Standard Deviants (originally The Standard Deviants) was a series of educational videos produced in the United States. The name also referred to the troupe of actors and comedians who presented the series. The series is owned by Cerebellum Corporation, founded in the Washington, D.C. area by George Washington University alumni Chip Paucek and James Rena, who created the series to help students learn using humor. As such, the series blended essential information with humorous examples and comic sketches. For example, the English punctuation video illustrates the usage of exclamation points through a sketch in which two characters excitedly play Battleship. The series was originally targeted at college students, but its intended audience became progressively younger over time, eventually described as "for junior high, high school, college and beyond". The original videos, which typically had running times of 1–2 hours, were later adapted into Standard Deviants TV, a series of fifty-two 26-minute episodes on PBS from 2000–2002. They were then retrofitted again into shorter videos for the K-12 school market, which as of 2024 are packaged as two lines: Standard Deviants School and Standard Deviants Teaching Systems. Cerebellum also created two other series, both short-lived. No-Brainers, described as "The Video Guides to Life", featured the same cast (but without the Standard Deviants name) in videos about various life skills, targeted at adults rather than students. The series comprised 12 videos, two of them adapted from Standard Deviants videos, released in 1998 and 1999. Later, Jibberboosh was a series of two videos for preschoolers, released in 2002.

Cast

Crew

Producers

Directors

Subjects covered

Sciences and technology

Mathematics

Social sciences

Business

World languages

English language

Literature

Life skills

These titles were released as the No-Brainers series: