Just because you have homework doesn’t mean the TV watching has to stop — really 12s, it’s true! Rob Trump’s weekly web series fun continues with Mark Erickson’s Infinite Solutions.

Well, my original plan for the first week of school was, having done Jake and Amir, to quickly knock off a review of the other major CollegeHumor webseries, The Michael Showalter Showalter.  But while I was watching some other CollegeHumor stuff, specifically their awesome “Minesweeper: The Movie Trailer”, I discovered something magical that made me abort my original plan.  It was Infinite Solutions with Mark Erickson.  Specifically, it was this:

This video was, by itself, way too amazing to pass over without further study.  The production of the whole thing, first off, right down to the nerdiest haircut imaginable, was so hilarious that even if this wasn’t intentional comedy, it was great comedy nonetheless.  And the actual content of the video?  The secret mode of minesweeper seemed, actually, pretty plausible to me; the only real tipoff that it might not be was the requirement that you erase your original scores, which, if it was fictional, seemeed a pretty brilliantly mean thing to make people do.  So I investigated further:

After watching this one, it became clear to me what Mark Erickson was doing, and I wholeheartedly approved.  The whole thing made-up, clearly, but it’s played so straight-faced, and with such attention to detail, that it transcends the lame internet practice of “trolling” and becomes something sublime.  There aren’t really “jokes” in Mark Erickson’s videos per se, and as a whole I’m not sure this is a web series that even belongs in the same category as the other ones I’ve reviewed, but if you can at all get into the Andy Kaufman-esque vibe of these elaborate prank tips, they’re very, very funny.  Maybe the two best he’s done are simple 30-seconders:

For even more comedy, look through the comments to find people who took Mark seriously and tried these out.

Mark Erickson, like Jeannie Tate, is someone that falls into the category of “if you like this style of comedy, just go watch them all now,” because there aren’t that many, and you won’t be able to rest until you do.  And next week, Showalter.