They splintered off into their own sect along with Eckman and McFadden, who weren’t performers, but were heavily invested in their own dreams: directing and producing, respectively. Pierson, Glover and Dierkes worked together in another New York University sketch group called Hammerkatz, and quickly found themselves in each other’s orbit both creatively and socially. Instead, the group looks back on those videos in the same way you and I recall our college years: a lot of sanguine, naive memories, with a few embarrassments in the margins.ĭerrick Comedy came together in the same way that comedy kids always join forces. In fact, for most of Derrick’s run, they never understood how they were changing the world. They can’t find it within themselves to be reverent. It’s still amazing.” “If Derrick Comedy was still active until now, it would probably be the biggest channel on YouTube.” What a joy it was, to believe that anything was possible with a video camera and the internet.īut the Derrick crew themselves are far more level-headed about their legacy. Today, the comments on those videos reverberate with a wistful, web-addled sentimentality, each of us remembering the overcrowded computer labs and candy-coated iMacs where we laughed and screamed at each month’s new video: “Shout out to 240p!” “I come back to this at least once a year. Go back and watch “ Hip Hop ,” which could be read as the beginning of the Childish Gambino persona, or the whirlwind, Radiohead-centric “ Girls Are Not to Be Trusted ,” and the heavy dose of Mr. There’s “ New Bike ,” which injected a surprising amount of heart into a joke about patricide. There’s “ Opposite Day, ” an improv game turned into a skit, performed with a precision of language that rivaled any writer’s room in the country. In fact, if you’re in your late 20s or early 30s, there is a good chance a Derrick Comedy sketch was the first video you ever shared on the internet. They were embedded into countless Myspace pages and ancient Facebook walls. You’ve probably seen most of Derrick’s greatest hits, even if you don’t realize it. We didn’t realize that being a YouTuber was a thing.” We never saw YouTube for what it really was. “Like, maybe that would get someone to write about us on CollegeHumor. We thought of it more of a place to post things, to drum up interest in our stuff,” says Eckman, 36, who still works as a director. “We were completely unaware that there was even a YouTube community. But for their millennial fans - the generation that served as social media’s first test case in the mid-2000s - their oeuvre pierced through each of our digital coming-of-age stories.įor a brief period of time, the group was the best thing on the internet. Pierson, Dominic Dierkes, director Dan Eckman, producer Meggie McFadden and an impossibly fresh-faced Donald Glover - have all charted their own paths in the entertainment industry in the decade since Derrick folded in 2010. If they couldn’t win fortune, fame and creative autonomy, they’d at least settle for something fun to do on a Saturday afternoon. The template is practically biblical at this point: Three college dudes filming no-budget short-form sketches in messy dorm rooms and commandeered lecture halls, for an audience of either everyone or no one. For many of us, the founding of Derrick Comedy’s YouTube channel in 2006 was the beginning of the internet.
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