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It's Illegal to Say
SKETCH-O-VISION
A VERY GOOD USE OF YOUR TIME.
The setup
The funny people
Meet the cast. 1
Say it with us
Highly quotable.
I'm not actually saying it.
It's kind of like a public service.
The premise
Here’s the bit.
Sitting before a patterned curtain, Trevor Moore introduces himself and delivers a straight-faced public-service message about forbidden threats against the president. He treats reporting a forbidden statement as a loophole that lets him repeat it, then keeps extending that logic with increasingly elaborate examples. As his delivery stays reassuring, an illustrative diagram makes the supposed warning harder to distinguish from the conduct it describes. He closes by introducing a group meeting with a conspicuously ominous password.
Behind the scenes
The people who made it.
Trevor Moore
Writer
A little extra
Notes from the archive.
The Supreme Court discusses an adaptation of this sketch in Elonis v. United States, 575 U.S. 723, 727–728 (2015).
Script
Automatically generated script; wording may contain errors. Speaker labels are inferred.
- 00:00
Himself
Hi, I'm Trevor Moore. Did you know that it's illegal to say I want to kill the president of the United States of America?
- 00:06
Himself
It's illegal. It's a federal offense. It's one of the only sentences that you're not allowed to say.
- 00:12
Himself
And it was okay for me to say it right then because I was just telling you that it's illegal to say I want to kill the president of the United States of America.
- 00:24
Himself
I'm not actually saying it. I'm just letting you know that it's illegal to say that.
- 00:28
Himself
it's kind of like a public service i'm letting you know so that you don't accidentally go out and say something like that
- 00:33
Himself
but what's interesting is that it's it's very illegal to say i really really think someone out there should kill the president of the united states of america that's illegal extremely illegal very very illegal
- 00:50
Himself
but not illegal to say with a mortar launcher because that's its own sentence it's an incomplete sentence but it may have nothing to do with the sentence before that so that's perfectly fine perfectly legal
- 01:03
Himself
I also found out that it's incredibly illegal extremely illegal to go on television and say something like the best place to fire a mortar launcher at the White House would be from the roof of the Rockefeller Hewitt building because of minimal security and you'd have a clear line of sight to the president's bedroom
- 01:18
Himself
insanely illegal ridiculously recklessly insanely Insanely illegal,
- 01:24
Himself
yet even more illegal to show an illustrated diagram.
- 01:29
Himself
Insanely illegal, ridiculously, horribly felonious, because they will come to your house in the middle of the night and they will lock you up, extremely against the law.
- 01:37
Himself
One thing that is technically legal to say is that we have a group that meets Fridays at midnight under the Brooklyn Bridge and the password is 6empertiranus.
The rabbit hole continues
One more couldn’t hurt.
More from across the archive.
