Wild Comedy: The Funniest People to Follow

A former Olympic mogul skier. A data analyst with an MBA from Harvard Business School. A middle school science teacher. A ski coach and former UVM ski racer. What all of these people have in common is that in some ways they kicked ass in their respective sports. But more importantly, they learned how to make fun of themselves and they now have us laughing with them. Check out the four New Englanders who have created some of the funniest content and commentary that’s online and what they are up to now

TROY MURPHY (pictured above)

 A.k.a: Donny Pelletier, Maine’s Finest Athlete Instagram: @DonnyPelletier207 Other careers: financial analyst, sales, board member, U.S. Ski & Snowboard, pro skier.  Alma mater: University of Utah Lives in: San Francisco, CA; Bethel Maine Where you might find Donny: Ripping bumps at Sunday River,  Me.

With a Maine accent as thick as the fog in Bah Hahbah, a red plaid jacket, jeans and straight skis, Donny Pelletier has become a poster child for the Downeast Skier. His videos show him flailing down bump runs, wildly out of control, legs splayed, sitting so far back he could be a dragging taillight. It’s a type of skiing that only a seasoned pro – or a guy who has his orthopedic surgeon on speed dial—could master.

Pelletier, of course, is the former. Troy Murphy (Pelletier’s real name) grew up competing in moguls and went to Gould Academy  in Bethel, Maine before joining the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Team. In 2014, Murphy started competing on the World Cup in moguls. In 2015 he won the national championships and in 2018 Murphy competed in the Olympics. After retiring from competition, he’s served as an athlete ambassador for Protect Our Winters and a board member of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association. 

Now 31, Murphy is working in San Francisco as a financial analyst at Goldman Sachs, which is why you might see him “puttin the absolute screws ta sum guy with a midair pass like Bubba Stewart.” Translation: flailing down a mogul run and then throwing a fully extended back flip over the same kicker as another skier does a spread eagle.

But Murphy still comes home to Maine. On March 29-31 he’ll serve as the Bust N’ Burn Master of Ceremonies (or “Master of friggin’ point-em,”) on the slopes where he learned his craft: Sunday River’s White Heat bump run.

COLTON HARDY

 A.k.a: Jerry, Chief Executive Jerry Instagram: @JerryoftheDay Other careers: account executive,
ski coach  Alma mater: University of Vermont  Lives in: Burlington  Where you might find Jerry: Skiing Mad River Glen

 “I never really had a plan from the beginning,” says Colton Hardy, whose LinkedIn profile proudly states he is the  Chief Executive Jerry,  @Jerryofthe Day. The website and line of clothing started off as a joke. Hardy was ski racing for the University of Vermont’s alpine team  when teammate Tim Kelley (of the Cochran-Kelly ski racing dynasty) brought four pairs of boots to test one day but forgot his shin guards.

Hardy took a photo and uploaded it to Facebook with the caption “Jerry of the Day.” That was in 2012. Since then, Hardy and now with his co-worker, his wife Lindsay, has made a practice of uploading anything that strikes them as goofy (football jerseys on the slopes, fur and most anything with an animal print), reckless, inept, or simply funny tojerryoftheday.com and its social media. Usually with a killer caption as a punchline.

There are photos of people in one-piece ski suits with goggles on upside down, videos of skiers crashing into liftlines at high speed, an avalanche pack exploding in a gondola car full of German skiers and plenty of big sends… that don’t quite make it as a skier planned.

One of the most popular videos this year was captioned “The battle of Jerrysburg #SavingPrivateJerry.” 

“It’s a POV video of someone snowboarding down a crowded slope on a deep powder day and it literally looks like a battlefield. People are stuck every 10 feet, digging themselves out of powder trenches and reaching for a savior,” says Hardy.

@JerryoftheDay now has 2.1 million followers on Instagram and Hardy gets nearly 300 to 420 submissions a week that he pores over, waiting for the right caption to come to mind.

Early on, Hardy started selling t-shirts with the motto Respect the Send. That’s morphed into a whole line of ironically goofy gear. “It’s joke gear that you would get as a gift,” says Hardy—things like a purple fanny pack with skiers all over it, a sweatshirt designed to look like an ugly Christmas sweater and Send-o-Vision mirror glasses. “It’s almost become this meta thing: people are ordering things like the Send-o-Vision glasses, then wearing them in photos and videos and doing something stupid just so they can be featured as Jerry of the Day.” He’s shipped orders as far as Azerbaijan.

Behind all of this funny business, Hardy has managed to make enough to create a full-time job for himself and Lindsay, who helped design the first t-shirts. A team of designers now churns out more than 40 items.

What’s Jerry’s secret to success? “I think one of the main things that makes JOTD funny is how relatable it is since we’ve all been there – everybody messes up. And if you haven’t I highly recommend trying it out! “ says Hardy. “Skiing is very gear heavy, so there are plenty of opportunities to get something completely backwards.”

MATT LYONS

Name: Matt “Schmutz” Lyons A.k.a.: Vertex, Macchiato, Caviar  Instagram: @mattslyon Other careers: Middle school science teacher, camp counselor and outdoor educator Alma mater: Roger Williams University  Lives in: Boston “but frequently in Vermont” Where you might find Schmutz: Snowboarding at Okemo or hiking the Appalachian Trail

Hey, what’s up? My name is Clavicle,” Matt Lyons says with an earnest intensity in “Every Person who Rides a Mountain Bike,” one of the videos he posts to multiple social media channels. “You know it’s an expensive hobby when the bike on the roofrack costs more than the car… Those people who say money can’t buy happiness? They clearly have never full sent it down a chute with the boys…If I see another rig with a bike on it, I’m gonna make that car pull over and we’re going to talk about tires for two hours.”

Clavicle is just one name. There’s “Champlain,” in “Your New Roommate at University of Vermont” who says “My senior motto was Reduce, Reuse, Recycle which I think sealed the deal on my acceptance.”

Lyons delivers most of his monologues with the sincere intensity of a dude totally grounded in the outdoors and a bro who is the master of his micro-environment – be that Every Person Who Cold Plunges or Every Person Who Only Skis the East Coast.

For most of his topics, Lyons comes across as hilariously legit as he nails the foibles and passions of those who are slightly obsessive/compulsive about their outdoor sports. “I think it’s funny because everyone knows someone like that. I don’t have to reach a wide audience but if just a few people watch these and send it to someone they think that skit embodies, it tends to spread pretty quickly.”

One of the reasons Lyons comes across as legit is that he is: “It all started when I was thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail in 2019 and I started making a compilation video,” he said. He’s since hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. Then in 2020 as Covid set in, he began posting to TikTok.  While some of his early posts were instructional and serious, he noticed that his send ups of people who live in sports towns (see “Every Person Who Moves to Burlington”) went viral.

Most of the material he knows inherently or picks up quickly. “My girlfriend went to UVM so I know Burlington. I taught at a camp in New Hampshire for a while and I spend a lot of time in Vermont,” he says.  However, sometimes if a sport is new to him, he has to do research.

The one thing he vows not to do, though? “Even though I taught school for many years, I can’t do stand-up in front of a crowd.” So for now, follow him on social media.

IAN MACOMBER

 A.k.a: Slalom Tokyo Drifter Instagram: @Slalom Tokyo Drift Other careers: Data scientist, alpine ski racing coach Alma mater: Dartmouth  Lives in: Boston, Ma.  Where you might find Macomber: At the Kelly Brush Ride in Middlebury.

As a ski racer at Burke Mountain Academy, Ian Macomber was taught many of the same things about skiing gates that propelled Mikaela Shiffrin. But it was the gates he missed that have earned him his biggest following in the ski racing world. After posting a video of his own ski crash with a self-deprecating commentary, Macomber began to get dozens of videos from others of their crashes. He started Slalom Tokyo Drift as a way to capture the “the best and the worst of ski racing,” a nod to the 2006 film The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.

STD, as it goes by, has earned a following of 170,000 on Instagram and is a favorite among pro racers. It famously earned Macomber a gondola date with Swiss racer Lara Gut-Bahrami during an early Killington World Cup.

With an MBA from Harvard Business School and a role as head of analytics engineering at the financial platform RAMP in New York City, Macomber isn’t trying to make a career off  STD. In fact, he turned it into a non-profit and donates to the Kelly Brush Foundation, which helps provide safety netting and other gear to ski races.

While most of STD’s images are “agony of defeat” worthy and the captions often hilarious, there’s a serious side that came out after Norwegian Alexander Aamodt Kilde’s season-ending crash at a World Cup downhill in Wengen.

Macomber wrote: “At @slalomtokyodrift, we share videos of ski racing crashes not to make light of these incidents but to highlight an inherent aspect of the sport. The skill, the speed, the danger, and the adrenaline are what make ski racing exhilarating, yet they also bring risks that every racer bravely faces. These moments are not about failure or ridicule, they are about the shared respect for the courage and commitment of ski racers.”

Yes, but sometimes laughter is also the best medicine.