Alex Meub

The Case of the Missing Sketch

One of my favorite podcast episodes is Reply All’s The Case of the Missing Hit. A guy has a 90s pop song stuck in his head. He can sing most of it, but nobody else has ever heard it, and he can’t find it anywhere online. He is determined to figure it out and the show even brings in musicians to recreate the song from his memory. For a long time it seems like he might have made the whole thing up. I won’t ruin it, but it’s a great story.

I’m the same way. When I rememer something and can’t find it, I get obsessed. Part of why it gets to me is that I’m spoiled. Almost anything is a few searches away, so when something doesn’t turn up, it stings. The longer it stays missing, the more I want to find it, and after a while I start to wonder if I just made it up. Usually the thing itself isn’t even that great. It’s more about proving to myself that it really exists.

I had my own missing hit experience but instead of a song, it was a comedy sketch.

The Sketch I Couldn’t Find

Back in March 2024, something reminded me of an obscure Demetri Martin sketch. In the sketch I remembered Demetri Martin, in a suit and tie, getting ready for an office job. He makes a pot of coffee and, instead of pouring a cup he drinks the whole carafe. Then he bikes to work in a ridiculous aerodynamic helmet, yelling at cars the whole way.

I didn’t know what it was called so I searched for it as a Demetri Martin sketch. I watched every episode of Important Things with Demetri Martin as I was sure it was from his show. When it wasn’t there, I figured it was the intro to one of his comedy specials, so I watched those, then his shorts and anything else I could find. I tried every YouTube search I could think of. Nothing.

So I asked Reddit. My r/tipofmytongue post said:

[TOMT][VIDEO][>5 Years Old] A comedy sketch where Demetri Martin is going to an important office job and makes coffee using a coffee maker and drinks the whole carafe of coffee

Nobody answered, so I gave up.

The Aha Moment

Around the holidays in 2024, I brought up the sketch with my brother. He remembered it too! Neither of us could place it, but at least I knew I hadn’t made it up, and that got me digging again.

This time I went through comment sections instead of search results, specifically Reddit threads about Demetri Martin and similar comedians. I randomly found it in a January 2022 r/boburnham thread called “I think Bo broke my sense of humour :/”. Someone missed Bo Burnham’s weird standup style, someone else said Demetri Martin comes close, and the reply to that was the holy grail:

u/Jesle37's comment on r/boburnham recommending Clearification

Clearification! That was the name I could never remember. It had been sitting in a reply with one upvote, in a subreddit about a different comedian, for two years before I even asked. On January 5, 2025, I marked my own r/tipofmytongue post solved.

The comment linked to the official Clearification YouTube channel, which is still up, with episodes 1, 2, 3 and 5 and all 34 animated clips. The scene I remembered is in episode 1, “A Rare Condition,” and my memory was almost exactly right. He drinks from the carafe at 1:08, puts on a silver aero helmet at 1:13, and then bikes to work, yelling into his phone, getting thrown over the hood of a car.

Demetri Martin chugging a carafe of coffee

The bike commute

Clearification was a 2006 web series that was really an ad for Windows Vista. Demetri plays a guy with a “rare condition” who checks into the Institute for Advanced Personhood to get clear. It lived on clearification.com, a full-screen Flash site, and Microsoft let the domain lapse at the end of 2007.

The Deep Dive

The YouTube channel was missing episodes 4 and 6, so I kept going, this time with help from Claude Code. The site’s RSS feed was the key. The Wayback Machine saved it more than 40 times, and the last full copy lists every file the site ever offered: 6 episodes, 34 animated clips, 7 MP3s and 13 wallpapers. That gave me a checklist.

The Wayback Machine had some of the clips, most of the music and all of the wallpapers, but not the episodes or the Flash site itself. The whole site was one SWF that loaded its content from a web service, and 2006 crawlers couldn’t see it.

Episode 6, “Looking on Wheels,” turned up as a 2012 fan re-upload. Episode 4, “Demetri, the Subject,” was my favorite find. A 2010 fan blog had embedded it from a YouTube video that was long deleted. findyoutubevideo checks a dozen archives for a YouTube video ID, and it found that on May 2, 2008, the Wayback Machine had saved YouTube’s raw video file for that exact ID.

The in-story Institute for Advanced Personhood had its own website, theiap.org, and its Flash file did survive, so I got it running again in Ruffle. The main Flash site is still lost, but a November 2006 YouTube “case study” screen-recorded it for about 40 seconds. I used that to build a recreation of the site at clearification.alexmeub.com, and everything I found is on the Internet Archive.

You Can’t Search for What You Can’t Name

Almost anything really is just a few searches away, and Clearification was findable the whole time. It was just only findable using a name I never thought to search for.

Search works on names, and often times people name things in ways you don’t expect or may not remember. Microsoft picked a made-up word and gave the series its own site, separate from the rest of Demetri’s work. Even the comment that finally pointed me what I was looking for was in a Bo Burnham thread. Search needs you to remember what something is called, and I only recognized the name once I saw it.

The Journey Continues

Clearification still isn’t complete. Here’s what’s missing:

  • The Flash site itself, vista_shell.swf. This is the one I want most.
  • The original episode files, which were much better quality than the YouTube copies.
  • lemonade.mp3, the music from episode 6.
  • The Cannes case study and banner ads from Mekanism, one of the agencies behind it.

I’ve posted about this on r/lostmedia, but it seems unlikely that I will recover these last pieces. I am happy that I was able to pretty much recreate the entire experience without them, though.

Wrap-Up

My favorite part of The Case of the Missing Hit is the moment the song turns out to be real. I had the same feeling watching Demetri drink that carafe again. I hadn’t made it up. It was just somewhere I never thought to look. After 20 years, Clearification is still funny and strange, and it feels like a bit like a Scientology parody but weirdly is promoting Windows Vista. You can check it out on the reconstructed Clearification site.