room, leave the the theater, and then we’d show a video of them exiting the multi-purpose room and doing a rap as they walk through the Bard campus center. And at one point, they bump into Ben and Ben says, “Oh, my twin brother is here from Texas,” and then in the room where the video’s playing, Ben stands up in a cowboy hat and says “Yeehaw!” We really tried to integrate the live and video aspects. That was one of the earliest times we did that, and that kind of became a hallmark of our live shows. I think the worst live shows we ever did were where it was just a bunch of sketches, and the best ones were where we tried to have things work together in a cool way. Where you felt like, I’m at an event here that is happening for me. The people who are gonna watch this sketch later are not getting the same thing that I’m getting out of it. That was something that was always really important. I think the movie is kind of that too. Even though it’s its own thing, you watch it and you feel like, This is like a thing that I’m watching and I’m understanding in a different way than just watching a movie, because of the behind-the-scenes aspects of it.

The Exquisite Corpse Project is available for download for $5 from Splitsider Presents.

Olde English Looks Back at ‘The Food Rap’