My great pal Eric Drysdale sent out one last note to a set of friends about an event he thought that set would enjoy, and I am extremely lucky to be included in that set.

Eric has a beautiful and exquisite comedic sense, an opinion I have that is borne out by his legacy of comedic work, including The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, The Late Show, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee and more. He has stood down 20 years of a world gone mad and reworked it, within hours, into a performance of knowing logic and insight, adorned with a chuckle or a sense that maybe there’s a toehold of reason in the chaos.

Eric, in other words, knows not just comedy, but comedy from the profane to the subtle harmonies distantly echoing on the periphery. You’ve likely laughed at something Eric has written, and now you are learning this moment how a few years back, he made a satiric View-Master-based remix of 1960s spy thrillers called The Man With F.E.E.E.T, which accompanied a live show I saw with actual View-Master in hand as we listened to the soundtrack. There have been shockingly few View-Master adjacent comedy shows in the world, and I’ve seen all of them, likely, which is to say, one. Eric’s.

I bring up Eric first as my tour guide to what he was asking us to attend because the nature of The Man With F.E.E.E.T. is that of a very powerful type of comedy that doesn’t live well on the Second Screen or the cacaphony of a Third Place, but within the same deep rewarding sconce illumating a plot twist or mysterious new door. You are both ridiculing a quirk of media and absorbed into its character. There are people capable of this craft but there is very little incentive to take this craft to its logical conclusion. You will make a very small number of people ecstatically happy and a large number of people confused or self-consciously dismissive. As someone who thought it a good idea to finally tell the story of text-based computer games in a high definition format, I know the highs and lows.

Eric was giving 24 hour warning to a show that was to be held in the city, called Programme 4. He and a few others were to be part of the live floor show before the main event. I chose at that point to not acquaint myself with the main event. That turned out to be a very canny move, but even if I’d thoroughly researched the project, I’d have attended and enjoyed it just as much.

To that end, I am writing this in the hope that you, a person who looks at Eric’s F.E.E.E.T. event above and think you would like to know where you could be right now at that event right now please, will consider Programme 4 as the next major opportunity coming down the line for you.

In fact, maybe you should stop reading. Here is a generic logo of Programme 4 so you can internalize it and close this window.

Seek out that phrase and jump at the next opportunity, be it a live show or (someday) physical media or virtual access.

Well.

I’m not disappointed or even angry. I know you, a sophisticate of the finest order, are instinctually aware of the dreams that accompany a shag carpet that touches all corners and never lets the plastic furniture clink against a wood floor. The breathtaking gap between a humming animated logo and the swift jolt of multi-colored video motion indicating yet another carnival of potential. You have the strength and the means and that means the strength to read of Programme 4.

The brainchild of Rachel Lichtman, whose talent and eye/ear for aesthetics knows no bounds, Programme 4 is the latest of her projects to re-imagine a hyper-real experience of a both lived-through and novelty traverse through a realm that I both love and know I can never truly reach.

I suppose on one level you could call it a television-themed sketch comedy video – that might get you through the woods. There are numerous examples of this, some of them running on television as we speak. Because of their wide-appeal goals and advertisers, these shows are often yoked and constantly dancing a line between acceptable, palatable and commerce-safe.

There were exceptions, which I encountered in my teens. Movies such as The Groove Tube and Tunnel Vision had terrible theatrical releases but lived a longer time on cable television movie channels hungry for cheap product to provide, and so I saw them there. But when I saw them, they simply lived among every other piece of Hollywood material that had taken the lonesome journey to Movie Dump Gehenna, exploitative action pictures and burnished romantic dramas and aluminum-foil science fiction epics. For me, watching whatever came out of the box, seeing things shift to a surreal, almost terrifying width and breadth of vicious parody or disturbed almost-plausible presentations, offered with a serious face, was mind-blowing. These films were meant to be lightly bundled joke skits but, unhooked from the actual limits of mainstream entertainment and carefully following the beats and cadence of all of it, was not something I was prepared for. As the phrase goes, I was warped.

You’ll find this realm of humor all over, once you solidly grab a thread of it and pull. Firesign Theater. The Yes Men. For a moment of safety, the Airplane! movie. Waterfalls of giddy surreality and dead-serious delivery, punctuated with deader-serious observation.

Programme 4, then, is the newest experience in a long-standing but often obscure branch of comedy, material which doesn’t pre-chew its messages and makes you find more and more references and consequences amongst its stacks. There are at least a half-dozen bits of iconography and reference in this deodorant advertisement parody, and you don’t need them all to land with you, although they’ll land over time as your life continues and you see the tropes it slapped around with such ease and skill.

Speaking of skill; this is Lichtman’s craft, and project, and has been years of work to put together. Graphics, sound, and scripts are woven together seamlessly. Any moments that go over or under your head are quickly overtaken by the next calvacade of perfection-honed bon vivant presentation. In the version that I saw (and the versions apparently change) there were a thousand sparkles in the champagne glass, all under a couple hours. You go from disbelief that this amount of effort was expended, to expecting each new transition to wow you, to familiar disbelief as it never stops.

At least, you do if you’re of that set of friends.

Programme 4 has a website to track its progression and affiliated projects. If this is all old news to you, I am sorry, and if it’s brand-new excitement to look forward to, you’re very welcome.

Life, it appears, still has one more title card, one more mixed-media epiphany around the corner.

Programme 4 is, I’m happy to say, the latest of them for me. I hope it is for you too.

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