Episode #400
Hello, readers and listeners: We did it! We made it to another milestone in personal podcasting history. FOUR HUNDRED EPISODES! That’s not why I’ve delayed bringing you this episode and transcript (for paid subscribers), but why not lean into that, especially because I just flew back from a week and a half at the Edinburgh Fringe and caught as many shows as I could in that time span. Feel free to catch up with my reviews over on The Comic’s Comic. Included among them: my ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review of BriTANicK’s Edinburgh Fringe show!
Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher grew up near each other in Atlanta but only became a sketch comedy duo while attending NYU together. As BriTANicK, they’ve made viral videos for YouTube, Cracked, CollegeHumor and Funny or Die, catapulting them onto Variety’s 10 Comics to Watch list in 2013. They’ve acted together How I Met Your Mother, Much Ado About Nothing, and the indie comedy film Balls Out; they’ve written together for Saturday Night Live, as well as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and The Goodwin Games. They’ve been the voices of the Cartoon Network. And now in the summer of 2022, 14 years after they first took to the comedy stages of New York City, they’re back performing live once more, taking their best sketches to the Edinburgh Fringe festival. But first, they sat with me to talk about their journey.
If you’re not already subscribed to my podcast, please seek it out and subscribe to Last Things First on the podcast platform of your choice! Among them: Apple Podcasts; Spotify; Stitcher; Amazon Music/Audible; iHeartRadio; Player.FM; and my original hosting platform, Libsyn.
If you’d like to read the condensed transcript of our conversation below, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription!
I know you guys both grew up in and around Atlanta. Did you decide to go to NYU together? Or was that just happy happenstance?
Brian: It’s kind of debatable between us. I think we both have different inclinations of what this answer is. We grew up in Atlanta. We were around each other all the time as kids. Went to the same preschool, went to the same acting camp, played in the same Little League. Our friends knew each other, our parents knew each other. We didn’t know each other, though, until we were like 17 years old. It was very weird. We kept almost intersecting, and then just like not, but then senior year of high school, we got really close. We both applied to NYU. And I remember Nick saying something like he got accepted to NYU because he got like an invitation to their opening day thing for the freshmen kids. And my friend Travis also got that, and so then when I got it, I was under the impression that they were already going. I really wanted to go to school with my friends. So I was like, immediately like, yes. And then I think Nick said later that he felt like he decided to go to NYU after that? I thought I was going to NYU because Nick was going, but I think in Nick’s mind he decided to go after I went, so I don’t even know who’s right and who’s wrong about this, but it felt to me like the vibe was both of us, at least implicitly or subconsciously were sort of deciding together to go to NYU. My other school was UGA that I really wanted to go to, not because I fit the vibe at all. I really don’t but, it was in Georgia and a big state school and I wanted to maybe just like do a just a liberal arts education and just be close to home. And it was kind of between this like huge football state school or this like conservatory for the arts in New York City. It was such a coin flip between two very different paths in my life. And I’m glad I went to NYU at this point.
If you went to UGA, do you think you would have even wanted to become a filmmaker/performer, or???
Brian: I think about this a lot because I was trying to figure out what the difference because there’s a part of me that’s like, film school’s a scam. Like what do you really learn? You should just get out there and start making stuff. That’s how you learn everything. That being said, a lot of the kids who were doing film when I was growing up, ended up stopping doing film as they went to college, because they just couldn’t find anyone around them to like help them do it. It takes a community, especially to make a film and do theater. So if I wasn’t around passionate people, I might have dropped it. The fact that I went to NYU, I was just constantly around people who were doing it and because of that, that fueled kind of my ambition to keep going. So I do think being around the right people. When I meet people who are in small towns and want to do this, and they ask for advice, one of my pieces of advice is go to a city where there’s a lot of people like you doing what you want to do, because it does just sort of keep you going. And there’s Nick.
(Kocher enters the Zoom)
Nick: Hello!
Brian was just telling me about how you guys met in Christian ska summer camp.
Brian: That’s right. Yeah, Five Iron Frenzy played every day. Hail to the masters.
Nick: Yes. And we were just fully indoctrinated with the good lord, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones.
Five Iron Frenzy, you were using their music on all of your early YouTube videos. So I figured there must be something there.
Brian: What it was, I’ll tell you exactly what that was. This when Nick and I became friends senior year of high school. I was searching for the Canadian National Anthem on Limewire. Just such a sentence.
2004, everybody.
Brian: I think I’d heard Terrance and Phillip sing it from the South Park movie or from a South Park album. And I was like, I love this Canadian National Anthem so much. I want to find every version of it, because that’s who I am as person.
And I just looked up and there’s a song called ‘Oh, Canada.’ I thought this is probably it, but it was a Five Iron Frenzy song about Canada. That is definitely not the national anthem, but it was like very weird and fast-paced and I loved their vibe so I downloaded all the other songs and one was called far far away. I didn’t like the verses at all, but that chorus made me like fucking groove, man. It became my favorite song. I played it all the time in high school at every party. Everyone was so annoyed by it. Everyone hated me for it. And then Nick Kocher came along and Nick was like, I like this song. Or maybe he liked trolling people with a song. I’m not sure what it was, but you were at least on my wavelength. And this was a fun thing to kind of dance to. So that became kind of like our little song that we liked and no one else did.
Nick: Yeah.
Brian: So when we started BriTANicK, we were like, if there’s going to be a song to put at the end of this, there’s only one.
Nick: There were a lot of things that Brian did that I don’t think hit with the general High School crowd but hit huge with me, and that was like, the basis of our friendship. Cranking people? Brian used to do this cranking motion whenever anybody got insulted, he’d go, You just got cranked!
Brian: That’s right. I could insult you and you could backwards crank yourself. I mentioned this to a lot of people and everyone was like, Get out of here. Who are you, anyway? Nick was like, I’ll do it. I’m on it. And then we created schnanking…
Nick: Mockturned and overturned
Brian: Oh my God, mock turned and overturned. Wow.
So many potential MTV2 shows.
Brian: I don’t even want to explain mockturned and overturned. So stupid. Back when people would go ‘oh snap’ all the time. I was like, I hate saying oh snap. That’s stupid. We did mockturned and overturned. You did a mopping motion, a churning motion, and overturning your hand. Nick and I would do that. If someone did that to you, you’d have to do it backwards and jump, like skip backwards. We did it to each other all the time. We did it to each other on the beach in Cancun during Spring Break as seniors. Thinking we were really funny and cool. I bet we looked like tremendous idiots but we loved it.
Is that really why you two ended up being a duo instead of a larger group? I know Nick, you are part of a larger group at NYU called Brave Aunt Beth?
Nick: Wow, incredible research team you have. I don’t know what Brian has said so far, but we were we were working together pretty quickly upon meeting and like making stupid silly videos. I did these 24-hour play things at NYU, that were kind of just like a 24-hour sketch show to some extent. At my acting studio, Stella Adler, and there were some really funny, great writers in that. I was so impressed when I’d first gone to see it and I really, really enjoyed it. And so I became friends with some of those people. My junior year, one of those guys started a group, which became Brave Aunt Beth. He had been part of a different sketch group and he wanted to start his own different group, and so he started this group. And it was like this great, really talented group of writers and actors. They were all actors, but they also wrote and they were good at writing. And nobody in the group knew film. And the whole idea that Pete, the guy who started the group, wanted to make online videos, and we just wanted to do live theater shows. Anyhow, it was eight people. It was very hard. Nobody likes saying no to each other. We made some sketches and stuff. I think the missing element with that group was 1) we had five different leaders over the two years or whatever that we were together. And then 2) it was like, if someone would write a script, we’d be like yeah, great, but there would be no like, let’s do a second draft of that. Also the members were constantly fluctuating. So it’s like five to eight people. It’s hard to get everybody together. It’s hard to get everybody synched up and half the group moved to New Orleans at one point, so it just sort of was falling apart at the same time that Brian and I started doing videos. We were going to be graduating next year and it just sort of seemed like inevitable of like yes, we need to work together. We should create these videos. We were also big fans of Derrick Comedy.
How much did watching Derrick Comedy go from NYU, to the UCB, to YouTube and just blowing up, how much did that influence you?
Brian: Fully. We copied them. That was three dudes, and then the director and producer, and we saw them perform live at UCB every time we could. They had their epic Cage Match run (a UCB live competition) in like 2007-2008, and they had a show called Street Legal they would do that was like an hourlong monthly show where they would do new stand-up, show a new video and then do improv. They were putting these videos online that were getting such traction and I remember watching those as I was graduating, being like we can do that. That doesn’t take that much money, but they look great. They’re short films. I mean they’re sketches. It felt like an immediate way to like leave film school and make something that I could be proud of that like didn’t cost an arm and a leg. We basically started doing sketch comedy because we were so inspired by them doing sketch comedy. And then we started doing our monthly show at UCB. It was like, every month, one hour, new video sketch, new stand-up, new improv. We just like copied their model. We really looked up to them in a very big way. They were like three years older than us at NYU, too. So they kind of like had this senior-freshman kind of thing. So it was, yeah, they were very important in the beginning of us.
One of the things that’s kind of amazing just to think about in retrospect, but looking back, there was a brief period of time and this coincided with you guys starting up as a group live and then on video. When you made videos they weren’t just necessarily for YouTube. One of your earliest biggest hits, the Academy Award winning trailer, that was initially for Cracked.com.
Nick: Oh yeah, a lot of them were for Cracked. We signed some deal with Cracked which was very interesting. Cracked would pay us like $1,000 a video or something like that. And that kind of allowed us to make the video, and then we had an arrangement where it would be like on Cracked for a week and then it would go to YouTube.
Brian: The Academy Award trailer, they let us take it after like two days, because it did so well, they were like, we’re done with viral part of it. You can just take it.
Nick: Yeah, and we had initially pitched that to CollegeHumor, actually. We sent them the script and they were like, yeah, we love this. We’ll do it. But the way our system works, it’s is like it’s gonna take a couple months for us to set up the production for it and we were like, no, no, the Oscars is in 11 days. We need to have it out by then. And they were like no, we can’t do that. And so then we went and about killed ourselves doing this.
Brian: The Oscars were on a Sunday and I had fly to Atlanta sometime in middle this shoot. We shot over like 11 days and then I think we were done shooting Thursday or Friday. And then like in the most epic editing session I’ve ever had in my life, it was pretty much edited Thursday night to Friday morning. And then by Friday afternoon it was on the internet, and then that was 48 hours before the Oscars.
Did that seem, though, like a winning path at the time was signing these contracts, whether it was with Cracked or CollegeHumor or Funny or Die?
Nick: I don’t think we were thinking path. We’ve never thought well financially in any capacity.
Brian: We’ve lost money on everything we’ve done.
Nick: Had we been smart and like you know, gone the YouTube route, we could maybe we’d be millionaires or whatever, but always we were like: We wanted a TV show. We wanted to make movies. So YouTube was always a stepping stone, I guess to get there. Cracked got good views on the videos. We really liked the whole team that was there at the time, like Michael Swaim and Dan O’Brien, Soren (Bowie). Everybody was so supportive and really friendly. So we loved that those guys would give us enough money that we can make a little bit of money and, you know, make the video, even though it’s like the budget for every video was like $0. The biggest expense was food. Because we just did everything so cheaply. We weren’t really thinking that far ahead. We were just like, yeah, just keep putting videos online until someone gives us a TV show, and we didn’t understand.
Brian: It’s still our model, by the way. Still trying that 15 years later, our thing is often like when we have a good idea, we just get hyper focused. We have to just get this online for people to see, like whatever the best way to do that without anyone like kind of trying to put their own spin on it. Like we don’t like the idea of anyone trying to tell us what to do. So it’s like, Cracked was like, do whatever you want. Here’s 1000 bucks. We’re like great. We’ll just take that right now because it seemed like a better pathway to get views at the time rather than just putting it on our YouTube channel.
Nick: Another thing they would do is they would title the videos, the most infuriating title in the world where it would be like, ‘What not to say when you’re having an awkward situation with a girl’ or something. We’re like, no! What are you talking about?
Brian: Well, it’s now everything is pretty much. It’s how news articles are titled now. But it was like back in the early days where we liked to have like titles for sketches where you don’t quite know what they’re about and you gotta watch it and it’s a little vague, and that just didn’t work. But then again, once we titled a sketch, Sexy Pool Party, you got 13 million views in a day. So we’re like, okay, maybe we should be titling more clickbaity things.
It’s all about SEO. You gotta have that search engine optimization.
Brian: I didn’t even know what that acronym was. I remember, we had a meeting with the Fine Brothers one time, who we loved, and the way they spoke about understanding the YouTube algorithm, we were both just like glassy-eyed the whole time. What? You guys know what you’re doing to a level that makes no sense to us.
So was Cartoon Network the first place that actually put you guys on TV proper?
Nick: Technically, Brian was in a regional radio commercial.
Brian: I was 11. Yeah, that was huge for me.
Nick: I was in, essentially, a featured extra in a Colbert Report sketch.
Brian: I forgot about that? What was that sketch?
Nick: It was about mayonnaise, or Miracle Whip. Oh, yeah, it was like, Miracle Whip had done a commercial where it was like all these guys partying and rocking out with Miracle Whip and the Colbert Report was making fun of it, because it’s like, it’s Miracle Whip. Like, why is this a party? And so they did their own kind of version of that with mayonnaise. And I think my character plugs an electric guitar into a tub of mayonnaise and like rocks out.
Brian: Do you still get those like two-cent royalty checks from that?
Nick: No, certainly not. I think that was non union or something. I don’t know that I was ever paid for that.
Brian: I think Cartoon Network was the first time we were like really put on and we did like a whole slew of commercials for them Memorial Day weekend. 2010. And it was looking like we were gonna become the new faces of the network for a minute. And then our agent was like, Don’t do it. We were like, we’re 23 and broke what are you talking about don’t do it. He’s like, you don’t want to be the face of a network as you try to pitch shows to other networks. You’ll just become this one thing. And perhaps he was right. But I mean, it almost immediately turned good because the moment we said no to it, which is really hard to do. They were like, well, how about you just be the voices instead, and we pay you more? And we were like, OK, yeah, so that happened for six and a half years. Yeah. Best job we’ve ever had. And will ever have. We really hit the jackpot with that one. And it spoiled us. It should have happened at the end of our career.
Nick: That would have been great.
I’ll tell Adult Swim if they’re listening.
Nick: A funny thing about that is I interned it at Adult Swim when I was in high school, and they had me writing bumpers for Adult Swim. The white writing on black background. And then upon graduating high school, I was doing the voice of Cartoon Network and I was like, Boy, I’ve been really taking people in and out of commercials of Cartoon Network for quite some time.
Brian: I believe you got some stuff in those bumpers like crank and schnank and Five Iron Frenzy lyrics.
Nick: I don’t have any idea of any of them ever aired, because they could have literally just been telling me I was writing them and then throwing them in the trash.
You mentioned that you guys just wanted to have a TV show. There was a chance in 2013. You had a Comedy Central pilot. What happened?
Brian: Next question! No. We’ve had a chance a few times. Yeah, we had a Comedy Central pilot in 2013 that we shot that exists on Vimeo under a private link, and we’re really proud of it. It’s great. We loved working with everyone. We really thought it was gonna go to series and then it didn’t, and then we tried again, just a pure sketch show with Comedy Central a few years ago. Wrote a script and some of that has become like sketched that we’ve now put on YouTube or we actually just shot a sketch from our pilot draft that we’re gonna put on YouTube, hopefully in the next couple weeks.
(it’s not up as of this publication)
Yeah, and then you know, we’ve we’ve been working on other projects that don’t star us. They’re like in development right now. Yeah, I mean, we still would love to have the BriTANicK show happen. And I have this theory that if we get like 20 years, we’re just making YouTube videos at a high quality, and like, we’re 42 and we’re still doing it. I feel like they’re gonna have to give it to us. Like, no one does that. It’s insane.
Everyone we started doing sketch comedy with when we began isn’t really doing it anymore. We’re still kind of clinging on and performing and making YouTube sketches. Which might not be he best route, but we just kind of can’t stop doing it. So I kind of just have a theory of like, just we got to just keep going.
Nick: I think it’s going to be longer. I think when if we’re 60 or, or even 70 and we’re still doing it I think then it’s like oh, these old guy,s like yeah, this will be great.
Brian: If we can keep the quality up, consistently, there becomes a certain point somewhere between two and five decades once you begin, where something snaps and people go like OK, we have to these people a shot.
Most of your contemporaries who aren’t making YouTube videos anymore, they’re not making them either because they leveled up and they’re doing films and TV now, or they got burnt out trying to satisfy the ever-changing algorithm.
Nick: Or one of them leveled up, and the others didn’t.
That’s the premise of the movie, Don’t Think Twice, Mike Birbiglia’s movie about improv.
Brian: Well, first of all, I think the fact that we have two people makes it easier. Like Nick said, when he had eight people in a sketch group, it fell apart pretty quickly. And it’s especially hard to keep that going for years. People like start wanting to do new projects and have different paths in their life. With two people, it’s hard. But it is sustainable. So I think we’re lucky. If we were three people, it probably wouldn’t have lasted this long. So that’s been one of the reasons why we’ve just been able to keep it going.
Nick: Yeah. I think the YouTube algorithm is a major bummer because it is, especially it’s hard to break in. But all the social media algorithms are a bit of a bummer, just by the inherent thing of like, you know, you have this X amount of followers, and then you’ll put up some sort of post and unless that post does remarkably well, it is viewed by fewer than your followers, and it’s sort of like, in my head. And this sounds so naive in the grand scheme of algorithms, I suppose. But I’m like, at least everybody should get to see it, right? Like not some small chunk of people. It’s like, you know, I missed the old the old chronological, Instagram algorithm.
The original feed where you saw your posts in order.
Nick: The one thing that was really cool was like back when the front page of YouTube was the same for everyone and really meant something. That was such a cool thing to get something on the front of that. It would just instantly blow up. Yah, so it’s like the algorithm is definitely a bummer because 1) we don’t have the energy or time to like figure out how to do that. And then also you just have to upload so much to really like, so regularly, to like have it be favorable to you. And it’s like what we like to do is take a long time and make the sketches really good and put them out. It’s my one hesitation about ever having a sketch show is, like when you have a sketch of this, the quality suffers a certain point, as opposed to like a narrative show where you’re just following the characters and seeing where it goes. And obviously some of those suffer as well as time goes on. But like a sketch show just almost inevitably will because you just run out of ideas. Key and Peele, I think really have probably the best hit record in terms of like, like they were good the whole time.
Brian: So many years. It’s kind of crazy. We keep coming back to YouTube, because it’s just our place to do what we do way we want to do it. You know, I guess if we had a sketch show that really let us do whatever we wanted to do, and we did that for a few years. We might then be like, OK, we’re done with this. This is a lot of work. But as long as like, you know, we work on other jobs which are great, but like we’ve always had this magnetism back to YouTube because it’s just like our little sandbox to play and so.
For a brief period, at least people in the industry might have thought that you guys were leveling up. You both appeared in this indie movie, which is called Balls Up or Intramural, depending on where you find it. It co-starred bunch of people who were or eventually were on SNL and then you guys got hired on writers. When you got brought on SNL, did you think at the time or did you hope at the time that you would become like the next Lonely Island or Good Neighbor?
Nick: I mean, certainly we hoped. I never really thought that that was going to happen because we were — I don’t know — maybe it was dumb to think that, I mean, obviously it wasn’t dumb, because that didn’t happen. I sort of felt like I was very excited about getting to work at SNL, but I didn’t have too many expectations about what was going to happen. I kind of figured, oh, we’ll write here for a few years and that will be that. Or we’ll get fired after one.
Brian: Something in the middle happened. I feel like this is exactly what we should do, if we’re here, is do our sketches on this show. And so I was like, maybe that’ll happen. But I think within the first couple of weeks, I was like, I don’t think we’re being groomed in that direction.
Nick: Aggressively not.
Brian: Yeah, I don’t think Lorne really understood what we’re about. In fact, I know he didn’t because he called Nick, Brian and Brian, Nick most of the time during pitch meetings.
So it wasn’t like when other sketch groups have been brought on where it’s like, oh, yeah, you guys do the videos. So we’re gonna bring you on and you’re gonna write your own little videos that exist within the ecosystem.
Brian: They already had Good Neighbor at that time. Good neighbor were our buddies from the very beginning of YouTube. They really helped us get on the show. So I think they kind of had that sort of taken care of in a way. I don’t think they’d want to just bring two writers on immediately as performers, let people know who we were. I don’t really know what goes on behind the scenes there. No one does. So we sort of—
Nick: Yeah, it seemed to me…we are being brought on as writers. I’m not good at impressions. I would have loved to have been on SNL, in theory, but I never really tried for it, because I’m just like that is not really the type of performing that I do, and I think that’s maybe like a little self-defeatist because it’s like, you know, there’s plenty of performers on there that don’t do impressions, but like, I don’t know, I just never really opened my mind up to that.
Brian: It’s not exactly what we do. It’s adjacent, but really, the way we write and perform isn’t fully — we’d established who we were for a decade, so I think if we were 21, maybe it’d have been different but—
Nick: We’re so much more conceptual based than character based when it comes to sketch.
Brian: I remember this so, we flew to New York to audition or whatever, to talk to the writers for SNL as sort of a job interview, and we flew back to LA and we landed in LA, we got a voicemail to call them, and we called them from the LAX airport and they’re like, you have the job. And it was like, a Thursday that we landed and we had to be in New York, moved to New York on Monday to start, it was like, four days to get to New York and pack everything up. So I was like, fuck. In that time, I was at at a bar one night. And I remember just like coming across, it was Tim Robinson, Brooks Wheelan and Paul Brittain all talking to each other who were like three dudes who had been on SNL. And I was like, Hey guys, I start SNL on Monday. Do you have any like tips? I kind of knew them a little bit. I remember Tim Robinson, who now has like the best sketch show ever, was like yeah, I got one: Don’t be clever. Be funny. I was like, OK, tell me more. He was like, You guys are very clever with your shtick. Be funny in a table read. Like that’s so much more important than being clever. And I was like, yeah yeah yeah. Cut to Nick and I are at the Wednesday table read, in our little clever, breaking the mold, meta deconstruction sketches and no one laughing and it’s like, OK. Well. This is not the right place for us.
Nick: Yeah, it was a lot of like, learning. The table reads are so interesting. Because it’s like, it felt like just throwing darts in the dark, where it’s like, you throw one and you’ll be like, that one’s definitely a bull’s eye. Nothing. And then another one where you’d be like, Well, I don’t even think I was facing the right direction for that one. And then that would like hit huge. We’re not like, failing at this because we’re doing well. You know, every once in a while we get like this heat. We have a sketch that does incredibly well, but it’s like what? I have no idea, and I think this is kind of true of everybody that’s there. It’s like, they don’t totally know what will work and what won’t. They’re just sort of like yeah, who the fuck knows. It’s like the thing that you work. You spend your whole night working on dies, and then the thing you wrote 10 minutes at 3am is for whatever reason hits huge.
Brian: I don’t think I’ve ever really bombed as hard as what it feels like to not get laughs at that table read. Streeter (Seidell) had that idea of everyone should just have one pass button, every table read, and be like pass! Guys, just go ahead. This isn’t working. I get it. Like the writer should be able to — we always say like by the top of page three, there should be the first joke. That’s often when the game has kind of revealed what the sketch is. And if that doesn’t get a laugh, it’s really hard for that sketch to come back. You’ve got like nine more pages of silence. And it’s got your name — it says McElhaney/Kocher on top of every single page when your script is there. So it’s like everyone’s just looking. You’re just sitting in between all the other writers and like 150 people in that room. It’s tough.
But at the same time, even though you weren’t onscreen. And even though you’re you’re unsure of what sketches are gonna hit or not. You’re still for a year and a half, two years, hobnobbing with the biggest musicians and the biggest movie stars in the world. It’s got to have a weird affect on you.
Brian: It’s very much you’re at the center of the cultural universe. So even if you kind of hate it or if it’s really tough for you, Saturday nights are really thrilling.
Nick: It was always a very exciting time. The way I’d describe it is I’ve never done crystal meth but I imagine it’s a very similar experience of very high highs, very low lows and constantly unhealthy for you.
Some years of the cast I think were on it?! But in the end, how did your SNL experience influence your individual and duo career aspirations?
Brian: We sort of like I don’t want to say fell apart after it, but it was like kind of I feel like after that we took a step back from what we were doing exactly. We kind of jumped on some other jobs, but like, I feel like we were just kind of wading in the mire a little bit of life. Like we feel like BriTANicK was on this upward trajectory. And then SNL happened, it felt like that was kind of the top, and then after that, it felt like this sort of plateau and this kind of swamp land for a few years to me at least. I don’t know that you felt that, Nick, but it was like something broke a little bit. We needed to kind of figure out what or how to put the pieces back together again.
Nick: I mean emotionally, yes, for sure. Just with anytime you get fired from something, even if you don’t like it or whatever, it’s always an ego bruise for sure.
Brian: I feel like it didn’t like bounce us to our next thing, the way that we kind of felt like things were happening.
Nick: It did somewhat. It just didn’t directly come from SNL. But we immediately afterwards we sold a sketch show to Comedy Central, and we’re adapting this French movie. And that to me, felt like a big step up because it was like, Oh, we’d written a feature before but it had been kind of a weird sketch comedy, like, we were learning to write a feature with that first one. And then we were adapting this French movie. We weren’t acting in it like that. That was like, sort of new territory. I really enjoyed that. It was nice to have a steady job, and then we became freelance, going from job to job and like that free fall in between it’s always terrifying.
Brian: I think we kind of value different things. I think Nick, really, you value yourself as a writer very much, and for me, I don’t feel alive unless we’re performing. I feel like that’s kind of like where it’s sort of stopped for a second, the performance aspect of us being out, whether it was performing live, which we did sporadically, or just making videos, which again, were also super sporadic. It felt like the BriTANicK-specific had slowed kind of to a halt while we’re still doing other things together. It felt like it was very different. Something different was going to happen after SNL.
Nick: Yeah, I think so. I think after our pilot didn’t get picked up like, that was like a really tough blow. You build up momentum with stuff and then something happens to disrupt that momentum. And it can be like, even if you’re in the higher place than you were before, but you’re not moving, it can be very like oh, what do we do? What happens next?
Brian: There’s a question of what is higher place? Because like right now, I feel like we’re going to Edinburgh and in my head, I’m like this the biggest thing we’ve done, but I’ve had a lot of people be like, Oh, why are you guys going to Edinburgh? You don’t need to do that. That’s kind of a you know, an early career kind of thing. And I’m like, not in my head. Like I think this is like, performing for 25 days, like to me that feels like a true actual, like performance that we’ve never done before. And it’s this huge festival. It’s international. So in a way, it’s like however you choose to perceive success and levels and hierarchies of what it means to be here, or down here. It’s kind of all up to you, in some sense.
Nick, you were talking about disruptions. The pandemic was a huge disruption for everybody. But right before that, though, you guys made a series of videos for Comedy Central digital, featuring two other comedians: Milana Vayntrub and Akilah Hughes.
Brian: That was great fun. We loved doing that.
Nick: That was like a weird kind of backdoor pilot for a sketch show that would be featuring Milana and Akilah. And yeah, Milana reached out and was basically just like, this is zero money, but would you want to come make sketches with us? And we were like, Yeah, sure! And we had a great time working with them.
Brian: I was inclined to say no at first because I was always like, No, we’re BriTANicK. We’re very specific and insular about what we do. And I made kind of an effort to myself to start saying yes to other people and things right before Nick asked me, because Milana texted Nick about it. And I was like, Yeah, let’s just do it. Because I felt like my instinct for my whole adult life is to like, was to shun away from that kind of thing. But for this, I was like, let’s see if it’s fun. And it was a lot of fun. And that was kind of a nice like, also, we had no other jobs. So we had to like, open up and like, bring other people in and be open to things like that. But that was great. And then Comedy Central kind of died when the pandemic hit. That show did not go, but I think those sketches are great. Milana and Akilah are great performers.
Well, Comedy Central died not so much directly from the pandemic as much as from Viacom, CBS and Paramount+ deciding to lay off most of the programming people.
Brian, you just mentioned the Edinburgh run. What was it that made you guys go, why don’t we try doing live stuff again?
Brian: We were going to do it in 2020 and then the pandemic hit. So we were already prepared. I had gone in 2018 to see our friend Natalie Palamides do her show NATE. Natalie, the other star of the BriTANicK pilot we shot in 2014. I saw her perform there and I just was there for 72 hours and I was like, this place is amazing. I loved it. I loved the vibe. I loved the spirit. And I talked to Nick about it, and we were like, yeah, let’s perform in Scotland.So it was just sort of in our head for two years.
Nick: We’d heard of it even before then. But we just didn’t know the like, how do you even do this? What’s the path forward? And Alex Edelman, our director for the show, had always been a big proponent of us going. He was like, yes, you should go. You should definitely go, oh my gosh. And then he helped set up some introductions. We were gonna go in 2019, actually. I think we got Assembly, a slot at Assembly. They said, I can give you this slot. Yeah, we were a little late in getting everything set up. But we got a performance slot and they were like you need a publicist and a producer, and I don’t remember which one we couldn’t find at that late date. I think we got a publicist, and then it was like all the producers, their slates were full. Whatever. We’ll try again next year. And then, you know, Zach Zucker bullied us into going with Stamptown.
Brian: It was really lucky that we found Zach. We were like, we’ve always wanted to this festival. He’s like, I run a production company. I’ll handle everything. You guys are under my umbrella. Let’s go. And so then he was like, he knows how to do this. And like, it’s crazy. Like there’s so many people on our team helping us out. The idea that we tried to do this by ourselves at the beginning, it’s hilarious, because we’re just like fielding emails every day and don’t really know what’s happening. So.
And your director, Alex Edelman. He won Best Newcomer when he went, so he must know how to ingratiate yourself with the Scots. How does it feel? You know, I saw your test run show at Asylum, the old UCB basement under Gristedes. And it was a lot of fun. It seemed like you’re really still kind of like testing what it’s like to do shows live again.
Nick: Yeah, well, a lot of those sketches we hadn’t performed in like five years. Some, the most recent time would have been the 2020 SF Sketchfest, we would have performed some of them at, so it had been two years since we performed anything live. And then, we also did what was like a very fat show, that was like us just being like here’s a whole ton of sketches. Let’s like actually survey the audience. And see what they like. And that was really interesting to do that to actually hand out surveys. And be like which sketches did you like? Which sketches did you not like? Because for every sketch, there’s like somebody that loves it, and somebody that hates it, and so there’s a really cathartic wonderful thing of like, seeing very, very quite clearly, oh, you can’t please everybody. Some people are like, oh, you definitely should cut that sketch and another person’s like that one needs to, that’s the best one, like you got to do that. So it’s really interesting weighing all that.
Brian: It’s nice. And also, it’s a little bit frustrating because you can get your own head a little bit like oh, wait, are we going to do the perfect show? You can be like OK, this sketch should start, but this person hated that sketch. So maybe we should just cut it entirely, like you can kind of go there if you really let yourself freak out about it too much. So hopefully we’re just gonna try to follow our own instinct and figure out what the sketch show is really supposed to be. But. Yeah, I mean, we’re trying to figure out if there’s a way to turn it more into like a show show, like a theatrical show with a thread to it, than just a bunch of sketches. And, you know, sometimes I think that it’s cool to elevate a sketch show and sometimes I’m thinking like, I’ll just give them sketches. That’s all I want to see when I see a sketch show. So it’s like, is there something in the middle there? We’re just trying to figure out what it really wants to be. But that was a great first show. I mean, people seemed to love it. So that was that at least made me feel comfortable that we had something.
Yeah Nick’s mom had a great time. I sat right next to her. I know this is a tough question to ask, but are you able to look past Edinburgh? As I’m talking to you in mid July, or do you kind of have tunnel vision in terms of we have this 25-night run we have to get everything in place. Then we can take a break and then figure out what’s next?
Nick: No, not at all. Edinburgh, we’re kind of doing for fun. We’ve got two separate other jobs that we’re doing, we’re writing at the exact same time right now. So it’s like, we’re going to be doing that throughout Edinburgh, like during the day, we’ll be writing these things. And so then immediately afterwards, you know, I think we’ll probably still be working on you know, one or both of them.
Brian: But then also we are going to probably perform in London at some point after that, at the Soho Theatre, and then we you know, our BriTANicK movie is a little bit on hold right now, because we’re just working on all these projects — we always have always wanted to do and that’s something we’ve been kind of writing a bit in the past couple of months. So yeah, we have ideas and then you know, if anyone ever approached us about doing a sketch show, you know, we’re down. So yeah, we have a lot of things after Edinburgh that we have to jump back into.
I’m excited to I’m excited to see how the show evolves myself. But I mean, I’ve been a fan of yours for what, 15 of the 20 years it’s gonna take for you to get to 42?
Brian: Three quarters of it. So thank you so much, Sean.
I really appreciate you guys sitting down with me.
Nick: This is a crazy question to ask now at the end. Was this a podcast?
Yes.
Nick: OK, cool!
From The Comic's Comic 
Leave a comment