2008 / Video / Early YouTube absurdist task-comedy
Gardening on Salvia
Erik Hoffstad’s ordinary garden task became a surreal early-YouTube comedy premise.
The original is hosted off-site; this page provides context and a link to it.
What was this?
Gardening on Salvia turns a basic chore into a deliberately detached, low-fi comic scene. The title refers to drug use; it is included as a documented comedy artifact, not instructional material.
Why it spread
The videos circulated through early YouTube’s oddity-sharing culture, where a plainly titled home video could travel because viewers needed to show friends how strange it was.
What happened
Gardening on Salvia turns a basic chore into a deliberately detached, low-fi comic scene. The title refers to drug use; it is included as a documented comedy artifact, not instructional material.
Where it came from
Under the letsGOtoCLASS name, Erik Hoffstad made the 2008 Being Productive On Salvia videos before later work as Internet Comment Etiquette with Erik.
Why it mattered
The series is a clean example of pre-creator-economy web comedy: a specific persona, a simple real-world setting, and a premise that needs almost no context to be memorable.
How it spread
The videos circulated through early YouTube’s oddity-sharing culture, where a plainly titled home video could travel because viewers needed to show friends how strange it was.
Where it led
Creator history
Started
Hoffstad posted irreverent home-video comedy to letsGOtoCLASS in the late 2000s.
Rise
The Being Productive On Salvia series became a long-lived early-YouTube reference point; its driving installment is the best-known surviving video.
Now
Hoffstad later became known for Internet Comment Etiquette with Erik, a satirical YouTube series.
Related official links
Keep going
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