Earlier this year, MTV made the two-season run of the Sifl & Olly Show available via iTunes and Amazon Instant Video. For those unfamiliar with it – and I’m guessing there are many of you, considering that after its short life it wasn’t even played as reruns – Sifl & Olly was about two sock puppets who hosted something that resembled a public access television show. Its bizarre segments included interviews with the planet Mars, commercials for something called lice monkeys, and songs about rock’n’roll friends checking library books back in – all of which were delivered with an absurd amount of absurd non sequiturs. Sifl & Olly ran on MTV from 1998 to 1999, around the time the network was souring on strange original comedies like The State and Beavis & Butthead, while preparing to embrace the bromoerotic goofballs of Jackass and scripted reality shows like Laguna Beach.
Even the people responsible for Sifl & Olly aren’t surprised that it never took off.
“You either really got it or thought it was stupid – there was no middle ground,” says co-creator Liam Lynch. “Some people couldn’t get past it being puppets. And I can totally understand that.”
While Sifl & Olly was an acquired taste, it did have dedicated fans. In a 1998 article in Spin, Lynch and partner Matt Crocco (who also provided the voices for the titular characters) mentioned that Portishead once told them that the show provided some much-needed laughter while the group was making their second album. After its cancellation, bootleg VHS copies of Sifl & Olly were sold on eBay, though repeated compressing, dubbing and tape degradation often made the images on these versions look like moving Pointillist paintings.
There was a possibility in the early years of the 21st century that Sifl & Olly would get an official release on DVD, like other alt-comedy touchstones Mr. Show and Get a Life, but no sets appeared. More than a decade later, the show makers and followers had basically given up hope. Then, after Lynch had been told five different times that it was coming, it finally happened. “Maybe with MTV it’s a desperate, ‘What else can we sell?’” says Lynch. “They had sold everything and they finally got to the back of the closet and they were like, ‘What’s this? Sifl & Olly?’”
Lynch is grateful that fans no longer have to settle for janky tapes or heavily pixilated YouTube uploads to see the show, and he says he’s proud of MTV for actually getting it done, but it’s not like he’s been idly waiting for a Sifl & Olly revival. Since the show’s end, his career has been prolific and unpredictable.
Lynch got the most name recognition for his 2002 single, United States of Whatever. Originally written for and performed on Sifl & Olly, the song became a surprise hit for Lynch on American alternative rock radio stations and European charts after burned CD copies were passed around until it made it to a DJ at the BBC who played it on the air. At the height of the song’s popularity, Lynch played it during the encore of a Foo Fighters show in Los Angeles with Dave Grohl backing him on drums.
After the interest in United States of Whatever settled down and nothing else from his album Fake Songs caught on, Lynch receded and mostly spent his time behind the camera. He isn’t bitter about the move. “I don’t care if I’m in the public eye,” he says. “I wouldn’t have done a TV show of my hands with socks over them if I wanted to personally be seen.”
Lynch became the common denominator for pop art that find the intersection between comedy and music. As a director, he’s made multiple projects with Sarah Silverman, including her breakout 2005 concert film Jesus is Magic and the video Perfect Night. He’s also repeatedly collaborated with Tenacious D, eventually directing their feature Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny, which flopped when released in 2006 but has quietly amassed its own cult following. Last year, Lynch teamed with “Weird Al” Yankovic for the video to the song First World Problems from the surprise hit album, Mandatory Fun.
When pushing his own projects, Lynch has been an adopter of new and less mainstream-focused platforms. He started the video podcast Lynchland in 2005 and created a YouTube channel of the same name in 2010. In 2006 he made a video for Dan Deacon’s free-associating track Drinking Out of Cups, which features a talking CGI lizard. Retaining the rights to the Sifl & Olly characters, Lynch made some new episodes and segments of the show for Machinima and the Nerdist network.
For almost two decades, Lynch’s career has experienced its share of periodic flare-ups but no continuous burn. Asked if each time one of those big hits come, he thinks that it’ll be the one that he’ll be able to coast on, he replies: “Everything that happened, happened five years after I did it. I wrote and made United States of Whatever five years before it was on the radio. Videos that I’ve made have gone viral five years after I made them. I was over them five years ago.”
What Lynch believes has been key to his career, is his prodigious output. Lynch’s velocity is part of the charm. There’s always been a haphazard element to his work. Listen to United States of Whatever and you can hear the song getting better, second by second, until the idea collapses upon completion at the minute-and-a-half mark.
He doesn’t know what’s going to make an impact, but believes there’s a chance that anything he does might. “It’s like I’m standing out in a field with a bag of Frisbees, and I’m throwing them as fast I can in every direction,” he says. “Some of them are going to hit stuff and some of them are going to go into the trees and some of them are going to land in the middle of the field with nothing around them ever. But it’s just fun to throw them.”
Lynch won’t get specific about his upcoming projects, only that he keeps busy doing both professional work for others and personal projects for himself. And if anyone else connects with either of them, that’s on them. “Some of the best things I’ve ever done, no one has ever seen and they never got views,” he says. “And whatever.”
