Well, you clicked on the 'about' section, or you got lost on your way to YouTube or something, so there's a high chance that you want to know the story behind all the wild behavior. Well, to properly get you in the position for understanding, just pretend that you have been riding the 'despair train' so badly, that you're not even sure of your own last name anymore. Not necessarily impoverished, but more closely related to all those situations highlighted in different movies and books where someone is pawning things to get by, selling old baseball card collections to make rent, and totally unsure of the future. The type of situation where you spend your days in coffee shops searching Craigslist for jobs and signing emails with, 'lonely...musty..., Dan'. When I try and convey this type of mentality to people, I usually have to comfort them at the end, ensuring them that I actually enjoy this situation and that it's not just a 'Connor Oberst, dig your own grave, it's all over, even before you wake up in the morning' depressive state of being. Basically, the idea that I'm stumbling laboriously towards here, is that out of this unsure and strange state of my life, was born something fantastic. I'm sure that we're all familiar with the human triumph of being able to do things that you're not supposed to be doing at the moment, very well, juxtaposed with what your are...in fact, supposed to be doing at the moment. Like how if you have issue A at hand, which happens to be, writing a 12 page paper for class the next day, your procrastination will drive issues B, C, and D (like, cleaning your room, running errands, cooking dinner), into a staging ground where they can flourish, because the pressure or risk associated with that task is null and void, compared with the inevitable consequences of screwing up the task at hand (task A, writing the paper). All these ideas that eventually became skits, music, poems, montages and finally, "I'm leaving you.", the show, started while working through everyday events. Things like: maneuvering my way through destructive and foolishly optimistic relationships, salvaging my possessions from hurricane flooding, desperately trying to pay attention in class, or contemplating my finances inside a cold downtown home in Wilmington, NC, became weights that lifted the flood gates on the ideas, created, unintentionally, within my mind to entertain me amidst these everyday situations. Essentially, I've been watching "I'm leaving you." inside my head for years before anyone else ever got a peek at the first skit.

With the previous explanation of genesis listed, consider this the official statement addressing the fact that ILY is not for everyone. I realize that there will be a great number of people that will not understand, like, or tolerate the sort of shinanigans, malarky, and general poppycock, that happens to make its way onto scripts. It will never be everything for everyone, although I'm sure that it will always have something for everyone. Again, I don't really have what one might describe as a "normal sense of humor" and I've always had, and surrounded myself with, people who possessed, a humor that wasn't really like most others, to boot. I would nearly get fired on the first days of jobs because of how funny I thought the, fairly serious "worst case scenario" style training videos were. I would get scoffed at by people I knew, when I would try to describe to them a funny situation I had thought of earlier in the day, involving a man having a mental breakdown inside a crowded upscale hotel lobby. that I had thought of earlier that day. I can't list how many pieces of small paper I've scrawled ideas for skits or poems or funny situations on, in the middle of something important, like a job interview. The realization that I could actually make something of this came to me the day that my roommate at the time, and now, good friend and movie producer, told me that he wanted to film me sitting in our downstairs recliner reading the "list of things that are funny" that I had written that semester on the back page of one of my notebooks for class, while attending UNCW. John Moore filmed the first "a list of things that are funny" while he and my other roommate, Randy Skidmore, from behind the tripod, tried to hide their approving (or hopefully somewhat disapproving) smiles.

A lot of folks have asked me about influences and I have to say that I can probably list them fairly accurately. In no particular order, my main influences have been the G.I. Joe voiceover series from Fensler Film, Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job, Seinfeld, my father Rob Bonne', Schaefer, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Beck, Brad Neely's brilliant cartoons, the band "Radioinactive", and the very very strange humor of Shane Miller, Justin Edge, and the brains behind the graphic art, website programming, and some of the writing you see here in the show, Randy Skidmore.

Thank you all so much for your interest,

Dan Bonne' ILY Creator and Chief Writer