Creator / Tin Can Brothers

L-R: Brian Rosenthal, Corey Lubowich, Joey Richter

The Tin Can Brothers are a theatre, sketch comedy and Web Video troupe originally based in Chicago, now based in Los Angeles, founded in 2014 by members of Team Starkid Brian Rosenthal, Corey Lubowich and Joey Richter. Their name is an in-joke about how the creators used to live in the same apartment and could communicate by Tin-Can Telephone, with tongue-in-cheek Retraux branding about how they've been performing since 1933.

TCB are known for their many collaborations, both one-off Special Guests and long-term partnerships. They and Team Starkid are Friendly Fandoms, referring to themselves as a Starkid "sister-in-law troupe", sharing much of the same Production Posse, including Starkid company owner Nick Lang himself acting in their most recent production, Wayward Guide for the Untrained Eye. They're also Friendly Fandoms with Shipwrecked Comedy, to the point where they staged a multimedia crossover event as a prank on their fans about the "falling out" between the two troupes, the Bookfarters Saga.

They've become a very eclectic and prolific group, starting off making YouTube sketches, growing into making short-length films and stage shows, and gaining a lot of attention for their debut full-length stage musical Spies Are Forever. Their current flagship work is the multimedia Web Video and Podcast project Wayward Guide for the Untrained Eye, which is a bit of a Massive Multiplayer Crossover of performers from the whole history of Team Starkid, Shipwrecked Comedy and Tin Can Bros themselves.

The Tin Can Brothers' work includes:

• Their YouTube sketch comedy channel
• Choose Our Destiny, an interactive improv show created for Project Alpha (a collaboration between Nerdist and Geek & Sundry)
• Spies Are Forever, a musical pastiche of James Bond in the style of Team Starkid
• The Solve-It Squad Returns!, a one-act stage play parody of Scooby-Doo
• The Solve-It Squad: Back in Biz, a Zoom script reading of four episodes of an imaginary animated series of The Solve-It Squad
• This Could Be On Broadway, a staged concert reading about high school theatre kids
• Flop Stoppers, a short movie-musical about the world of fan outrage over a bad Comic-Book Adaptation
• Idle Worship, a short film about the world of YouTube influencers
• We Didn't Plan to Kill Our Guest, an interactive stage show masquerading as a Talk Show where their Special Guest tragically dies halfway through the performance
• The Can-To-Can Podcast, a behind-the-scenes interview series with TCB's friends and collaborators
• Garbage Musicals, a side channel for standalone animated Music Videos of satirical songs about pop culture
• The Bookfarters Saga (a Feud Episode crossover with Shipwrecked Comedy)
• Wayward Guide for the Untrained Eye, a multimedia Web Video and Podcast experience loosely based on the Parlor Game Werewolf (1997)

The Tin Can Brothers and their work contain examples of:

• Actor Allusion: Neither Joey Richter nor Brian Rosenthal are gay in real life and obviously they've never been a couple, but the characters of Kyle and Brendan in Ex-Vloggers are very loosely based on them; Brendan (played by Joey) is the one who's more interested in acting and has ambitions to break out of vlogging into "real" show business, while Kyle (played by Brian) is the one who edits all their videos and is more of a tech geek. (In Real Life Joey is the more accomplished actor with more mainstream credits, like his roles on Jessie and Henry Danger, while Brian's day job is as a professional video editor.) The fact that one of Brendan's complaints is his resentment of Kyle putting personal stuff about him in the videos he doesn't want online reads, in hindsight, like it might be inspired by Joey and Lauren Lopez's decision to avoid openly announcing they were dating or living together for several years until they finally announced their engagement in 2020.
• Adam Westing: The old-school TCB sketches are an exaggerated version of Joey, Brian and Corey when they were younger, keeping up the conceit that they're three roommates who live with each other (which hasn't been true in Real Life for years).
• Ambiguous Ending: Ep. 4 of Ex-Vloggers was for several years the last freely viewable episode, showing Brendan and Kyle announcing big changes at their channel at the end of their video, making you think they're going to defy Julian and publicly break up, only to balk at the last minute and change it to an announcement they're updating on Tuesdays rather than Thursdays. (The real ending was originally paid content only until it was finally released for free in 2020, showing that Kyle decides he's had enough after Brendan finally moves out and makes and uploads a video announcing the breakup unilaterally.)
• Analogy Backfire: In Ex-Vloggers when Julian is trying to convince Kyle and Brendan not to break up he first compares them to Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez (who at the time were in a notoriously stormy relationship where they'd broken up several times in the past few years), then to The Jonas Brothers (who had broken up as a musical act two years prior, and who were never in a romantic relationship because there were three of them and they were brothers), before finally settling on Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, which, while the two of them indeed were and are still together, is still far from a flattering comparison.
  • This became Hilarious in Hindsight with Kim and Kanye's notoriously stormy marriage finally ending in divorce in 2021.
• Attractive Bent-Gender: Brian makes a surprisingly convincing Scarlett O'Hara in "Southern Hospitality".
• Audience Participation: Several of their shows have involved this. Choose Our Destiny mimics a live improv show by letting viewers vote on what direction the show will take as it progresses, several of the YouTube sketches have a joke fan voting Stinger, and We Didn't Mean to Kill Our Guest had social media polls on Twitter letting fans decide details of each show in advance, including each guest's means of death.
• Author Appeal: TCB's favorite subjects run the gamut of typical nerd obsessions, but with a special focus on Comic Books and Tabletop Games.
• Awful Wedded Life: Kyle and Brendan in Ex-Vloggers aren't married (gay marriage was legalized by Obergefell v. Hodges a few months before the first video came out) but their interactions very much reflect this trope Played Straight and Played for Drama.
• Bad to the Bone: In lieu of classy Classical Music, episode 3 of Spilled Milk goes for the most hackneyed choice available for a melancholy Lost Love Montage, Gary Jules' cover of "Mad World" from Donnie Darko.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • The "Dick Pics" two-parter is based on this — the first video is an (obviously joking) promise to release dick pics to their subscribers once they hit 10,000 subs, followed by a whole video of them desperately trying to get out of it.
  • "Holiday Fireplace Video For Your Abode" calls itself a "fireplace video", making you think it's just a video of a fireplace like the famous Yule Log video, only for you to find out it's a P.O.V. Cam from the perspective of the fireplace, making you watch the TCBs warm their hands at your face for ten minutes (while improvising a hilariously disturbing conversation about how they're in a post-apocalyptic Endless Winter where humans have ceded the position of dominant species to sapient bears).
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Tons of the sketches are built on this, as is the whole Bookfarters Saga.
• Breakthrough Hit: Spies Are Forever was their initial one, with Wayward Guide being a new level of success for them.
  • They've pointed out that "The HOT Breakup" is by far their most popular short-form sketch video (with over 100,000 views while most of their videos only have 20-30k), largely because of Actor Shipping between Joey Richter and Lauren Lopez.
• Breakup Breakout: There was never an actual "breakup" between Team Starkid and TCB — Joey Richter continues to be one of Starkid's most recognizable actors and Corey Lubowich continues to be one of Starkid's biggest behind-the-scenes members — but Brian (who hasn't acted in a Starkid production since A Very Potter Senior Year in 2012) and Corey have gotten a lot more recognition among fans since TCB was created. The year 2020 was notable for TCB actually achieving more visibility than Starkid for the first time, with Wayward Guide showing up on the KTLA-5 local news as one of the biggest Web Video projects to come out during the COVID-19 Pandemic (while Starkid's own plans for the 2020 season had to be shelved as a result).
• Call-Back: TCB's hiatus video in 2014 made use of Nick Lang's Barack Obama impression from Holy Musical B@man!.
• Celebrity Paradox: "The Entourage Paradox" is a video about Joey Richter geeking out over this concept, based on one of the most famous meta Set Behind the Scenes shows to invoke this (Entourage).
• Cerebus Syndrome: Ex-Vloggers in 2015 was the Tin Can Brothers' first foray into dramatic storytelling rather than comedy sketches — to a lot of viewers' surprise, while there's some Black Comedy jokes (mainly involving Hilarious in Hindsight observations of what Kyle and Brendan must be really thinking while trying to pretend to be a Sickeningly Sweethearts couple) it really is drama, not Dramedy, and by the end of it is a gut-wrenching tragedy.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Most of the meta TCB sketches involve portraying themselves as this against a Special Guest who acts as the Straight Man, though quite a few reverse this. The Bookfarters Saga was about TCB and Shipwrecked trying to do this to each other.
• Copiously Credited Creator: All of the TCBs share the writer/producer credits on most of their videos, usually with one or more of them directing (usually Corey) and acting (usually Joey and Brian).
• Corpsing: A couple of sketches leave this in, and allow the sketch to just dissolve into an "Everybody Laughs" Ending because the premise was too silly to keep up.
• Creator In-Joke: "Fucked Up FRIENDS Opening Season 1" is an in-joke the TCBs had going back to college with Darren Criss about trolling a karaoke bar by singing only the first line of a song over and over again, which was referenced again in the Starkid 10niversary Livestream.
• Cursed with Awesome: "Midas Touched PSA" is about King Midas getting over the angst of his famous curse and deciding its destructive effects are actually pretty awesome.
• Deal with the Devil: The sketch "Deal With the Devil" (Exactly What It Says on the Tin), an early appearance of Joey playing a Satanic Archetype.
• Fan Community Nicknames: In-universe, Kyle and Brendan address their fans as "Daves", a name that gets a Cerebus Retcon in a bonus video where we find out the original "Dave" was their friend/lover who originally introduced them and then tragically died.
• Flanderization: The Bookfarters Saga plays up the perception that Shipwrecked Comedy specializes in highbrow humor about classic literature while Tin Can Brothers specializes in lowbrow pop-culture humor and fart jokes, pointing to their live sketch "Breathe Me: A Tale of Two Farts" from five years ago as an example. While TCB does have plenty of moments of immature humor, the "Darn Tootin'" video from The Bookfarters Saga is, in fact, the first actual fart joke they've done since that sketch.
• Freak Out: "Buffering" ends up being just a montage of Joey and Brian portraying escalating levels of this in response to a lagging Internet connection while trying to watch a movie, ending in them trying to kill each other and themselves and burn down the apartment.
• Freudian Slip: The "Whisper Challenge" on Ep. 3 of Ex-Vloggers is designed to engineer this from the person wearing the headphones, which ends up as another way Kyle and Brendan further their Passive-Aggressive Kombat.
• Genre Roulette: The idea of the Spilled Milk series is taking a perfectly mundane event, one of the roommates spilling a glass of milk, and Switching P.O.V. to have each of the roommates react to it in a different genre:
  • The first roommate, Josh Berkowitz, simply tries to clean up the spill without any supplies, in the style of a pretentious indie film making an Existential Horror melodrama out of a mundane event via creative camera angles and Classical Music.
  • Corey goes to buy more paper towels, only to end up in a corny Chop Sockey Martial Arts Movie trying to retrieve the last roll in the store from Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy Curt Mega.
  • Brian goes to replace the spilled milk, only to end up in a Meet Cute with a girl in the dairy aisle that leads to a whirlwind romance that then ends up as a maudlin "cancer movie" about him nursing her through her long decline and tragic death.
  • Joey, who unfortunately made the decision to dose himself with shrooms shortly before the milk spilled, goes off to buy a new glass, which leads to a surreal fantasy adventure a la Alice in Wonderland where a magical gnome (played by Dylan Saunders) leads him on some kind of Vision Quest populated by anthropomorphic animals.
• Good Cop/Bad Cop: The Copposites sketch series is one enormous Overly Long Gag about this trope.
• Hilarious Outtakes: TCB published a bunch of behind-the-scenes footage including blooper reels on their TCB+ subscription service, and after discontinuing it released most of it on YouTube for free.
• Ho Yay: There's a lot of it specifically around Joey and Brian, who co-star in a lot of sketches that play with this; Ex-Vloggers was a decision to take this and run with it smack-dab into a brick wall of Cerebus Syndrome.
• In-Universe Camera: Several sketches openly acknowledge Corey as the one holding the camera and filming Joey and Brian; The Reveal of Joey holding the camera and interviewing Ashley is the climax of Idle Worship.
• Inner Monologue: "Speak Your Mind" is a parody of this trope, starting off with giving one to two people stuck in a meandering conversation, then slowly giving one to every object in the apartment.
• Interclass Friendship: An early series of sketches about "Your Rich Friend" star Kevin McCarthy as "Kevin", the Tin Can Brothers' absurdly rich Jerkass friend.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Project Alpha, the website for which Choose Our Destiny was created, is now defunct and TCB don't own the rights to post it on their own channel, so the only way to watch it now is as bootlegs fans circulate.
• Kent Brockman News: The "Tin Can Brothers News Network".
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: "Why Do We Do Daylight Savings?" is a joke about the Tin Can Bros trying to get into the YouTube "explainer video" genre despite having none of the relevant education to do so.
• Large Ham: Everyone in Spilled Milk is this, albeit in different genres. Ex-Vloggers makes a joke out of how Julian, Kyle and Brendan's manager, is this to an over-the-top degree (and is also played by a fourteen-year-old boy) while Kyle and Brendan are Played Straight down-to-earth characters.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: The argument over what qualifies as one is the theme of "Spoiler Alert".
• Lost Episode: "Copposites 4: Requiem", which was previously available (along with a few behind-the-scenes videos) on the now-defunct subscription service TCB+. (The finale of Ex-Vloggers was made available as a $1 purchase on the pay-per-video service that replaced it, but not Copposites.)
• Manchild: The TCBs poke fun at themselves for being this in multiple videos, but "Neverland Vlog" is one long joke about Millennial "influencer" culture being this (with Peter Pan reimagined as a YouTube personality).
• Masculine–Feminine Gay Couple: Kyle and Brendan in Ex-Vloggers. It's somewhat downplayed, since by most standards both Kyle and Brendan are Straight Gay, but Brendan is slightly more Camp Gay than Kyle, is the one who's more emotionally demonstrative and openly sensitive about being portrayed in a bad light on camera, and is the one who has the slightly more "feminine" interest of acting as opposed to Kyle's "masculine" skills of doing the editing and tech side of their job. Their first big fight is a stereotypically masculine-vs-feminine one where Brendan is nagging Kyle about household chores while he's trying to finish working on a video, which leads to an explosion about how Brendan is the one trying to have difficult conversations while Kyle avoids them. Joey Richter's normal shaggy haircut gets played as Brendan being a Long-Haired Pretty Boy, and Kyle's gray beanie hat marks him as the drab, less flamboyant one. (There's also a few things that play against this, like how Brendan is very much the bigger and taller one, and there's a hint at one point that he might actually be bisexual.)
• No Nudity Taboo: "LA Halloween" exaggerates the common observation of LA being a No Dress Code city by having everyone show up to a Halloween party with exposed genitals.
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations: The Tin Can Interview Series has Emily Hanley mistakenly think she's at a date instead of a job interview, followed by an interview with Mary Kate Wiles which does the reverse, misleading her into thinking she's at a job interview instead of a date.
• One-Steve Limit: Played with in Ex-Vloggers, where one of the other YouTubers Kyle and Brendan work with — whom Kyle not-very-subtly suspects Brendan likes more than him — is named "Brandon".
• Pants-Free: Multiple sketches make a punchline of the Brothers filming themselves from the waist up and wearing only their boxer shorts below while hanging out at home.
• Passive-Aggressive Kombat: Ex-Vloggers has a lot of this, in extremely uncomfortable stretches of their supposedly cutesy vlogs.
• Phoneaholic Teenager: The very first TCB sketch is about Joey experiencing drug-like withdrawal symptoms upon being briefly separated from his phone.
• Plot Hole: "The Trouble With Continuity" is a meta sketch about giving up on trying to prevent these in the editing process.
• Pointy-Haired Boss: Julian, Kyle and Brendan's manager in Ep. 4 of Ex-Vloggers (played by Ty Simpkins) who in one of the series' funnier moments turns out to be a bratty teenager who tyrannically orders around two men twice his age that if they ruin their channel's brand by publicly breaking up he will destroy their careers.
• Portmanteau Couple Name: "Kydan," for Kyle and Brendan of Ex-Vloggers.
• Production Posse: The TCB share a roster of LA-based actors with Team Starkid and Shipwrecked Comedy who recur in most of their projects. As with most other facts about the Tin Can Brothers, they ended up doing a meta sketch series about doing job interviews for one of their contacts in LA (Ashley Skidmore, Emily Hanley, Mary Kate Wiles, and Carlos Valdes) to become the "fourth Tin Can Brother". (Three out of four of these would, of course, have been the the first Tin Can Sister.)
  • The Bookfarters Saga Played for Laughs the idea of Lauren Lopez as a "neutral party" given her common appearances in both troupes' productions (while downplaying the fact that she was in the Tin Can Brothers' livestream at Joey's apartment because she is, in fact, Joey's girlfriend.)
  • For productions that involve music, TCB has continued to collaborate with TalkFine, the musical duo consisting of Clark Baxtresser and Pierce Siebers that provided music for Team Starkid from 2009-17, including on Wayward Guide in 2020 (after Starkid controversially switched to songwriter Jeff Blim and music director Matt Dahan to produce the Hatchetfield series). They've also drawn on other former Starkid collaborators Nick Gage (the songwriter for Holy Musical B@man!) to write the Theme Tune for The Solve-It Squad Returns!, and Chuck Criss (Darren Criss' brother who provided music for "pre-Starkid" production Little White Lie) to write the Theme Tune for Wayward Guide for the Untrained Eye.
  • The "Disney Domination" video reunites the team that did Team Starkid's pastiche of classic Disney music, Twisted, lyricist Kaley McMahon and composer A.J. Holmes.
  • They've also consistently hired veteran Starkid costume designer June Saito to do costumes for their stage shows.
• Prop Recycling: There's a Satan mask that shows up repeatedly in different contexts.
• Public Domain Soundtrack: TCB have used this in a number of sketches, like Spilled Milk using Bach's Prelude in C and "Habanera" from Bizet's Carmen as a soundtrack for Episode 1's Le Film Artistique, and using "Hall of the Mountain King" from Peer Gynt as a soundtrack for Episode 4's Mushroom Samba.
  • Aside from the use of actual Classical Music, TCB also uses a lot of CC-licensed music from Kevin McLeod.
• Real-Life Relative: "The Houseguest" is a rare onscreen appearance of Joey Richter's actual parents playing themselves.
• Reality Subtext: Joey Richter and Lauren Lopez have played their real-life Creator Couple status low-key up until their engagement in 2020, which didn't stop them from doing a ridiculously goofy sketch ("The HOT Breakup") about the two of them breaking up.
  • The "Personality Caricatures" sketch is very heavy on this.
• Retraux: TCB's signature theming is pretending to be from the 1930s, with old-timey fonts, signage and handlebar mustaches.
• Really Dead Montage: Did a tongue-in-cheek one the first time their schedule went on hiatus.
• Recycled Set: The first Tin Can Brothers live show, Alive! On Stage!, took place on the same stage as The Trail to Oregon!, and the scenery from TTO is visible in the recordings.
  • "Dick Pics" lampshades how they've used the same apartment as a set so often that viewers "know every inch of that place by now".
• Retroactive Legacy: The whole joke of "Captain's Vlog #5: Captain Hook's Chubby Bunny Challenge", the only actually produced episode of an imaginary ongoing vlog of Captain Hook's adventures.
  • Ex-Vloggers starts In Medias Res of Kyle and Brendan's apparently long and fruitful — up till now — vlogging career.
• Running Gag: The "Chubby Bunnies Challenge" (to fill your mouth with as many marshmallows as possible and then say the phrase "Chubby Bunnies") was a behind-the-scenes gag on the Team Starkid SPACE Tour, which gets referenced in "Captain's Vlog" and again in Ep. 1 of Ex-Vloggers.
• Seinfeldian Conversation: The in-universe vlog posts in Ex-Vloggers are mostly Kyle and Brendan playing goofy party games as a conversation starter intended to spark this. Subverted, in that their on-camera convos end up containing a lot of subtext about the very serious issues their relationship is going through.
• Self-Deprecation: A lot of their sketches feature a heavy amount of this, especially from Joey Richter poking fun at himself for being a Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond "diva" of Web Video.
• Set Behind the Scenes: Ex-Vloggers is a sketch series about a fictional lifestyle vlog channel called Boys Will Be Boys: Our Life In LA (with "Boys Will Be Boys" also the title of the first episode), run by trendy gay couple Kyle and Brendan whose branding as Sickeningly Sweethearts hides the Dark Secret that they've hated each other for a long time now and are very close to permanently breaking up. The series does a lot of Painting the Medium, with the vlog posts themselves shot with bright, saturated lighting, peppy Background Music and the stereotypical Jump Cuts indicating they've been heavily edited, while the behind-the-scenes footage consists of long, unbroken takes with a handheld camera shot in only natural ambient light and no music (Dogme '95-style) to convey an unedited reality.
• Shout-Out: "Deal With the Devil" has Brian's character's Overly Long Name be that of former Team Starkid member "Nicholas Joseph Strauss-Matathia".
  • They also keep up the Starkid in-joke of using "Clark Baxtresser" as the name for a hot guy, seen or unseen.
• Sickeningly Sweethearts: Brendan and Kyle of Ex-Vloggers. Subverted hard, given that the premise is that their relationship is on the rocks behind the scenes.
• Signature Headgear: Kyle's gray beanie in Ex-Vloggers, which he's never seen without until the last episode. It turns out that Brendan originally bought it, and his last Kick the Dog moment in their breakup is demanding Kyle give it back to him.
• Social Media Is Bad: The theme of a lot of their work, as Self-Deprecation since they themselves are YouTube personalities and influencers. Not only is their very first video about phone addiction, the fakeness and lies around famous social media personalities is the theme of both Ex-Vloggers and Idle Worship.
• Special Effects Failure: Possibly an intentional one in LA Halloween; the Pixellation hiding everyone's genitals is obviously fake (it's a static image covering them up that doesn't change when a differently colored object moves into the "pixellated" region) and, in the case of Devin Lytle, doesn't at all hide the straps of the bra she's obviously actually wearing.
• Special Guest: "Personality Caricatures" and "DIY Kidnapping" both feature satirical crossovers with non-comedy YouTubers as Darker and Edgier versions of themselves, sketch artist Mary Doodles and lifestyle vlogger Jill Cimorelli.
  • There's a meta version in Ep. 3 of Ex-Vloggers where Jon Cozart shows up As Himself as the guest on Kyle and Brendan's Show Within a Show, who ends up the awkward Third Wheel to their barely-restrained couple drama.
• Stylistic Suck: Garbage Musicals is so named because it's presented in intentionally low-budget, quickly-done South Park-style animation.
• The Tag: Most of the sketches have one, set to the tune of the Tin Can Brothers' theme song, with the actors out of character exhorting the viewers to like, subscribe and vote in a (usually fictional) social media poll. Notable because in Ex-Vloggers these are still in-character with Kyle and Brendan still talking about their fictitious channel, continuing to give Character Development and plot points.
• Take That!: Flop Stoppers was a very scathing one at both big-budget comic-book adaptations and overzealous Fan Dumb backlash at them — with the song "Disney Domination" from Garbage Musicals being an even harsher one aimed at Disney specifically.
  • Idle Worship is one at YouTube influencer culture.
• Team Pet: Joey Richter and Lauren Lopez's pet dog Diane, who's shown up as a frequent livestream guest, starred in her own sketch and is in the cast of Wayward Guide as the Mayor of Connor Creek. You can even buy a commemorative bobblehead of her.
• Theme Tune: TCB has one for their troupe as a whole that plays after their older sketches, a jazzy Scatting piece by Jack Stratton.
• Those Two Guys: A lot of sketches have Joey and Brian play this (with Corey showing up less often on-camera).
• Troubled Production: After Project Alpha shuttered, the TCBs and Ashley Skidmore revealed on an episode of Can-to-Can that the audience voting technology on Choose Our Destiny was meant to be far more sophisticated and unobtrusive than it actually was (letting fans vote on continuously updated monitors in real time rather than having to wait for the final results of a timed poll) and the clunky way it was actually implemented made it something more to work around than an integral part of the show.
• Underage Casting: Julian in Ex-Vloggers is a joke about the low average age of movers and shakers in the influencer world, with Kyle and Brendan's manager/boss being played by Ty Simpkins, who was literally only fourteen years old.
• Visual Pun: A number of their sketches are about visualizing an Incredibly Lame Pun, like "Fool's Errand" and "Exercise Your Demons".