It all started with Susan Fox. Fox, who manages the website ParkSlopeParents.com, had been following the slew of Sh*t videos (her favorite being Sh*t Guys Don’t Say) popping up on the Internet and wondered what those Park Slope parents would say if they had a video of their own. You know, those parents who offer responses like, “Sorry, can’t, have my child care shift at the Coop” or “Meet you at Mommy and Me yoga class.”
So she posted the Sh*t New Yorkers Say video to her list serve – which goes out to approximately 5,100 members and generates 50 e-mails on any given day and posed the question for fun. What came next ended up fueling the script for the Sh*t Park Slope Parents Say video written and produced by Katie Goodman and Soren Kisiel. The pair, who own and produce Broad Comedy, a five-woman sketch comedy troupe, also starred in the video with Goodman’s cousin Julie Kay.
“Susan saw Katie’s current show, “I Didn’t Fuck it Up,” at the Triad Theater, contacted us and said ‘hey would you like to make this? It seemed like great fun,’” Kisiel said, adding the pair just happened to have time to pull it off. “She handed over all those ideas and we wrote some of our own and off it went.”
According to Fox, she received more than 40 e-mails with suggestions just 24 hours after posting that e-mail on the list serve. She contacted Goodman, who Fox had first met online, then at a holiday party, culminating with seeing Goodman in action at her comedy show. By Feb. 3, Goodman had signed on and by Feb. 5, Kisiel and Goodman sent a script to Fox for her reaction. The video was shot on Feb. 7 by James Schlittenhart and as of Feb. 9, the now infamous Sh*t Park Slope Parents Say video, which is just under four minutes, was born.
“It is like the fastest thing we’ve ever done because most of our stuff is highly complex music videos which takes months,” Goodman said. Some of her well-known music videos through Broad Comedy include “Soccer Mom Ho” and “MILF,” which Fox had seen and loved – and ultimately prompted her to see Goodman’s one-woman show.
“Katie and Soren are so talented,” Fox said. “I would love to see her take off. She’s so good at physical comedy as you can see in the video.”
Goodman was excited to take on the project but made sure that many of the ideas came from Park Slope Parents since she and Kisiel just moved to Carroll Street in August. Though new to Park Slope and P.S. 321 where their 9-year-old son attends, the family had stayed in the area while performing a show last year. They currently split their time between Brooklyn and Bozeman, Montana.
In deciding upon content for the video, she and Kisiel opted out of rehashing material that was already done in the other Sh*t videos – such as the ‘oh, we don’t have a TV’ and ‘a big stress on organic food and bagels.’
“We tried to pick stuff we hadn’t seen and that was really specific to parents and Park Slope parents in particular,” Kisiel said. “We wanted to keep things as specific as possible to the community.”
The pair poked fun at everything from organic milk being on sale for $6.99 to parking the car, to taking a food processor a neighbor left outside to the slapstick bit of Goodman fumbling with a baby carriage up a hill in Prospect Park.
“What I like about the video is that it shows we can make fun of ourselves and not take ourselves so seriously,” Fox said. “The whole series with the car is really true, the stroller down the stairs with too much stuff, all of those things are what Park Slope parents live. It allowed us to make fun of ourselves and to laugh at our sometimes obsessiveness over things.”
The blue “boy’s” hat bit was a nod to the 2006 controversy that spun out on the list serve regarding someone finding the outerwear and describing it as “Found: boy’s hat.” What ensued was a heated discussion about gender politics and a write-up in New York Magazine and Gawker.
“People have been picking on those Park Slope parents for basically ever since that came out,” Fox said of the hat incident. “We are on year number six of being the bane of jokes about entitled parents.”
Still Fox said the video has generated a lot of positive responses – as of Feb. 19, the video received 72,000 hits on YouTube and for the most part, the responses have been positive.
“Around the neighborhood, on the street, we have been getting recognized quite a lot,” Kisiel said. “People actually come up with their own – ‘oh you left out the double-wide stroller,’ that kind of thing.”
But Kisiel said he was surprised at the interest of people outside of the neighborhood. The Gothamist wrote posts about discouraging the video from being made. “I was just making it for the people in the community,” he said.
And those within the community have enjoyed it. Even the blog F’d in Park Slope wrote they got it right in their Feb. 10 post on the video for mention of the “Nannygate Scandal,” or “Our nanny does my [Coop] shift,” even if earlier they were raging against the possibility.
Kerri Doherty, managing editor of the blog, said though these “Shit Everyone and Their Mom Say” videos are way beyond expiration date, she admits she can’t help but watch them and in this case, Kisiel and Goodman represented well.
“Sh*t Park Slope Parents Say was playful and funny for the most part, though they did mention a few things that weren’t parent-specific (bitching about parking and restaurants closing, or noticing that Boardwalk Empire was shooting nearby). I liked the almost subtle cameo of the infamous Pepto-Bismol brownstone. I myself don’t have kids but based on what I’ve seen in this neighborhood, I’d say their video was pretty spot on.”
The Observer also picked up on it and noted the short amount of time it took for Fox to get the video out and Curbed NY appreciated the boy’s hat mention and the pink house cameo.
“It’s funny, the people in the neighborhood like it because it’s fun and playful and people outside the neighborhood that have some bizarre interest in not liking this neighborhood also like the video,” Kisiel said. “So that’s been funny to see.”
For more information about Broad Comedy and Goodman’s one-woman show “I Didn’t Fuck It Up”, visit www.broadcomedy.com.
