A Christmas Song Homage to Hall & Oates

A lot of people send me a lot of links to a lot of YouTube clips, and most of the time, I either delete them immediately or scold the sender for forwarding videos of cats doing stupid things. I hate cats. But yesterday, a colleague sent me this one by Philadelphia comedian Chip Chantry. In it, a fictional musical duo known as the Cunningham brothers mash up Christmas lyrics with Hall & Oates tunes. And it’s darn near brilliant in parts. I got Chantry on the phone to find out from whence this bit of genius came.

So be honest. How drunk or stoned were you when you came up with this idea?
I was completely, 100 percent sober. I actually came up with it right before Christmas last year, so I didn’t have time to get it together. So over the last year, I worked on some sketches. And then this past Saturday, we did the video shoot.

Any tunes that didn’t make the cut?
We had a Hanukkah song in there to the tune of “Method of Modern Love.” Unfortunately, that didn’t make it in. We wanted to include our Jewish friends, but …

I noticed that you and your co-star Tommy Pope went for the classic Hall & Oates look, with Oates bearing the facial hair while Hall is clean-shaven. Meanwhile, they’ve actually swapped looks in more recent years. Was that a difficult artistic decision to make?
Oh yes. Absolutely. It was a very long process, which basically amounted to walking around Urban one morning. They sell mustaches there in a pack, a variety of mustaches. Lots of mustaches. And Tommy wore the mustache. He actually has a real mustache under the fake one. Meanwhile, I have the facial hair of a nine-year-old. I’m not growing anything anytime soon.

What do you think Hall & Oates would think of it?
We didn’t want to offend them. That’s for sure. We really wanted it to be an homage. We didn’t want to lampoon them. You’ve reached maturity when you realize that Hall & Oates is really good, non-ironically.

Do you have any bets going on how many views you’ll get before Christmas?
Well, we were hoping to have it done sooner. But hopefully it’s going to be big. I expected a couple of hundred today. And it’s already at well over 1,000. [More than 13,000 by the time this publishes, actually.]

What do you do when you’re not making videos?
I’m a comedian. I’m also writing for 1812 Productions, for This Is the Week That Is. I’m helping them write the news. I also enjoy being a smart aleck on Twitter. That’s one of my favorite things to do.

Smart aleck? What are you, one of those clean comedians?
Did you see what I did there? I’m minding my Ps and Qs. This is not NHL 24/7 going into the Flyers locker room. It’s the holidays, after all.

So can we wrap this up with a good Christmas joke?
Hmm … a Christmas joke. Let me think … Christmas joke. I dunno …

It’s okay. Jokes are never as funny in print.
No, no, wait. There’s this one that I did on Twitter: I think I’m going downtown to buy all the seven fishes out of all the grocery stores just to show those Italians who’s boss.

Yeah. That might have worked on Twitter.
If you put it on the website, it will probably just sound racist.