“You’re dead, Cody. I’m sorry,” says a mysterious man in a white room, seated across from his bewildered guest. “And now you’re here for processing.”

Thus begins Chris Smith and Jack DeSena’s comedic short film “The White Room,” in which recently deceased Cody (Smith) finds himself in a blank room called Purgatory, where he’s given the rare chance to ask an unnamed receptionist to the afterlife (DeSena) any question he wants.

But there’s a catch: He only has one minute. Then he goes to Hell.

Naturally, Cody speeds through a series of inquiries, frantically jumping between the profound and the petty—from the great mysteries of the universe (aliens, the Kennedy assassination, other dimensions) to the absurd details of his own past (“How many pounds of hair did I grow in my life?”). Without missing a beat, his purgatorial host answers every question with cosmic certainty, until the minute expires and Cody meets his doom.

On Friday, the film went viral after Smith posted it to Reddit’s Videos community, where redditors praised its rapid-fire dialogue and surprising, dramatic, hilarious ending:

“I had always wondered what it would be like to get flat-out, no-filtered, fact-based answers to some of the biggest mysteries in the world,” Smith tells Upvoted. “There was never an intention of having the twist, that part just came out in writing.”

“The White Room” is the debut film of Smith and DeSena’s newly launched YouTube channel, aptly titled Chris and Jack.

“We both started doing sketch and improvisation comedy while in undergrad at UCLA,” Smith recalls. “From there, we got close with a few other comedic folks and went on to make Dorm Life after graduation.”

After Dorm Life, they collaborated on a series of shorts, most recently Movies in Space:

“Movies in Space is a comedy sci-fi,” Smith explains, “following the rise and fall of Travis Shepard, a future-earth-ambassador, who unwittingly gets caught up in an alien Hollywood-like system.”

(The full film—which Smith and DeSena are still showing on the festival circuit—will be released in late March.)

Though their new YouTube channel currently has only one video, many redditors recognized Smith and DeSena from their individual careers before Chris and Jack—though their earliest projects share little resemblance to “The White Room.”

Smith is a longtime professional juggler. In fact, his last viral hit in Reddit’s Videos community wasn’t a comedic film at all, but a juggling tour of Iceland, filmed on a GoPro in 2013:

He also tried out for Blue Man Group on a whim in 2012—and got accepted.

“I had never seen the show up to that point and couldn’t drum, so I thought [auditioning] would be a funny experience to tell my roommates about,” Smith explains. “Lo and behold, I got the job and was suddenly on the road for three years.”

Meanwhile, DeSena starred in the classic animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender (as the voice of Sokka) and Nickelodeon sketch show All That (in the post-Amanda Bynes cast):

For their next project, Smith and DeSena plan to continue with the tone set by “The White Room.”

“Jack and I both have a deep love for sci-fi, thought experiments, and high-concept ideas,” Smith shares. “We hope our channel will be a platform to explore all of these in a comedic way.”