Six Degrees: Robert Smigel interview

The Onion’s A.V. Club has posted a cool interview with Robert Smigel (Late Night with Conan O’Brien, TV Funhouse, The Dana Carvey Show) to coincide with the release of his film You Don’t Mess with the Zohan. It’s well worth the read anyway, but I’m guessing our audience will be most interested to learn that there are some rather sweet little tidbits in there on Stephen.

From The A.V. Club:

Robert Smigel
Interviewed by Nathan Rabin
June 3rd, 2008

. . .

AVC: Getting back to the dick jokes, in Zohan, Adam has the largest package I’ve ever seen onscreen.

RS: I’m actually jealous of this movie, because I wrote an Ambiguously Gay Duo live-action movie with Colbert a couple of years ago. Every successful character on Saturday Night Live prompts the question, “Is this a movie?” Ace and Gary were two characters I had no interest in doing a movie about. When I thought of them doing it live-action though, I thought, okay, I can make the characters much more dimensional, and, boy, would they look funny in those costumes with the enormous packages.

AVC: Especially if they were Carell and Colbert.

RS: Well, at the time, Carell and Colbert were, you know, it was the year 2000, and they weren’t superstars. Nobody had any idea. They blew us away at The Dana Carvey Show and we thought that they should have incredible careers, but we were surprised that they weren’t famous even then. We were surprised that Saturday Night Live hadn’t hired them back in 1996. Because they were both like 30 years old already, and they’d been around Second City. You never know when someone’s going to get a break. But it’s refreshing to see talent win out like that.

AVC: You were briefly a consultant on The Colbert Report.

RS: Yeah, I probably never earned a credit less. That was nice of Stephen to do. I talked conceptually about the show a few times with him and I didn’t even know he was going to do that until they called me and asked me where I wanted my check to go. Then later he told me he did it for his own inspiration, which was sort of sweet and nice of him to say and nice of him to do.

AVC: What did he mean by that?

RS: Well, I didn’t want to get into that. “What do I mean to you, Stephen?” We’re great friends and I hired him at the Carvey show and I believed in him. I’m so proud to see what he’s done. I saw him when I was still at Saturday Night Live in ’92 one summer. We were scouting for people and I went to Second City. We saw their show and we were told there was an understudy that night for this guy Steve Carell, who’s really great, but, you know, this was the night that Lorne Michaels could go. But I was just blown away by the understudy, who of course was Colbert. I became obsessed with getting Colbert involved with something I was doing. I tried to get him involved with Conan when we started. It didn’t come together then.

AVC: As a writer or a performer?

RS: As either a writer or a performer. But for some reason it didn’t click at the time. So then The Dana Carvey Show happened and he was not available to audition so he sent in a pathetic videotape where he didn’t really do anything, he just was trying to be funny to the camera. Then he showed us his newborn child and begged us to hire him. I told Carvey, let’s just fly him in and see what he can do. Then we flew him in and did a genuine audition and he was hilarious. At that point it became very easy. But anyway, Zohan has a big dick.

. . .

Read the full interview here

This exchange totally made me think about the commentary that Robert Smigel, Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell did for the Ambiguously Gay Duo here (warning: the, um, “adult themes” in the commentary might make this one a good candidate for headphones):

Ambiguously Gay Duo Commentary
Uploaded by sporkythespaz

Anyway, you really should read the whole interview, but I’ll also mention here that Mr. Smigel said that there will be a Comedy Central TV Funhouse DVD coming out on July 22nd. Sounds like a blast!

Tip of the hat to TWoP’s Dogbert for the link!