We’re Tommy Dassalo and Karl Chandler, and we make a living as hosts of comedy podcast The Little Dum Dum Club. The internet gave birth to us, and it can end us.
Guardian Australia has certain rules about what we can submit as the “funniest things we have ever seen on the internet” and according to them, it’s not appropriate to just send in a bunch of clips of our comedian friends where we re-voice them and make them say negative stuff about vaccines. So instead, we’ve sent in a bunch of other junk. Catch you at the end for a plug.
1. Dave Chappelle on Kramer
Neither of us are very big consumers of standup specials on the streaming services, but this short clip of Dave Chappelle at the Laugh Factory is a massive favourite – in which he kinda defends Michael Richards’s infamous set there. “Hang in there, Kramer!” has become an essential, multi-purpose catchphrase in most elements of our lives. But most of all, it’s just fun to imagine that we live in a world where Dave Chappelle literally thinks that Michael Richards’s name is Kramer.
2. The ‘India’ prank calls to 2SM
Prank calls were trolling before we had the internet. In 2006, a bunch of people – including Sam Mac, before he was a Gold Logie-nominated weatherman – were listening to a quiz segment on Sydney radio station 2SM and heard a caller mistakenly guess “India” to a question. The caller was then berated on-air by host Graeme Gilbert for guessing such a wrong answer.
The natural next step for Sam Mac et al, of course, was to get everyone they knew to call in and guess “India” to every question that was asked – for the next million years or so.
We both became obsessed with this. We discovered it just before we shared a car in a four-hour traffic jam, and the word “India” was possibly 70% of our conversation. Sam Mac should’ve won the Gold Logie for this.
3. I Think You Should Leave: Driver’s Ed sketch
Tim Robinson’s I Think You Should Leave is easily the funniest sketch show of the last few years – and this sketch is a really great taster of what you can expect. To be completely honest, we’d probably both pick the courtroom sketch from season two, but we had to submit clips that are officially available online. So go watch that sketch on Netflix and then pretend that you’ve seen it embedded in this article. Tables!
4. Jackass Forever: movie trailer
We get it, it’s incredibly stupid to put a movie trailer in the list of funniest things we’ve seen. But: as if this movie isn’t going to rule. Its release date getting bumped back from last October to this year is probably the worst thing to have happened to us in 2021. Although watching it in a packed theatre at the moment is probably a dumber stunt than anything they actually do in the movie.
5. Final 2
This is a longtime personal favourite of Tommy’s. An animation student put together an animation showreel of Dobby from Harry Potter – a decent way of showing off his skills – but then went the extra mile by inserting himself into the video and writing a little scene between himself and Dobby, where they seem to be in love with each other? Which, as far as I can remember, is not canon in the Harry Potter universe.
He’s also recorded Dobby’s dialogue on what seems to be the world’s cheapest microphone, and then filmed all of his parts in a public park, so you can see people walking their dogs through the background. No hate though, because the animation is great and is far better than anything I could do (after dropping out of animation school after eight months).
6. Kay’s Cooking: avocado on toast
Kay is a lovely lady in the north of England who videos herself learning to cook the most basic of foods. She’s intriguing and eminently likable but boy oh boy does her food look like a sack of crap.
In this particular episode, she’s trying to make avocado on toast for the first time ever. However, she’s mistakenly used an eggplant instead, and is confused when she tries to mash the rock-hard innards of this “avocado”. It sounds bad, and it looks even worse.
She’s since relabelled the video as “aubergine on toast”, to save face. Kay, you can’t fool us, especially by using the fancier term “aubergine”.
7. Succession but everyone wants some of Logan’s M&Ms
Another Tommy pick. It seems like everyone loves Succession at the moment, but I don’t know if very many people have seen this clip. This guy is unbelievable. Doing even one of these characters so spot-on would be impressive, let alone the whole cast.
I have a very limited range of impressions – I think the only way I’d be able to pull off a video like this is there was a prestige HBO drama where every role was played by Dave Hughes.
8. Seinfeld
A few years ago, we were giddy off the back of selling out a live podcast at the Sydney Opera House and being invited to do a live podcast at the most exclusive comedy festival in the world, Just For Laughs in Montreal. We had a meeting with a major radio station in Melbourne, thinking, “Here we go. We could get a radio show here.” Instead, the executive who was going to meet with us pulled out without explanation and sent in some guy who knew nothing about us (or much else), and ended his meeting with two comedians, in the year of 2017, by asking us, “Have you ever seen Seinfeld? That guy is funny.”
So, we’d like to pass that suggestion on to you guys. Have you ever seen Seinfeld? If not, here it is.
9. Norm MacDonald on Saturday Night Live
Weirdly, the official Saturday Night Live YouTube account has no clips of the late, great Norm MacDonald hosting Weekend Update: one of the best and most influential bits of comedy in the last 25 years. So instead, I (Karl) am gonna supply this stupid, weird sketch that I love so much in tribute to Norm.
Most of the cast in this sketch were fired after this 1995 end-of-season episode (Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, Jay Mohr), and others were demoted (Norm and David Spade), and it’s clearly written by dead men walking. It’s SO dumb and the audience appear to HATE it. But what do people know? NOTHING.
10. The Little Dum Dum Club
Seems a little silly to promote everyone else to people out there who, more than likely, don’t even know our own stuff. So, here’s our stuff.
It’s the story of the time I (Karl) annoyed an open mic-er who was trying to get a gig at my weekly comedy night by relentlessly insisting he bring Dave Hughes along, despite the fact he clearly didn’t know him. And we told it on our show to Hughesy, who loved it. Stupid, pretty funny and a decent summation of the last 11 years of doing this podcast.
The Little Dum Dum Club’s long-delayed live recording of their 500th episode takes place on 15 January at the Athenaeum Theatre, Melbourne. Listen to their podcast here
