“This is, I think, the sixth time [I’ve] come here,” the woman’s public comment to the Corpus Christi City Council begins. She is wearing a full-body cockroach costume, antennae and all. “Last time, I brought you a bag of dead roaches. Some of you were offended, so this time, I’m bringing you a live one.”
This 51-second clip is a perfect example of the IRL Parks-and-Rec hilarity buried in public meeting recordings from communities across the country. It was the first such clip posted by Hamlet, a company with ambitions to use humor as a civic engagement tool and build “C-SPAN for local government,” according to founder Sunil Rajaraman. The tagline of its dedicated channel, Hamlet TV: “The human side of democracy — curated with warmth, humor, and respect.”
Hamlet launched an app for Apple TV in December, but the company is primarily focused on its TikTok and YouTube Shorts channels, Rajaraman told me. It has 164 followers on TikTok and 121 subscribers on YouTube; Rajaraman said the team expects Hamlet to surpass 1,000 subscriptions on both platforms within two months. (Hamlet TV also posts on Instagram, where it has fewer than 100 followers.)
Among the 40+ videos posted since December are:
The clips are anywhere from a few seconds to three minutes long; Rajaraman said the Hamlet team is still experimenting with the ideal length. Most clips have around 1,000 views on YouTube Shorts, give or take a few hundred. The three top-viewed videos there to date are a taxpayer demanding removal of a sign-in sheet (35,000 views); a Lincoln resident asking the city to “remove the name ‘boneless wings’ from our menus and from our hearts” (22,000 views); and a fight between a resident and a realtor (10,000 views).
Hamlet’s most-viewed clip on TikTok is of a woman kicking someone off Zoom at a British public meeting. It has more than 400,000 views. (Hamlet overwhelmingly pulls from American public…