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Gregory Kerr (Core '16, CAS '18) is one half of the two-person team behind Overly Sarcastic Productions, a YouTube channel which uses animation and storytelling to educate viewers about mythology, literature, and history. At BU, Kerr graduated magna cum laude with majors in classics and philosophy and minors in economics and Core interdisciplinary studies. Earlier this spring, he joined Core Journal editors Bruce Hallgren and Nyah Patel via Zoom to answer questions about content creation, the educational potential of video games, and how the pandemic impacted his work.

Bruce Hallgren: On Overly Sarcastic Productions you go by the moniker "Blue", and you and your partner "Red" both use cartoon avatars rather than 'live-action' video. What made you decide to create these personas for your channel?

Kerr's cartoon avatar "Blue"; drawn by Red.
Kerr's cartoon avatar "Blue"; drawn by Red.

Gregory Kerr: In the early days, Red and I were at different colleges, with different schedules, and couldn't really work synchronously. Instead, we worked in parallel, with our own production pipelines where we could still pass notes back and forth. Now, Warren Towers at BU is not conducive to high-quality filmmaking, so initially we both hid behind our virtual characters in order to mask the fact that we didn't have studio space. As time went on, we realized, oh, these are actually fun; let's run with it.

Truth be told, a lot of the choices we made early on and which guided the trajectory of OSP were products of necessity. The channel's origins go back to when Red was in high school and early college creating Shakespeare summaries, and around the same time I was in CC101 and CC102 reading Homer, Virgil, Dante. When Red shifted to working on video content, I was like, I'm studying this in class—I can help!

After one truly memorable lecture by Prof. Samons [Loren J. Samons, Classical Studies]—it was on the Athenian empire—I was like, man, this is good stuff. That was when I started doing videos on topics like Greece and Rome before going into other directions.

BH: It seems like the avatars have become a symbol for your show, and that the decision worked out quite well.

GK: Well, you can only take a cartoon character so seriously, right? And that works for us because we're not trying to be authorities. Cartoons add to the lightheartedness of what we're doing, and the accessibility. And it's also an extra layer of abstraction between us as people and the content we're producing. When you never see a human face, it's easier to focus on the raw material, whether it's a drawing, a map, or a recreation of ancient Rome. Having those characters as stand-ins is a useful way to not put ourselves in the presentation as much, while still allowing for emoting.

BH: Do you think that comedy is a bridge to getting young people interested in history and literature?

GK: Absolutely, because that's how it happened for me. After you get them engaged via humor, you can teach them important thematic, moral, and structural lessons about how the world works, why things are the way they are, how the choices that people make matter, and how cultures influence political and economic systems and institutional structures. In academic contexts, you're being tested on this material. But in our videos, which tell jokes, you don't have the same pressure. Instead, it's like, I'm letting this information come to me; I'm laughing; and along the way I'll catch bits of information. Then when you see that material again for class, you'll have anchor points you picked up from OSP, and you'll know better where to go next. That initial summary we give you—and we're not trying to be comprehensive—is meant to be entertaining and engaging to make it as easy as possible and as accessible as possible for a wide range of audiences: high school, college, or beyond.

Nyah: Now, back when you were in our seats in CAS, what was your favorite Core text? Do you have any meaningful experiences or discussions from Core that you'd like to share?

GK: Oh, gosh, that's like picking a favorite child. From CC101, I really liked the Odyssey. I had read it before, in high school, but then I was at the BU Open House for admitted students when I heard Prof. Esposito give his Penelope lecture [Click here to view Prof. Stephen Esposito's 2020 lecture on Penelope].

I was like, whoa, that's such a cool reading of it. We all know that the Odyssey is a story about Odysseus, but actually Penelope is the one doing all the work over here!

Then in CC102, the Aeneid and the Divine Comedy really resonated with me, both for the sake of seeing the literary progression from one to the other, and for the chance to dig a little into the cultures that shape those texts. Really engaging, really exciting. In CC201, Machiavelli was a blast. I was that nerd in high school who had read The Prince for fun and then also the Discourses on Livy. I had points I could bring up in discussion that no one else could because no one else read the Discourses except me and the instructor! I am a man of simple tastes: Greece, Rome, and Italy.

BH: How do you go about telling stories of historical figures who are so mythologized, and about whom we have so many varying reports?

GK: We really only focus on specific people in our "History-Makers" series. With our "History Summarized" stuff, it's usually states, time periods, big events, and large swathes of history. Sometimes I'll cover two thousand years in a single video like an absolute madman. But then I had wanted to do a video just looking at Homer and how his legend came to be. So I needed to justify the fact that I would be doing something different from my usual fare. I wanted to talk about this character, but I didn't want to confuse it with "great man" history, because that's garbage. I still wanted to talk about the people whose works shape our understanding of the past, and Homer is one of the first people to do that. So digging into whether or not this character was real (probably), and whether or not he wrote his epics himself as original works (probably not), was my way of synthesizing. We can talk about the Iliad and the Odyssey, but let's also talk about how we got those stories and what that process means, and how it fits into the cultural context of early archaic Greece.

That first video on Homer was an experiment, but it worked well, people liked it, so I did more! It's great how each one is an opportunity to bring together historical facts, biographical data, and great texts in a way that is much greater than each of those topics or approaches individually. A good example is our video about Marco Polo, and how his travels comprise a very much historically significant document—the West's first encounter with the East and with the far Muslim world.

BH: Some of your more recent videos take a look at video games, many of which have a basis in myth—like Hades—or history, like Assassin's Creed. I'm curious to know your feelings about video games as a means for storytelling.

GK: It depends. Some people use games as a setting only and some people try to do something more substantive. Reading about people in textbooks can be distancing, but seeing and talking to Da Vinci, hearing Machiavelli and Ezio move and talk, in games set in the Italian Renaissance—Assassin's Creed II, or Brotherhood, say—is just so cool.

Sometimes our livestreams show us playing games that are either historically or mythologically relevant. We talk about how those games work, what choices the creators made, and how they use historical or mythological sources to tell their stories. But there are some games where I do just a realism review. "Hey, they have this setting. It's very vibrant and well-realized, but does it corroborate with historical accounts?" For example, with Assassin's Creed Origins, I'm like, yeah, this is pretty good. They butcher Cleopatra and Caesar but overall, the world, the setting, and the events are pretty okay. Assassin's Creed Odyssey is really cool in the way the world is presented. Not every structure is perfect, but there's so much historically accurate detail that you know the creators did their research. The Assassin's Creed games actually came out with a Discovery Tour mode where players go through and just learn history in the context of the game! It's like time travel, and that's awesome.

Then there's Assassin's Creed Valhalla. It tries too hard to be cool, by name-dropping every single period detail that you've heard of. 'Yeah, we're going to do Beowulf, but in England, even though the poem takes place in what is known today as Denmark and Sweden'. I don't want to discuss Valhalla.

So yes: video games can absolutely be used as a medium to tell historical stories if attention and effort is invested in creating a world in which players can interact, get immersed, and get a sense of historical context. The quality is variable, of course; people can write trashy historical fiction in prose form and, in the same way, people do this for video games. But while the medium is still in its infancy, the possibilities ahead are astronomical. We're going to see more game studios take a crack at creating historically accurate worlds in ways I think will be exciting for people in academic settings, giving students a new entry point into all of these great stories and places.

NP: Are there any blind spots or prejudices your find in the traditional, academic presentation of historical events, like what you might find in a high school textbook?

GK: Yeah, the part where it's interesting. Sorry, I mean, there are always prejudices. Consider how the history we encounter in the US is so heavily Eurocentric. And how history is so often presented from a point of "let me convince you why this is important and, for instance, why the British Empire is the best thing ever" rather than allowing work to speak for itself. We get these explanations in the mode of "This event caused this event caused this event", which can be skewed or self-serving. In trying to create those grand narratives, people have agendas they're trying to promote.

With OSP, our perspective is usually just, look, this is a cool thing. We're going to try and be enthusiastic to get you to share in our enthusiasm. We're not trying to be authoritative. We hope our videos serve as catalysts for people to go and do their own research. The difficult but crucial thing for us is crafting a story that is both accessible and compelling. We don't always hit our target, but it's always what we're aiming for.

BH: You mentioned that more people have been looking to your channel for educational purposes. Have you noticed an increase in viewership or subscribers?

GK: We've always experienced some level of subscriber growth because as you get bigger, YouTube will start recommending your channel to more people. But obviously it's great to see our videos get more popular. Besides subscribers who are now watching more videos and going back to watch old ones, we're steadily bringing new people into the fold to join our fun little club.

The Overly Sarcastic Productions logo, drawn by Red.
The Overly Sarcastic Productions logo, drawn by Red.

BH: How have you liked the business of being a YouTube content creator? I know you previously have done sponsorships with companies like Audible.

GK: I haven't done one of those in a while! There is, unfortunately, a pretty considerable class divide between people who do this as a hobby and people who have enough subscribers and enough viewership to do it as a full-time job. We got lucky in the spring of our junior year. Randomly, one of our videos on Eros and Psyche got a huge bump in viewership, and we went from about 23,000 subscribers to 100,000 in the span of a month—if you're at 100,000 subscribers, you can do this for a job. Once we got to that point, we're like, cool, we're good.

For  sponsorships, we only work with products that we enjoy and would recommend. For example, you won't hear us talking about Raid: Shadow Legends. But I recognize, for a lot of YouTube creators, that's the only way they can monetize their channel. In the past year, the number of sponsors we work with has gone way down, which is great for our audience. Even if we're making less money, it's so much more enjoyable not to have to listen to an ad in the middle of a video.

Without getting into the weeds of YouTube economics, this is a job that we can do full time and feel secure with because we have a very strong and engaged community that supports what we do. We're very thankful for that. There are a lot of people who do incredible work and go unnoticed; many channels go viral and then fall off a cliff because they aren't ready to maintain a consistent enough channel presence or a steady level of video quality.

If one of your videos goes viral, you're lucky; on the other hand, if you sustain an increased viewership, then you're good at what you do. A lot of channels are good but not lucky and a lot of channels are lucky but not good. For us, we got lucky when we got that bump in viewership, but we kept it because we like to think we're good at what we do. People join and subscribe, and they stay to become part of the OSP community.

There's no way you can go into an industry as competitive as YouTube and plan to become successful. That's not how it happens. Red and I were working for four or five years before we hit the point where making a living at this seemed plausible. Initially, it was just a fun thing that we did because we enjoyed it.

BH: In terms of channels that are good but not lucky, are there any that you would recommend?

GK: Oh, Daniel Green; he's a friend of ours. He does this literary channel with book reviews and deep dives and analysis. Daniel does fantastic work and posts a video every day, which is insane. We post videos once a week and that almost kills us! He's really great.

There's one channel, Al Muqaddimah, named after the book by Ibn Khaldûn, which focuses on Islamic history and is really well done. And there's Archaia Istoria which does a lot of classical stuff, mostly Ancient Greece. Those two are both very good channels that I enjoy. But a lot of the channels I like are actualy faily large. I'm working all the time and don't have the chance to really dig into the deeper layers of YouTube. Sometimes I'll do a little bit of competitor research to see what other people are up to—we want to be sure we're not copying what others are doing—but I don't actually spend all that much time researching what else is around.

BH: I'll have to check them out!

NP: Yeah, me too! Turning away from YouTube, are there any books that kept you company or sparked your interest over the last year?

GK:  Well, I mostly read for research. If I'm doing a video on the Byzantines, I'll pull a copy of John Julius Norwich's A Short History of Byzantium off my shelf and just flip through that for two days to get all the information I need. I've been slowly making my way through a book called First Principles, which looks at the classical education of the first four American presidents: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. The book examines how the presidents' experiences with classical texts influenced their careers and their conceptions of what an American Republic should look like. Madison, for example, was a keen student of the Augustan period. He built mechanisms into the Constitution specifically to stop one individual from becoming an authoritarian ruler. Many ideas from classical antiquity are the roots for the American state. It's cool to draw connections between ancient Greece and Rome and the American Revolution.

BH: As you know, the past year has had its ups and downs—mostly downs. But despite all that, you and Red continued to create content. What kept you motivated to carry on your work?

GK: Frankly, I am terrified to break our weekly upload schedule. We are committed to getting a video out every Friday. Red and I alternate, so I am responsible for a video every two weeks. The thought of violating that timetable and unleashing a Lovecraftian monster keeps me grounded.

It's been motivating to realize that people found our work useful during COVID. People have a hard time engaging with online education. There are a lot of things that are being done to help students—which is great—but it's not enough. So, knowing that we can help someone who's having a hard time keeping up with online schooling has been a huge motivator for us. To know that the work we do is meaningful and helpful is very rewarding.

NP: Do you ever read the comments on your videos or engage with commenters?

GK: Oh, all the time! We're lucky to have cultivated a very academically-oriented comments section, since so many of our viewers find our videos while looking up topics for school. Red and I like to joke, come to OSP because you need to pass a test but stay because learning together is fun.

I just put out a video on Augustan-era Rome, and we got some many comments with jokes about Caesar or Marcus Antonius. People are just engaging in a way that's very fun. I'll often jump in and participate in the discussion. Yes, sometimes we get negative comments, but usually we're able to filter those out. We've gotten to the point where we know how to recognize the difference between unwarranted criticism and the good feedback that's coming from a place of, here's something that I genuinely think needs improvement. Sometimes the criticism is in the form of, this is dumb and I hate it, or, history is boring and your jokes aren't funny. To that my response is: Well, that doesn't tell me anything! Now, Twitter can be a lot nastier than YouTube. I'm not scared of YouTube comments. I'm definitely scared of Twitter.

BH: I know that this is a bit existential, but if there is one takeaway from the past year—something that we've learned that we should keep in mind—what in your opinion would that be?

GK: That small actions have big consequences. I think the last year has shown many examples of how one small action by a single individual, good or bad, can have substantial ripple effects. Whether it's wearing masks or staying home, we've seen how our individual choices can have far-reaching consequences. In the case of the election last year, we've seen how individuals can influence the decisions of entire groups. Our agency is a responsibility.

BH: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.

NP: Yes, thank you—it was wonderful chatting.

Graphics above by Red. Find OSP merchandise, creator bios, and news updates at overlysarcasticproductions.com. New videos are posted weekly to the OSP YouTube channel. Connect with the OSP fan community on Twitter.

This feature is an expanded version of the interview appearing in the Spring 2021 issue of The Journal of the Core Curriculum. A note from the editors:

"Our thanks to Gregory for making himself available during challenging times for this interview. "It seems very strange that one must turn back, and be transported to the very beginnings of history, in order to arrive at an understanding of humanity as it is at the present"—These words from Émile Durkheim remind us that knowing what has come before allows us to be better prepared for the challenges of the current moment, and for challenges that lie ahead. The intellectual and technical storytelling labor of Blue and Red and creators like them is part of that preparation."

For more information about The Journal, email the staff.