Pitchfork

Pitchfork Music Festival Pre-Party standup comedian Aziz Ansari and the rest of his Human Giant comedy troupe (Rob Huebel, Paul Scheer, and Jason Woliner) have just announced that their own comedy series, creatively titled "Human Giant", will debut on MTV in the first quarter of next year.

All four troupe members will executive produce the show, with Ansari, Huebel, and Scheer also starring in it and Woliner directing it.

Ansari explained the MTV deal in an interview today with Pitchfork. "We didn't pitch them a show or anything, they just saw the shorts and they really wanted us to do some sort of show for them. 'Shutterbugs' we shot on our own, and 'Illusionators', we shot in Vegas. We put a teaser trailer up for ['Illusionators'], but we never released it because it was too long. And we started talking to people about doing some sort of show, so we thought, 'We shouldn't release this so we have something in our back pockets. When people meet with us, we can show them this other thing.' So those two videos and then the mixtape video-- we had all those on a DVD. MTV got ahold of that DVD and told us they wanted us to make a pilot of short films like that. We started the pilot in April and finished it in July, and that's when we found out we got picked up. They ordered eight half-hour episodes and it'll be on regular MTV.

"When they said we got picked up on regular MTV and not even MTV2, I was really taken aback because if you think about it, I can't even think of any shows on MTV that are scripted anymore. They're all reality TV and stuff like 'My Sweet 16' or 'My Parents Just Set Me Up on a Date' or whatever, [but] with stuff like YouTube out there, people are familiar with sketch comedy. They understand that format, so I feel like if people see a sketch of ours on the internet and they like it, hopefully they'll want to watch our show."

Ansari further addressed the issues of "viral" video and specifically whether or not MTV would allow Human Giant to upload clips from the show to sites like YouTube by saying, "I don't know what the best way to use the internet to promote a TV show is. I don't think anyone's really figured out what the best method is to get people to watch it on the internet and then watch the show, because it could be this thing where people are like, 'Yeah that's funny. I'll just watch the next one on YouTube.' I don't know what the method is to do that, but hopefully their marketing people will figure out a brilliant plan that will maximize the rate of people watching from the internet and then watching TV. I think our stuff is really internet-friendly because it's really short and just quick and funny. So hopefully we'll be able to use that to our advantage."

When asked if the content of the show would resemble the online music-friendly Clell Tickle and Other Music videos, Ansari said, "Any stuff I write about, be it standup or sketches or whatever, is [about] whatever's going on in my life, any frustrations or whatever, manifesting itself onto paper. I listen to a lot of music, so that kind of stuff is going to seep in there. I was writing some sketch about getting tickets for a Beck show, so you know, that kind of stuff is going to seep in there, I think it's part of our sensibility a little."

Human Giant are currently writing material, a process that began "at the end of August. We've just been writing for now, and then at the end of October we'll start shooting. We've been writing a ton. We throw out so many ideas, and so few of them make it past the initial pitch stage to actually getting written into a script. All four of us have to think it's hilarious for it to go forward, and sometimes it's just hard to make all four of us really get into something, but we generally have the same sensibility."

He gave a little bit of insight into the writing process when he said that the material is "sketch in a very loose sense of the word. A lot of it is improvised, like Clell Tickle. So much of that was improvised. The people we use in our shorts, they're friends of ours, people we know really well, performers, and we trust them to improvise stuff and do it naturally. Sometimes if stuff is really scripted it doesn't feel as good to me. We really try to keep it loose, like a 'Curb Your Enthusiasm'-style model."

Ansari said that the show will include some old material. "We ended up with a 12-minute version of 'Illusionators', and chunks of that are in the show. We're going to film new 'Illusionators' stuff, and that will be in the show. The mixtape thing is going to be in the show, and Clell Tickle will probably be in some episode."

As for new material, Ansari said, "We're definitely looking forward to shooting new episodes of the 'Bugs'. Those are really fun characters to play, and now we have casting people so we can get these awesome little kids to do crazy stuff, like the last episode where we fight the little kid. Originally we wanted it to be a whole clan of kids beating us up, but we didn't know enough kids. And now we can do crazy stuff like that."

He jokingly added, "We're really looking forward to it, being able to use the MTV machine to shoot our crazy ideas before our show gets canceled."