'Pipe Rock Theory' is a short comedic masterpiece for our time

Conner O’Malley strikes again with a five-minute skewering of Joe Rogan, Scientology, online pedophile panic, and the insane conspiracism of the Trump II era.

Conner O’Malley is a comedic genius known for some of the best Internet-based comedy of our time, which has occasionally broken through into mainstream entertainment, including on I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson.

Last year’s full-length movie Rap World, which O’Malley co-directed with Danny Scharar, was the story of a bunch of small-town Pennyslvania idiots trying to pull an all nighter shooting a rap video, didn’t get much of a release beyond road show screenings and landed soon after on YouTube. But it was one of my favorite movies of last year.

O’Malley is also responsible for one of the best cinematic works of the new year, although it’s only five minutes and 40 seconds long. And since it’s reportedly been removed from Letterboxd, it’s debatable whether you can even consider it a “movie,” even though short films typically are included there.

The video is called The Pipe Rock Theory, and you can watch it on YouTube as well as various social media platforms. It’s an extremely dead-on parody of various Internet tendencies at this very moment, from Joe Rogan podcast clips to TikTok aesthetics to pedophile sting videos to other factually questionable nonsense that goes viral daily, in the current era of Elon Musk-owned X.

The video begins with what looks like a Rogan-style podcast, in which a weird guy (O’Malley) shares “The Pipe Rock Theory,” about woo-woo mind control experiments involving pipes inside rocks, which he describes as “Netflix for pedophia,” as the host listens to this nonsense and gullibly agrees, in the Rogan tradition, with every word.

Soon after, the video pivots into one of those off-brand To Catch a Predator TikTok channels, as O’Malley gets confronted and kidnapped outside a Target. The third act pivots to making fun of Tom Cruise, the Church of Scientology, Bono, the theme from Band of Brothers and other surprising targets.