Chatting With Will Sennett, Comedy’s King of Absurd Sports Humor

A few years ago, the comedian Will Sennett saw a billboard for the big-screen adaptation of Dune and was struck with a very particular thought about the film’s leading man, Timothée Chalamet.

“I was just like, ‘I could fucking get his ass, dude,’” Sennett remembers. “Truly, I just started typing. Get his ass this way, get his ass that way, bang bang. He’s gonna chase the high cheese every time, fucking idiot.” Moments later, Sennett had posted a tweet (since deleted) and subsequent TikTok detailing how he’d strike out Chalamet on three pitches. Deeply bizarre and undeniably hilarious, the posts went viral.

That ode to pitch sequencing has been viewed 279,000 times on TikTok and counting, with countless shares on Twitter that introduced Sennett as the clown prince of sports comedy, a perfect avatar for the type of person that lives and dies with their favorite team but also loves I Think You Should Leave. Approaching the two-year anniversary of the video’s posting, Sennett says people will still approach him on the street or yell at him on stage about it. He jokes about how it’s better to be known for that than it would for something he didn’t like, didn’t find genuinely funny, or even worse, was problematic. He’s made a whole world out of things like this—nonsensical musings about whatever’s on his mind, which most of the time, has to do with sports. “It was so specific, so I was kind of surprised,” he recalls over Zoom, with a World’s Best Uncle plaque visible over his shoulder. “The specificity, if you really get in there with sports stuff and have an absurd angle, people tend to really dig it.”

He’s not exaggerating. The standup from Cincinnati has amassed over 100,000 Twitter followers and 10 million TikTok likes thanks to a very specific brand of comedy, one that stands at the elusive intersection of absurdity and earnestness. But today, we’re here to talk about sports. Sennett, 28, is a full-time sports freak. His devotions are forever with the Bengals and Reds, two teams that put a “learned helplessness” in him, but have accidentally laid the foundation for his entire worldview. As such, he’s carved out an interesting niche for himself: the alt-comedy jock in a sea of theater kids, one who’s now successfully convinced several previously-uninterested people in his Los Angeles comedy orbit to post up at Buffalo Wild Wings with him every NFL Sunday.

“I played sports 24/7, 365 for the first 18 years of my life,” Sennett tells me from his LA home. “It’s just on the forefront of my mind. It was the way in which I experienced every single emotion for the first time: happiness, sadness, joy, sorrow. To this day it’s still kind of the lens through which I look at everything, obsessively. The other night I got drunk, came home, and watched the 2022 Bengals highlights. That’s just like, my first move.”

And today, sports-related content is a huge part of Sennett’s online presence, whether it’s a video about how other countries have no idea how to run a two-minute drill or a tweet clowning on soccer’s substitution ritual. But when he reached a crossroads in his life and began to consider pursuing comedy, he says, he never set out to be the spo