Hamming it up online

One man’s attempt to pass off hamburgers as “steamed hams” has become another man’s magnum opus.

Winnipeg graphic designer Tyrone Deise has achieved YouTube fame for his creative renditions of an iconic Simpsons sketch in which principal Seymour Skinner hosts school superintendent Gary Chalmers for an unforgettable luncheon.

The episode, which first aired in 1996, sees Skinner serving his boss fast food after his carefully prepared roast goes up in flames. Calf stretching and alleged aurora borealis sightings ensue.

Deise, 44, is a hobbyist filmmaker who grew up watching The Simpsons. After seeing the episode memed online, he decided to remake the steamed hams bit in the style of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. He submitted the silent, black-and-white Super 8 film to the local WNDX Festival of Moving Image and uploaded it to his YouTube channel (@TyroneDeise) in 2022, without a second thought.

“Eleven months later it just randomly blew up,” Deise says.

The video, titled Steamed Hams but it’s a German Expressionist Film, garnered more than a million views, and thousands of comments praising Deise’s artful approach to an objectively silly concept. The positive reception inspired him to take the gag many steps further.

Deise has uploaded 12 different steamed hams videos over the past three years, referencing everything from 1930s radio dramas to mobile game ads to shadow plays from the Ottoman Empire.

Each video hits the main plot points of the source material — dubious directions, misheard menus, suspicious grill marks — with a wink and a twist.

In a Seuss-ified version, Skinner and Chalmers are turned into Whos and their dialogue spun into rhyming couplets in a hardcover book that Deise painstakingly illustrated by hand.

In an era when AI-generated art is becoming ubiquitous online, he makes a point of walking viewers through his process with behind-the-scenes videos.

High production value and experimenting with new techniques are a big part of the appeal for the filmmaker, who has spent hundreds of hours on the project.

“What makes it fun and challenging is always trying to dig deeper and find something fresh to do with it. It is still something I find extremely creatively rewarding,” Deise says.

The story of a bumbling underling trying to impress his superior while things go awry also hasn’t gotten old, yet.

“There’s something so ancient (about their dynamic), that’s why people connect with it and why it’s so endlessly remixable,” he says.

That said, Deise may be finished “steaming the hams” — at least for now. Last weekend, he released what he describes as his swan song: a live-action, 45-minute parody of My Dinner with Andre, a dialogue-heavy 1981 film starring André Gregory and Wallace Shawn.

The YouTube video, Steamed Hams but it’s a Critically Acclaimed Feature Film, has already amassed more than 145,000 views and stars amateur local actors Reegan Bourgeois and Terrence Ferguson.

“I didn’t anticipate that it would get the reaction that it has,” says Ferguson, who plays Superintendent Chalmers and who isn’t a big Simpsons watcher.

Bourgeois, a longtime friend of Deise, has appeared in several videos as Skinner.

“Tyrone goes all the way with his stuff, which is one of the reasons I wanted to be a part of it. There’s not gonna be any half measures here. He comes up with an idea, then it turns into a weekend having fun with a friend and making art,” Bourgeois says.

While Deise has exhausted his list of steamed-hams ideas, he plans to continue making humorous videos but is mulling more serious topics, such as social commentary and anti-consumerism.

Whether they’ll be a hit with his tens of thousands of YouTube followers is beside the point.

“If people do like them, then that’s great, but at the end of the day I’m making these videos to make myself and my friends laugh,” Deise says.

eva.wasney@winnipegfreepress.com