Comedian Joe Nunnink recreated some friends for this hilariously instructive video that brings English Lit Majors into the Writer's Room to try and write a compelling porn film using the Hero's Journey and other established popular story structures. Because it's not enough to simply fuck the plumber — the lonely housewife must have external and internal goals that she is actively pursuing in order to make her into a compelling protagonist.
The "Hero's Journey," also known as the monomyth, is a common storytelling template for classic Western folklore and mythology, popularized by literature professor Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. While there are plenty of valid criticisms of the Hero's Journey, it's still frequently used as the broad structural basis for a lot of modern storytelling, particularly in the Hollywood mold of shortcuts for sellable stories with plenty of perfectly predictable plot twists. And this video perfectly, erm, nails that structure. Nails it hard. Harder. Right there. Yes!
And of course, for the non-embed crowd:
