Creator / Joel Haver

Joel Haver is a filmmaker and animator best known for his uniquely styled YouTube sketches that parody common tropes in popular media. Using tried-and-true Rotoscoping techniques combined with modern editing software, namely Adobe Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop and EbSynth, Haver's animated videos replicate realistic human actions in a cartoony graphical style for comedic effect. Beyond his animation projects, Haver has directed and performed in several live-action films and short skits.

Several of Haver's animated sketches have loose continuity with each other, with some apparently set in a Shared Universe. The most famous of these is the Playing an RPG series, which follows an eager but inept protagonist's misadventures in a generic High Fantasy RPG setting.

In January 2024, Haver announced that he would be creating one feature-length film for each month of the year. The films are:

2024 Films

• The Hero's Journey aka My Life aka The Caleb Johnston Story (I'm Caleb): Caleb made this while going through some stuff. (January 26th, 2024)
• Anyone Else But Me: A man takes an acting exercise too far and must deal with the consequences. (March 1st, 2024)
• The Text: A text becomes the focal point for the stragglers the day after a party.

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The works of Joel Haver contain examples of:

• Beat Without a "But": "This Box Could Change Your Life Forever" is an advertisement for Box Of Snakes, and mentions a limited-time offer to get Snakes To Go with your order completely free. One customer tries (and fails) to shill for Snakes To Go:
  Testimonial: Look at it this way: Snakes To Go is not necessarily less annoying than Box Of Snakes but... [Awkward pause. Cut to new scene.]
• Boss-Arena Idiocy: In "When The Controller Dies From An NPC's Perspective", the Big Bad shows his henchmen the warehouse he planned to have a sniper duel with the hero in. His henchmen point out that all three of his intended sniping points have chandeliers hanging above them that could be easily shot down and dropped onto him.
• Cool Old Guy: Joel's dad, Jack, starred in many of his videos and demonstrated a similarly offbeat sense of humour to his son. He tragically passed away in December 2019.
• Corpsing: Happens in many, many videos. Sometimes the sketch ends with the actors breaking character to laugh, sometimes scenes in the middle of the sketch end with the actors laughing, and sometimes the laughter is included as a post-credits Stinger. The video "reunited" is almost nothing but corpsing, as Trent can barely say a full sentence without cracking up at something. Halfway through, we see what he's laughing at: Joel is wearing giant Spongebob Squarepants eyes over his own.
• Deconstruction: Just about every video of Joel's deconstructs at least one tired trope.
• Erudite Orangutan: Played for Laughs in "Lanky Kong listens to DK Rap for the first time." Lanky Kong, an orangutan who is an inverted example in his home series, gets Adaptational Intelligence here, acting more like a normal, reasonable person. He is deeply insulted that his section in "The DK Rap" makes him look like an idiot while praising the other Kongs. Notably, he speaks perfect English, while Donkey Kong, a gorilla, speaks in ape sounds like all the Kongs do in the games. Lanky also mentions that he works in IT.
• Fantasy-Forbidding Father: One video has a young bear nervously confess to his dad that he wants to pursue musical theatre, and his dad isn't having it, instead wanting him to stay in the family business of wiping their butts. The mom is gentler but agrees with the dad.
• First-Step Fixation: In "How bad do you want it?" Dave is trying to pass a DVD to Brian, but neither of them wants to leave their car, and they just can't figure out how to park so their driver-side windows are close enough to reach. Eventually Dave tries throwing the DVD to Brian, but it lands short. Dave finally gets out of his car to retrieve the DVD, and winds up just a few steps away from Brian's door—then he gets back into his car, so he can try throwing it again.
• "Freaky Friday" Flip: In "Freaky Friday but the characters learn the lesson as quickly as the audience", two friends deduce that the universe body-swapped them because they were arguing about their inability to walk in each other's shoes, and then they are promptly switched back.
• Forced Meme: The time he tried to make "insano style" a worldwide catchphrase.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: The subtext of "When you laugh at an inside joke that you're not a part of". The three friends purposefully exclude their fourth friend from events, then viciously mock his attempts to be included.
• Gassy Gastronomy: He subverts this in "We Ate BEANS to Make Us FART?!?" A trio of obnoxious YouTubers announce their intention to eat baked beans and film themselves farting. After eating, they sit around for an awkwardly long time waiting for the beans to kick in—and then finally notice that they accidentally bought "No Fart" Beans. The rest of the video is Cringe Comedy as the other two guys tear way too hard into the guy who bought the beans.
• Heroic Comedic Sociopath: Jacob goes around viciously attacking anyone who even resembles an enemy, whether they have a health bar or not. The consequences of his shoot-first tendencies come back to bite him in the ass several times.
• His Own Worst Enemy: Jacob from the RPG series doesn't realise that enemy health bars only represent who is an enemy to themselves, not to others, illustrated by Drayloth the Giant's health bar disappearing after he is given a self-esteem boost. Jacob then looks up to see that he has a health bar himself and doesn't react well. We later see Drayloth giving helpful advice to other "enemies".
• Hobbes Was Right: The Galactic Emperor has recently taken over a despotic intergalactic regime, yet is actually an incredibly chill, reasonable guy who dismisses traditional "evil emperor" tropes like randomly destroying planets as ridiculous wastes of time, makes peace with his enemies in the Rebel faction, and implements reforms to oppressive galactic laws.
• Implausible Deniability: "When you bump into your enemy in public" was released April 9, 2020, just as most of the USA was enacting quarantines over the pandemic. The two actors, Joel and Patrick, interrupt the video with some out-of-character commentary, reassuring audiences that they did not break quarantine just to film a silly video in public, and in fact this is actually a short they filmed two years ago. As the video continues, the characters make increasingly specific references to 2020 pop culture (like name-dropping Tiger King) and COVID-19 social distancing guidelines ("Please stay back. You have to. It's the law right now, it's literally the law.")—all the while, Joel and Patrick awkwardly insist these references aren't what they seem, and that they really truly did film this video back in 2018.
• Improv: Joel almost never works from a script. The actors in any given video just come up with a vague premise for the sketch beforehand, then make everything else up as they go.
• In-Joke: Takes a nasty turn in "When you laugh at an inside joke that you're not a part of". Three guys at the poker table laugh at an inside joke—then when the fourth guy laughs along, even though he wasn't there for the joke's original context, they go silent and ask him why he's laughing. They interrogate him so hard he winds up begging for death by the video's end.
• Medium Awareness: Played for Horror / Drama in "when a scene starts with a joke ending", in which characters display awareness of the scenes ending, their roles, and the script itself, all while lamenting or accepting their utter powerlessness.
• No Ending: "when a scene starts with a joke ending" ends with Jim setting down the box and abruptly ending the film.
• "Not Illegal" Justification: * In "Joker's Most Devious Plan Yet", said evil scheme is that the Joker befriended a teen girl on social media—and now he's counting down to her 18th birthday so he can start flirting with her as soon as it's legal to do so. Batman admits this is technically legal, but finds it so creepy he seriously considers breaking his no-kill rule to stop the Joker.
  Joker: Wendy is so adorable. So sweet, Bats. But at midnight... she becomes sexy. [evil laughter]
  Batman: Joker, what the fuck? Joker, I would rather you do other things. This is legal, technically, but I don't like it, it's weird. This is just weird, Joker.
• The Oner: "The Text" is filmed this way — according to the description, with "no hidden cuts".
• Overly Literal Transcription: In "How I Take a Perfect Pasta Picture Every Time", Joel tells his assistant Brittney to write several things down on a list, further emphasizing this by repeating "Write that down, write that down!" Careful examination of her list later shows that Brittney followed Joel's directions so literally, she added "that down" to the list multiple times.
• Please Subscribe to Our Channel: Every video ends with the message "subscribe for weekly short films".
• Retraux: "A Classic Joel and Trent Video" opens with a skit in the style of a black-and-white silent film.
• Small Town Boredom: His video titled "The Couple That Still Hangs Out at Your Hometown's Playground".
• Special Guest: "Sand Planet" features Justin Roiland as a disgruntled Uncle Owen and a suicidal droid.
• The Stoner: The Galactic Emperor is all but stated to be one, judging by his demeanour and speech patterns.
• Superboss: Dogan the Disfigurer, Eviscerator of Realms and Concluder of Time in The Hardest Enemy in an RPG is a parody of this, with his therapy sessions making very little progress.
• Surprisingly Happy Ending: After two videos of Jacob hilariously fucking up and committing crimes against humanity, he finally gets his act together in the third RPG movie, saves the kingdom from Marshall the Rat, and settles down to marry a beautiful maiden.
• Victory Is Boring: In the third RPG video, Jacob saves the kingdom and settles down to marry a beautiful maiden. We see in the fourth video, however, that his domestic life isn't as dreamy as he made out, since his wife is a bland NPC with gratingly repetitive dialogue and he has literally no more quests to complete.
• Who's on First?: In "If 'Friends' had a Behind the Scenes Reality Show", a crew member of Friends says he's not here to make friends. The other crew members misunderstand him as meaning he's not here to work on the show.

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