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. Here, the group looked back at a video made on the road.
Adam: One we should talk about that’s a little bit of an aside is The Fight. That’s a video from…
Raphael: The road trip? You want to talk about the road trip?
Adam: From the road trip, yeah. In 2007, we also did a road trip across the country from New York to San Francisco for the San Francisco Sketchfest. And we said, we’re gonna do all of the videos…
Raphael: And the live sketches.
Adam: And the live show. We’re gonna write and produce…
Raphael: When we leave New York, we’re gonna have no sketches, and when we get to San Francisco, we’re gonna have a full show.
Adam: Yeah. And that’s what we did, and we never got around to uploading most of those videos. We should really do that at some point.
Raphael: But also, but a lot of them only work in the context of that show. You’d see us meeting in some weird town, like, “Alright, we have to make a video in this city,” and then you’d see us try to do it. With that package around it, it’s really fun and exciting, because the audience is like, “How are they gonna pull this off?” But just the sketch on its own is meh. This is the one that kind of works on its own outside of that context.
Adam: It’s a very funny small little sketch. Dave wrote it in the minivan on the road, and then once he was done writing, we stopped the van, got out and shot it, and then got back in and kept driving to San Francisco.
Raphael: Oh, then there was something wrong with the footage so we had to re-shoot it.
Adam: Oh yeah. We got sand in the camera.
Caleb: Because we were shooting out the window for a second.
Raphael: So we had to reshoot, and we were under pressure. We gotta make it to San Francisco, like we literally got to the theater an hour before our show started. We rolled out of our van and started doing our show. We told the audience, like, “Our van is just parked right outside. You can see the van we came in.”
Adam: Yeah. We all smelled like shit. We’d been in this stinky van for a week.
Caleb: Does anyone remember the rules of that sketch?
Raphael: The gimmick behind it was we’d make him do a sketch and then we made him drink on stage. That’s what it was. He did the sketch, and then he had to sit on stage while the sketch was playing and drink like, four shots? Five shots?
Chioke: There’s definitely one live video from that show that I remember where, it was either Dave or Ben has a fear of talking to…
Raphael: Ben had to get phone numbers.
Chioke: Had to get phone numbers, and the number of phone numbers that he got was the only thing that he could dress himself with on stage.
Raphael: He could only wear clothing that was pieces of paper that he’d gotten girls’ phone numbers on.
Chioke: I think during the whole trip he’d only gotten like four or five girls phone numbers on like scraps of paper…
Raphael: Because he’s very shy.
Chioke: Right. But then I think the last phone number he asked for was on like an enormous piece of paper, just to have something to cover him.
The Exquisite Corpse Project is available for download for $5 from Splitsider Presents.
