I would strike out Timothée Chalamet in three pitches.
If you’re a Cincinnati sports fan who has been online in the last three years, you’ve almost certainly seen this bizarre video where a goofy guy in a Reds jersey details how his two-seam fastball would make the Dune star “feel like he’s drowning.” Will Sennett is one of the most popular comedians on the internet today, with almost 500,000 followers across social media, 10 million TikTok likes, a GQ profile, and a recently completed nationwide tour with comedy group Girl God. He can also count the entire cast of Oppenheimer as fans. (More on that later.) But even now that he lives in Los Angeles, the Middletown native still prefers sitting at home obsessively watching highlights of his favorite Cincinnati sports teams.
Sennett is one of those guys who can pull out names of players you forgot were even on the team, but one big name illustrates where his misery as a Cincinnati sports fan started: Carson Palmer. In 2006, the Bengals were good for the first time in Sennett’s lifetime. But on the second play of their first playoff game in 14 years, quarterback Palmer tore his ACL, MCL, and had meniscus and cartilage damage. The Bengals’ new dynasty was snuffed out before the team could even finish one postseason drive. He saw his whole family break down in anger. “Because they, like every [Bengals] fan, were used to constant devastation and hope being snatched away right before their eyes,” he says. “That’s where I was like, Oh, this is going to be my whole life, isn’t it?”
While attending high school at Bishop Fenwick, Sennett was a three sport athlete; a pitcher, quarterback, and shooting guard. Sadly, he was no Joe Burrow on the football field (“I had the hair but that was about it—pretty much halfway there, right?”), and on the basketball court his play style was closer to Kyle Korver.
“I couldn’t do anything but shoot threes. My senior year, I shot almost a hundred threes. And, like, two two-pointers. Looking back, I think I almost did that as a bit. Like, wouldn’t it be funny if I only shot threes much to the detriment of my team and myself?” He’s exaggerating, but only slightly; 86 percent of the shots he took in high school were three-pointers.
However, moving up to the next level wasn’t in the cards, so he “dicked around for five years” at Miami University getting a communications degree. He tried to break into sportswriting, but found he hated having to keep his words brief; he wanted to wax poetic about his favorite players for as long as humanly possible. He interned at Local 12 one summer, too, only to be stuck at the TV station the day Harambe was shot, which he described as “awful” and “bleak” and helped him come to the realization that he didn’t like television much, either.
Eventually, he finally figured he’d try out the one thing he’d always wanted to do: stand-up comedy. At the time, there wasn’t much of a scene in Cincinnati. The closest place that would take him on for a set was Go Bananas Comedy Club in Montgomery—nearly an hour away from Oxford. He also didn’t realize that the show was what’s called a bringer show: You can do a stand-up set for free, but you better bring five friends and they better all buy drinks.
“Luckily, I was in college, and so all of my friends were like,” Sennett pauses and clears his throat before putting on the most stereotypical frat-guy voice he can muster. “Hell yeah, dude. We’ll go, we’re gonna see you crush. You always say the right Step Brothers quote at the right time, you’re like the funniest guy in the world. So I dragged all of my friends an hour away, and proceeded to eat shit on stage in front of all of them.”
At one point, three minutes into that first set, he forgot the entire thing. He pulled out his phone to read what he’d written and was so nervous his hand was “violently trembling.”
“I just remember thinking, Oh God, this is not going well. I should just move to L.A. and do this. That seems like the right thing to do. Which is absolutely crazy in retrospect.”
But he did it. Each day, for a whole year, he would do two open mics a night at comedy events in Los Angeles, do poorly, get home at 1 a.m., and get up for work at 6. He says it was even more difficult than he expected. “I didn’t know anybody out here, and if you suck, everyone avoids you. They don’t wanna get your suck on them. It’s almost like you’re contagious.” With time and effort, though, he got a lot better, made several friends, and started having a lot of fun. Then the pandemic hit.
Stuck inside and unable to hit the comedy circuit, Sennett got a text from a friend who suggested he take to Twitter. “I was like, people still use that?” He’d created a Twitter account in high school, but his dad forbade him from using it out of fear that the young Sennett would tweet out his social security number. He found no real use for it in college either, noting that the only people he knew on the site were “those Miami guys who would just retweet Barstool articles all the time.” Now, bored and sitting at home in L.A., he logged on and resolved to tweet as much as possible. After a while, he started developing a fanbase for his weird mix of absurd comedy and sports commentary. Simultaneously, TikTok had begun to fully take off, so he started making videos there as well.
“It was mostly my friends being like, Do this! and I’m like, OK! and then just getting obsessed with social media and letting it, you know, sort of take over my entire life and personality,” he says, sarcastically.
His first ultra-viral moment—the one you likely know him for—occurred on a trip to New York City while driving to see a movie. In the middle of the Big Apple, he saw a massive billboard of Timotheé Chalamet for the upcoming release of Dune: Part One. And a thought occurred to him: if he was facing the actor on the pitcher’s mound, he would certainly emerge victorious.
“I could fuckin’ light that kid up, I thought to myself. That kid steps in the box against me? He’s in trouble.”
So he got to work on typing up the lines that any Reds fan under 25 has nearly memorized at this point: Slider outside. Curveball in the dirt. Bang, 98, inside corner. You’ve been out since the day you were born. The first draft of the tweet took 20 minutes to write and was 3,000 characters over Twitter’s limit. “There was a lot of cutting and editing. My friends were like, What are you even doing? and I was like, Shut up. I’m working.”
It paid off. Numbers are unquantifiable for the tweet/video—the tweet was since deleted, and the video version has racked up a modest 500,000 views across TikTok and Instagram, but it’s all also been remixed a million times and put onto Redbubble stickers, under Reds tweets, into Subway Surfer compilations, and on and on. He has no idea if Chalamet has seen it—but another viral moment did draw him some celebrity attention.
On August 8, 2022, Sennett tweeted: “Bobby Oppenheimer get your country ass over here my momma says you been in the city Inventing a bomb as big as a damn bus.” The subsequent video version was the one that went, well, nuclear. One of the cast members in the movie—he can’t say who—reached out to Sennett and told him that the video had made the rounds on set and the cast found it hilarious.
“I said, You’re telling me Matt Damon might’ve seen little old me? Wait, has Cillian Murphy seen it? They said, He doesn’t have a phone, he’s pretty offline, so we’re not sure. But we’re pretty sure he has. I’ll take it!”
But it always comes back to sports for Sennett. Often, he’ll fly back to the Queen City for big games because “people in L.A. don’t know how good they’ve got it.” Despite having the Lakers, Dodgers, Rams, Chargers, and several other sports teams close by, most people in L.A., he says, just don’t care about sports.
“I remember during the Super Bowl, it was literally in L.A., and I was walking around in my Bengals jersey all week waiting for someone to talk shit. But you know what? I saw maybe three, four people wearing Rams jerseys the whole week. At the Super Bowl! Everyone here has it so good, and none of them appreciate it. It’s truly a soulless, godless place when it comes to sports.”
He likes sports so much, in fact, that he and his friend Nate Fisher wrote an eight-episode podcast about a fake World Series that never happened. The series came to life during the pandemic, during which Sennett simultaneously and ravenously consumed Jon Bois’s sports documentary The History of the Seattle Mariners, the Iraq War history podcast Blowback, and the nonfiction page-turner CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. Out of boredom and pandemic restlessness, he spent an entire day imagining a chaotic mix of all three: a faux-history podcast where two fictional baseball teams played a legendary World Series, complete with CIA assassinations and Saturday Night Live after-parties. He then thought of Fisher, who has both a love for baseball and a talent for doing many different voices, and texted him an essay-length message about his idea. (Fisher’s initial response: “Why don’t you take a nap and call me later and we’ll talk about it some more?”) The duo spent eight months pouring their heart and soul into the podcast over Zoom calls before recording it and releasing it to the public. It did well enough to warrant a second season. “It’s my favorite thing I’ve ever done,” Sennett says. “Probably the most fun I’ve ever had doing anything.”
Despite years of pain and suffering as a Cincinnati sports fan, Sennett feels like there’s a reason for optimism for the first time in a long while. He comes back to visit every year for sports (he also gets “three Skyline coneys and then I’ll wish I got four”), no matter how the teams are performing, but there’s never been a moment in his lifetime where every single team was good at once—until now.
“Cincinnati sports fans: There’s light at the end of the tunnel. I think we’re gonna win a World Series soon. I think we’re gonna win a Super Bowl soon. And I’m not saying that with tears in my eyes. I’m not sweating as I say that. I think we’re gonna do it, dude. I think Cincinnati fans have been in a sort of Job situation. If we just power through, if we just keep on trucking, I think there’s a nice reward in sports heaven waiting for us.”
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