It starts out like a typical, sentimental, heartstring-tugging ad for a home pregnancy test. In a cozy suburban home, a nervous man drums his fingers on a table. Meanwhile, a woman in a bathroom looks at the plastic stick she is holding. As she comes into focus, her face registers overwhelming joy and surprise. With tears streaming down her face, she descends the stairs and delivers the good news to the man: “It’s positive!” They embrace and tell each other what good parents they’re going to be. Emotional piano-based music underscores all of this. One expects the Clearblue Easy logo to appear on the screen at any moment. But just when it seems to have reached its natural conclusion, the video keeps going. The music turns ominous, and the camera drifts away from the prospective parents to focus on a withered houseplant in the corner. Welcome to “The Test,” a devilish, Creepshow-referencing comedy sketch directed by Josh Jones and performed by a Philadelphia sketch duo known as The Incredible Shrinking Matt & Jacquie. This blessed event might be more of a curse.
So, yeah, maybe these two should not be responsible for a human life. Or any life. The Incredible Shrinking Matt & Jacquie are graduates of the Philly sketch comedy troupe The Flat Earth, who gave the world that profanity-laden Bill Burr/Her mashup back in 2014. So far, Matt & Jacquie have been concentrating on live performances, even opening for Danny Tamberelli of The Adventures of Pete And Pete fame, but they’ve slowly been building up a decent library of YouTube content as well over the last few months. In this little vignette, for instance, the two play a couple of extremely enthusiastic and woefully misguided Minions fans:
And they took a typical VH1-style 1990s nostalgia documentary in a weird and sad direction, too, with this sketch about a panelist who doesn’t remember virtual pets or Where’s Waldo? but definitely remembers something he calls “the light.” Everyone remembers the light, right?