Ryan George / Pitch Meeting

Pitch Meeting is the simplest sketch on YouTube. Ryan George plays both characters. One of them, the Producer, says “tight” too many times and approves things he shouldn’t. The other, the Screenwriter, explains that the plot of whatever film is being mocked relies on the Producer not asking obvious questions. The Producer doesn’t ask. The Screenwriter says “Super Easy, Barely An Inconvenience.” The episode ends. The episode is six to eight minutes long. There have been more than a thousand of these. There will, as long as Hollywood exists, be more.

Comedy theorists will tell you that the hardest joke in the world is the same joke told for the seventh time. Ryan George is, by this metric, doing the hardest job in YouTube comedy. He has been doing it for eight years. The joke has not gotten old, which is itself the joke, which is itself the additional joke. Pitch Meeting is comedy as Zen koan. The format is the punchline.

What He Does Extraordinarily Well

The mechanical thing first: George plays both halves of the conversation, alone, in a single edit, without a co-star, without studio polish, in roughly the same green-cushioned office every time. The voice for the two characters is barely differentiated — it is the same voice, doing two things, and your brain accepts that they are two characters because the script says so and George commits to it. The cheapness of the production is part of the bit. He doesn’t fix it; he never has. Every Pitch Meeting looks like the first Pitch Meeting. Every Pitch Meeting is the first Pitch Meeting.

The structural thing: the Pitch Meeting framework lets George do something that genuinely difficult — film criticism that is funnier than the film. The episode about The Last Jedi identifies, in seven minutes, every plot beat that requires the Producer not to ask a question; the episode about Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is funnier than Tenet; the episode about Morbius is, almost by definition, funnier than Morbius. The form is criticism wearing a wig, and the wig has been on so long it has become its own face.

Ryan George has made the same joke a thousand times and the joke is still funny. That’s not laziness. That’s discipline that looks like laziness, which is itself a comedy trick most professionals never master.

The third thing — and this is what tips the X-Factor score — is that “Super Easy, Barely An Inconvenience” has escaped containment. It is now a phrase used by people who have never seen the channel. It has entered the language. Very few YouTube comedians can claim that. Drew Gooden cannot. Danny Gonzalez cannot. Eddy Burback, despite our affection for him, cannot. George can. He has built a meme and the meme has built him.

Where He Falls Short

Replay Value is the issue. You watch a Pitch Meeting once. The format is too tight to reward rewatching the way an essay video does — the punch is in the structural reveal, and once revealed, it stays revealed. Hardcore fans will rewatch the all-time greats (the Last Jedi one, the Cats one, the Avatar 2 one), but the median Pitch Meeting is consumed once, laughed at, and never returned to. We score Replay at 70.

The other thing is that the format is genuinely narrow. Every Pitch Meeting is about a film with a plot hole. There is no Pitch Meeting about a film that is genuinely good and has no plot holes; the format wouldn’t work. This is not a complaint, but it is a ceiling. George has, increasingly, branched out into other formats — the Honest Trailers-style breakdowns, the original sketch material — and the original sketch material is fine, but it is not Pitch Meeting, and we do not pretend otherwise. The channel is the format. The format is the channel.

The verdict. Pitch Meeting is the most consistent comedy show on YouTube, full stop. It is not the funniest. It is not the deepest. It is, every Friday, exactly what it said it would be — and after a thousand episodes of being exactly what it said it would be, that is its own kind of greatness. EXCELLENT, with strong Top 50 entry. Tight; tight, tight, tight.