Long before he wrote and directed a Web series for Comedy Central, garnering hundreds of thousands of hits, Sandeep Parikh '02 worked as a "humor TA" in Professor of Computer Science Andy van Dam's introductory programming class.
"Every TA has a side job, and they pick two to be humor TAs," Parikh said. "Your job is to basically deliver lessons with sketches or with little short films."
Parikh, who writes and directs the live-action Web series "The Legend of Neil," a spoof on the popular video game series "The Legend of Zelda," first posted his videos on YouTube in July of 2007 and now runs his own Web site, effinfunny.com.
As a computer science concentrator with a passion for writing, Parikh described being a humor TA as a "perfect marriage" of his two interests.
One of the gags in the class entailed bringing van Dam water each class in an increasingly elaborate way.
On the first day, Parikh and the other TA brought van Dam a glass of water with a straw in it. On the second day, they offered the professor water in a boot.
"By the end of it we just did a whole 'Les Mis' parody, where instead of 'one day more,' it was 'one drink more,'" Parikh said.
Parikh said he also filmed a Halloween skit in which the sweater van Dam always wears over his shoulders comes alive and attacks the TAs.
"The sweater was iconic and having it cast as the villain was fun," van Dam said. "It was unusual. No one had tried that before."
During the summer following his junior year, instead of procuring a computer science internship as he had in previous years, Parikh and a few friends worked on an "insane 30-minute short film" entitled "The Courier Dodge."
The movie became a finalist at the Ivy Film Festival, which encouraged Parikh: "If other people can do this, then why can't I?"
During his senior year, Parikh received a Capstone Award for a feature screenplay he had written. After graduation, Parikh lived in New York and put up a few plays "off off off off off off Broadway." About a year later, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in film and television.
He shot an independent pilot, "The Good Guys," about a group of superheroes and what they do when they're not saving the world. The pilot helped Parikh land an agent at the William Morris Agency.
"Before I knew it, I was meeting with TV and all these other Web companies out here, and then Comedy Central kind of swooped in and trumped all the other deals and said they wanted to guarantee six episodes," Parikh said.
He also promoted talented comedians on his Web site. "I know a lot of standup comics out here from doing a lot of improv, and that seemed like the easiest and sort of simplest thing to shoot and get a lot of content up for the site," Parikh said. "The concept for the site was to put up a new standup clip virtually every day."
Parikh has also created an original Web series called "The Guild," which focuses on the lives of members of an online guild. He is currently releasing new episodes of "The Guild" and is working on the second season of "The Legend of Neil." He is also pitching a few television concepts.
He credits his time at Brown with helping him figure out that he would like to do something creative with his life.
"Thanks to Brown I am able to apply my sciency/logical brain in creative endeavors," Parikh wrote in a post on the Class of 2002's blog. "I'm like a Terminator who can paint landscapes or sculpt."