AVC: For half the film, you smoke pot for 30 days, and for the other half, you stop smoking for 30 days. Which was harder?
DB: Going into it, I thought smoking for 30 days would be harder. It turns out it was much easier. Not smoking for 30 days wasn't hard, in the sense that I didn't experience much withdrawal. I missed smoking pot, but I didn't mind it. Having the cameras there helped me to not think about it that much, because it was sort of my job to not smoke. That month where I was smoking constantly, I thought it would be like when you catch a little kid smoking cigarettes, and you make him smoke a whole pack. I wake-and-bake on occasion, and I smoke almost every evening, but smoking day in and day out for 30 days, I thought by the end, I was going to be sick of it and that would be it. I'd either smoke pot rarely, or not at all. But Day 31, partway through the day, I lit up a joint. [Laughs.] You know, I never had to drive a car, because my crew drove me everywhere. So we tried not to break any laws, but at the same time, that was a strong enabling system I had. There was a camera filming me, and I had to smoke, and I didn't have to drive, and all I had to do was do stand-up comedy and hang out. It was pretty darn easy to be high for 30 days.
AVC: As for all the supposed risks of marijuana—loss of short-term memory, lung problems—what did you find out?
DB: The long-term effects, I obviously won't be able to determine for some time, but short-term memory… I'm getting old enough now where I forget stuff all the time anyway. My friends forget stuff too. They do a memory test on me and Graham Elwood in the movie, and he does worse than I do. In terms of my lungs, pot smoking is not like cigarette smoking. It doesn't affect the lungs as quickly, or as much over time. If I stopped pot smoking today, my lungs could heal probably 100 percent in a few years. According to the doctor in the movie, right now I have 90 percent lung capacity, which is pretty good for my age and how much pot I've smoked over the years. And wanting to eat all the time—in the movie, I gain about eight pounds, so that's obviously a problem for some people. But in terms of short-term effects, I haven't experienced anything worth worrying about.
AVC: Do you think Super High Me will change anyone's mind about marijuana?
DB: I know The Marijuana-Logues changed a couple of minds. I had people tell me they tried smoking pot again afterward—like they hadn't done it since college, and then they got back into it. [Laughs.] Which I'm not necessarily proud of. I'm not trying to recruit anyone. I think minds can be changed, but I also think they don't have to be changed. If someone doesn't want to smoke pot and doesn't think it should be legal, then that's fine, but the numbers that do are going to continue to grow to the point where change will eventually occur. How soon it will occur, I don't know, but I'm perfectly happy with the current system. I renew my doctor's note once a year, and go to a neighborhood dispensary where I buy an eighth at a time. It lasts me a week or two, and I mostly just smoke it at home. I don't really need to change minds with this movie. I'm just preaching to the choir.
AVC: Let's talk about some of your projects not related to marijuana. How did your show The Benson Interruption come about?
DB: One night at the M Bar in L.A., a friend of mine, Suli McCullough, was playing a character who would talk to comics while they were onstage. He asked me if it would be okay if he interrupted me with stupid shit, and I said, "I'd love it." That night, it dawned on me that it would make a great format for a show: Somebody would be doing their act, and I would be interfering—hopefully in a humorous way—to make it funnier. Two comics working at once, rather than one comic trying to tear down another one. Audiences liked it, and when we moved it over to the UCB Theater, it got even better. We do it the last Thursday of every month in Los Angeles, and it sells out every time. That was way too long an answer. The short version is, I like talking shit while comedians are on stage, so why not do it into a microphone?
AVC: It seems like we've become a culture of commentators—that there's no wall between performer and audience anymore. Is The Benson Interruption your way of commenting on the commentators?
DB: [Laughs.] Well, it's certainly my way of getting my two cents in there. In my case, the comics mostly like it. Every now and then, I'll say something that steps over the line or that's too insulting, or they'll say something mean to me. Obviously, you take that risk any time you do something where comedians interact with each other. Like a roast, somebody's always going to cross over the line. As far as the public goes, I like feedback, I like to hear laughter, and I like the occasional pointed heckle, but it's true: Everybody thinks that they need to express their opinion now. There's been this sea change—specifically with the Internet and MySpace—where people are constantly writing to me directly about stuff, where in the past you'd never hear about it, because nobody would go to the trouble of writing you a letter or trying to find you to make one of their stupid comments.
On my MySpace blog, I had to disable the comments, because I just want to say my joke and move on. People can read it and enjoy it or not, that's up to them. But when you leave the comments open, then there's this flood of stupid remarks from people who don't add anything. They'll start getting into debates with each other about stuff. The thing is—because I'm a total narcissist—of course I'm going to read every word of it, and then I'm just sitting there all day reading this shit. Society has definitely gotten to the point where everybody has to comment on anything, and if you want to stay sane as a performer, you're better off not reading that stuff.
AVC: Of course, you do a lot of commenting of your own on Best Week Ever.
DB: [Laughs.] Well, in the case of Best Week Ever, I know there's a lot of nasty humor directed at celebrities, but my feeling is, in most cases, they deserve it. The cases where they don't, it's just too good of a joke to walk away from. If someone wants to make a joke about me smoking too much pot, I'm not going to get mad at them, because I've put it out there that that's what I do. If I'm on Best Week Ever making a joke about Snoop Dogg being high, I can only hope that Snoop Dogg isn't going to turn around and say, "What did that bitch say about me?" But I've yet to run into a famous person that cares about what I've said about them. Most of them don't watch, and the ones that do must have a sense of humor, otherwise they wouldn't be watching.
AVC: With that show, do you always have, like, a store of Britney Spears riffs ready to go?
DB: Basically, they fill you in on that particular week's events with regard to Britney, Lindsay, Paris, whoever. Like, they'll say, "This week, a video of Tom Cruise talking about how awesome Scientology is made it to the Internet." Then they'll show us that clip and tell us to do whatever jokes we want. I don't have to keep up, because the show itself does most of the heavy lifting. And if you don't have a joke, you can always say "Pass," and move on to something else. Like, within weeks of Anna Nicole Smith dying, I didn't personally think that was the most hilarious topic. Most of the commentary was about how crazy the coverage surrounding her death was, so it was mostly making fun of the press, but I still thought, "She just died! Can't we not treat her like a piece of shit for just a little while?" Or when Dave Chappelle went to Africa because he supposedly went crazy. I was like, "I don't have anything to say about that. I like Dave Chappelle, and he went to Africa. So what?" Sometimes those comments actually make it on the show. They just let us be ourselves, and then they edit it severely.
I know that Best Week Ever gets kind of a bad rap—like, for instance, whenever I travel to a city that has The Onion, there's always a blurb about me saying I'm in town, and it usually says that Best Week Ever is the most horrible thing to happen to television, "but Doug Benson is funny." Like, "He's funny in person because he's not doing four-second jokes about Dancing With The Stars." I don't know how I can get people to come back to Best Week Ever, but I think the show right now is considerably better than it was a few years ago. With some people, it's got a reputation for being too many comedians that don't have anything clever to say, which brought it down in the minds of some hipsters. But how can you not watch that show just to see Paul F. Tompkins? Or [John] Mulaney? I mean, it is what it is. It's certainly slapped-together. You're going to have some substandard comedy jammed in there, just because it's such a giant jigsaw puzzle that has to be put together every week. I feel the same way about The Soup, even though it's just one guy. I think Joel McHale is hilarious, but the show lives or dies by each joke. That's my favorite thing I see on the Internet, by the way. People saying, "They covered the same topics on The Soup that they did on Best Week Ever!" Yeah, no shit! They're two shows that talk about what happened in entertainment in the last week! What else are they going to talk about?
AVC: Do you ever feel worn down by the constant stream of tabloid scandals and bad reality TV, to the point where it stops being funny?
DB: You have moments where you go, "I'm tired of talking about this." That's the beauty of it: You can just walk away from something. One time they used a clip of me saying—I think it was about Hilary Duff's sister Haylie—"Haylie Duff? Now you're just making shit up." You can comment on how ridiculous it's getting. About a year or two ago, Patton Oswalt quit the show because he was getting angry having to talk about Paris Hilton every week. He just doesn't feel like that's his sensibility, having to come up with material about this one worthless celebrity. But I will continue to be on it as long as it's on the air and as long as I have the time in my schedule. I'm probably never going to get my own talk show, but on Best Week Ever, I get to say my own monologue jokes every week. I get to do jokes about stuff that's happening right now, and it's on TV right away. That to me is one of the biggest appeals of having your own show, and as long as I have the forum to do it, I will.
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