Pitchfork

Like a viral video Voltron, the members of Human Giant have banded together and taken the internet by storm this past year. And now that they have their own MTV show, they're poised to sink or swim in the murky waters of mainstream cable television.

Human Giant actors Rob Huebel, Aziz Ansari, and Paul Scheer (the fourth member is director Jason Woliner) spoke to Pitchfork recently about the show, its guest stars (Ghostface, Tony Hawk, Linda Cardellini), and what an excellent piece of equipment the Zune is.

Pitchfork: How did the Ghostface cameo come about?

Rob Huebel: Aziz's best friend is this guy Ghostface, and he called up his best friend and said, "Yo man..."

Aziz Ansari: Yeah, he was my best friend as a kid. We grew up together in South Carolina.

Pitchfork: Oh really? Because I thought he was from Staten Island.

AA: No, all that stuff about Shaolin is just marketing from Def Jam or whatever. He's actually from South Carolina, and we grew up together. We're basically like brothers. Actually, we didn't want him on the show. He was like, "I heard you and Rob and Paul and Jason are doing this show..."

RH: The real answer is we were shooting this bit, and we wanted to approach someone that we liked. I'm not sure who hooked us up with him. Did MTV speak with him?

AA: I don't remember. We were like, "Oh, you know who would be great is Ghostface." And they were like, "Yeah, he's shooting something else for some MTV thing," so we just went and [shot] the thing with him real quick.

Pitchfork: Did he have any idea who you guys were beforehand?

RH: I think his handlers knew our stuff and thought it was funny and just told him that we were funny. It's always that sort of weird thing, like when someone else has to vouch for you a little bit. So I guess his people kind of vouched for us and said we were funny.

Pitchfork: Was he pretty game for what you guys wanted him to do in the sketch?

AA: Yeah, he ripped a couple of lines. He's really comfortable on camera. He's a good performer.

RH: Yeah, that dude is super comfortable doing anything. I think a lot of those music guys are also generally pretty funny. They usually get it right away.

Pitchfork: There is the maxim that all musicians want to be comedians and vice versa.

AA: Yeah.

Pitchfork: Is that why you guys were spending time at South by Southwest?

AA: Haha, yeah, trying to leech off of whatever music cred we can get.

Pitchfork: How many official showcases did you have at South by Southwest?

RH: Only one official one, but everybody kind of ran around and did a bunch of sideshows, which was awesome.

AA: Yeah, we just ran around hosting and doing standup at different shows. So many people want to have people do comedy at their shows now. It's just a fun way for us to go see a lot of shows [laughs].

Pitchfork: Does hosting ever frustrate you because you don't get to do a full set?

RH: It's a little bit weird when people are expecting music specifically and only music. Sometimes you feel like you're trying to shoehorn some comedy in there, and you really don't want to. The thing about comedy is that you'd never want to put it somewhere where it doesn't actually belong. We've all done shows in weird places before, where a friend's like, "Oh man, this buddy of mine is doing an art gallery opening. There's gonna be people drinking wine, and you should do some comedy." Then you do it, and people are like, "What the fuck are you doing?" That kind of stuff is a disaster, but in general, as long as people are cool with the fact that there's going to be some comedy there, it usually goes over well. Usually at music shows it's pretty cool. I think there's such a crossover now that people are fine, as long as you keep it short and tight and then you give them the band that they want.

Pitchfork: Rob and Paul, I saw you guys host at the FADER Fort that Saturday. How much of that stuff had you planned, and how much was just riffing?

RH: That thing specifically was not a great example of comedy in action. That was more of a PR thing, actually. They wanted to have this DJ play a song on the Zune and then have the audience do this weird name-that-tune thing, and the winner was going to get all this stuff. And they were also supposed to win a Zune, but it was hilarious because the Zune wouldn't work. The DJ could not figure out how to make the Zune work. He was like, "Look man, my job is to play music from devices like these, and I can't figure it out!"

At one point the people from FADER started giving the audience these red ping-pong balls. They threw out like eight million red ping-pong balls, and me and Scheer-- they just turned on us and started throwing these red ping-pong balls at us, but it was fine. That was just a fun day. We were just goofing around, drinking beer on stage and stuff like that. We were being very loose and just being like, "Okay, bring up the next band, and if we can shoehorn some comedy in here, we'll do that."

Paul Scheer: That is the most ridiculous job, because they're always like, "People really want to see you guys!" And then you go out there, and no one really wants to see you, so I think Rob and I were having a lot of fun just yelling at the audience.

AA: You do get kind of swindled like that sometimes. They're like, "Hey yeah, we really want you to host! Hey, do you mind talking about the Yaris for a few minutes? Hey, you mind talking about the Zune for a few minutes?"

PS: Yeah, they're like, "It's going to be so much fun! You just definitely have to say, 'The Zune is the best music player.'" They give you lines of dialogue and computer printouts with things circled and underlined, like "Just say it in your own words, but definitely don't not say this."

AA: I always read those things in such an unenthusiastic, shitty way. There's no lineup that Zune or Yaris is going to put together-- they could have Arcade Fire and Radiohead play my house-- I would never buy a Zune or a Yaris. So I could care less about reading that little thing for them. I don't feel like we're shilling for them or anything.

RH: The only way to be funny in a situation like that, where you have to mention a sponsor, is just to fuck it so hard you're just like, "Okay, if you're not wearing Levi's, stand against this wall, and you're going to get shot right now."

PS: And then, for the 50 or 60 people in that group of like a hundred that are paying attention, they had a good time, and the rest are just, "All right, bring out Deathpaw!"

Pitchfork: How did you get some of the other guest stars on the show, like Tony Hawk and Kelly Slater?

AA: It was weird. We got an email from an MTV person when we were in New York on our first leg of shooting, and they were like, "Hey, if you guys ever need Kelly Slater, he's a big fan." And we were like, "What? That is so random." And a few months later we had this bit, and we were like, "Oh man, that would be perfect for Kelly Slater!"

RH: The bit that we used them for was a thing where we were these extreme sports guys, but in a retarded, heightened way. I think my guy is a big wave surfer that also rides a BMX bike on top of the surfboard as he's surfing.

AA: We do maximum extreme ultimate sports, so it's like we've taken it to the next level.

PS: I parachute out of an airplane on a half-pipe at the same. It's a half-pipe on a parachute, and that's what I rollerblade on.

AA: I think my guy kayaks up mountains or something, or rock climbs while kayaking.

RH: We basically had them do these self-deprecating bits where they kind of shit on themselves. They're sort of like, "Oh man, I don't know what I'm doing in this sport. Those guys are awesome. I suck." It was pretty funny.

Pitchfork: What about Linda Cardellini, how do you know her?

AA: She was a friend of a friend, and she did this sketch that's in the first episode. She was just great.

RH: I think we're all big fans of hers from "Freaks and Geeks", and we kind of went after these people we admired from afar. We realized that our friend Nick Swardson did that movie Grandma's Boy with her, and he was a fan of [our] stuff and made sure she got the script. And she read it and really liked it.

Pitchfork: Are there any other people on your guest-star wishlist?

RH: I'll tell you who we didn't get that we really wanted: Tom Selleck.

PS: Yeah, we wanted to get that guy bad.

AA: We really did have a bit with Tom Selleck. You know how Keanu Reeves and some of these celebrities start vanity bands? It was a sketch where Tom Selleck asks us to join his band, and he's just really mean to us and gives us a hard time and tells us we're always fucking up. We tried to get him to do it a few times, and he turned us down like three times. It's kind of embarrassing.

RH: The whole bit was that we're in a band, and the only song he'll let us play is the theme song from "Magnum, P.I." And so we go to him, and he wouldn't do it. We were so pissed.

PS: Well, he was interested in it, but his editing responsibilities on a British TV movie took precedent.

AA: We were also told that he definitely doesn't do stuff involving "Magnum" anymore, and our script was all "Magnum" stuff.

PS: We tried to get away from it in one script, but then we were just like, "Fuck it, let's write another one where we really want to do the 'Magnum' thing."

AA: I mean, that is like, the best TV theme song ever.

RH: We're still very bitter that we couldn't get him.

PS: We're gonna get him, even if it involves us going to his house late at night.

Pitchfork: Are you guys aware that your time slot on MTV is next to "Pimp My Ride"?

PS: That's at 9 o'clock. We're at 10:30.

Pitchfork: That's still pretty close.

AA: We're just sharing a block with our buddy Xzibit. It's no big deal.

PS: If you've seen our stuff, you know it's very similar to "Pimp My Ride". We're building sketch comedy.

RH: Those are two hilarious shows, back-to-back, baby.

Pitchfork: You should have aspiring sketch writers come in and pimp their sketches.

AA: [laughs]

RH: You know what's really funny is that we've actually had to deal with a fair amount of hilariousness where MTV will come up with these ideas for promos that they want us to do. They want us to do stuff with these other shows, which would be fine. I'm sure those guys are all nice guys, and we'd be happy to do that. But they wrote these scripts that are hilarious, and we were like, "There's no way we're doing this. I'm not going to be hanging out in a swimming pool with Xzibit."

Pitchfork: Why not? That would be awesome.

AA: Well, first of all, these promos didn't even have Paul in them.

RH: We only think they saw "Shutterbugs", the first episode of "Shutterbugs". You know what? It's an interesting lineup, and we're excited to be a part of it. Buy a Zune, man.

AA: I gotta go climb into my Yaris and take a spin. I'll see you later. It's got a hi-fi in it, maybe you didn't know about it.

RH: MTV really, beyond anything, has let us do everything that we wanted to do. They're really just like, "All right, yeah, let's see what happens." They're trying to do different shows that night, so we'll see what happens.

AA: They weren't like, "Hey, it'd be great if you'd put the girl from 'American Idol' in a sketch." We tell them, "We want to put Patton [Oswalt] and Brian Posehn in this stuff," and they're like, "Great, those guys are awesome."

PS: They aren't ever like, "Can you do a sketch with Xzibit? Or maybe Human Giant has a car that needs to be pimped. Why don't you guys make a special guest appearance on there?" There are no crossovers.

AA: They didn't make us do anything we didn't want to do. And that promo thing, it's not a big deal. The promo just had cheesy jokes in it, and we were like, "Oh, we don't want to do that." Even our executive, before we even had a chance to say we didn't want to do it, was like, "Hey man, those guys can't do that."

RH: To their credit, they didn't allow their marketing people to write jokes for us.

Pitchfork: Since you have the show now, does every idea you have get put into it at this point? If there's something you want to do on the side real quick and upload it to YouTube, is that still possible?

AA: Not YouTube. Viacom.

RH: Viacom for some reason has decided to sue YouTube for a billion dollars, with a "B". It's sort of ironic because the internet sort of helped us along the way here.

RH: So that's a little crazy, but the answer to your question is, the episodes will be pretty much locked. We're still editing right now. We only have the first few edited right now. We actually worked all night last night editing and shooting some stuff.

PS: We definitely will have extra footage on DVD, and I think there was even some talk about, "If you buy a whole season on iTunes, you get something special." I don't know what that special thing is, but we'll figure it out.

AA: We have little behind-the-scenes clips and outtakes that I'm sure will be on the internet somewhere.