by David Pardue
Photos by Scott Aukerman and Steve Agee. More photos of CDR can be found here. More You’re Welcome ones, here.
Aziz Ansari was at You’re Welcome Wednesday night to introduce some clips from the upcoming season of Human Giant. If the rest of the show is as good as the clips, then we’re talking almost Mr. Show-level potential here. The rest of Human Giant (Paul Scheer, the Professor, Rob Huebel, Mary Ann) joined Aziz to present these clips on Tuesday at Comedy Death Ray to an audience that was totally eating them up. So, is it inevitable that Human Giant is going to blow up and be huge? Will we never see them again at the likes of You’re Welcome or even CDR?
This week’s comedy shows had me thinking about the give and take relationship between the LA alt-comedy scene and the Industry: they give our alt-comics a few breaks every pilot season, and then they take our alt-comics away from us, sometimes for a night, sometimes forever.
Mary Lynn Rajskub at You’re Welcome told how she broke into the scene. She was doing “performance art,” as she called it, when a friend told her to modify her act into stand-up by playing it for humor, and promised to hook her up with a manager. This was in the early 1990s. “I didn’t really know what a manager was back then,” she said. “Now I have a whole team: managers, agents, lawyers, stylists, personal assistants.” From performance art, to Mr. Show, to bubble wrap alien, to the darling of network TV, she’s gone awfully far. She stuck around for the whole show last night, and I think she enjoyed being part of the scene at the M Bar. Rajskub sighed, “I hang around with a lot of Republicans these days.”
I guess we’re lucky that she still wants to come test out her material now and then. Rajskub’s day job, negotiating over the phone with the giant chip on Jack Bauer’s shoulder, meant that she couldn’t officially confirm her You’re Welcome appearance until the day of the show. Patton Oswalt had to cancel an appearance the day before because (as he reported later with a shrug of disbelief) he was being interviewed by kid reporters for the upcoming Pixar film Ratatouille. And last week, the special Paul F. Tompkins-hosted Benson Interruption became the Graham Elwood Interruption when the folks at CBS kept Tompkins late on the set of his new pilot. (As an aside, kudos to Elwood who did a masterful job of Interrupting. As Andy Kindler put it to him, “either you’re a genius or it’s not that hard a job. I can’t tell.”)
Paul F. Tompkins did show up Tuesday night for the Human Giant-hosted CDR, to fill in for a sick Brian Posehn, and had more edge than usual. Honestly, I thought he must have been in a foul mood coming in; probably as a result of the demands of this pilot he’s working on. Recall last week, if you were there, when Tompkins regaled us with how the show’s producers sent him to the dentist for an appliance that would fill in the gap in his front teeth. Seriously? Oh come now. Could there be anything more adorable and inoffensive to America than the gap in Paul F. Tompkins’ teeth?
The answer to that is probably this: Bobb’e J. Thompson. The impossibly precocious star of That’s So Raven and, um, some other things on IMDb I’ve never seen, performed in a skit at CDR this week, pretending to be the head of MTV (with Matt Walsh as his toadie) making sadistic demands of the Human Giant boys. It was pretty funny, and if we take them at their word, completely improvised. Little Bobb’e J. — can I call him BJT? — in his white suit and cell phone left the stage to an appreciative round of applause.
…And then in walks Tompkins. If Tompkins was in any sort of mood coming in, it only made him that much funnier. And braver. With Bobb’e J. (and his parents and handlers) in the building, PFT launched into how much he fucking hates child actors. He told a story of impudent kid extras on the set of his pilot, screwing up the filming and the dialog, and how a sassy 7 year old girl ended up ruining his entire day, because he couldn’t help but sink to her level and want revenge on her. (”You will grow up with issues!!” is what he wanted to say to her, but didn’t.) So when he walked into the green room at CDR, and saw Bobb’e J. being indulged by a crowd of adults, according to PFT, “I walked right back out.”
BJT (yeah, I’m going with it) will be seen in the last Shutterbugs segment of Human Giant, about cutthroat agents of aforementioned child actors (keep your eye out for the 9/11 one – it’s unbelievable). If Human Giant does as well as I think it will, then kudos to Hollywood for discovering these guys. And if PFT’s sitcom gets picked up, then I’ll be damned excited for Paul F.’s well-deserved mainstream success.
But still. Fuck you, Hollywood, for stealing our comedians away from us. Why can’t you just come out with a string of Employee of the Month movies? Keeping Dane Cook busy shooting a movie that no one will ever see is a noble gesture. Greenlight that one, bitchez!
Disclosure: I would give my left nut for a writing gig this or next pilot season; if any is available, I will take down this recap and pretend it never happened. I love you, Hollywood, you sexy beast! Also, I have a script on InkTip.
