From The Comic's Comic

Episode #390

Wyatt Cenac and Donwill have enjoyed a long friendship and working relationship, with the DJ providing beats and sidekick commentary for Cenac when he had a long-running Monday night stand-up showcase in Brooklyn called Night Train, which begat a Seeso series of the same name. They also worked together on Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas for HBO. And since 2011, the duo has presided over a live movie screening event called “Shouting at the Screen,” in which they provide running commentary and more while watching a classic blaxploitation film. After hitting pause for two years during the pandemic, they have relaunched Shouting at the Screen at a new location in Prospect Park. Cenac and Donwill joined me over Zoom to talk about their comedy collaborations, the joys of guiding audiences through cinematic experiences, and how to balance jokes and silly ideas with weighty subject matter.

The first “Shouting at the Screen” event happened April 28, 2022, at Nitehawk Prospect Park. Future Shouting screenings will take place there in July and October of 2022, and January 2023. Each event also includes a surprise special guest: Past guests have included Jason Sudekis, Sasheer Zamata, Roy Wood Jr,  Jean Grae, and Michelle Buteau.

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Wyatt and Donwill, thank you so much for chatting with me. We can start shouting whenever you want, since we are looking at a screen and talking about shouting at the screen right now.

Wyatt: IT’S GOOD TO SEE YOU, SEAN!

Donwill: THANKS FOR HAVING US!

IT HAS BEEN TOO LONG!

Donwill: …30 minutes of that…

Wyatt: Yeah.

So Wyatt, have I even seen you since Problem Areas in person or no?

Sitting front row center for HBO’s promotional event for the media at P.S. 149 Sojourner Truth, which shares facilities with Harlem Success Academy 1 charter school, in advance of season two for Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas, March 19, 2019.

Probably not? No, because I think that went down and — I’m not saying that the pandemic was a response to my show being canceled — but those two things fell on the heels of one another pretty quickly. So I don’t know if that was just the Earth, saying hey, we wanted more of this show. Instead, we’ll just give you a pandemic, that’s killing people.

Mother Nature does have a way of answering questions you didn’t even know you asked. So that makes sense. When was the first time you two met up? I know you’ve worked together for quite a while, whether it was doing the live “Shouting at the Screen” shows or working on Night Train, the Seeso show, that you did as a live show for years before that at Littlefield. When was the first time you guys met?

Donwill: I believe at a Tonya Morgan release party. My group. A friend of mine, Ilyas, a member of the group. He was a member of the group. He had invited Wyatt out. They knew each other and they were like trying to link up in person, while Ilyas was in town. He introduced us and being that he was the one that didn’t live in New York, I stole his friend.

Wyatt: That’s more or less I think yeah, Ilyas was working on a solo project that he asked me to help out on because, what a lot of people don’t know is, I make amazing beats. And then yeah, invited me to this thing and wound up ditching both Don and I. He disappeared to New Jersey and left the two of us just hanging out. So I don’t know that it’s as much Don stole a friend as Ilyas saw an opportunity to abandon two friends.

Donwill: There we go. The truth always comes out. That’s the way it should be worded.

Wyatt: He was like a deadbeat dad where he left us at a nightclub and said, I’m gonna go out for some cigarettes. I’ll be right back. But get your baseball gloves out because we’re all going to play catch. And then yeah, a decade later, we’re still waiting.

So at that point, Wyatt, in your career, were you already at The Daily Show at that point or were you at that strange point right before The Daily Show where you were like couch surfing?

Wyatt: No, I was at The Daily Show at that point. I’d maybe been in New York for a little less than a year at that point.

And Don, had you done any work with comedians before?

Donwill: I hadn’t. Honestly, I think Wyatt was the first comedian that I met and hung out with. I mean, I was aware of comedy. I’d been to shows, but I never like, been able to have a conversation with someone that did comedy.

So the idea of spending every Monday night for the rest of your life in Gowanus/Park Slope… (NOTE: After DJ’ing for Cenac’s Night Train, Donwill has continued to serve as the resident DJ for Butterboy, the Monday-night comedy showcase hosted by Aparna Nancherla, Maeve Higgins, and Jo Firestone)

Donwill: I don’t know what spell Wyatt put on Littlefield but I’m just bound to that venue in perpetuity.

Wyatt: And I’m free! That was the deal. I had to lock someone else in so I could get free.

Donwill: So I’ve got to put the spell on somebody else next. Got it.

I would suggest Jo, but I feel like Jo is the kind of person who put spells on other people.

Donwill: Yeah, I gotta, I gotta cast it on somebody before they cast it on me again.

So is “Shouting at the Screen” the first thing that you guys did together, or did you do other projects? You work on Wyatt’s beats? What was the first thing you guys actually did together?

Donwill: Did Shouting come before Night Train?

Wyatt: Yeah, Shouting came before Night Train. Yeah, I think that was the first thing and yeah, it kind of started in a weird place. Not a weird place. But Don and I had gotten invited to someone’s home. I don’t even know who the person was. We were at a show. And then it was one of those uniquely New York things where you’re at a music show. And then there’s someone who lives close by who you don’t know, who’s just like, ‘Everyone come over to my place,’ and we wound up at this apartment, where the owner of the apartment started putting on I think, put on ‘The Thing With Two Heads.’ And we’re just like, oh, yeah, what a ridiculous movie. And there’s a bunch of ridiculous Blaxploitation movies. It’d be fun to watch more of these and be like, weird and silly, and I think in that space, everyone was kind of like, getting drunk and just like, What the fuck is this? So I think the idea was sort of born out of that. And then from there, yeah, it became about finding a location and people willing to let us do this very ridiculous idea.

Was it always centered around Blaxploitation films from the get-go, or did you have to have a discussion about that first?

Donwill: It was centered around Blaxploitation primarily because it’s such a finite amount of films and you know, there are these kinds of films that are born from that era of filmmaking that are like Menace II Society, and Boyz n the Hood, and kind of like these 80s and 90s Black films that people have suggested to me that we screen, but those sorts of films don’t necessarily have — they have a little bit more of fanfare and nostalgia, and people remember them very vividly, and they remember to celebrate them in a way that they don’t celebrate the vast canon of Blaxploitation films outside of like two or three different titles. So it was always focused on Blaxploitation films. Just to make sure that it was, you know, properly celebrated.

There’s a lot more than just Dolemite out there.

Both: Yeah.

For both of you, what were your first childhood memories where you had your own shouting at the screen experience? Do you remember a movie or a place?

Wyatt: I mean, I think for me, I oftentimes was that kid that would go into the theater, with my friends and the lights would go down and we would be like, ‘Space, the final frontier’ and we’d get like, a few titters from other people in the movie theater, and that would make us feel like we were some like, comedy geniuses. And at some point, I’m sure if somebody realized, oh, it’s those same kids that just keep going to every theater doing that. But then I remember at various points being in movie theaters and feeling like, you know, either whether it was in college or even in high school, too, the sort of fun collective experience of going to a movie that everyone had — if it was something that was ridiculous, or you know, I feel like the last movie I remember being at like that was maybe after college, I went and saw that movie, Hancock. With Will Smith and Charlize Theron. And there’s a moment in that film. I remember there were like, kids watching the film in front of me, and they were little kids, and they were totally wrapped up in it. There’s a moment where the film totally shifts. And they and everyone else in the theater were just kind of like, ‘Wait, what?!’ But the fact that everyone had been paying attention, these kids were like bouncing in their seats. And then at some point, like they’re thrown by it, and it was like, alright, we can all agree if the 9-year-olds realize that this is a giant plot hole. We’re all on board. Right? And I just remember that sense of, oh, yeah, we all know what we saw and that sense of relief that we don’t have to pretend anymore.

Donwill: I would say for me, when rap albums would come with DVDs — so Master P would shoot a film to complement a rap album, or like Cam’ron or Jay-Z had features. There were these films you could only get if you bought the album or bought on bootleg. We would watch them over and over again and invite people over to watch them with us and, to what Wyatt was saying, there’s parts of the movie where you’re talking through it with your homies, and you’re like OK, watch this part. Watch this part. And like everybody just kind of like freaks out. Yo! What was that? That was crazy, rewind it! The jokes are happening. And there’s this joy in sharing those moments over and over again with groups of people, you know?

Even just talking now, I had a flashback to when I was maybe nine or 10 and the first movie that I remember hearing people talking back to the screen was the old Clash of the Titans movie that had Harry Hamlin and Burgess Meredith, I think was the voice of like a robotic owl or something like that. And it was just so ridiculous. And I think part of it was the special effects at the time. But people would shout and make and make jokes throughout that movie. That will be great. Before I moved to New York, I was working at a newspaper in Boston. And this is before Twitter. They had me go to the midnight premiere screening of Snakes On A Plane and I did a I did a minute-by-minute commentary on the film that they then published. So full of spoilers, but we kind of published like, here’s how to enjoy Snakes On A Plane.

NOTE: Trying to find this viewing guide online, the Boston Herald has virtually destroyed its online archives (hmmm), so I cannot even verify if I did this for them or not, but definitely I published it on my personal blog of the time. Maybe I just did it there? Anyhow. In case you want to see how I broke down the movie or use it whenever you care to watch Snakes on a Plane?!

Donwill: There’s something fun about the guided experience through a film, though. Just in general, even if it’s a film you’ve seen hundreds of times, like when you’re showing it to somebody new for the first time, you get to watch it through their eyes in a way.

Wyatt: Yeah, and I think it’s also there are very few things like that, that exist where you can get an audience of people and have a sort of call-and-response in that kind of way that you know, you go to a stand-up show, the response is laughter. It’s not really about like, trying to collectively say hey, this thing we all heard was weird or didn’t make sense. It’s very much a very directed and guided thing, and I think with a movie as well, there are moments where you maybe jump in your seat or do those things, but it also feels like it’s fun if you’re in a movie and that moment that you’re supposed to jump in your seat, or that the director hoped you would jump in your seat. If you don’t, we can all collectively be like, yeah, ‘Did anybody piss their pants? It’s OK if you did. Just, let’s just take a straw poll here. Anybody piss their pants with that? That was not blood that was paint. We’re all very aware that was paint.’

I suppose pre-pandemic, we did have collective movies like that, such as The Room, or before that Showgirls, maybe. And then when I was a kid, there was always Rocky Horror Picture Show. But it was always the same movie over and over that people would go to. It’s not like what you’re doing or what Mystery Science Theater was doing, which is, oh, we’re gonna go through a whole catalogue of films.

Wyatt: Yeah, well, I think what’s fun about especially going that far back to the ‘70s. I mean, you can do this with the ‘80s or the ‘90s as well is, I think about the movies that we’re watching right now. And so many of the movies that we see, the special effects were like, ‘Oh my God, these special effects are amazing. We’ve never seen anything like this. It looks so real.’ And I remember when like, you know, The Phantom Menace came out, and we were like, Oh my God, these special effects. Special effects have hit their peak. They’re never gonna get better than this. And then if you go back and you watch it, it’s like, that looks like shit! And what’s so fascinating to me when I look at some of these movies, especially going back to those Blaxploitation-era movies, there is a moment in time where thee special effects — some of these movies have real money behind them. And this was an action movie that would be on par with your great action movies like a Hancock. And so I think in those ways, there’s something about it that you’re watching it, and you’re kind of appreciating the fact that at this moment in time, somebody was like, that was an amazing bit of special effects. You look at a movie like The Thing With Two Heads. Rick Baker did the special effects on that movie. It was the first movie he ever did. He went on to do The Nutty Professor and so many you know, I think Alien, one of those, but like, the premier special effects makeup guy. And he did The Thing With Two Heads. It looks terrible by comparison to the work he’s doing now. And yet in that moment, somebody approved it and they were like, that really does look like Rosie Greer’s head on Ray Milland’s body. Yes. Wow, it looks like it’s breathing.

It’d be like looking at clips of an open mic’er and being like, oh, yeah, but this guy is is a great headliner in 20 years.

Wyatt: Right? Yeah. 100%

Tell me how you’re approaching “Shouting at the Screen” differently now, since you had a couple of years off, and it’s been over a decade since you guys first started doing it. Are you approaching it differently in 2022 and going forward?

Wyatt: More hand sanitizer.

Donwill: We don’t have drinking games anymore. It’s hand sanitizer. Wash your hands every time something happens.

Wyatt: Yeah, whenever someone dies just sanitize your hands.

Donwill: I will say the biggest changes is it’s quarterly now instead of monthly. That in a sense makes it feel a little bit more rare and a little bit more special and a little bit more. We build community around these films and around the event that would show up every month. And like, to what we were saying before, you know, there’s a finite amount of films and at Alamo we could only show a certain amount of those films. So we ended up repeating a bunch of stuff from over the years. So there were people who’d traveled from theater to theater to theater, and they were kind of just like — these had become their favorite films again, because they have seen it three or four times. So now it’s like, with the event being spaced out a little bit more, and us having a little more latitude to pick different films. We’re digging a little bit deeper into the crates to show stuff that we’d never shown before. And stuff that like was kind of on our wish-list to show that we hadn’t gotten the chance to.

Wyatt: Yeah, and I think the quarterly thing as well. It’s nice because we’re getting older. You know, just to get out once a month, ugh, it’s so hard if anything, this pandemic has really just made getting out a premium, not for the audience just for me. Like I can get my groceries delivered. Why do I need to go out anymore? But I do think I think that that idea of you know, for us whenever we were doing it, it always felt like the fun thing is Don would DJ. We’d have the movie. Like it really felt like OK, let’s make a night of this that if you’re gonna come out for this, you don’t just have to come up for the movie. We’re doing it in a space that has food and alcohol. Don’s playing music so you can come before the show and hang out and you know pick your seats or whatever, but eat a little before the movie starts but just hang out and catch up with a friend. Then go into this movie. Enjoy the movie, and then you know if you want to keep hanging out, keep hanging out. Because I do think going to the movies is such a great experience. But it’s also one that as an audience, you’re still in a show. So even though our thing is called ‘Shouting at the Screen,’ it’s a guided shouting. It’s not like, you know, it’s not chaos at the screen, and it’s not alright, well they’re shouting so why don’t you and I catch up with what you’ve been up to for the last three weeks. How’d that date go? Did you file your taxes? We don’t want to turn it into a coffeehouse with a movie in the background.

Or a free for all where the shouting cancels each other out.

Wyatt: Exactly. And so I think that’s where, you know, you mentioned The Room and Rocky Horror and I feel like, what we’ve tried to do and over the years I feel like how the show has evolved is trying to create our own sort of version of what shows like that do when you have those public screenings where, all right. There are the moments where we drink or we all sort of celebrate something or call something out together and that even though it’s a movie that you haven’t seen in the same way that people have seen Rocky Horror a dozen times or seen The Room a dozen times. We’re trying to set those those things up for you in the beginning. So you as the viewer can keep an eye on them. Because I’ll be honest, 20 minutes in, I’m pretty shit-faced and so I’m not paying attention. So I need somebody else to at least be like, haha somebody died. OK, let’s all celebrate.

Is that something the two of you learned from working together on Night Train whether it was the live shows at Littlefield, or then bumping them up to recorded specials for Seeso? In that you had to do something more than just a straight stand- up showcase. Like really put a curated show together?

Wyatt: I mean, I think on some level, I think that’s always been top of mind for me, was that a show is an experience and you want to give the person in the audience the best experience you can and try to give them a complete experience. And so I think for me, that’s always been top of mind. The challenge has always been, well, you want to give people an experience, but do you have the budget to get that experience? It’s OK, yeah. You want pyrotechnics. But can you afford that or can you just afford a couple of sticks of incense?

Is that the difference between Seeso money and HBO money?

Wyatt: I’ll be totally honest with you. I don’t know that I was on the top level of HBO money, so the HBO money and the Seeso money was a lot closer than you would have thought.

Donwill: It was just the brand of incense. It wasn’t necessarily incense or pyrotechnics.

So you’re like, oh, this really does smell like cinnamon.

Wyatt: I wasn’t getting Game of Thrones cash

What happened with the rights to Night Train? Can people find that now or do you own those?

Wyatt: I believe it’s available on Starz.

Donwill: I think last time I checked it was on Starz.

NOTE: Night Train with Wyatt Cenac was on Starz that day we spoke, but appears to no longer be on that platform?! Hmm.

Okay. Yeah. And then Don: You also worked on Problem Areas, too. Right?

Donwill: I did. Yeah.

Wyatt, in your answering of my other question, it certainly felt like you kept the viewer experience at top of mind for Problem Areas as well, even though it delved into serious topics for an entire season. You still had these interstitials or these these moments that people can enjoy or just be like, Oh, what the heck was that?

Wyatt: Yeah, I mean, I think it was always very deliberate. I remember just with that show really wanting to make something that, you had this story we’re telling but you also have other bits of information that can exist, separate from that larger narrative. Whether that’s yeah, the smaller kind of like quick hit, you know, modest proposal things that we would do, or just little things within the episode. We were very deliberate in thinking about, OK, the way that we’ve shot just this one little moment, that could be a GIF. And if the corporate digital team has the GIF squad on it, they could basically chop up this episode and a lot of GIFs that can be passed around. And while those aren’t touching on the serious topic we’re discussing, that’s still maybe driving someone to be like, Oh, what was that dumb GIF from? Oh, it’s from this show, and then they’re like, oh, now I’m learning about police abolition. What a backwards way to do that.

GIPHY’s full complement of GIFs from Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas

Donwill: That’s how it goes, the transfer of information is just like, one minute you’re enjoying a Leonardo DiCaprio GIF the next minute you’re figuring out what it’s from and then you’re just in that cinematic universe.

Wyatt: Yeah.

What have you learned, you know, talking about like that mix of like playful GIFs with with police abolition. And then now where you’re talking about like shouting at the screen for Blaxploitation films. What have you both learned in terms of like, what’s the ideal mix of delving into serious topics but also being able to be lighthearted without getting the audience confused as to what’s the joke and what should we seriously take away from this stuff?

Donwill: There’s a level of, I don’t want to overuse the sugar with the medicine metaphor, but there’s definitely a level of just levity with certain heavy topics that you kind of have to have in order to make people listen to you. If you’re constantly saying the sky is falling, the sky is falling, the sky is falling. Eventually people will just kind of stop looking up. You know what I’m saying? You just gotta like slowly guide their sightline to notice that something’s falling as opposed to like, forcing their heads up.

Wyatt: You can use humor, but it’s also about engaging with these things in a real way. I mean, when I think about Shouting at the Screen, one of the things that’s fascinating about it is a lot of these movies are actually trying to talk about social issues. And sometimes they’re doing it in a really clumsy way. Sometimes, they’re often doing it in outdated ways, that today feel very problematic. And so I feel like there’s even in being able to kind of look at these films in a loving, yet. poking fun way. There is something underneath that, that we can also point to you know, at the end of the show, we don’t have a voter registration drive or anything like that. But it does feel like OK, yeah, by the time this show is over, like you know, I’ve mentioned the thing with two heads before, but they are talking about something very serious there, which is, you know, they’re talking 1) about incarceration and the way that we treat those who are incarcerated, and they’re also talking about the medical profession and there’s a moment in the film where they try to have that conversation. It’s just weird because there’s a man with another man’s head attached to his neck. But they do try to get into these things. If anything, these things continue to be repeated, decade after decade after decade, and they’re worth repeating. And as much as they’re worth repeating. It’s also worth remembering that oh, yeah, the same racism that we’re calling out today, like, Get Out. A lot of the same conversation that’s happening in Get Out, you can see some of that same conversation happening in a movie like The Thing With Two Heads. And so I think that you know, you can do that and then at the same time, be like, what horrible special effects. Or drink, because that guy died.

Well as someone who has, especially over the last six years since 2016, found myself screaming a little too much at my phone, at the TV news, at just about any screen. sincerely grateful that you guys are bringing back Shouting at the Screen to give us all a more cathartic experience. So, so thanks for bringing it back.

Wyatt: THANK YOU FOR HAVING US! BYE!