Do you enjoy being held hostage and being electrocuted with jumper cables? If not, maybe you shouldn’t be selling decorative birdhouses made from reclaimed wood on Etsy.
On Dec. 4, the folks at Funny Or Die called upon the services of Rachael Leigh Cook, Tracey Gold, and Mark-Paul Gosselaar to tell the story of fictional Etsy head Ellie Harper. Harper, the mind behind the “site women turn to when their poetry careers don’t take off,” is portrayed by Cook as a maniacal dictator who resorts to violence and intimidation when Etsy sellers fail to stay in line.
“eBay is for nerds selling busts of Doctor Strange…craigslist is for sex offenders,” states the Queen of Etsy, a twinge of mental unbalance visible in her eye as she speaks. “If you need Etsy, you need me.”
When Etsy seller Maggie Chester (Gold) goes on the record claiming that Harper broke her “quilting hands” for refusing to pay a 20-cent protection fee, Detective Michael Peck of the FBI’s San Francisco Division (Gosselaar) looks into the case. He determines that Harper has been responsible for the deaths of over 200 arts-and-crafters.
Harper does not deny the claims but instead embraces them. At a board meeting, she beats a board member to death with a rhinestone-encrusted baseball bat to assert her stature.
In the video’s climax ending, Maggie Chester approaches Harper and pulls a gun. Harper follows suit, but both women forego a bullet-riddled ending in lieu of a shower of compliments on their weapons of choice: “personalized six-shot .38 revolvers with ribbons, glitter, gemstones.”
Viewers of the video were happy to see Gosselaar, who began his acting career as wise-cracking teenager Zack Morris on Saved by the Bell, make a return to comedy, but it seems the jokes about Etsy’s domination of the online craft market were lost on many.
“RACHEL LEIGH COOK HOT video not funny,” Richard Gonzales wrote on Facebook.
“Don’t get it. Not funny,” bmore commented on a Huffington Post article detailing the video.
Photo via newyorkinsider/Flickr