Perks!

Lest you doubted that doing a thing purely for the love of it leads to the greatest rewards, a few notes:

Our Michael Palin for President video, now viewed 660,000+ times on YouTube alone, has also been embedded in hundreds of other people's blogs, and was picked up by other sites like Will Ferrell's funnyordie.com. News reports popped up a few Sundays ago in all the major London papers talking about the video, even reporting that unnamed Republicans were complaining that the video was clearly the work of Democratic operatives running a smear campaign on Sarah Palin.

We were even contacted by an enterprising CNN reporter, although she did warn us that the producers at CNN are notoriously lacking in a sense of humor. Having seen the "Picture of the Day" spot that runs on AC360, I believe her. Nothing about our video ever appeared on CNN.

But the people who were watching the video, and visiting the website, started contacting us. They demanded buttons and bumper stickers, so we uploaded some designs to CafePress and started selling buttons and bumper stickers. (Plus thongs, because you just have to.) It's not the sort of thing that'll make any of us rich, but it'll certainly pay for the domain name registrations and the website hosting for the next several months. (Although I'm still waiting for the moment when I see someone with a Palin bumper sticker out in the wild....)

Some very well-meaning folks simply missed the joke. A very nice, very earnest woman in Atlanta wrote to Michael Palin care of us, begging Michael not to run for President because he might split off too many votes from Barack Obama. Which does raise the startling possibility that there might actually be a few people, here and there, who actually do write in Michael's name. I seriously doubt there would be as many as a thousand, spread across the country, but you never know. Someday, Marc and I might be reviled in the same way Ralph Nader is.

And just today, I was handed a copy of The Complete Monty Python Collectors Edition Megaset, a massive DVD box set containing the entire TV series, the live performances, the "Personal Best" discs, and two new documentaries I'd never seen. It's currently deeply discounted on Amazon at just over a hundred bucks, but the merchandising company that created the set found our site and, for promotional purposes, offered us three free sets to give to our newsletter subscribers. (They even handled the shipping, all we had to do was pick three people, get addresses, and forward them on.) Then they sent over a couple extra sets so that we too could enjoy them, thus leading to a happy Saturday afternoon as I watched both documentaries.

We made the video because it amused us. We had no expectation of anything, we just did it to have some fun and geek out a little. And from it, all this has come. Pure intentions, without expectation, has indeed yielded these great rewards.

I say all this because Thereby is done. I've excerpted it before, and I've always known it was massively uncommercial, the sort of thing I did for the love of doing it, largely to amuse myself. But watching the documentary about how the Pythons conquered America, none of them ever believed that the show would have any impact in America; it took Cleese years to believe it really had caught on. I have now written and rewritten my mad little novel to the point that I'm ready to start sending it out to real publishing people. (Actually, a friend of mine from high school knows a publisher, so I've already started there.)

A novel of pure intention, written without expectation. Is it hubris to think that maybe there's a place for it in the world after all?

Going Viral

Not quite six days ago, Marc Rosenbush and I put a video up on YouTube, and launched a companion website. The video was of course the one embedded a couple posts below, about the entirely mythical candidacy of Michael Palin for President, and the website is of course called Michael Palin for President.

Last time I looked, our silly little satire has been viewed 103,000 times. And counting.

This is, I suspect, fueled chiefly by two things: (1) we brought the funny, mostly thanks to selecting good clips of Michael Palin being funny, although I think the fact that there is a point being made doesn't hurt; and (2) the more I learn about Sarah Palin, the less I like her, and I don't think I'm alone in that.

Comments (over a hundred of them) have been about 90% positive, which could mean that the video really works well, or that the people bothering to comment are mostly members of the choir. Endless variations of comments like "The only Palin I'd vote for! Vote for the other one and we WILL get the Spanish Inquisition!" But of course there has been the other side heard from as well. Examplars of considered political discourse such as "If you have a child, I hope he dies in a car fire!" (That, by the way, was the only part I could repeat here without violating FCC decency standards.)

I have to say, it's been a lot of fun. Making an actual movie is such a long process, months and years of effort. But Marc and I put this video together in eleven hours last Monday, and over a hundred thousand people have seen it since. That's almost certainly people more people than saw me in my entire theatrical career, over the course of years.

At the same time, I'm starting to feel a certain sense of responsibility. I mean sure, the Constitution bars a British citizen like Michael Palin from becoming President of the United States, but enforcement of the Constitution has been a bit slippery for a while now, so maybe this little joke is something I should take a bit more seriously.

Because, as one YouTube commenter put it, "His cabinet would no doubt be an interesting bunch." And I don't think that, as a general rule, we need new government departments--but a Ministry of Silly Walks would be an admirable use of taxpayer money.

Who's with me?

P.S. Just found out that the Pythons' official website is now featuring our video. Speaking as a lifelong Python geek, that is just too cool.

The Wrong Palin

For your viewing pleasure: