While Ben falls behind with his inability to comment on the best thing he’s ever written, I keep pressing forward with one of the most non-me things I’ve ever written.

The Issues That Divided Us

Grade: C+

This is simply a clever analogy to the stem-cell/abortion debate to the creation of fossil fuel. While I think it brings up an interesting question of why we believe life to exist before it exists but not after it exists which makes us question our linear understanding of time, it is one joke. One joke that needed not be extended into a full scene, that then relies on wikipedied dinosaur knowledge to provoke laughter from the nerdy audience. I like the basic joke here and I think the sparing use of dino-physicallity is funny, but the constant wink-wink-nudge-nudge “jokes” that are simply references to dino-words are obnoxious and play on a type of humor I find obnoxious. The audience, instead of gutteraly laughing at something they find funny, forces out guffaws to prov that their dino-knowledge is extensive when, in fact, the author simply copy a pasted some sentences from Wikipedia as lines.

All of that being said, I love when a sketch attempts no semblance of setting up the scene and instead just has the two characters walk out and start talking, and I love dino-anger. I also really love using dino as a prefix. What truly saves this scene though is the last line. The last line is genuinely hilarious as the audience has now accepted the conceit that one actor is a dino-conservative and one a dino-liberal, and after a long angry dino-silence, the actors move on to another conservative/liberal argument, but this time it makes absolutely no sense given the context that they are dinosaurs because it is about creationism which assumes the existence of dinosaurs being at a time when they didn’t exist.

Best Actor: Joe as a Stegasaurus. Best Line: “What do you think about creationism?”