Chris & Jack – The White Room
2016 · Directed by Chris W. Smith & Jack De Sena
177K Likes
Best comments
1.“'What's the smartest question I can ask?' 'It's that one.' *Mind blown*”
More comments
- 2.“I love how, when listing the reasons he's going to hell, the guy says 'jaywalking' – as if that's one of the worst things a person can do.”
- 3.“I can imagine M. Night Shyamalan writing this in the 10th grade after doing bong hits with a couple of friends.”
The story
Cody wakes up in a white room. A calm man across from him breaks the news: Cody is dead, and before whatever comes next he gets one minute to ask anything he wants. Straight answers, no fortune-cookie wisdom. So Cody starts firing – aliens, the JFK shooting, how much hair he grew in a lifetime, whether his dad loved him – and the answers come back fast, weirdly specific and not always welcome. He even learns he had a soulmate, and that the two of them once sat back to back in a steakhouse without ever looking around.
Then he asks about the cheating. Bad move. The white room turns out to be something other than the afterlife, and without spoiling the last beat: reality TV is involved, and so is the girlfriend.
This is where Chris & Jack started. The channel's first sketches went up in January 2016, and The White Room is listed as episode one. Jack De Sena spent four seasons on Nickelodeon's All That as a kid, then voiced Sokka on Avatar: The Last Airbender and Prince Callum on The Dragon Prince. Chris W. Smith is a former Blue Man from Blue Man Group (and a juggler). Longtime friends, they write, direct, edit and star in everything, and for years they paid for the productions mostly out of their own pockets while working other entertainment jobs. They describe the work as genre-bending videos that feel more like short films than run-and-gun sketches.
The formula, as PopMatters put it in 2026: grab a pop-culture cliché everybody knows – the deal with the Devil, the Groundhog Day loop, the message from your future self – and push it past the point where it makes sense. The White Room does it with the oldest one there is, the moment you meet your maker. When MetaFilter users went digging through the channel in 2022, they called it criminally underrated, and this one came up as a highlight. A commenter back in 2017 already had a soft spot for it. In 2024 the two took the act to feature length in Me, Myself & the Void, with De Sena as a struggling comedian and Smith as the best friend living in his head. Still one of my favorite things in the whole Weirdness.
