This week, justArts spoke with Dave Ahdoot and Ethan Fixell who started out their careers making comedic dating videos on YouTube and now perform at colleges all around the country. The two will be performing at Brandeis this upcoming Saturday. 

justArts: In 2008 when you guys posted an ad on YouTube asking girls to double date you, what were you planning to do with it? 

Dave Ahdoot: It was kind of done 75 percent as a joke and 25 percent trying to get these dates. And we were kind of overwhelmed with the responses. We thought of not doing them, but we were like, “Hey we might as well go on these dates. That sounds pretty awesome.” 

So we ended up going out on a lot of dates with people who responded to our ad and video. 

So we made a video on YouTube and we linked it to a Craigslist ad—where everybody finds love. You, know, the classiest of love seeking. Our friend saw our first video which was just us joking around and was like, “Hey this is funny, you should keep doing videos like this.” And that’s how our whole career started. 

JA: What prompted you to make a comedy show out of your videos and out of your experiences? 

Ethan Fixell: The comedy kind of came by itself. Because some of the dates that we went on were so crazy and ridiculous that we started talking about them on YouTube and video taping some of them for YouTube, [and] the comedy sort of came from it. 

Dave and I were thinking about creating a comedy show together for years because we had known each other since middle school, but we never knew what it would be about. So when this happened we were like, “Boom! There’s a comedy show.” 

JA: Do you have a favorite skit or act that you do in your show? 

DA: We do a dating game in our show which is where we bring up people from the audience and that’s always fun just to see what the students can come up with on the top of their heads… and these are people who are not used to being in front of an audience, and here they are, in front of an audience, trying to come up with good answers to our questions. 

[It’s] always fun to watch because it’s different every show. 

EF: My favorite part of the show is actually when we get to do improv. Every show we talk about people’s worst dates, and we usually act out a story of people’s worst dates. So that’s always fun for us. 

JA: What is your favorite video? 

EF: My favorite video right now is a brand new one. It’s a music video we did with a guy named Daniel Koren, and it was directed by Evan Gregory from the Gregory Brothers … and it’s a video that blends real-life bystanders with a choreographed song. 

DA: I think my favorite video was one of our first videos with our grandmas. We were asking our grandmas for dating advice. But they’re both very fun in the video, and it was one of our first videos. 

And both of our grandmas have passed on, but we’ll always have that video which is cool. 

EF: I suspect that Dave had a crush on my grandma. 

JA: What’s next for Dave and Ethan? 

EF: We’re [going to] run for president. 

DA: We’re working on a web series. We have something with Above Average, which is our YouTube series which is under Lorne Michaels. 

We just started a dating show on there. And we have a pilot, which we will be finding out about in the next week if it gets picked up or not.