‘Rehearsal’ Fans Are Rehearsing Their Reddit ‘Rehearsal’ Posts On Reddit

Fans of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal on the r/TheRehearsal subreddit have started a new subreddit, r/TheRehearsal1stdraft, to rehearse their posts.

The Rehearsal is a show on which Nathan Fielder stages elaborate stunts in order to help other people “rehearse” stressful moments in their lives. These scenarios vary wildly—one person wants to rehearse coming clean to his friends about not having a masters degree, while another wants to rehearse raising a child from birth to adulthood. Not only does Fielder hire actors and create detailed recreations of people’s houses and the places where they hang out, like the Brooklyn bar the Alligator Lounge, but he also employs a flowchart of responses to help guide the conversation through all its possible permutations. 

In some ways, it’s an enviable ability to have. Who wouldn’t want to be sure that an anxiety inducing conversation would go the way you wanted? To that end, reddit user DonttouchmethereUwU has created a new subreddit where redditors can try out the kinds of posts that they’d want to write on the actual subreddit for The Rehearsal.

Right now, the subreddit only has 300 members, and users are still trying to figure out how to get the tone right. In some posts, users write out the full text of the post they’d like to add to the main subreddit for The Rehearsal, with other users giving their feedback. One post has the user replying to himself, playing the part of both the poster and the potentially angry replies. Although it’s not a long thread, my personal favorite is a user asking for advice on their first comment on Reddit ever. The two commenters advise him to post, “first.”

Over time on The Rehearsal, Fielder has gotten more and more involved in his own show, to the point that he is now the sole subject of a rehearsal he set up for other people. It’s therefore not all that surprising that his fans would follow him down this rabbit hole, making their fandom more and more recursive;  r/TheRehearsal1stdraftTheRehearsal1stdraft seems delightfully inevitable.