Nineteen years ago (gah), after a crappy shift at a bougie grocery store, I was dissociating by watching Fuse—a now-defunct MTV offshoot for the 2000s alt crowd—and a sketch comedy show called The Whitest Kids U’ Know came on. I still remember cry-laughing at an Abe Lincoln skit where he’s taunting a short-tempered John Wilkes Booth at the Ford Theater as my mom wandered in desperately to figure out what I was going on about. She watched for a few seconds, then left the room perplexed, as most mothers would. 

We were a Def Comedy Jam household growing up, despite me being far too young for those crude-ass jokes. But they shaped my humor. Eventually, I developed a taste for anarchic comedy that was silly and irreverent, and, most importantly, I needed that joke or skit to escalate almost to the point of discomfort.

If you’ve ever found comedians who feel divinely calibrated to your personal taste, consider yourself lucky. There’s maybe no better feeling than a joke or punchline that blesses you with the kind of laugh that leaves you breathless, like your body can’t release the joy fast enough. Your head could explode from the pressure of it all. The Whitest Kids U’ Know comedy troupe brought me there more than any other performers in the dismal then, fondly thought of now, late ’00s.

When I sat alone in a theater in 2009 to watch Miss March, a raunchy comedy about a sheltered dude who wakes from a four-year coma and road trips to the Playboy Mansion with his reckless best friend to win back his now-famous ex from high school, I thought I might die laughing in the theater. During a scene where Eugene empties four years’ worth of bodily backlog all over a hospital room after being beaten awake with a baseball bat by his best friend, who’s in Ace Ventura cosplay, I (figuratively) lost my shit and am still thankful that there was no one there to witness it.

There’s a pure joy in watching Trevor Moore bug out his eyes at every ridiculous turn of events as the movie lurched from one chaotic scene to the next. It’s stupid, silly, gross and now a nostalgic part of Desiree history. When I went back to see it again a few days later, still alone because it tanked at the box office (currently at 5% on Rotten Tomatoes), I laughed maybe harder, because I knew exactly what was coming. (Horsedick.mpeg will never not be funny to me.)

Comedy rarely ages well, so I’ll never achieve the peak, head-splitting laughter watching Miss March the first and second time, but thinking back on it still makes me smile.

Sadly, we lost Trevor Moore in 2021. I remember my heart sinking when I read about it online. Sometimes it feels a bit strange to mourn someone you never knew, but his work had brought me so much joy that the loss felt personal.

On a happier note, Trevor helped bring one last project to life, which opened at the Alamo Drafthouse in LA this weekend. Three of the four remaining WKUK members showed up for a post-screening Q&A, and I managed to grab a ticket, a full-circle moment for my older, still very devoted self. (I even got my copy of the Miss March DVD signed by Zach, which totally made my day.)

It was a heavy feeling to sit down in a theater to watch the final project that WKUK will ever release together.

Thankfully, Mars has a hilarious (and freakily timely) premise that is anti-somber. The animated sci-fi comedy follows a lethargic dentist who signs up for a one-time month-long trip to Mars to dodge marriage and the slow creep of ordinary responsibility. But everything spirals when the billionaire running the mission is violently killed inside the transfer chamber between the ship and the Martian atmosphere, leaving the small crew of amateur space travelers stuck on the Red Planet. 

The film’s existence feels a lil improbable once you understand how many times it nearly fell apart. The project dates back to 2012 (according to Wikipedia at least) and was originally conceived as a live-action feature before evolving into animation out of necessity (according to what the guys said at my Q&A). Funding hurdles and rewrites slowed progress, but a crowdfunding campaign during the pandemic, which raised over a quarter milly, gave the production the momentum it needed to continue. 

“It’s about a couple of billionaires’ race to put a city on Mars,” Moore said in an interview on Wisconsin Public Radio in July 2021. “That’s the kind of line that we like to hit where it’s like, alright, we’re not talking about Elon Musk, we’re not talking about Branson or Bezos or any of these guys, but we’re going to talk about this. What’s happening in society right now is like all these rich guys are about to start colonizing the moon because we think that’s still going to be an issue 20 years from now. It’s not going to age itself out quickly.”

When Moore died suddenly a couple of weeks after that interview, the project could easily have ended there. Instead, the group chose to finish it as both a tribute to their beloved friend and a promise to the fans who helped bring it to life.

“Trevor Moore was the driving force of the Whitest Kids,” WKUK member and Weapons director Zach Cregger told Variety in 2024. “Getting this to the finish line without the main captain was really tough, and it meant constant debates about what he would have wanted, giving Trevor a vote in it.”

Voiced by Cregger, Kyle anchors the film as a sad-guy dentist who goes on an existential quest to find himself by literally leaving Earth with a crew of misfit space travelers. His avoidant decision to abandon a stable life with his fiancée, Candace, for a publicity-driven civilian Mars mission run by arrogant billionaire Elron Branson drives the story. If you’re in the middle of a midlife crisis, you’ll feel for poor Kyle. 

Paralleling Kyle’s journey is the unraveling of his ever-loyal best friend, Cooter (a perfect name), played by Moore. After assembling a crew of male strippers at Kyle’s bachelor party, Cooter spirals into drug-fueled paranoia and conspiracy hunting as his BFF tries to adapt in the space shuttle, culminating in a surreal closing sequence that is quintessential Trevor Moore. This is a WKUK joint, so the comedy is vanta-black; the film takes jabs at suicide, death and addiction, but one of the highlights is a recurring bit involving intimacy with a porcelain doll. But nothing rings hollow cause there’s a nice emotional undercurrent running through it all. 

“We wrote all these other movies in the time that passed after our first draft of this. But we just kept coming back to Mars because it was our favorite thing,” Cregger told IndieWire. “Just for fun, Sam and Trevor and I would pull out Mars and just punch it up. Then, a year later, we’d get together and do another month of work on Mars. We realized that this was the thing we all kept coming back to. Usually, we’ll get really excited about an idea, and then a little time will pass and we get over it. And we just never got over ‘Mars.’

The movie’s unique look comes from director Sevan Najarian, whose approach to animation grew out of practicality as much as style. The film was built in After Effects rather than through traditional animation pipelines, a method that allowed him to control the visuals and keep costs manageable with the limited budget. That choice gives Mars a bright, slightly off-kilter texture that fits the tone of adult animated comedy you might see while stoned and watching Cartoon Network after midnight. (Is it still on air? sigh.)

“I wasn’t really an animator, so I just did it by necessity to make things,” Najarian told IndieWire.

Behind the scenes, finishing the film without Moore was no easy feat. Cregger has spoken about sitting in the edit and hearing his best friend’s voice while choosing takes, a process that made the technical work feel inseparable from grief. Completing the film meant constantly asking what choices he would have wanted, an unusual kind of collab and possibly a solid way to process a loss of that magnitude.

The rest of the troupe, Sam Brown, Timmy Williams (who plays Wimmy Tilliams in the movie) and Darren Trumeter, fill out the world with a rotating gallery of characters, preserving the loose ensemble energy that defined their offbeat sketch comedy. It was so dope to see their camaraderie IRL during the post-screening Q&A where Brown, Williams and Cregger and Najarian talked about the years of iteration and the difficulty of finishing the film.

Moore’s presence is everywhere in the film, from the design of Cooter to the 10-plus-minute, Friends-inspired theme song that plays over the credits as the names of supporters who helped fund the film scroll by. It’s there in the meth-fueled conspiracy tirade—a funny echo of the real-world speculation that followed his passing—and in the film’s willingness to push every premise to its strangest possible conclusion.

Watching the film in a packed theater was tough because it was funnier to me than Miss March, so my laughter was hard to contain. There’s a twink army led by a man named Cooter, and it damn near shares an ending with Sinners, which is a sentence that I never thought I’d write (bigots don’t fare well in either film). One of the would-be astronauts looks like a disaffected Trent from Daria (and kinda like 2000s Justin Long from Zach and Miri Make a Porno…). Put simply, Mars is my idea of a perfect comedy.

For day-one fans, it’s a chance to hang with WKUK one last time and to honor Moore, whose spirit is baked into every ridiculous joke the movie throws our way.

As a final treat, Mars arrives on Blu-ray March 10 with behind-the-scenes interviews, a commentary track and deleted scenes. Let’s gooooooo!

After the screening, I briefly met Zach Cregger, who was generous to all of us fans who wanted to chat, a fittingly warm way to end such a celebratory experience. I’ll be curious to see what he does next with Resident Evil later this year and just pre-ordered my copy of Mars so I can dig into those special features from the comfort of my own home.