Rex Protein

A Covid sketch I made from a newer perspective

“The studios might be closed, but our bodies aren’t” - Rex Protein

Remember Covid? Unless you’re 5 years old or younger, I’m pretty sure the answer is yes. And if you are 5 years old or younger, what are you doing reading my Substack? There are swear words and you should be doing something more fun!

During peak Covid I was living in Chicago with my two roommates and there wasn’t a lot to do. Everyone seemed to dabble in something like creating art or baking bread or drinking your body weight in whiskey. We all seemed to have a hobby.

Amongst the many things I did to try to occupy my time and not think too much about how much being stuck inside sucked and how insane significant portions of our society reacted to having to wear a mask, I wrote a lot and made a couple sketch comedy videos. It was good to have a project to film and edit and get lost in Adobe Premiere for a while.

For this idea, I really wanted to try and spoof follow along workouts. I actually got pretty into doing cardio workouts and yoga and other stretching routines that I still do. See, not everything from Covid was terrible. But there wasn’t a lot of comedy in those workouts. There’s the crossover idea the world has been waiting for.

The sketch that came out of it all is called “Rex Protein.” I play the titular character named, you guessed it, Rex Protein. A friend had cut my hair into a mohawk and dyed it blue not too long before we filmed this sketch. If you’ve seen me before or since then, it will look way different than my fairly boring normal hair usually does, but it felt pretty bad ass for a while.

There really isn’t much setup needed for “Rex Protein.” He just wanted to teach people how to workout and his roommates were being real buttholes. Credit to my former roommates Jonathan and Jesse who are not in fact buttholes in real life.

The lighting isn’t great, the shots weren’t overly planned out, and the sound could be better (which I could say about too many of my filmed projects). But we made something at a time when it just felt good to be busy. It still feels good to complete projects, but it felt as much like therapy as it did art back then.

I hope you enjoy it.