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Looking for some quality comedy entertainment to check out?
Who better to turn to for under-the-radar comedy recommendations than comedians?
Remember the 2000s, whenreality TVwas new and nobody knew what was going on?
At our heart, were all just scheming drunk assholes, right?
2003sThe Joe Schmo Showstarted out with that premise.
It was one of the first breakout roles for Kristen Wiig.
When Wiig was injured doing a fake game, Matt gave his prize to her.
He was too nice to prank.
You have this golden couple, Austin and Piper, he tells Vulture.
What immediately hooked Levenstein was the fluidity of storylines on the show and how the format challenged the performers.
One of them did figure it out.
About halfway through the season, Ingrid realized the show was fake.
Its nearly impossible to findJoe Schmo 2online today.
Im going by memory, Levenstein says.
Why did you pickThe Joe Schmo Showfor this?Joe Schmo 1wasnt really underrated.
It was kind of a big deal at the time.
I do feel likeJoe Schmo 2is a little bit under-regarded.
I would almost rather focus on that because that was the first one I saw.
He was such a sympathetic character.Joe Schmo 2was more complex to me.
There are a lot of reasons for me that I like it a little bit better.
Well, lets talk about that.
And season two got so ridiculous that one of the marks figured it out.
People saw that as a failure.To me, it wasnt a failure whenIngrid realized it was all fake.
And they knew they were being reckless with it.
We feel bad about what were doing.
The host in season one was playing a hyped-up version of himself, but it was pretty real.
In season two, he was playing this fake British guy.
It was like a crime:Can I get away with it?
I want to get away with it; yet I dont want to get away with it.
Walking that line was so funny.
Earl, The Veteran.Right.
And at the end of the season, he was like, Was our friendship real?
Thats such a heartbreaking thing.
Were you really my friend?
Season two, you had Tim.
The guy whom were following is not that likable.
Hes kind of cheesy.
Hes kind of a frat boy.
You could totally imagine him, a little guy himself, kicking the littler guy.
He thought he was falling in love with Piper, but cultivating a catchphrase along the way: Jackpot!
To me, its a better moment than What is going on?
because it has more levels.
It doesnt mean what Tim thinks it means.
And thats where I first met Nick Kroll.
We had to adjust the storytelling to fit [the improv].
Kind of like inJoe Schmo,how the real person reacted would change the plot.
They didnt feel so bound by genre parody that everything was dictated from that.
The storytelling was so open-ended.
But then, in the writing, something can surprise you.
Audiences can be so self-congratulatory when they feel like theyre right there with the creators figuring it out.
But I love that feeling of not knowing whats going to happen and being surprised.
My goal is always to be surprising.
I think thats true withArrested Development;it was true ofKroll Showfor sure.
Joe Schmo 2was certainly surprising.The details were very impressive, too.
The falcon twist was hilarious; the way the falcon would fly in when something happened.
The eliminations were very funny.
The comedy styling was remarkably fresh.
Joe Schmoresembles modern reality TV more than the shows it was parodying at the time.
But now the reality shows do it because theyre being funny, too.
That was tricky onKroll Show.We were doing a lot of reality parody, different kinds of reality shows.
If youre doing a really good reality-show parody, youre doing some stupid stuff.
The audience asks, Is it the reality show thats doing stupid stuff or the comedy show?
Although, the one they did like five years ago sounded crazy.They did a bounty-hunter thing.
Lorenzo Lamas was the first-round elimination.
He was playing a heightened version of himself.
That was crazy, butSteven Seagalhad a reality show where he was a cop.How do you parody that stuff?
Thats why onKroll Show,we used reality shows more as a way to tell stories.
If we had just been parodying them, it would have been low-hanging fruit and not that satisfying.
Lets go back to how, inKroll Show, a joke could change whole plots.
Because that show did have a lot of low-key serialization.
By the time we were in production, most of the writers would be gone.
Onstage that day, wed deliver the script, then all sorts of other things would happen.
Nick was in control on the day.
And sometimes it would be little continuity things, but sometimes they would be big things.
The serialization was a dialogue that happened between the writing and the improv.
It would happen on a daily basis.
Every day youre improvising; every day youre writing.
Honestly, that sounds like what story producers do now on reality shows.Right.
It was all-consuming for me.
I was writing every weekend.
It was impossible to do it without being fully immersed.
In your podcast, you did anoral history of a guy who vomitedand ruined your show at Aspen.
It turned out they were nicer than youd imagined or remembered.Thats true!
It was that group that got together and didSit n Spinin Aspen.
He was an agent!
I just assumed he was a douchebag.
So in telling this story together, were getting more mad at him.
Were talking about going to Aspen, what it meant to us to be reading to the crowd there.
I had cast him as the idiot who drank at altitude and threw up and ruined my show.
Thats such a beautiful full-circle thing.
Fifteen years ago, your night can be derailed because things arent going according to your plan.
He was offering us all discounts to come to Las Vegas anytime, and he was sincere.
I believe he would treat us very well in Las Vegas.
