Comedy fans in Starkville may be surprised at how close to home quality humor can be found. Good Commitment, a troupe of Starkville residents including MSU alumni, have been regularly submitting internet videos available as podcasts since January of this year.Their Web site, www.goodcommitment.tv, is now home to nearly thirty episodes of comedy sketches focusing on a wide array of topics.
The site began as a self-imposed challenge of the founding members.
“We wanted to prove to ourselves that we could put out a weekly video, and we did that,” says cofounder of Good Commitment Kary Rogers.
“We just started out trying to be committed and seeing how far we could take it,” Rogers said.
Good Commitment has grown in terms of production value, number of viewers and content since their beginning. Good Commitment has even managed to be the source of controversy.
“We started ruffling feathers when we did sketches about Alabama fans,” Comans said.
Other than humor at the expense of MSU’s Southeastern Conference rivals, Good Commitment’s controversial sketches have included comedy focusing on race relations and an episode parodying the infamous Westboro Baptist Church.
The troupe’s focus is not only on satire, however. Their library also includes a lot of videos that are just funny for the sake of being funny according to the duo.
“Sometimes we just have a goofy idea,” Comans said.
Past videos have included unique characters such as severely intense waiters, members of the queen’s guard, and overdedicated fans of “Lost”.
The members of Good Commitment met doing improv with Mississippi State’s renowned comedy team, Lab Rats, which was known as Running with Scissors at the time. Therefore many of the regular actors used in their videos may be familiar faces to Mississippi State students. However, Good Commitment is unaffiliated with Mississippi State University.
“We pull from our actor friends,” Rogers said. “I feel like that helps us out quite a bit having friends who have experience in front of a camera.”
One of Good Commitment’s frequent actors and collaborators is renowned local actor and former MSU student Gabe Smith, who found himself involved with Good Commitment as cofounder James Comans’ roommate.
“If you’re Gabe’s roommate, he’s too good to let him just sit in his room.” Comans said.
The site currently has been nominated for several awards and has been featured Myspace’s homepage. Their videos have had about 300,000 views. Currently Good Commitment puts out a new episode every two weeks.
An important moment in Good Commitment’s history came about when they teamed up with Graham Hancock and Derek Russell, who are the creative minds behind successful local podcasts “Tenth Wonder”, which focuses on NBC’s television series “Heroes”, and “Starkville’s House of El”, which is about the enormously popular “Smallville” television series.
Also, they produce “Tangent” which is a podcast catering to a more diverse audience in which the show’s hosts and a celebrity guest have a casual conversation.
“Starkville’s House of El” is to be featured on one of the coming “Smallville” season DVD’s.
“We wanted to play with the big boys,” Comans said.
Hancock has made a large contribution to Good Commitment in terms of their video quality and production value.
“I knew that Graham really had an interest in video,” Rogers said. “[Hancock and Russell] had established shows that they had been doing from scratch.”
With all these recent successful developments in the Internet community based out of Starkville, the guys have decided to come together to form a web portal where links to all of the podcasts can be found.
The site is temporarily located at www.starkvillemedia.com, and links to “Starkville House of El”, “Tenth Wonder”, “Tangent” and Good Commitment’s site can be found there.
The teams behind the podcasts feel that this new webpage will be a big help in bringing to public’s attention to each individual site through the success of the others.
“We make each other stronger,” Rogers said.
“Between us, we’ve got four really good podcasts,” Hancock said. “I think that by combining them, we’ll be able to produce a lot better things. The more popular one show gets, the more people will be exposed to the other shows. It’s great that each show has its own personality.