Local couple brings signature comedy to YouTube

Kevin and Vickie Hicks are a husband and wife team with a passion for video production. While they’ve done plenty of production work under their company, Chinimble Lore, the two Lansing natives recently decided to try something new — creating a YouTube channel.

Their YouTube Channel, called Couple o’ Hicks (tinyurl.com/y2lbktte), currently hosts dozens of videos under three main series — “Vickie’s Happy Place,” “Him & Her” and “Night-Time Whistler,” with the latter two especially focused on showing off the Hicks’ signature style of comedy.

As the couple explained, their history in video production goes way back.

“We have a video production company that we’ve had for about 20 years,” Vickie said. “We’ve done everything from local and regional commercials to a lot of editing jobs for enterprise companies.”

Kevin added that they started with commercial jingles.

“It started off as an audio production company,” he said. “And then, we moved into video as the technology afforded that, and then, basically, I’ve just been doing it professionally since about 1999, 2000.”

They’ve also produced several independent films, the links for which are available on their company’s website, chinimblelore.com/completed/.

While their video production work has largely been for national or even international projects, Kevin and Vickie love their local community.

“I love Lansing,” Vickie said. “It’s got a real community feel to it that we both love. It’s a small town, but it’s kind of got that almost tinge of rural appeal to it. But it’s still close to Ithaca and everything. And it’s just a lot of really good people are out here.”

Kevin added that they also know “a good number of the local business owners.”

“We like that community as well,” he said. “It’s a very tight community that looks out for each other.”

As far as their new side venture, Kevin explained that, while the couple had done some work on YouTube before, the idea for Couple o’ Hicks came during the pandemic.

“Through COVID, we actually produced three very, very small, independent feature films,” he said. “And then, after seeing how they did and just seeing the way that everything was changing in the industry, we decided to go back and look at YouTube as an option that basically, for the most part, affords us to make changes in terms of the creative stuff that we’re working on a lot easier than if we were making feature films. A feature film is an eight-month to two-year process, whereas a YouTube series like we’ve done, you can get it off the ground within a few months and make adjustments to it as it goes.”

Vickie added that the YouTube channel also affords them a lot more creative control over their content since it doesn’t take a “large crew” to produce its videos.

Couple o’ Hicks launched about a month ago, but work on it began well before that, so the couple has “a lot of ammo” in their arsenal, Vickie said. Kevin explained their overall approach to their channel.

“Part of our strategy is to have enough so that we can keep feeding it regularly a lot of times, and one mistake that we made in the past was to sort of put everything that we did all up at once and not have that constant activity on the site,” he said. “So, we probably have about twice as much in reserve than we already have posted. And we’re still producing.”

When it comes to the channel’s content, the two each have a video series of their own — “Vickie’s Happy Place,” where Vickie talks about topics related to life and aging in the modern world, and “Night-Time Whistler,” where an animated Kevin talks to a tree that whistles to him at night. “Him & Her” features both Kevin (Him) and Vickie (Her) acting as a married couple playing out short but comedic conversations while watching TV.

“Kevin, he’s got a fabulous sense of humor,” Vickie said. “He does most of the writing. And his character actually seems so funnier when I play the straight man, pretty much, on [‘Him & Her’], the poor beleaguered wife.”

Kevin explained that the inspiration for “Him & Her” skits usually comes up naturally in conversations.

“One of the things that we do a lot is ‘he’ will get words wrong,” Kevin said. “And so, sometimes, we’ll be talking and we’ll say, ‘Boy, if we switch that word out, that would be funny.’ So, a lot of times, it’s not sitting down and saying ‘OK, let’s write a script.’ It’s just, … we’ll be in a conversation, and then it’s like, ‘Oh, go write that down’ and that type of thing. So, it tends to just sort of occur to us, as opposed to something that we just sit down and deliberately try to pound out.”

While Kevin and Vickie didn’t start the channel to actively fill a need, they acknowledge that their target demographic — adults ages 45 and above — is underserved on YouTube.

“I think our main thing here is we’re not trying to copy anybody else or go into an arena where it’s real competitive because everybody’s doing the same thing,” Vickie said. “We’ve looked. We haven’t seen a great deal on YouTube that’s like what we’re doing. … We want to entertain people for a few minutes, just entertain. That’s all it’s about.”

Vickie said that the two thoroughly enjoy working together on Couple o’ Hicks.

“We’re a great working team,” she said. “We actually have been for decades. We work great together. And this has actually just been a lot of fun. We’re laughing through most of it. Kevin described it as a four-month honeymoon. And it really has been like that.”

Though their videos generally have low view counts right now, Vickie and Kevin said the response from their personal circles so far has been positive, and they know growing a channel like this is a process.

“Everybody related to us think it is really good,” Kevin said. “And we understand that it’s a soft thing. It’s a long process, everything like that. That’s why it’s more important for us to have to do things the way we’re doing it right now. I’ll just sort of let it be there while we’re populating it slowly at first, just so that we can work out the kinks. We’ve already gone through and had to rerender everything because of certain things that we didn’t realize we needed to do. So, we’re still dealing with the learning curve. So, that’s why we’re not in a real hurry.”

Kevin and Vickie will be keeping up with their company’s video production work while adding more content to Couple o’ Hicks, Kevin said.

“We see it as two different entities,” he said. “This is another venture, just like a film would be, just to see where it goes. We still have to pay the bills and all that stuff, so it’s basically just time management between the money work and then making the time and budgeting the time that we can do, which is at this point investing in the future endeavor. So, it’s just balancing those two realities.”

For now, Kevin said they have over 30 episodes of “Him & Her” produced and are planning to publish them periodically this summer. Check out their channel at the previously listed website.

Lansing at Large appears every Wednesday in Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to editorial@VizellaMedia.com.