What did you do over your Easter weekend? Most of you without children probably didn't even realize it was Easter until you noticed an upsurge in Cadbury Creme Eggs at drug stores and creepy, humanoid rabbits taking over the city (outside of the usual furry convention season, too).
Comedian roommates Cody Tidmore and Grant Redmond, a two-time Funniest Comic in Texas finalist, used the bizarre holiday on which Americans celebrate the resurrection of the Prince of Peace by hiding plastic eggs in backyards to shoot a sketch for what's sure to become a popular video-sketch series simply titled Grant&Cody (sic).
We're sure of that because their first sketch, an Easter-inspired adventure called "The Bad Egg," got over 190,000 hits and counting in just one day after scoring some prime virtual real estate on sites like The Daily Dot and the front page of Reddit's videos section.
The sketch has a "Stella" inspired quality of two roommates occupying a seemingly boring living space that is turned upside down by one of the group's insane plans for fun. Cody is a frustrated, scowling roommate who just wants to have some eggs for breakfast or a midday frittata. A bunny-eared Grant jumps into the frame sounding like some sort of rabbit-themed Batman villain and challenges Cody to find the eggs with a series of pointless riddles.
The two concocted the sketch on Good Friday at their regular bar, Tidmore says.
"If I recall correctly, we were doing our usual Friday night thing where we go to a bar, have a few beers and see if anything comes to fruition," Tidmore says. "We started thinking about holidays as a fun challenge for coming up with fresh content, and well, then all of that happened."
Since the sketch had an Easter theme, Redmond said it gave them a deadline to write, shoot, edit and upload the sketch in time for people to see it before their Easter sugar rush wore off. They uploaded the video to their YouTube page and shared it with as many friends and sites as they could, including Reddit's videos page, where it first began to gain traction.
"We put it on Reddit, which is a quick indicator if you have a good product," Redmond says. "They're a tough crowd over there. Then I saw an article on The Daily Dot about it, along with some smaller websites with the word 'meme' in it. So we probably got a thousand 12-year-olds to watch it after that."
By Tuesday, the video amassed more than 180,000 hits, something they didn't realize because YouTube's amazing technology can do everything but provide an accurate viewer counter in real time.
"Once the video counter froze at 301, I knew it must be blowing up pretty quickly," Redmond says. "YouTube has to validate those views, so it puts it on hold until it catches up. I wasn't sure how many views we had until this [Tuesday] morning. We saw multiple websites share the link but the video still said 301 views. It was driving me crazy."
Tidmore and Redmond say they are already planning on shooting more episodes of the series now that they have a huge audience clamoring for another installment.
"There's a lot of great people in this city, and while we're going at it as Grant&Cody, we want to work with fun people that make us laugh," Tidmore says.
