Are you ready for February? Or maybe you’ve noticed there’s not a lot to look forward to next month. It’s just a month we all have to endure so we can get to spring.
This clip about February apparently goes viral every year around this time but I’d never seen it before. The correspondent who wrote it is Kevin Killeen. He created this for KMOX, a news radio station in St. Louis, back in 2016. I’ve watched it 3 times and he made me laugh.
Something about this reminds me of Steve Martin or maybe Harold Ramis. It walks a fine line between absurdism and a kind of bleak realism that I’ve always enjoyed. I think that combination was behind a lot of the great comedy I grew up with in the 1970s and 1980s. I’m thinking of films like Meatballs, Animal House, Stripes, Trading Places and even Ghostbusters, films that would whipsaw between the mundane (having no job, dealing with petty tyrants) and the insane (the end of any of those movies). In fact, Kevin Killeen feels a bit like a real life version of fictional television weatherman Phil Connors from the film Groundhog’s Day (written by Harold Ramis).
Last year when the clip went viral, Killeen acknowledged some of the people who looked him up on Twitter:
Thanks for all the very kind words about my report on February. I thought it was just me, but apparently a lot of us feel near to flickering out this month. I avoid all major decisions in February—vacuuming, haircuts, swing dance lessons. The right path will emerge by spring.
— Kevin Killeen (@KMOXKilleen) February 5, 2022
Thanks, Debbie, sociologists have been warning us for years about the dangers of the internet. https://t.co/T8JgG3XEjA
— Kevin Killeen (@KMOXKilleen) February 15, 2022
Here’s an older tweet from 2020 on the same topic:
Two photos, same spot, one day apart. This shows why you should never make any major decisions in February. Things will get better. pic.twitter.com/xqoyVQusjT
— Kevin Killeen (@KMOXKilleen) February 27, 2020
This year, the clip has started to go viral again and people like me are learning about it for the first time.
Why, thank you. They call me Mr. February.
— Kevin Killeen (@KMOXKilleen) January 26, 2023
In addition to doing mostly weird news coverage for KMOX, Killeen is also an author of several humor books including Never Hug a Nun and Snow Globes and Hand Grenades: A Novel.
