Boston Comedy Interview: Sam Brown On the Whitest Kids U'Know Final Seaon

Sam Brown from Whitest
Kids U'Know

Tonight on IFC, The Whitest Kids U’Know begins its fifth and final season as a TV sketch group entity. They will remain a loose group working together, but there are too many outside projects and concerns tugging at the five individual members to keep it going. As Sandwich native Sam Brown told me, it’s hard to keep a sketch show fresh, and it’s time to move on. The Kids did manage to sneak a full-length movie into the show, called The Civil War On Drugs, a portion of which will end each episode. They’ll be screening that on its own Monday in LA at the Steve Allen Theater.

Brown’s comedy career started in Sandwich at the local cable access channel, where he was part of a show called TV Galactica. He met the other Kids in college in New York, where the troupe started and went through various permutations before settling with Brown, Trevor Moore, Zach Cregger, Darren Trumeter, and Timmy Williams. For a little more about them, read my profile here or see my video interview with Brown after the Kids’ 2009 show at Great Scott.

I spoke with Brown by e-mail about the new season and what’s next.  

How did you decide this will be the final season of Whitest Kids?

It was a lot of stuff. My whole thing is when writing sketch you are constantly coming up with funny ideas that get shot down because there's an SNL sketch you never saw that’s like it, or a Kids in the Hall sketch, or a State sketch, etc. I think this is something that happens to anyone writing a lot of sketch. Well after doing five seasons and over a hundred sketches a season I started to notice I was having more and more sketches shot down because we already did a sketch like that.  I think we were successful at keeping it fresh up till now so it’s good that we didn't push it too far.

Is the group staying together to work on other project, like feature films or touring?

Think of it like what Jackass did where they stopped doing a show on MTV. They still went on and did their own TV shows that involved each other and every few years they would get together and do a movie.  

How hard has it been to keep doing the show given everyone’s individual schedules?

It’s tough and its only getting tougher. Now Trevor has his Fox show [Breaking In], we all live in three different cities and Timmy has kid on the way.  Scheduling is the reason we haven't toured more.

Will you be screening The Civil War On Drugs as a complete film anywhere else besides LA?

Hopefully we will. I'm really happy with how it came out and my ideal outcome is that ten years down the line the Civil War on Drugs is seen as its own thing. 

Was Civil War written to be broken up at the end of a series of episodes, or was it meant to be a feature film?

The Civil War on Drugs was an idea we came up with a long time ago for a movie. Way before we had a TV show even.  At the time a lot of people told us that it would be hard to get a studio to pay for you to make a civil war pot comedy.  That’s one of the things that made the it the perfect story to make into a movie within the show. We're making the movie that people told us we couldn't. For that I think it was important to write it all as a movie and worry about cutting it up into segments later. I've watched it as segments though and think it’s successful as both. We'll see though. Maybe we're just stubborn. 

Did you approach this season any differently since it’s the last?

A little. I mean we weren't 100% sure that it would be the last season while we were in production but we were conscious of the fact that it could be. I think the only real difference it made was when writing the Civil War on Drugs. We knew we wanted it to end the season, so when we got to the ending it made a difference that it wasn't only the end of the movie but possibly the end of the series. As that, I think it works.

Have you been performing frequently on your own as a stand-up?

I actually had to make a new years resolution to start doing stand-up again. I had been doing it for about five years now but when I moved to LA a year ago, I got lazy and didn't end up really doing it out here at all until recently. It's been good though, I didn't realize how much I missed it.

Has the transition to stand-up been difficult? Some people seem to think you can use some of the same disciplines as sketch, but some see them as completely different.

Stand up is a lot scarier for me because in a sketch group you have other people to laugh at the jokes before you perform it live. You don't know exactly how they'll do but you definitely have a sense.  With stand up you don't really have any idea how your jokes will work till you tell them in front of an audience for the first time.  There's been times where I've said something I thought would be great and it'd flop and there have been times when I've told a joke that I was certain would fail and it would get a huge laugh. That's also part of stand ups charm to me. You never know.  All that being said, there have been times where I've flopped at both and at least at sketch I've had four other people commiserate with.

What other shows are you producing?

Trevor and I are in the early stages of writing something for a network.  So early that I think it'd be jumping the gun if we started to talk about it.

Are there any videos floating around from TV Galactica?

I think there is an outside chance that at the Sandwich Cable Access Television station there is a 3/4" tape cassette that they no longer have the decks for, collecting dust in a dark corner. My mom is friends with the manager there so I was able to give it a quick look but no luck.  I bet one day if I get famous the tape will surface. That's what I'm working towards.

Any plans to perform in Boston, either as a group or just yourself, doing stand-up?

I'm sure when we do a tour we'll play Boston.  That’s where all my friends and family are.  Plus that show at Great Scott's was one the more memorable ones on the last tour. Now that I’m thinking about it, it was after that show we went to the Middlesex Lounge where my brother works and about fifteen minutes before the bar was closing they set up the mic and Timmy and I did an impromptu stand-up show. There was hardly anyone there and I could barely stand I was so drunk but I got some jokes off and made some people laugh. That was what eventually started a series of monthly stand-up shows I did there with Boston comedian Rob Crean. Maybe next time I'm going home we'll set up another one of those.

Weekend Comedy -- Stephen Lynch, Whitest Kids U'Know, DJ Hazard

It was a busy weekend in Boston comedy with three great sold-out shows from a couple of out of town acts and a Boston treasure coming back to his old stomping grounds. Starting with Saturday and working backwards, DJ Hazard at Mottley's Comedy Club was the show to see. The club holds just shy of one hundred people, and it was packed to maximum capacity to see Hazard, who now lives in New York City.

It was a hot crowd, and they were didn't take long to warm up to Tim McIntire and Bethany Van Delft, who hosted and middled the show. Van Delft was especially on, with material about her modeling days and efforts to conceive. She mixed drier, headier material with a couple of well-placed, more graphic punchlines. Ira Proctor did a drop-in set, working on material for a tape to send to the Tonight Show. He did what you'd call an extremely tight five, talking about running to get in shape after not having done it in a while ("It's changed," he said), and the type of lazy it takes to not get off the couch, even to go to bed.

But it was Hazard's night, and he absolutely crushed. Material new and old -- a few things you'll hear on his new CD, Man of Hazardium,and a few things I'd never heard him do. He compared going on a first date to bringing your balls to the Antique Roadshow (I won't spoil the punchline for you), talked about gun violence (I'm beginning to think if more people got shot, less people would get shot"), performing on cruise ships, and a variety of topics for about an hour's set with not a single lull.

He closed with a classic Hazard tune, "Untie My Ankles," which is so far removed from the original Juice Newton song from which Hazard borrows the tune that it had no right to go over as well as it does. Attribute that to Hazard's skill at feeling out a crowd and timing a set. The song went right into his "DJ Hazard -- Nightclub Comedian" routine, wherein an animatronic DJ mouths a prerecorded message from the future. If you're a Hazard fan and haven't seen this bit, see him every time you can until he does it. It's offbeat, inventive, and it was just the right way to sign off for a well-satisfied audience.

Friday, I pulled double-duty, catching the Whitest Kids U'Know at Great Scott and the late Stephen Lynch show at the Comedy Connection Wilbur Theatre. The Whitest Kids were playing Anderson Comedy's usual Friday night show, The Gas, and sold it out about an hour before show time. They brought a mix of sketch comedy and video, material most of the audience seemed to recognize from their Tuesday night show on IFC, like the Deer Hunter sketch and "Slow Jerk" (check my interview post from earlier this week for videos of the original sketches). I spoke with Sam Brown (a Sandwich native) after the show, and him to describe what you missed if you didn't see the show.

Here's the quick interview:


Stpehen Lynch played two sold out shows at the Wilbur, each of them about two hours of music drawn mostly from his new album, 3 Balloons. I caught the second show, which was literally the second show of the tour, and the second time Lynch had performed this material together the way he will for the rest of the tour (he's done a bunch of the songs for one-off gigs, and you can find a few of the songs if you search YouTube). He did twelve of the fourteen songs on 3 Balloons, a few old favorites like "Special," showed a couple of video shorts, and even covered Prince. He had a bit of support from friends David Josefsberg (whom he perfomed with on Broadway doing The Wedding Singer) and Rod Cone, who helped with the banter and the background singing. For the encore, he played piano for what he said was the first time onstage in front of an audience.

I spoke with the very tired Lynch backsstage after the show about the show and the tour:

Who Are The Whitest Kids U'Know?

What exactly is the Whitest Kids U’Know? We know they have a TV show that airs Tuesdays at 10PM, now in its third season on IFC (the first season was on FUSE). We know they are a comedy troupe that is coming to Great Scott tonight to play a show with Anderson Comedy. Then there are the viral videos like “Hitler Rap” that spread through YouTube, and even a movie called Miss March (out March 13)written and directed by Whitest Kids Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore, who also star.

The Whitest Kids U’Know, then, is a five-person comedy troupe (rounded out by Darren Trumeter, Sam Brown, and Timmy Williams) with experience making short films and producing a weekly live sketch in New York City. Their show in IFC looks mort like a collection of short films than a traditional live sketch show. That may be splitting hairs, but it’s a distinction of which the troupe is aware.

“The funny thing is that when we first started as a troupe, we were pretty much at our very early stages, trying to make a TV show for a live show,” says Brown, a Sandwich native whose brother tends bar at Miracle of Science and the Middlesex in Cambridge. “And then eventually, once we started doing the weekly shows, we realized we’re making a live show. We started writing to that, writing stuff to work with a room. And yeah, second or third season, we had to shift our minds back to making a TV show again.”

“Sketch has changed. It’s like SNL doing ‘Digital Shorts,’” says Trumeter. “We still think of them as sketches but the format has kind of changed, because we’re not playing in front of an audience.”

Cregger, Moore and Brown all had experience with film studying at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Williams studied film at Brooklyn College, and Trumeter brought a depth of theater experience when he joined the troupe, and had also made a short film. That experience was a tremendous help when they were transitioning from the live show to television.

“Us being able to produce out own stuff is how we got going,” says Brown. “We all just knew how to edit, spoke that language of how things are laid out with cuts and things like that. We were able to speak to the finished product.”

Running a weekly live show was also a boon, giving the group a lot or material from which to create the first season. “The first season of the show, 90 percent of the sketches we had that season were written before we got the show, from doing the live show for so long,” says Brown. “The second season we had some [material] from doing stuff live. But then doing the third season was all new.”

The troupe has a taste for scatological, potentially controversial, and sometimes even mean material. They have featured sketches about miming workplace masturbation and a spiteful grade school teacher who tells a student his mother died in a car wreck. Probably one of the least controversial is the “Hitler Rap,” which shows the former fuehrer reformed and battling MCs instead of leading a holocaust.

When they started with IFC, the network told them they would have pretty much free reign for content, they took it as a challenge to push boundaries. “They really let us do whatever we want,” says Brown. “But the interesting thing is that this season, we weren’t as compelled to just push the boundaries, we were more like, all right, let’s just make the funniest stuff we can make. And it still ended up [with] more animal sex sketches than ever. Like, oh, we just are really weird people, aren’t we?”

The Kids are still waiting to hear if they will have a fourth season with IFC, and are working on a Whitest Kids movie. But in the meantime, they’re happy to be able to get back on the road and play in front of a live audience. “The tour has been amazing because we kind of threw it together last minute, and the turnout has been insane,” says Trumeter. “We had no idea that we had this many fans.”

Anderson Comedy's The Gas presents The Whitest Kids U'Know at Great Scott. 18+. 8 p.m. $15. 617.566.9014.

"Deer Sketch"



“Slow Jerk”



Classroom Sketch



"Hitler Rap"