KENNETH YODER’S “RODRIGO QUINTEZ” IS A LAUGHING SHAME
Published in Reel Chicago, August 2014
Kenneth Yoder aka “Rodrigo Quintez”
“Rodrigo Quintez,” the webseries about a sloppy male children’s entertainer who wears a tight dirty pink rabbit costume, speaks in a bad Latino accent and kinda hates kids, has scored more than 2,000 YouTube views since debuting last week. That’s great news for Kenneth Yoder, the Chicago filmmaker who created and stars in it.
“It’s fresh,” he says. “The best feedbak so far is from Google analytics. We’ve got a lot of minutes. People are watching the whole show.”
But whether or not this kind of professional insight would matter to a guy like Rodrigo Quintez, the show’s main character, is another thing; and that’s part of his charm.
“Rodrigo Quintez is not trying to put out good entertainment,” Yoder explains, “he’s just trying to strong arm people into enjoying his act.”
Yoder should know. Rodrigo Quintez has been his alter-ego since the mid-2000’s, when he bartended at an upscale Chicago restaurant and worked with a Cuban American food runner who would say things like, “hey, Kenneth, mon, check out the girl in table four: I think she wants to have my baby.”
He was so amused by his coworker’s behavior that he occasionally adapted it for kicks.
He was so funny,” he says. “I used to do it for Halloween.”
Kenneth Yoder
At the same time, Yoder was honing his skill in places like the Annoyance Theater and 2nd City, where he still frequently takes classes “to keep my finger on the pulse of the up and coming improvisors.”
As the costume took on a life of its own, one of Yoder’s friends realized that it was much more than a party joke.
“Dan Fisher is a cinematographer,” Yoder says. “I met him on the set of ‘Derailed.’ He pretty much forced me to do the series.”
Yoder and Fisher went after the type of humor normally found in animated shows like “South Park,” except they filmed on location with real people. They call the results, “wildly inappropriate.”
Indeed. In the kickstarter campaign, Quintez threatens to sell one nine year-old girl to human traffickers and encourages another to beat a piñata fashioned like an African American male. In the first episode, he allows kids to cuss, offers no adult supervision and disregards the innocence of youth with gusto that borders on contempt.
The second episode is titled, “Retardeler.”
The raunchiness comes as no surprise to Yoder, the son of a Nebraska pool hall owner who “got a bunch of attention because he was a really small guy” and, at the same time, a “huge character.”
Yoder came to Chicago in 2011 with an engineering degree from the University of Nebraska but dropped the straight career when he realized that, “guys like Mike Meyer actually went to Improv Olympic.”
“Get out there and make comedy that makes you have fun,” he says. “If you’re not having fun,” he says, “then you’re the dick.”
When he’s not acting like a terrible children’s entertainer, Yoder freelances for studios like the Onion Media Labs and recently signed on as a director with Quriosity Productions.