Online comedy's very important person
Vic Michaelis is a face of Dropout's social media success.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
This interview was originally published in February 2024! —Kate
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It’s nice to know in the current media environment that there is such a thing as a beloved company coming back from the dead. Founded in 1999, CollegeHumor helped launch many now-beloved comedians’ careers. But after spending the 2010s battling with Facebook’s video algorithm and eventually restructuring, the company had been reduced to, in Vulture’s words, “a zombie shell of itself.”
Which is why it may be surprising to know that the studio, now owned by Chief Creative Officer Sam Reich and renamed Dropout, is behind some of the most viral videos on TikTok. Early series like Dimension 20, a riff on Dungeons & Dragons, and Game Changer, a game show in which the game…changes, were chopped, clipped, and dispersed across the app in order to drive people to Dropout’s subscription platform which, in September 2023, had reached somewhere in the “mid-hundreds of thousands of subscribers.”
While I had seen and appreciated these clips, I wasn’t fully on board with Dropout until Vic Michaelis ended up on my FYP. They’re the host of one of the latest shows, Very Important People—a resurrection of Josh Ruben and Pat Cassels’ Hello My Name Is from the early 2010s. Each week, a new comedian is surprised with a full makeover, one they must improvise a character for while under Michaelis’s questioning. If you came across any clip from the show, it was probably this one.
I was interested in talking to Michaelis to learn not only how they came to their sharp and irreverent comedy, but also how they’ve helped crack the code that few else have for a thriving subscription service that also thrives on social media.
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I came across you through Very Important People, doing these improvised interviews with improvised characters. How did this show come about?
This show is a show that Josh Ruben and Pat Cassels did under the name, Hello My Name Is years ago. I mean like, both just real powerhouses and old College Humor staples. And Josh now does a lot of stuff with Dropout. I got an email from Sam May of last year being like, “Hey, we're looking to reboot this, give it a new take. We were wondering if you'd be interested in hosting.” Once again. Like I got like halfway down the email like, “Yep.”
I think one of the things I love most about working with Dropout is they really allow a lot of creative freedom, which I think having worked a little bit with a couple of very deeply failed pilots, watching behind the scenes and how tightly a lot of like people that are in charge of those companies hold onto those creative projects, with Dropout it is not lost on me how much trust and faith is put in us and how much they let us pour in creatively to these shows. I'm so unbelievably grateful.I feel like the word collaborative gets used a lot, but it really, really is and it really feels that way, which feels very special.
I think what stands out about your performance, at least in this specific show, is you're playing ostensibly the straight man, but it’s so fun. How do you approach your character on the show?
We're gonna get into the weeds of improv, which is my favorite thing to talk about. That is true, that it's a voice of reason. I love playing voice of reason. It's my favorite type of character to play. And I think people often don't see a voice of reason as a three dimensional character. And I really think the voice of reason is like anybody else, they have their weird things also that come up when they come up. And we just don't really get into it, 'cause we're focusing on this snapshot in time where it's this person who's bouncing off of this unusual person.
We and the director, Tamar Levine, talked a ton about this host Vic character having their own thing going on. And it's not the focus of any one episode, but it's a reason to watch the thing as a whole, especially as these characters carousel in and out, to parse out some of this information about this character. And we had a couple of ideas, but mostly it was coming to us as the episodes were coming out and cataloging all the canon that we've created in episodes so we could go back afterwards and be like, “Okay, this is what we said, this is what happens.”
Continue reading the full interview below:
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