I feel like I was the first guy to say “Comedians of Comedy,” but Patton might say he did too, so who knows? We were trying to name it, and I was like, “Well, we’re just comedians, so why don’t we just call it Comedians of Comedy?” It was kind of a wink. You guys are the Kings or Queens and whatever else, but we’re just comedians, right?
Speaking of you and Patton, let’s talk about one of the great shows that could have been: Super Nerds, a failed pilot about two comic book store employees.
We were doing (a stage version of) Jerry Lewis’ terrible script, The Day The Clown Cried. Patton found the script. He cast everybody. We all have parts. Everybody you can think of, like Toby Huss from the Halloween movies, Bob Odenkirk, all these funny people have these parts. We were doing it in Santa Monica, and Jerry Lewis’ lawyers came that afternoon and told us, “No, you aren’t.” They shut us down. So instead, we did a live show for the crowd that was all completely improvised. And the first time we did Super Nerds, it was improvised that night. We just started characters of ourselves. I always joked, “It’s us being nerdy, but we are f***ing nerds.” So it was us just us riffing on Boba Fett in a nasal voice with our actual Boba Fett knowledge.
Comedy Central had a theater space at the time. We knew it was something that night, it was the standout of all the things people improvised. So we wrote it as three plays originally and called it The Trilogy, of course when they were doing the (Star Wars) special editions at that time. Comedy Central bought it, did a pilot, Bob Odenkirk directed it, we wrote it, Sarah Silverman is in it. It should have been on Comedy Central for 10 years, but I don’t love the pilot.
Comedy Central
There’s an eight-minute version that floats around, and I feel like that’s the funnier version than the 22-minute version. Pacing-wise, if we could have tinkered with it, we might have had a show there. There was still some purity about it that we did love, the moments with Sarah and the moments with Patton and I just riffing. He is one of my favorite people to be funny with. There’s something funny about a 5-foot-4 dude with his 6-foot-6 gargantuan friend.