The ALL NEW Big Wakeup Call with Ryan Gatenby

Scott Aukerman Talks About the 2022 Comedy Bang Bang Tour

July 29, 2022 Ryan Gatenby Episode 625
The ALL NEW Big Wakeup Call with Ryan Gatenby
Scott Aukerman Talks About the 2022 Comedy Bang Bang Tour
Show Notes Transcript

Our 12th anniversary celebration continues with a visit from perhaps the favoritest of our favorite guests! Scott Aukerman makes his 18th appearance on our show for a chat about the upcoming Comedy Bang Bang World Tour 2022!


Scott Aukerman joined our show for a chat about the upcoming "Comedy Bang Bang" 2022 Tour.  [Edited for length and clarity.]

Ryan Gatenby: My next guest is making his 18th appearance on this show since 2013, which means we've spent about three hours total talking and still know nothing about each other. He is the creator and host of "Comedy Bang Bang." He's bringing the show live to the Chicago Theater on August 3rd. We are going to catch up with Scott Aukerman. Scott, welcome back. Good to talk to you again.

Scott Aukerman: Happy anniversary, Ryan. So great to talk to you. When you say those statistics, I realize I talk to you two times a year. Is that what it is?

RG: Twice a year, which is about as often as Paul F. Tompkins is on "Comedy Bang Bang," right? He's hardly ever on.

SA: Exactly! About as many times as I talk to all of my loved ones, actually.  So you're in good company.

RG:  I want to chat about the "Comedy Bang Bang" world tour 2022. Do you have a name for the tour? I know Paul McCartney is out on the “Get Back” tour. I remember the Stones had “A Bigger Bang.” Could you steal that and have like “A Bigger Bang Bang?”

SA: Maybe “An Even Bigger Bang Bang!" Yeah, I don’t know. Technically, this is the “Oh No!” tour.

RG: Why is that?

SA: “Oh No” became a catchphrase in on the first episode of 2022 with someone who was on the show called "Dr. Sweetchat, The Small Talk Robot," and since then a lot of people have said “Oh No” on the show.  So we decided to call it the “Oh No” tour, which I I'm questioning if that's the right decision, but that's what it's called.

RG: So you've gone from “What Up, Hot Dog” to “Heynongman” to “Oh, No!”

SA: Yeah. I'm trying to get smaller and smaller until finally it's just like a vowel or a piece of punctuation. 

RG: You were at the Chicago theater last in 2019, which was such a fun show. You had Paul F. Tompkins as Alimony Tony. We had Lauren Lapkus as Big Sue, and then super special surprise guest, Jason Mantzoukas. It was one of the best live comedy shows of any iteration that I've ever seen. I gave you a five-star Yelp review.

SA: I didn't realize we were on Yelp! Well, thank you so much. That means the world to me. I believe you got a free ticket though, did you not?

RG: I did, but that did not impact my enjoyment. 

SA: We try to deliver! You know, it's been now three years since we've even done a live show. I'm trying to remember exactly how to do them. But we're super excited about getting out there and especially to Chicago, where that last show that we did was so amazing.  I know the lineup for this year too, and it's really good. So I don't want to spoil it, but I think people will be very happy with it. 

RG:  Can you set it up so Jason just happens to be in Chicago doing his live podcast show the day before yours again?

SA:  That was such a weird coincidence that it worked out. I mean, it literally -- we didn't even coordinate that. His podcast, “How Did This Get Made,” just happened to be playing the exact same theater the night before, so I was like “stick around for a day!” 

It’s not going to happen this tour, but there is someone who is in Chicago who has agreed to do the show. So there are going to be surprise guests on the tour other than Paul F. Tompkins, and I am excited about kind of rotating a bunch of people in and out, and people are going to be doing like three or four day stints on it, and then new people will come in. So it's really exciting to be able to come to these cities with new performers and new favorite people that people haven't seen before.

RG:  What kind of prep goes into a live podcast tour? Because I'm thinking a band getting ready for a tour - they can rehearse, but when they go out there, they're doing the same 20 songs every night. For you, each and every night of the tour is a different show. So how much prep can you do ahead of that?

SA:  Well, to give you a serious answer, on one of the early tours, we kicked it off at Largo here in Los Angeles. I remember, I think Paul F. Tompkins and Andy Daly were both on that show, and it was the start of one of our long tours and I think none of us prepared anything. 

Paul just kind of came out as a character that he'd done a bunch of times before, but he didn't plan on anything to say, or anything to talk about. And it was kind of a little aimless and it didn't have kind of forward narrative momentum. After that he said to me, “Oh I get it, I need to come out and have a topic to talk about each time.”

So after that, he's really good about figuring out first of all what character he hasn't done in whatever city we're in. He keeps a running list so that he doesn't repeat characters. But he also is really good about figuring out why that character would be in the city and what they have to talk about. So that really takes a lot of the pressure off all of us. That's really good prep work that he does. 

That's kind of what we talk about for the tour, is at least come out with like an idea of what you want to talk about, and that's really most of the time on the actual podcast. That's what we do for that as well. You know, everything is improvised, but at least come in with a topic that we can talk about. So we're not flailing about aimlessly.

RG:  Maybe this is better because you're rotating people in and out. Is it difficult to spend so much time on tour with your co-hosts or castmates or scene partners or whatever you want to label yourselves -- you spend all that time traveling and you still have to be able to turn it on at night and do a fresh show. A band can be sick of each other, but they know when they hit the stage, “we’re doing this set list.” but  you need the support and trust of everyone to put on a good show.

SA:  It weirdly has made me closer to everybody, these tours. You know, the tour that I did with Paul F. Tompkins and Lauren Lapkus -- we started a whole separate podcast because we got so close on the tour. I think when you're in a band and you're just kind of playing your own part and you're playing with everyone, but you know your own part, you know the songs. There isn't that sense of like, “we need each other” or “we rely on each other.” 

I think the combination of spending so much time in a car or on a plane together, spending all day traveling and then relying on each other to do the show – I think there's a really unique bond in that, and it makes all of the performers who appear together really close-knit. So I really enjoy it.

RG:  Part of the thrill for a comedy and improv nerd like me is being like a fly on the wall witness. I like seeing the creation. I like seeing, or hearing how you develop the bits and the characters and the more specific they become, and maybe that comes with you being more intimate and familiar with each other.  The more specific the characters become, the funnier it is for me, and then it seems to give you all more freedom to play.

SA:  Yeah. I don't know. There's just a certain sense of magic about doing it in front of a crowd. I know it's a little bit different. You're sort of pausing for laughs and occasionally you'll trot out references that will get laughs and stuff, but there is an excitement to it about creating something live in the moment. 

Having people give you an immediate response is so different than doing it as a podcast where you record it and then it comes out in a few days or a few weeks, and you've forgotten it by then. There's something about going to live comedy and especially live improv comedy that’s just so magical to watch when you're there in person.

RG:  I like the concept of just throwing out random references in the city. It reminds me of seeing this rap group open for someone - they were called Black Sheep. 

SA:  Yeah. I love Black Sheep.

RG:  They had a hit with this intense rap song, and in the middle of the song, for no reason, they’re like, “Hey Chicago, how about that basketball!” Didn't name a team. Didn't name a player, they just said “Hey Chicago, how about that basketball!” Yet everyone still applauded.

SA:  So they were talking about the actual sporting equipment.

RG:  That's right. Literally the ball, the actual ball. How much we love it.

SA: I love it. I've got to try to do stuff like that too. I mean, it might just turn out to be “how about that basketball,” in every single city.

RG:  Do you feel like you're playing a different role on stage versus the podcast?   You have to be driving the show, but you're adding to the creation, you're building on it.  Oftentimes a host is going to have to play a role of straight man, and you're doing that. You're throwing it to the guests and back, but you also get to be immersed in it, and that's got to be more satisfying than just being like a traditional “host.”

SA:  Yeah. A little bit. I mean, on the podcast, because it's just our voices, I have to, like you say, drive it. Essentially, I’m steering it towards commercial breaks. There's a three-act structure to the show and I'm sort of trying to steer it into those all the time on stage.

People are looking at me and they're seeing me have fun, which you can't always hear that on the podcast. I mean, I try. People can hear me laughing during the podcast, but [on stage] they're seeing the electric back-and-forth between people. So it's a lot more fun for me to have people watching that and watching the creation of it, but also because it's on stage, it doesn't have that three-act structure that the podcast has, so it's a unique animal unto itself where you have to create a narrative on stage. That's going to be satisfying for the audience. 

I'm in charge of the end of the show as well, and figuring out that last laugh line where we take our bows. Sometimes I'm really good at it, and sometimes it's so funny during a show where the perfect last line happens, and I step up to say, “that's our show” and someone else talks and cuts it off, and it's like, “God, now we’ve got to do another five minutes.” So we find another good one, but there's unique challenges in it, which I really enjoy, though.

RG:  How do you resist the temptation -- or maybe you don't -- because it's a live stage, and the Chicago Theater is huge. It's a big stage. There's a lot of space to fill. How do you resist something like, “Oh, maybe I need to go bigger and broader because people are watching me.”  

SA:  A little bit. I remember that last Chicago show was very physical, and as the shows have gotten to be in bigger venues, I do sense a little bit of a responsibility to kind of get everyone out of their chairs a little bit and say “oh, let's act this out. " If an idea comes up, a lot of times we'll say, “well, let's role play this” because it gets us out of our chairs and gets us walking around the stage and filling the stage a little bit more. 

That sense of responsibility about the scale of it even goes down to the furniture on stage to get really nerdy. We've had a lot of discussions about how uncomfortable the stools are, but there's something about low chairs, which are so much more comfortable but make the performers sink down, and the energy gets sapped a little bit. So even though we are a little bit uncomfortable, I would rather be sitting in high stools.

Look, I'm not going to be walking around the entire time and standing on my feet for months, sure. But I’m definitely going to hopefully be sitting as high as I can. 

RG:  I think for the last 20 minutes of that show, you were up every couple minutes. Someone would think of a line out of nowhere and it just got funnier and funnier and then “Oh, should we act that out?” At the end it was a “carpets and rugs down there” shop, and then the "Dink Dink Man" came in. First you were dead, and then you were a tree, and it just kept building.

SA:  Yeah, those are so fun for me to do, those kind of shows, but I also love just having a really super funny conversation with Paul F. Tompkins. Sometimes it can last up to 45 minutes that's just me and him talking. I think that is what's really cool about "Comedy Bang Bang." 

"Comedy Bang Bang" is not like a typical improv show where you're going to see a bunch of performers come out and go, “okay, we need a suggestion of where a scene is going to take place" and then everyone just acts out a crazy scene. It really is a unique show in the improv world. It's an improvised talk show, which means that I'm the host and guests come on and we all improvise conversations in a way, but that leads as a springboard to crazy things happening.

Sometimes we do scenes. So it's an interesting, almost unique anomaly in the improv world, which is really only because the art form of podcasts were invented and that was a way to do an improv show on a podcast.

RG: Scott, before I let you go, will there be any cool new merch?  Because I have two "Comedy Bang Bang" shirts. It makes up about two-sevenths of my weekly shirt rotation. And I'd like to add a third.

SA: I've seen pictures of you wearing them places, so I appreciate you representing. There are two new shirts. I just approved them today, and these are tour-exclusive shirts, I believe. So who knows, maybe they'll be available after the tour, but this is the only way you can get them. There's also a tour poster, which a really great artist has been working on. So those are three really great new things that will only be available on the tour.

RG: "Comedy Bang Bang" is live at the Chicago Theater on August 3rd. New episodes of "Comedy Bang Bang" are available every week wherever you listen to your podcasts. Scott Aukerman is of course the host and my guest. Scott, thank you as always, and best of luck with the tour.

SA: Thank you, Ryan. Always a pleasure to talk to you.