Things Are Shapan Up

Finger Lickin’ Good

If you haven’t seen, or by been fooled by, the work of Cris Shapan, I’m here to help you laugh today. Shapan, a master of Photoshop, retools magazine ads, movie posters, and old TV and movie clips as parodies to the point of belly-laughing absurdity.

Shapan, in an interview with Richard Metzger of Dangerous Minds, says I’m a hack. I started decades ago in movie advertising, did a bunch of years in corporate art departments, and then 13 years ago I answered an ad on Craigslist and wound up working on Tom Goes to the Mayor at Tim and Eric. Since then I’ve been bouncing around on the fringe of edgy comedy, on shows like Awesome Show and Kroll Show and Baskets, doing silly art & deliberately awful effects. It’s a high-pressure gig for an artist, but it can also be a whole lot of fun. it’s scary to see something I did purely to entertain friends become someone else’s reality. Some claim to remember or even own something that never existed. Others will repost a parody ad as real, especially if it reinforces some agenda they’re touting (sexism in advertising, the past was a horrible place, frankenfood, etc.). People read the fake ad copy and leap to the wildest interpretations, often expressing outrage at something that never actually happened. It’s just bizarre. Some people are so convinced these parody pieces are genuine that they’ve gone in and modified Wikipedia pages to reflect their existence, which of course compounds the stupidity.

If you’re on Facebook, and definitely one reason to be so, you can ‘follow’ Shapan at his page Deluxe Fuxley Corporate Archives.

And then there’s the Nazi Abatement Patrol in the episode The God Damn Sons of Bitches Raid.

And my favorite, The Gary Show…

And now…