“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” by CollegeHumor
Best known as the producer of some of the most successful comedy videos on the Internet, CollegeHumor has become an institution in the online entertainment world, competing head-to-head with (and frequently out-performing) big-name comedy destinations like Funny or Die, Cracked, and The Onion.
The reasons behind CollegeHumor’s success lie in its ability to play to its market: pandering to teenage and twenty-something males is a no-brainer when it comes to tailoring a product (just ask Michael Bay), but CH takes things to an entirely new level by capitalizing on its own in-depth knowledge of the target demographic. CH’s original videos and articles pound away at every imaginable aspect of college life: sex, alcohol, parties, academics, relationships, video games, Internet culture, pranks, and so on.
CH knows its audience, and it knows what its audience is thinking about—and you can bet that, among all the things that college males think about, politics and social change are not all that high up on the list. Which makes one of their recent comedy sketches—titled “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”—an interesting addition to their catalog of videos.
Sure, the video features a lot of the same comedy stylings that CollegeHumor has used in its other videos (political incorrectness, funny accents, gay sex jokes). And while I might like to tell myself that the sketch’s writers (the consistently witty Streeter Seidell and Patrick Cassels) were intentionally making a pointed statement with this bit, the reality is that they probably thought up the funny scenario without much concerning themselves with sending a socially-conscious message.
Which brings us to the larger point: if a decidedly non-political pair of comedy writers found hilarity in the concept of a hyper-homophobic Army sergeant, what does that say about the ludicrousness of the military’s actual “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy?
Devon Grandy is a writer, blogger, humorist, filmmaker, and musician. The creator and Editor-in-Chief of Break Out The Oreos, Devon is chiefly responsible for the alternatingly mind-numbing and glee-inspiring process of transforming his brainchild into a "for real" web magazine. Read more.
