Topic: Possible Idea: Shorts Tournaments for Various Comedians

[Umbrella Sam]

Wanted to get some thoughts here. I posted in another thread that I recently got into the channel Tastes Like Music and I’ve been particularly taken by their March Badness series, where they do March Madness style brackets to decide what the worst album/song of all time is, talking in detail on why they made the pick they did. That got me to thinking about the old shorts tournaments we had here and wondering if anyone would be interested in taking part in something like that again. Even if we don’t get a ton of participants, I still think it would be interesting to kind of present our arguments in a similar way to March Badness to make up for the lack of participation, almost kind of like a combination of the Shorts Tournament/Master Debates that were on this site. It doesn’t have to be super in detail, you can decide how much you want to argue for your favorite shorts, I just kind of thought it could be a fun way to bring some variety. My idea was to do a bracket for all the Keaton shorts first and then maybe we could try different brackets for different comedians as we go along, maybe do something for Langdon once we finish that run, something for Lloyd, etc. Just kind of throwing ideas out here. Let me know what you guys think.

[metaldams]

For the Keaton shorts, would you do just the silents or include just the silents or include the Educational, Columbias and maybe even the Arbuckles?  Just do it, I’ll see the format in the flesh and then chip in.  Maybe we can do this with the Stooges at some point too if it’s not too repetitive based on what we’ve done in the past.

But yeah, I’m open for any new ideas for this board.

[Paul Pain]

Go for it.  I'm always game for a shorts tournament!

[Umbrella Sam]

For the Keaton shorts, would you do just the silents or include just the silents or include the Educational, Columbias and maybe even the Arbuckles?

This was part of the reason I decided to get some thoughts, as I wasn’t entirely sure how I wanted to proceed with this. I was thinking along the lines of having separate tournaments for the silent shorts and the sound shorts, as it seems obvious to me that the silents would beat the sound shorts anyway, and I like the idea of crowning a winner from both eras. If I do the silent shorts and the Arbuckles together in one tournament, then it actually works out to an even 32, and I think I could manage to get to that number with a “sound Keaton” tournament if I included some independents and BUSTER KEATON SHOW episodes.