![]() ![]() “How the fuck you can’t catch a guy who shoots a gun with his arms flailed out like this?” Travis asked. Yedoye Travis using an Animal Crossing reaction to accompany a joke about James Bond being a terrible spy. Yedoye Travis was particularly adept at this in the first show, and several of the comedians used the game’s magic-wand item to incorporate elaborate instantaneous costume changes into their material. The cute little Animal Crossing people make reactions like delight or expressions of alarmed surprise to coordinate with joke setups and punch lines. As the comedians perform their material over Zoom, they can also manipulate their in-game characters. When it’s their turn to perform, each comedian walks their game avatar up onto the little stage and stands behind a microphone. It works like this: Yang invites other comedians with Animal Crossing accounts onto her island, hosts them in her adorable basement comedy club, and streams the feed from her Nintendo Switch onto a computer screen where a bigger audience can watch it live over Zoom. And then, she got to work on Comedy Crossing, a live show combining Zoom call mechanics with Animal Crossing aesthetics. So Yang built a comedy club in her virtual Animal Crossing basement, a room complete with brick walls, a microphone, and a little greenroom space off to the side. They’re exhausting, and because they’ve become so ubiquitous in corporate culture, they now feel more like a workplace rather than entertainment. The problem is that as an interface and visual experience, Zoom comedy shows are not ideal. “If you have even five people who are unmuted, it’s already 100 percent better than telling your jokes into a hallway of nothing.” “If you know that your room is quiet, if you want to laugh and be part of making the show a show, unmute yourself,” she explains. Eventually, comedians began to land on a structure that sort of worked: Zoom shows with at least a few audience members unmuted to help re-create the experience of a reactive audience. “There were a lot of Instagram Lives, a lot of variations ,” she says. Yang started paying attention to what seemed to work and what didn’t in those shows. she missed (she also has a LACMA lights installation and a Hollywood Forever Cemetery), she started participating in some of the comedy Zoom shows popping up to fill the void of live, in-person comedy. “I got the game because I was so sad.” But before long, “it very quickly dawned on me that I could try to re-create all the places I missed in real life, including a comedy club.”Īt the same time, while Yang began collecting items and modeling her virtual island after the L.A. “It was a sad quarantine purchase,” Yang says, laughing. Like everyone else, she downloaded Animal Crossing not long after the country shut down. Nothing about it screams “great location for a comedy show.”īut when Yang first started playing the game a few months ago, she could immediately see the potential. One person’s island can only host up to eight online visitors at a time. It isn’t designed to be a hub where lots of people can communicate with one another, and although you can go visit other people’s islands, the chat system is fiddly and unbearably slow. ![]() Animal Crossing has an appealing, sweet visual style and an addictive catalogue of cute items to collect, but the premise of the game involves clearing and organizing a deserted island, gradually turning it from a wilderness into a little village. I’m one of the millions of people who have spent a good long time in the world of Animal Crossing over the last few months, and when I heard about Yang’s show, I was both fascinated and completely unsure how it would work. That place is Jenny Yang’s comedy show Comedy Crossing, and it takes place on a remote island in the video game Animal Crossing. Comedians - including Jenny Yang, Judah Friedlander, Yedoye Travis, and Ify Nwadiwe - have done sets there the July 3 show will include Cristela Alonzo, Andrew Orolfo, and Danielle Perez. You can watch a group of comedians all in the same space, clapping and laughing for one another, and you can hear other members of the audience laughing (or not) at the jokes. ![]() There is a place you can go every other week and watch live stand-up comedy where there’s no risk of catching COVID-19. Comedian Jenny Yang, dressed here as “a Karen,” introduces a Comedy Crossing show. ![]()
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