They may not be a household name in America yet, but thanks to a new show on Netflix, more and more people are discovering the Australian comedy group Aunty Donna. Now, the comedians have taken credit for another viral sensation that has taken over the internet in recent months. The confession comes in a new video released in collaboration with the YouTube channel I Did a Thing.
How did Aunty Donna plant a monolith?
In the video, we see that Aunty Donna, which is a group of six comedians, reached out to I Did a Thing to order a monolith as a way to promote their Netflix show. The video repeatedly suggests that the crew is actually responsible for planting monoliths all around the world, including in Utah and Romania. While that’s not actually the case, they are very much responsible for planting one in Australia.
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Over the course of the video, we see them contract someone to build the statue, and then try to figure out how to get it in place. They eventually fix it to the floor of a forest, and then have a discussion about the best way to kill people who have seen them transporting the statue. The video is a great example of viral marketing at work, and also a showcase for exactly how easy it is to install one of these in a random location.
What is Aunty Donna’s Netflix show about?
Although the origins of the other monoliths may not be clear cut, Aunty Donna’s decision to install a monument wasn’t all for naught. It was an attempt, and likely a successful one, at intriguing viewers about Aunty Donna and their new show on Netflix. The show is called Big Ol’ House of Fun and features new material as well as clips from old live shows that the group produced.
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The show also features guest appearances from people like “Weird Al” Yankovic, and has been a long-term goal of the group for some time. Although Aunty Donna began producing content for the web, they say that their goal has always been to move into the world of TV.
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“TV’s always been really important for us,” Mark Samual Bonanno, one of the stars of the show, said in an interview with The AV Club. “I would say from the start we were always like, ‘We want that half-hour show.’ The internet stuff has just been this byproduct of ‘Oh, that’s what people are doing now, so we’ll dip our toes into that.'”
Zachary Ruane added that the internet can be a great platform for one-off ideas.
“YouTube and online is such a perfect platform for individual sketches,” Zachary said. “But there’s an interaction between sketches you can’t get. Every sketch you put out has to be a piece of gold, and it has to have the accessible notion, it has to have that core thing.”
Now that they’ve got the show that they’ve been working towards, it seems Aunty Donna is going to great lengths to keep it on the air. Not every comedy group would be willing to plant a monolith just for the publicity.
Season 1 of Aunty Donna’s Big Ol’ House of Fun is streaming on Netflix now.