The vibe is an element household reunion, half enterprise assembly as “Comedy Bang! Bang!” host Scott Aukerman sits down on the huge, graffitied desk within the transformed storage at his Hollywood residence. He’s sporting a black swimsuit; to his left, comic Paul F. Tompkins is, as all the time, neatly dressed. From behind his lavish beard, Jason Mantzoukas asks Tompkins — matter-of-factly — which character he’ll be taking part in. (Aukerman had simply, a couple of minutes earlier, FaceTimed together with his toddler daughter and really sweetly had her say hello to “Uncle Jason.”)
Then the microphones activate, and so do the performers. Aukerman, now with a a lot brasher vitality, begins needling Mantzoukas, who bandies jokes again throughout the online. Quickly Tompkins enters this free-for-all theater of the thoughts as a Truman Capote-coded socialite named “Hoover Personae” — who at one level observes that the masked vigilante “The Shadow” “was a butterface.”
It’s the jumbo, four-hour vacation episode of “Comedy Bang! Bang!” and earlier than lengthy this room is full of 12 folks all doing character voices, singing filthy lyrics to Christmas carols and cracking one another up. The ultimate visitor to reach is an automatic restaurant service performed by Gil Ozeri, whose janky iPad recordings of an AI model of Aukerman’s voice make Mantzoukas giggle so arduous he has to face up and maintain his head.
Twelve grown adults, sitting round a desk on a Saturday afternoon fooling around and ad-libbing as their very own cartoonish innovations. That is their job — and that is the broad enchantment of “Comedy Bang! Bang!”
“There’s nothing quite like it,” says Lisa Gilroy, one of many newer standouts on the present. “I think it is kind of every improviser’s dream to play with people that are just perfectly, as equally mentally ill as you are.”
Scott Aukerman could possibly be known as the Lorne Michaels of character improv.
(Liezl Estipona)
The podcast, which turned 15 this 12 months, not too long ago returned from a tour that took Aukerman and a rotation of company across the nation and to the U.Okay., averaging an viewers of 1,000 folks per night time. On Friday, the tour will culminate in an enormous, all-star residence present on the United Theater on Broadway.
“I get kind of concerned, like, is this podcast’s audience just aging along with me?” says Aukerman, 54. “And it was great to be on tour, because there are so many young people. There were a certain amount of parents who brought their kids with them who are also fans — like, generational fans — and just a lot of 20-year-olds.”
Nonetheless, Aukerman admits he was feeling nostalgic this 12 months, so he introduced again Bob Ducca — a dysfunctionally paternal character that Seth Morris has been taking part in on the present since 2010 — and Nick Wiger singing his hysterically obscene parody of “Monster Mash,” a longstanding Halloween custom.
The present that started life as “Comedy Death-Ray Radio” on Indie 103.1 in Might 2009 is sufficiently old now to have a tonnage of legacy and a tome’s price of character lore; an precise e-book, “Comedy Bang! Bang! The Podcast: The Book,” got here out final 12 months and is a New York Instances greatest vendor. However Aukerman has all the time been proactive about reserving up-and-coming improvisers — which continuously refreshes the podcast with new voices and completely different comedy kinds, and equally attracts in new listeners.
In that manner, Aukerman might pretty be known as the Lorne Michaels of character improv. “CBB” is, in some ways, the “Saturday Night Live” for humorous actors who act on their toes: it’s a uniquely prolonged showcase for growing a persona, or a bit, and a spectacular sandbox to play in with different improvisers. It additionally typically options superstar company — from Zach Galifianakis to Allison Williams to Jon Hamm — and reaches someplace round 200,000 listeners.
“My agents would always go, ‘Why are you doing this?’” says Hamm, who has made greater than 10 appearances on the present since 2009. “But the podcast model is so smart, because the cost of entry is so low. The real coin of the realm is creativity, and if you can do something that people find interesting… if you build it, they will come. That’s what Scott’s done for 15 years; he’s built this world … the ‘Comedy Bang! Bang!’ Universe.”
Aukerman, who is way extra chill and subdued than the heightened and barely belligerent “Scott Aukerman” who hosts the podcast, has weathered large modifications within the leisure ecosystem: when he began “CBB” nobody even knew what podcasts had been, or else they didn’t think about the shape legit; then the viral likes of “Serial” captured all the consideration; now, seemingly everybody has a podcast and the most important reveals are celebrities interviewing different celebrities.
By means of all of it he has continued to steer insane, non sequitur panels with such oddballs as the paranormal “Time Keeper” (truly only a man in Florida who works at a watch restore store), Ho Ho the lewd Christmas elf, Randy Snutz — a slack-jawed Midwesterner who refills the ice in restaurant urinals — and the handfuls of spot-on impressions (Werner Herzog, Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber) or chaotic creations by Tompkins, the present’s MVP.
Aukerman has felt some strain so as to add cameras for a video model, like so many podcasts do now, and “I just really resist it,” he says. A part of the present’s magic is that performers can actually be anyone or something and the listener completes the phantasm with their thoughts’s eye.
His vitality as ringmaster has flagged at instances — the pandemic was a doozy — however “I honestly don’t see any reason to stop at this point,” Aukerman says. “It’s still fun.”
This although he’s a new-ish father and co-hosts a number of different podcasts, together with “Threedom” and “Scott Hasn’t Seen.” He additionally sits astride “Comedy Bang! Bang! World,” the corporate which homes a number of spinoff reveals and employs a lot of his favourite performers.
He’s nonetheless hoping for the possibility to create a TV sequence or direct a movie once more; Aukerman co-wrote and directed “Between Two Ferns: The Movie” for Netflix in 2019 (primarily based on the favored net sequence he created with Galifianakis), and he at present has a first-look take care of Sony.
A dwell efficiency of Comedy Bang Bang
(Kenzie Trezise)
However for now, podcasting is his essential squeeze.
At one time, that may have felt like a letdown, or presumably even a humiliation. However podcasts are hotter than they’ve ever been, and the place else might somebody with Aukerman’s underrated abilities as a straight man host — extremely expert at greasing prolonged conversations or comically derailing them, juggling a number of excessive personalities, taking good care of visitor stars who is perhaps confused or presumably terrified — apply them extra completely?
And the place else might its large secure of improvisers play so freely, and in entrance of such an infinite crowd?
The podcast “opens up your audience to thousands of people,” says Lauren Lapkus, a fan favourite who first appeared on the podcast in 2012, “who don’t normally get to see improv shows or who just want more of it. That really allowed me to create things on my own without waiting to be cast, or without waiting for someone to say yes to me. I got to just improvise at length, with my humor, doing what I want to do.”
Like different “CBB” alumni, Lapkus has gotten voice performing work as a direct end result from her appearances on the present. Many different alums have populated writing rooms and casts of TV reveals and movies; Ego Nwodim — who performs unhinged nuts like “Entrée PeeE Neur” on “CBB” — is a present member of the solid of “SNL.”
If something, a lot of Aukerman’s comedy carnies — together with Nick Kroll (creator of “Big Mouth”) and Tim Baltz (“The Righteous Gemstones”) — turn into too huge, or a minimum of too busy, to remain an everyday.
However everybody loves coming again, as a result of it’s the final word playtime for all of those grown-up children. It’s the sensation of drowning, Gilroy explains, “and you look over and Scott either pokes a hole in some reality that you’ve just established, or asks you a question that you don’t know the answer to, and you feel the sweat rising — and oh, it’s hell and heaven all at once.”
And for its legion of listeners, the podcast is an opportunity to drag a chair as much as the identical desk and hang around with among the funniest folks they know — or a minimum of really feel like they know.
