A project I worked on a few years ago bubbled up from the sea. Honestly, I thought this project might’ve gotten shipwrecked. Over the past few years, my professional seafaring has led to more than one crashed vessel. I’m glad it’s out, because I had a whale of a time making it!
Yup, you guess it. This project is about… dry land!!
Recently, one of my oldest friends, comedian Asterios Kokkinos, began releasing episodes of his actual play podcast SeaPunk RPG. (You can listen to the whole season free on his Patreon page.) The show is a parody / homage / goof on the short-lived sci-fi TV series SeaQuest DSV, which was supposed to be Star Trek, but underwater. The ocean is so deep, you see, that we have no idea what’s going on down there! There might be aliens, ancient civilizations, or less likely, mutant fish with lightbulbs on their heads. SeaPunk RPG is a comedy take on that premise with an incredible cast of comedians, roleplayers, and lovable nerds using the Powered By the Apocalypse roleplaying system. My character is Timothy Bloomwell, a pseudo-intellectual author who’s on-board the ship to write a book about how the sea is bad and you should hate it. There are two crews on the SeaPunk. You can listen to my first episode here.
I love making things with Asterios! He has a brilliant, unpredictable comedy mind. He’s a very generous, boisterous, and fun-loving guy. I think of myself as a Donatello and Asterios as a Michelangelo, though if we were in a battle with Krang and Shredder, he’d do a better job keeping his cool and closing the portal to Dimension X. I’d hide under a pile of broken Mousers.
Our friendship grew out of a professional partnership. We met in college. When I was in high school, I performed stand-up, wrote and shot a TV sitcom pilot for public access, and made thousands of dollars on MP3.com performing comedy songs. So I figured I was a shoe-in for a spot on one of Emerson College’s several hundred on-campus comedy teams. I auditioned for every single team… and was rejected by every single one. (Later, I found out that freshman rarely make the teams, because those spots tend to go to upperclassman, but it still stung.) It wasn’t all bad, though. I was cast in a sketch comedy pilot for the Emerson Channel. Yes, my alma matter has its own TV station, and I’m morbidly curious to know what I’d think of their programming now. The comedy pilot I was cast in was produced by comedians who were similarly rejected from those other several hundred teams. This was a pattern at Emerson. When someone was rejected by the official teams, they started a new team, until there were eventually more comedy teams at Emerson than fish in the ocean.
Asterios, then a sophomore, left one of the several hundred official teams over… I forget the specifics, but let’s call it “comedy drama.” Comedians beef with each other over dumb shit. It’s not just a Marc Maron thing. I believe Asterios saw me on the Emerson Channel and invited me to be part of his new live sketch group. Initially it was called Esoterrific, but I liked our second name better: Atomic Powered Millionaires. There’s a postcard one of our teammates drew of gigantic monocled monopolists in top hats crushing a city like kaiju monsters. I can still imagine the postcard when I close my eyes. It was funnier back in the mid-aughts, back when rich people weren’t destroying our lives as conspicuously.
When I finally graduated, Asterios and I immediately started a two-man comedy duo in LA called Overtime, which morphed into a three-person YouTube sketch team with the hilarious Joan Ford, another close friend you may have seen on various Dropout shows. My wife and I recently subscribed to the channel and were thrilled to see her pop-up again and again!
The collaborations between Asterios and I had a manic energy, both in their final presentation and their creation. I usually played the relatable straight-man and Asterios was the volcanic wildcard. Our best loved sketch was called “Caveman Jesus,” a parody of elaborate TV theme songs where Asterios sings about the adventures of a time-traveling Jesus Christ, while I flipped through a giant art pad of hand-drawn illustrations in the background. Halfway through the song, the illustrations become direct cries for help, implying I’m being forced to do this against my will. We performed that sketch so many times, but I never got tired of it, because Asterios had boundless energy and was so much fun to watch perform.
Asterios could be frustrating to work with, too. There were often last minute crises with Asterios, like the theater got booked incorrectly and the show had to be cancelled or a sketch needed to be hastily rewritten for who knows why for an audience of, like, seven people. It wasn’t that Asterios caused every crisis, but he entered a room with an aura of unpredictability. By the same token, Asterios could always be relied on to solve a crisis. If I got a flat tire, I knew I could call him for help and that he’d drop everything to be there, which may have caused a crisis for someone else in his life. He was as reliable as AAA and a lot funnier.
We held court in the Emerson dining hall, and in LA, the North Hollywood Diner, spending hours writing ideas into notebooks and making each other laugh. We’re both loud talkers, so we must’ve been extremely annoying to anyone just trying to eat a mealy veggie burger in peace. When you’re making things, and everything cliques into place, the rest of the world stops mattering. You’re in the zone. You’re a trained runner going the distance. You’re in an underwater bubble, making fun of the crazy fish swimming past. It’s a high I’ve chased many times since.
When Amanda and I started a humor publishing house, we brought together a group of comedians as editors to shape the voice of the magazine. Asterios was one of our authors and editors. During the run of the publishing house, Asterios moved to NYC and would call into the meetings via FaceTime. The other editors would try to guess what unusual location he’d call in from next. Would it be a laundromat? An aquarium? The MIR space station? No, Chuck E. Cheese for his nephew’s birthday. Oh, hello Chef Pasqually!
In those editorial meetings, I was surrounded by comedians I loved and admired, but Amanda and I had a responsibility to run a small business. It was a sobering anchor against the spirit of collaboration. I was no longer pretending to be a straight-man on stage. I was an actual, real-life straight man. A business man, the quintessential straight-man archetype.
Making SeaPunk RPG with Asterios came closer to the spirit of those sketch comedy days, but life has changed for both of us. We got older. We live on opposite ends of the country. I got married. Asterios will be married soon to his longtime partner in life and podcasting, the lovely and sharp-witted Sirancha. I focused on writing and eventually game development. Asterios pursued stand-up, podcasts, and advertising. We’ve drifted apart, but we never forgot each other. In fact, the reason this newsletter is late is because Amanda and I met Asterios and Sirancha in Orlando for a Disney World trip. When I texted him that we were going to see the closing of MuppetVision 3D – not just my favorite attraction, but one of my favorite places in the world – he wanted to join us. It was so great hanging out with them for a few days. Almost like nothing had changed.
When people in LA ask me about Asterios, they always say the same thing. “I miss him.” I don’t miss Asterios, since we just went on the Rock ‘n Rollercoaster together a few days ago! But I do miss those days. Yeah, we were motivated by dreams of work. We wanted to be TV staff writers. Or have our own Comedy Central show. Or conquer the internet. It wasn’t a pure drive to be creative. The specter of capitalism loomed over all our collaborations. But in the moment, on a Thursday night at the NoHo diner, with empty plates covered in chicken finger crumbs in front of us, I just wanted to make Asterios laugh. That’s a feeling I do miss.
🎲 Your Turn: Do you currently have a creative partner? Or have you had one in the past? What was your collaboration like? Did you get along well or was it a struggle? Reply to this email and let me know, or hit the orange button below to leave a comment and tell the whole world.
4 responses to “Old Friend Adventures”
Asterios and Geoffrey, couple of cards, huh? Lol yeah, I had a similar friendship in high school. He was a pianist and a composer. I was a filmmaker and a saxophonist. We’d make covers of songs from JOJO’s Bizarre Adventures, make music videos out of them, and put ’em out just for fun. One of them actually went viral. Hit 5 million views. He would also compose for my silly little short films, and we’d get together to record let’s play videos simply for the fun of playin’ game and tellin’ jokes. Now, he and I are focused on different things. We still hang out regularly, and every once in a while, I’ll ask him to score something for me. But for the most part, we’re just buddies now. I don’t see that as a bad thing; it’s just that our life paths have diverged. Though, who knows, maybe I’ll get another creative partner soon…
Sounds like a wonderful friendship and creative partner. Congrats on going viral together, that’s so cool! Will you post the link?
Yeah, life paths have a way of pathing.
Honestly, some of the stuff we have found in Earth’s oceans is far stranger than the craziest ideas sci-fi designers have had for aliens.
Chemosynthetic bacteria that thrive in superheated water at a thousand atmospheres and sulfur levels that are toxic to most life, Angular fish where the males digest most of their organs and live as parasites on the much larger females, eels with such complex life cycles we used to think they were five different species, giant squid, just to name a few of the creatures of the deep.
You’re absolutely right. The creatures in the ocean are on the whole weirder and creepier than anyone you’ll find in the Mos Eisley cantina. Though in the cantina’s defense, they’ve got stellar jizz music.