Human Giant

[squints]

the sketches i like the most are the ones where they  play buddies doing regular stuff and then have a bizarre twist.

Like some good ol' fashion fun?

[squints]

My buddy Granger Brown has a radio show. He lived in NYC for a while and for his local radio show he got an interview with the boys from Human Giant. it's a pretty interesting interview. (Please feel free to skip the Postal Service playlist Granger put's up Feel free to skip Granger's terrible interview skills and terrible comic timing) they talk about the new season and the dvd.

New Season starts March 11th
First Season DVD comes out March 8th

http://www.independentlyexposed.org/2007/12/new-episode-we-are-human-giants.html

[MacGuffin]

The Human Giant Speaks
We sit down with MTV's hit sketch group.

There was a time, probably around ten years ago, when my perception of improv comedy was limited largely to what I saw on Whose Line is it Anyway? -- short, five-minute games (commonly involving props) of relatively little story or depth. And up until one night in New York City, walking past a non-descript, virtually non-existent little comedy club called The Upright Citizen's Brigade (whose TV show I'd seen only a handful of times), I had no real understanding that improv could offer something much more substantial.

The guy outside the club was screaming a word which I would later learn to be "Asscat" (the venue's anything-goes Sunday evening show) though the phrase that really caught my attention was "free." I was in college at the time and "free" was the most beautiful word in Webster's wonderful dictionary. The show inside both challenged and changed my understanding of – and, indeed, my passion for – comedy in a very permanent, very profound way. As the years progressed, I caught performances there every week, learning improv from ridiculously-named groups like Respecto Montalbon, in which I first glimpsed comedians Rob Huebel and Paul Scheer.

Nearly a decade has passed and both Huebel and Scheer, as well as comedian Aziz Ansari, now constitute MTV's hit sketch comedy group, The Human Giant. With the show's first season releasing to DVD on March 4, 2008 and their second season preparing to premiere on March 11, the guys sat down for a quick interview about their sudden rise to success.


IGN: Hey, guys, thanks for taking the time to chat!

PAUL: Thanks for having us.

IGN: I used to follow your shows back in New York, in the days when they were still filling seats for Asscat.

ROB: That's old-school.

IGN: We met a few times around UCB, but it's great to get the chance to talk.

ROB: I remember now. You were really drunk and you tried to steal my jacket. I punched you in the stomach, right?

PAUL: You son of a bitch...

IGN: To what degree does your improv background feed into your sketches?

PAUL: We come up with an idea; we write it out; we script it and then we allow ourselves to be open to improvisation on set.

ROB: We have to show up with a script that's written and everybody is happy with, but often when we get there we just throw it away. Usually, we end up finding stuff that we like even more just by improvising.

IGN: Do you get your sketch ideas from stuff that you've riffed on stage, or is it a separate process?

ROB: We improvise with a lot of different people and it's always a strange thing to take and adapt something that you've created, even if it's just in the moment, with somebody else.

IGN: You've just wrapped production on Season Two...What can fans expect based upon the success of Season One?

PAUL: Season Two is going much cooler because the three of us – Rob, Aziz and I – we adopt a little baby. And it's like, "Oh, man, this is crazy," and we're just trying to figure out how to be fathers. [laughs] This season, actually, we have a lot more creative freedom within the network. They trusted us more, and so creatively, we really took some chances and treated every day on set like it was our last. I think that it's probably a little more cinematic this season. Plus, we'll be bringing back a lot of the characters from the first season like Shutterbugs or the Illusionators.

AZIZ: If you thought that the first season was total crap and not funny at all, you're probably going to think that season two is about the same.

ROB: Conversely, if you thought that the first season was like a really great handjob then the second season is going to feel like a really great blowjob.

AZIZ: That's the poster quote, actually.

ROB: The other thing – to be serious for a second – is that we're on a half-hour later. They've created a new timeslot for us. They usually repeat other shows at 11 PM, but they've given us this timeslot with the intention of branding it and making it a big deal. They've given us the freedom to really go crazy, especially since it's a little bit later. We can get away with more.

IGN: Is that something you worried about going with MTV – especially considering that you come from this background of incredibly unrestrained comedy at venues like UCB?

AZIZ: I think we were a little nervous doing anything on TV. We were just making videos for ourselves, mostly to play at live shows and on the internet. But MTV has been very cool about the show and their Standards people have been great about letting us get away with whatever we want....Except penetration. We can't have penetration.

PAUL: Next season is all about penetration.

AZIZ: Season Three is going to air exclusively on the Spice Channel.

PAUL: That's actually on the poster, as well. "Human Giant – Now with More Penetration!"

ROB: We're not your typical MTV characters. We're not in the demographic in terms of our age or our looks. Everybody on that channel is really attractive and stupid. We don't really fit with the people you see on the channel.

PAUL: The hardest challenge for us in convincing people to tune into MTV. Who watches MTV? It's really ten-to-fifteen year old girls and we're definitely not in the same zeitgeist.

ROB: When you think about alternative comedy, MTV is not what you normally think about. You think of Adult Swim or HBO or Comedy Central, but as it happened, MTV came to us and everything worked out. And to their credit, they've been incredible. The president of MTV just really gets the show and understands comedy and understands what we're doing. We're this kind of anomaly that doesn't really blend and I think they appreciate that.

IGN: Do you apply the same methodologies and rhythms to sketch writing that you would to certain forms of improv?

ROB: UCB's show was pretty much a Herald – three scenes with second and third beats of each scene that all collide together at the end. We've never attempted to do anything that technical. We just try to shoot what we think is funny. We try to improvise as much as possible and experiment with ways to play with character. And it only gives us more options later when we're putting the show together.

IGN: What can fans expect from the tour that you're currently doing?

ROB: We're doing a combination of live sketches, as well as a sneak peek at Season Two.

PAUL: We tried to create a stage show that was much more of a fun night out. It's not a sketch show. There's a lot of presentational bits and interacting with the audience. We didn't try to put a square peg in a round hole.

ROB: There's also a certain level of legitimate danger. You're going to think I'm f*@king around, but I'm totally serious. We've recently acquired a set of t-shirt cannons. You know, the ones you see at basketball games. We wrote a sketch called The T-Shirt Squad, which was basically just an excuse for us to use these awesome, awesome guns. So now we have these weapons that are powered by huge CO2 tanks and they fire a f*@king t-shirt – I'm not kidding – at a hundred miles an hour. So we come out and basically just shoot at people in the crowd. We just did a show in Colorado – where the air is very thin – and the t-shirts were traveling with deadly force.

[Ravi]

Season 2 previews

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/d6e1037cc2

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/4f551b0252

http://www.dead-frog.com/blog/entry/human_giant_season_2_preview_pauls_grandma/