Your friends and family are YouTube’s best filters.  The reason?  The majority of the clips you find browsing are terrible.  Most likely, unless you’re intentionally subjecting your friends to garbage, you’re not going to send them bad material.  What you send, naturally, is a mark of your identity.  Send something dumb and you think it’s funny?  Hope you have dumb friends.  A buddy recently sent me a clip too stupid to waste time describing with the subject line, “This is funny…I swear!”  Well, it wasn’t funny at all.  It was horrendous.  When I realized he was serious it made me consider whether or not we were really friends.  How could our senses of humor be so different?  I thought I knew him better than that! 

But through the video muck, now and then, is a diamond.  It’s not difficult to identify, because you do it every day.  A new sitcom takes 2 minutes before you know whether you’ll watch it again (ie, “Rules of Engagement,” which premiered last night on CBS, flopped the second I heard the laugh track).  After watching enough Super Bowl commercials on Sunday you knew within 3 seconds whether the theme would be funny (and thus require you to watch the remaining 27 seconds) or serious (and allow you to turn your attention to the Amstel Light in the fridge).  It takes something special for a YouTube video to grab your attention straight away.  And Dutch West, a New York-based comedy troupe with a lot of material on YouTube, and a lot fans watching it, does just that.  One particular clip, “Street Magic,” with over 40,000 views, is a parody on the modern magician, only one whose skills are not quite fully developed.