Staff Picks: A New Wave journey and the most deliberately irritating improv game

Sure, the Television Academy is primed to tell you what it likes this weekend, with the 78th Primetime Emmys kicking off on Monday night. But what about what we like? Would the Emmys have the boldness to hold up a highly personal/synth-heavy Criterion Channel pick, or a web series where Australian comedians torture national improv treasure Colin Mochrie? We contend that they would not. For this week’s Staff Picks, staff writer William Hughes proffers a guessing game and film critic Monica Castillo finds a New Wave rabbit hole.

William Hughes: The Most Upsetting Guessing Game In The World by Aunty Donna

I’ve been enjoying Australian comedy weirdos Aunty Donna since back when I reviewed their first big American attack, Netflix sketch series Big Ol’ House Of Fun, in 2020. But I hadn’t checked back in on the trio of Broden Kelly, Zachary Ruane, and Mark Bonnano for a couple of years until just recently, when they posted an improvised, extremely silly attempt to make their own X-Men movie on the cheap. Dipping into the troupe’s recent online filmography, in turn, brought me to a new obsession that bodes ill for anyone forced to live through an extended car ride with me any time soon: The Most Upsetting Guessing Game In The World. Based on a version of classic short-form improv game Party Quirks—if you’ve ever watched Whose Line Is It Anyway?, you’ve seen it—the game lives, wonderfully, up to its name: An increasingly bedraggled party host forced to guess idiosyncrasies that have been designed to be nigh-impossible by anyone with a regular human brain to suss out. (An early favorite: “You’re an electron in superposition around an atom, but every time the host guests, your waveform collapses and they know your exact location.”) 

As someone who thinks there’s nothing much funnier than the madness that sets in when people get mad at their trusted comedy partners for betrayals both real and imagined, MUGG has become a sort of perverse comfort viewing for me: A journey from the early giddiness of the guests coming up with the universe’s most irritating prompts, followed immediately by the consequences of then having to live with those decisions, followed by a slow death march as they’re forced to drag word after word from their broken and miserable guessers. But funny!