" 'Sup, my well-read ballers?"
Classical Literature. Original Gangster.Yo yo yo, what up, dawg? This week, we gettin' up in this crib with Thug Notes, by Sparky Sweets, PhD.
A collaboration between comedian Greg Edwards (playing Dr Sweets), Napkin Note Productions (Jared Bauer and Jacob Salamon) and researcher Joseph Salvaggio, Thug Notes is a weekly Web Video series. Each five-minute episode is devoted to a brief summary and analysis of a particular work of Western literature as explained by a Soul Brotha and punctuated by deliberately unpolished illustrations. The result is half irreverent, half educational, and completely hilarious.
Books analyzed by Thug Notes include:
- 50 Shades of Grey
- Nineteen Eighty-Four
- A Clockwork Orange
- A Separate Peace
- All Quiet on the Western Front
- Alice in Wonderland
- American Psycho
- Animal Farm
- At the Mountains of Madness
- Brave New World
- Beowulf
- Beloved
- The Brothers Karamazov
- Catch-22
- The Catcher in the Rye
- The Crucible
- The Color Purple
- Don Quixote
- Dracula
- Dune
- Inferno
- The Epic of Gilgamesh
- Oedipus the King
...and many more.
Thug Notes is available for viewing on its official site
or on its Youtube channel.
This series contains examples of:
- April Fools' Day: On April 1st 2014, the channel posted an episode covering Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. It turned out to actually be analyzing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
- Big "WHAT?!": His reaction to the huge Continuity Snarl at the end of The Epic of Gilgamesh.
- Catchphrase:
- "Nah, blood!"
- "Damn!"
- "Cold-blooded!"
- "Peep this motif, son."
- "He/she dead."
- "Street justice!"
- "Peace!"
- "[Character] chucks deuces outta there."
- Dramatic Irony: Oedipus the King begins with Sparky wishing us a happy Valentine's Day and that today we're going to look for some motherf(bleep)in' truth, completely unaware of the big twist.Sparky: His mama! Ughhhhhhh! An' his kids are his brothers and sisters! Aw man, that's nasty, man! Disgustin'!
- Eye Pop: The preferred method of showing surprise in the illustrations.
- Eye Take: Commonly seen in the episodes, especially when the work being analysed moves into disturbing territory, and occasionally caught on the video thumbnails.
- I'm Not a Doctor of Philosophy, but I Play One on YouTube: While the character of Sparky Sweets has a PhD in Classics, this doesn't carry over to the actual crew. Joseph does have a master's in the subject, though.
- Incredibly Lame Pun: "So Don Quixote gets up on his horse, and Sancho gets up on his ass."
- Jive Turkey: The entire premise of this series is the analysis of (predominantly) famous works of Western literature in a style that's far, far from normal academic discourse.
- Done deliberately, as the original intent was to Lampshade how literary analysis doesn't have to use high academia to be valid discourse.
- "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: Sweets often cites specific pages where something he seemingly exaggerates turns out to be an actual thing in the text, such as the descriptions of Nurse Ratchet's breasts in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
- Public Domain Soundtrack: The first few episodes aside, most episodes open with Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, except the Halloween episode (Frankenstein), which opens with Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.
- Running Gag: Sweets saying "Damn" whenever a depressing plot point is described.
- Sophisticated as Hell: In general, the idea of delivering literary analysis in slang, and this juxtaposition is most pronounced when Sweets quotes from either the original text or other sources - and by necessity, jumps back and forth between slang and regular English.
- Soul Brotha: Sparky is a stereotypical one - if the Jive Turkey didn't clue you off, the do-rags and gold chains probably should.
- Sound-Effect Bleep: The bleep sees limited use, usually for "F***" and "S***" - lesser words like "bitches" and "ass" are routinely left uncensored. When the N word is suitable for its historic content (To Kill A Mocking Bird), it would be left alone.
- Stylistic Suck: Most of the characters in the videos, are portrayed as stick-figures with the faces of public domain photos or photos from movies, copypasted onto them.
- Subverted by the provided analysis, which is always well-researched and quite on-point.
