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I love all of our subpodcasts.
Scott Aukerman -
I came into the 'Comedy Bang! Bang!' TV show with a level of confidence that I don't think I would've had if I hadn't been doing the podcast for three years already. I certainly had to figure out in those three years the sense of humor I wanted to do and the way to talk to celebrities without being incredibly intimidated by them.
Scott Aukerman
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Others may dispute this, we have tried to keep that sense of experimentation and putting new people up alive. And we haven't become a show, where we're like, "We know the 20 comics who are good and we're just going to keep on recycling them."
Scott Aukerman -
You become a victim of your own success. It's what happens in TV when Fox has a big hit with the X-Files. And they start chasing and the rest of their shows suffer. Because the experimentation that made the X-Files a show is all of the sudden lost.
Scott Aukerman -
I get inspired when I look at Tom Lennon, who did Reno 911! for six seasons while writing huge movies and directing, and also doing other pilots; he did that FX pilot, the Star Trek thing.
Scott Aukerman -
You see people who are disenfranchised elsewhere coming to Comic Con and making lifetime friends. I love seeing the outcasts of society all bonding together.
Scott Aukerman -
I think shows that have more of a narrative and are about what's going to happen next, those need to wrap up as a complete story. But it's weird when a goofy comedy show needs to end.
Scott Aukerman -
I think comedians should focus on what makes them happy, what art form fulfills them the most. Don't be calculated about it and say, 'Okay, I'm gonna tweet, and I'm gonna podcast, and I'm gonna do standup, and one of those things is going to lead me to my own TV show.' I don't think that should be the goal.
Scott Aukerman
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Endings of television shows are sometimes such depressing things. I think shows that have more of a narrative and are about what's going to happen next, those need to wrap up as a complete story. But it's weird when a goofy comedy show needs to end, and we knew it was going to be the end, and sometimes it's just better if a comedy show ends and goes away and they never had a series finale.
Scott Aukerman -
You have to pay your dues. And what's nice, after booking a lot of new people... I counted the other day. We're in September and we've already booked between 30 or 40 people who've never done the show before.
Scott Aukerman -
And that's the thing about our show: what are they going to do put on the poster? I don't know. It's always easier when you have someone like Cedric the Entertainer where you can go, "You know this guy. You love this guy. Watch his sketch show." And then people tune in and go, "I though I knew that guy. I don't love that guy in a sketch show."
Scott Aukerman -
I think expressing yourself and working hard can't help but have great results. Look at Zach Galifanakis. He didn't tweet. He didn't have a podcast. He just went out and did the funniest standup you'll ever see in your life. And he was rewarded for that.
Scott Aukerman -
I guess when I was a kid I wasn't the type of person playing a lot of pranks. I was the type of person upon whom pranks were pulled.
Scott Aukerman -
The great thing about the Internet is - our show is totally modular. Every piece can be popped in and out. They're relatively short pieces. They're not long. And we can say, "here' s one way to market it. Take these pieces out of the show and put them on the Internet." And we're doing dirtier cuts and put those on the Internet. It's a real great way to market the show. This is finally the year a show like this can happen.
Scott Aukerman
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I would say we had two goals when doing this CD. The first goal is to introduce people who have never seen the show before to the best comics that are on the show. And goal number two is to introduce people that they never heard of before and give you a bit more flavor of what the show is actually like. And those goals are very much in line with the philosophy of the show from the very beginning. It's the very best people who are out there.
Scott Aukerman -
My partner, Jeff Ullrich, and I always thought Earwolf was going to be big. There were a couple of studies before we launched saying podcasts were going to really grow. But I remember so many conversations at the beginning where people would say, 'How are you going to make money with this?'
Scott Aukerman -
Each week we usually have one person who's never done the show before. Last year we had close to 60 who'd never done the show before. We're constantly booking new people, sometimes to the consternation of people who live here who do the show regularly.
Scott Aukerman -
You don't get a lot of life milestones in show business. It's really difficult to make things, and a lot of times you don't know you're at the end of something. With Mr. Show, I was only a writer and we knew we were going into the movie, and we thought, "Okay, like Monty Python, we're going to make five movies." And we didn't know it was the end. So it ended up being a bummer and such a terrible ending for Mr. Show. We never got to feel like, "Wow, we did it! We did something."
Scott Aukerman -
A lot of good things can come from not expecting anything.
Scott Aukerman -
When we came to the network, it was a very interesting time where Portlandia had just come on the air and had been very, very successful. I think people had Portlandia-sized expectations for Comedy Bang! Bang!, especially after the first episode was sampled by quite a large number of people. I remember getting the ratings after the first episode, and the network was over the moon about it. And then the second episode tanked so hard. Like, no one watched it. It was a resounding, "Hey, a bunch of people tried your show, and they all hate it!"
Scott Aukerman
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Your average comedian doesn't know the podcast universe, really.
Scott Aukerman -
We like to keep the show small. Honestly, where we moved the show to the UCB theater, we moved it to a smaller space. Even though the show has technically gotten more popular. And that is, only because we like intimacy and the ability to experiment more. We don't want to be like, "We can get 250 people in a week. So let's do that. But we have to be careful about who we book..."
Scott Aukerman -
I always viewed the podcast and the TV show as two separate things.
Scott Aukerman -
I find I've always been judgmental about comedy (laughs) and it's hard to turn that off, really. But what constant exposure to live comedy does is it makes you give people a second chance.
Scott Aukerman