Debaser Bassprov and Armando Diaz's Joe Bill

People are always asking us to help plug something of theirs—an upcoming show, a new record, some book they wrote. Because we’re not in the pandering business, we think there should be a trade-off. Debaser allows these folks to plug whatever they want, with one caveat: They also have to tell us something embarrassing about themselves. This week, Joe Bill, co-captain of the blue-collar improv show Bassprov, comes clean on the worst April Fools' Day prank ever.

The A.V. Club: So other than teaching and performing the occasional Bassprov show, what's keeping you busy improv-wise? 

Joe Bill: There's a couple of shows that I do at iO: I do the Armando Diaz show Monday nights, and I just started playing with The Deltones, which is the newest musical improv group at iO. They've been around for a little less than a year now. I came out of musical-improv retirement because of this group. I was surprised because they're really good. They book stuff on the road. And in this economy, I'll do anything for a little extra money.

AVC: And what about the embarrassing story?

JB: In eighth grade, on April Fools' Day, my friend Bernie and I decided that we would cut school as an April Fools' joke. His mother had a pot roast in the refrigerator and a bottle of this God-awful liquor called Wild Duck, so we were going to eat the pot roast all day and drink Wild Duck. We were about an hour into that when the phone at his house—which was two blocks from the grade school—started ringing incessantly. It just kept on ringing and ringing and ringing and ringing. And, slowly but surely, we became unnerved, convinced that the principal had found us out. So we concocted this story that we were going to school, but Bernie had felt faint, and I was walking ahead of him, but when I heard him faint, I stepped on a rake—much like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon—and the rake came up and hit me in the face, causing me to fall back against the house and hit the back of my head.

Both of us were nearly unconscious, just trying to get back to normal health, when the phone started ringing and shook us out of it. So in order to sell this bullshit story, my friend unscrewed the radio that he had mounted to the handlebars of his bike, and, in an effort to cause a welt, repeatedly smashed me on the back of my head. In doing so, he broke the casing of the radio, but didn't damage my head at all. So I went to school to propagate this bullshit lie, and I stuck to it the whole day. I had had two bites of this awful pot roast, a glass of this God-awful liquor, and I went into the cafeteria. Lunch was open, [and] this girl that I was in love with said, "Oh, I still have half a sandwich you can eat. You must be hungry." And I took this entire half of the sandwich and shoved it in my mouth and started chomping on it, thinking that, "Oh, she really does care about me," and about five seconds into munching on this, I realized that the inside of that sandwich was covered in soap powder. So I went to the bathroom to wash out my mouth, and the basketball coach came in and asked me to tell him this bullshit story, and as I was telling him the story, bubbles were coming out of my mouth.

Cut to the next day, the principal lined up the entire seventh and eighth grade classes in military fashion, and Bernie and I got paddled with wooden paddles in front of everyone.

AVC: Was this a Catholic school?

JB: No, it was a public school, but the principal was a former Marine. He had a tattoo on his forearm and three different paddles hanging inside of a closet, the largest of which had holes drilled in it—legend had it so that the paddle had less wind resistance when it was heading toward your ass. And that's the one he grabbed and whacked us with. And my father was more than happy for me to be disciplined in that fashion.