A St. Louis reporter’s bleak but hysterical perspective on why February is the worst month of the year has once again gone viral.
The deadpan, absurd and frequently existential segment saw local reporter Kevin Killeen of St Louis’ KMOX break the news about February’s place in the pantheon of terrible months back in 2016.
“February is the worst month of the year, but it’s an honest month. It’s a month that doesn’t hold up life any better than it really is,” Killeen begins the infamous segment.
With his gray rain jacket and maroon tie, Killeen speaks about the urban landscape behind him like Edgar Allen Poe, detailing a tableau of misery. Standing atop a parking garage, he looks out at a cluster of dark industrial office buildings and says, “Something great happened here, but it’s over with—and that’s the way February is.”
Heading to the bottom of the garage, Killeen finds a broken green umbrella with a pink floral pattern stuffed inside a trash can. He warns that the “expedition” through February had become dire and somebody had abandoned the umbrella like a “desperate flinging off of something that’s not true anymore.”
The camera slowly zooms in on a gray and foggy city street that the reporter describes as a place where people who are punished get sent.
“If you notice the way people cross the street in February, it’s different than in the summer. Nobody is tap dancing or breaking into a Rodgers and Hammerstein song,” Killeen says. “It’s their lunch hour and they’re just barely able to get across the street and hunker over a bowl of chili.”
Killeen becomes increasingly philosophical and morbid as the segment continues, describing the land as “tired” and the trees as figures hiding some “awful truth” hiding in the branches.
“Something that’s been bothering you for a long time is out there. What is it? You can almost see the shape of it. When all the color is gone and life is stripped down to the starkness of February,” the voiceover continues.
Concluding the segment, Killeen says the month is bleak, honest and tells you how things truly are. He then signs off with an old saying from his father, who said, “If you can live through February, you’ll live another year.”
Despite the bleak nature of the script, the February segment still makes people chuckle to this day.
“I am crying laughing,” San Antonio Report Editor-in-Chief Leigh Munsil wrote on Twitter.
“Hilarious. This content is what the internet was created for,” Emmy-winning producer T.J. Allard chimed in.
Speaking with The Guardian last February, Killeen said the segment was initially intended to be a “throwaway piece” and credited KMOX for giving him the editorial freedom to make it. He said the segment’s success should be a lesson to new editors.
“They don’t know half the things their people could create for them if they just let them be creative,” he said. “News editors are always saying what’s on the wire, or what’s on the New York Times when they could be asking, what can you not stop thinking about? What have you been talking about at parties?”