Laugh Harder, Grow Smarter
Wisecrack is an Analysis Channel composed of various comedians, academics, filmmakers, and artists who collaborate on a series of videos analyzing pop culture. The group is prone to look into Anime, Western Animation, Classic and contemporary Literature, Films and Video Games and analyze them, drawing out philosophy, sociology, psychology and whatever other hidden meanings can be found within them.
Wisecrack produces and hosts several series on their website
and YouTube channel, including:
- Boss Bitches Of History — A short lived series where Sovereign Syre and Ela Darling – two entertainers who defy contemporary standards of American intellectualism and Feminism - talk about emboldened women throughout the ages who bucked the system and boldly faced the sexist powers of their time.
- Eight Bit Philosophy — A series of animated cartoons that uses classic video game sprites and images to teach the viewers on fundamentals of theocratic, existential and political philosophy.
- Earthling Cinema — Set in the far future, alien archeologist Garyx Wormuloid provides a colorful, hilariously inaccurate summary of the plot of a movie and then provides a brief summary of the philosophy and message of the film in question.
- Pop Psych — A series where Tessa Goss psychoanalyzes behavior exhibited by fictional characters (Batman, Mario, Santa Claus, etc.) and determines a diagnosis.
- Thug Notes — Gangster Sparky Sweets provides a colorful summarization of classical and modern literature and then provides an educated analyses of the book’s themes, point of view and reflections of the time they were published.
- Wisecrack Edition — Hosted by various Wisecrack writers and editors and narrated by Jared Bauer, Wisecrack Edition selects specific pop culture properties - movies, anime, cartoons and even individual celebrities - and analyzing the philosophies they represent as a whole. Other episodes even go more specific, videos talking about religion, economics and psychology in particular franchises and even individual episodes.
- What Went Wrong? — A spinoff series of Wisecrack Edition where the team analyzes a failed or problematic property (Suicide Squad, Assassin's Creed, etc.) and both try to find the message they failed to convey and why it failed.
- The Film Tourist — A show that analyses a very specific and trivial part of a production — a specific scene, setting, line of dialogue, choice of music, cut, etc. — that redefines and establishes the meaning of that specific piece of art.
- How Did We Get Here? — A show that acknowledges the ways that fiction has predicted actual, real-world problems that is occurring in our present day and estimates just how it came to that.
This website contains the following tropes:
- Analysis Channel: They are of the "analyze the work's deeper meanings" variety.
- Chess Motifs: The site's icon is clearly a play on the Knight chess piece, replacing the horse’s head with a donkey's. To see the significance of this, see Visual Pun below.
- Edutainment Show: All of their shows are built with this in mind: educate the audience about various topics (most famously philosophy), and make the education entertaining in some way, be it humor, beautiful graphics, or great writing.
- Vanity Plate:
- Their first was a brief, three second clip of a white piece of paper crumpling itself up before rolling downward, revealing the Wisecrack logo beneath.
- Their second and current one is a brief animation of two people being covered in a liquid that forms the logo's shape, only for the liquid to split in half and reveal a brown logo. Then the company's name appears.
- Visual Pun: The website's icon — a donkey wearing a monocle — is clearly a play on the term "wise-ass."
