Jordan Raskopoulos is the front woman of the comedy trio The Axis of Awesome, best known for its world famous song Four Chords. That little ditty has amassed more than 30 million views and is one of this highest rated comedy videos on YouTube. Axis has released six albums over the past 10 years and has performed all around the world. Stevivor had the pleasure of sitting down with Jordan at PAX AUS in Melbourne to talk about her new YouTube channel, Insert Coin.
“We are a comedy channel for gamers,” Raskopoulos said. “We’re a new YouTube channel producing high-end sketch comedy content using professional comedians and filmmakers to make comedy about games, game characters and game culture. We have new videos out every Tuesday and it was started by me and Lee [Naimo] from The Axis of Awesome.”
The duo is occasionally joined by Benny Davis, a fellow Axis member.
“Benny’s been in a few videos and he also does a lot of the composition of the music in the background of our videos,” Raskopoulos added. ” When we do Axis of Awesome a lot of the production work was me and Lee and a lot of the music work was Benny. So Lee and I wanted to start a new production project and that’s the way it turned out.”
For Raskopoulos, a focus on gaming comedy was obvious.
“I’ve been a massive gamer and massive geek since I was a kid,” she said. “I’ve played every single Zelda game and I’ve even got a Zelda tattoo and I’ve found when I’ve been performing at shows like this [PAX] or Dungeon Crawl I could make a certain type of joke that would be completely lost on a mainstream audience.
“I remember making a joke about some obscure spell from Dungeons and Dragons and being in a room full of people that knew what I was talking about. And the same applies at PAX! We do a song about Wii Fit and when we perform it at PAX it brings the house down but when we perform it for a mainstream audience it’s like a quarter of the audience gets on board.
“So they’re the kind of things that I enjoy so it was all about creating a space where we could do jokes about games, jokes about pop culture for people who enjoy them. That’s the joy of YouTube and the joy of the internet as it allows us to do that.
“So if my Mum watches our videos she doesn’t have a clue except for the videos about The Sims or Candy Crush,” she continued. “But we’ve done mainstream projects and that’s what Axis of Awesome is, whereas this is something niche for gamers, from professional comedians who are gamers, and giving them an outlet to do jokes about games.”
Raskopoulos says the channel isn’t designed to critique games, but rather elevate them.
“Well what we’re doing is more celebrating games and we’re definitely not ragging on any games. We’ve got one sketch about Fallout 4 where the character has a looted body in his house, and the body is just in their underwear on the floor. He’s like, ‘I cant, I cant move the body. I’m sorry, that’s where it lives. It’s just there.’ And then somebody commented, ‘Actually if you just hold down the A button you can move the body.’
“The thing is, we write about games that we enjoy and that we know about. We’ve got a huge pool of writers so occasionally someone might write about something that somebody else is unfamiliar with so we just have a chat and explain it but all our jokes are coming from a genuine place. We’re not getting comedians who don’t have any idea about gaming, everyone’s passionate about it and they’re all gamers.”
Of course, the channel is very much about Australian humour, though the troupe is mindful of its global audience.
“We certainly understand Aussie humour can be very parochial so we do bare in mind that games is an international language just like music is an international language,” she said. “So early on with Axis, once we started touring internationally we had to keep in mind how certain terms or phrases might not hit with an international audience. But because the language is games we’ve been hitting far and wide.”
Stay tuned for more with Raskopoulos in the coming days.
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