“It’s actually a really boring and bad time, and we all dread getting together to make the show because we’re not friends and we don’t enjoy each other’s company. It’s really painful to do the show.”
Sarcastically said, senior Will Gould reflects on his experience thus far as a writer and actor for the student-run TV show, Ca$h. Ca$h is comprised of seniors John Adkisson, Eddie Dettloff, Will Gould, Tommy Neuman, Josh Raebel, Evan Richter and Evan Sucher. According to Gould, the members of Ca$h have been close friends since the beginning of high school.
“The Ca$h experience really starts with Paradox because that’s when all of us, the Ca$h guys, started acting and writing comedy,” Gould said. “[Ca$h] is actually an extension of what we’ve been already doing.”
Gould described the goal of the show as bringing a new type of humor to the South community.
“Basically what we are trying to do is make people laugh at things they haven’t laughed at before,” Gould said. “We want them to be watching an episode and think, ‘Hey, that’s really not that funny, why am I laughing at this?’ Anyone can do punch line jokes, but not [everyone] can really make the audience have to almost evaluate what they’re laughing at.”
Richter, Ca$h director and producer, says the show is a representation of how the group of friends interacts when they hang out.
“I think [Ca$h] does a pretty good job of showing our collective personality,” Richter said. “We say and think of really weird things, […] and now we just happen to have the camera as we’re doing it.”
So far, Ca$h has aired two episodes and plans to air six more episodes over the course of the year. The 13-15 minute episodes are comprised of several mini skits written by the cast members.
“When I’m acting [in Ca$h], it’s something I wrote or something that my friends wrote, and I know how it would want to be portrayed,” Gould said. “The fact that we are all close friends really makes it easier to get the desired product because we all know each other so well.”
According to Richter, the process of creating an episode begins with creating scripts or outlines of the skits. After filming, Richter edits the material to add transitions and special effects. According to Richter, each minute of the show requires approximately an hour of editing.
“[When] editing, you need to maintain the timing and the feel of the skit as it was thought out,” Richter said. “If there’s a certain joke being told, there needs to be a certain amount of time between the delivery and the set up. Editing is about making sure the idea of the joke isn’t lost.”
According to Richter, the process of choosing a name for the show was spontaneous.
“The origin of the name is that we were all standing around and I asked, ‘Hey, what should the name of the show be?’” Richter said. “Tommy wanted to make it $, literally just $, so I thought of Ca$h, with a dollar sign as the ‘s’.”
While the majority of the content in Ca$h is clean, they have had some incidents in which they haven’t been able to air their content.
“There have been a few times when we’ve had to bleep stuff out of skits we filmed and ones where after we’re like, ‘Alright, we’re not going to air this. We are not showing this to anyone [but ourselves],’” Gould said. “There was one where we wrote it, filmed it, finished it up. It was hilarious but not [appropriate for air].”
The final product of each episode can be viewed on YouTube, vimeo and GBS TV. According to Dettloff, the feedback so far has been great.
“My favorite part is probably having so many people liking it in the end,” Dettloff said. “It’s really rewarding, having something that you’ve produced and seeing other people liking it and complimenting you about it. I think that’s one of the most rewarding parts about it.”
To watch episodes, visit their YouTube page, cashdollarsmoney, or like them on Facebook, facebook.com/cashdollarsmoney.
