AVC: Are there any sketches that stand out for you as being especially absurd or fucked-up, or maybe you went too far?
BM: We always talk about [how] "Love And Sausages" almost broke up the troupe. It was a weird film.
ST: Yeah, and now it's really popular.
KM: Is that on YouTube?
ST: Yeah, and I think I saw it on Wikipedia.
DF: I like it. And I hated it at the time.
BM: Well, it was just too—I know personally, once we started experimenting with films and different style films, then I think that got, if anything, a little indulgent. I probably—I would have liked the show to have gotten more indulgent, if anything. And I think if we probably carried on, we would have probably done that, in a way.
DF: We'd get more and more like Elephant Parts, you mean?
BM: Yeah.
ST: But that wasn't that funny.
KM: There's funny stuff in Elephant Parts.
DF: Yeah, but it's pretty indulgent.
KM: Every now and then, there's funny sketches.
ST: Yeah, I've got regrets for certain things, but I don't know—
MM: Oh, I can think of one half-hour thing you did.
ST: Yeah, I think I went too far.
KM: He did a half-hour thing that had a whole story, it was a Buddy Cole Christmas special.
ST: Maybe he shouldn't have flown. Did you see those men that I was flying with? My God!
MM: I remember that week in the studio, all of us, like, checking in, meeting in dark corners—"He's out on the floor with Rip Taylor."
BM: He'd come in with 40 pages, and he'd change everything. And he'd give you a new line reading and stuff—it's like, I was the beaver, and he kept yelling at me because I wasn't being the beaver very well.
DF: "You're not even trying!"
BM: The beaver was supposed to have to want to fuck the queen. And it was like "Oh, I'm so mad at you! You're fucking not even trying!" "I'm trying! Fucking beaver! What am I supposed to do?" And the brown makeup is melting on my fucking head… [All laughing.] Beautiful boys with fur for fucking 14 hours…
ST: What they're trying to say is that they regret their behavior.
MM: It was like a slow-moving-but-burning freight train coming at you slowly, because he kept bringing this fat half-hour script in and read it in its entirety, and there'd be these crickets.
DF: Fat three-hour script.
MM: And we'd be like, "Yeah, yeah, go work on that one." And we'd be like, "Whew! Dodged that one." And eventually, after a particularly spectacular tantrum, we green-lit it. I don't think that's the way we do business now.
DF: Yes it is.
KM: And Rip Taylor was in it, and he kept complaining that the confetti wasn't big enough.
ST: He stayed a week.
DF: That's when Buddy Cole was this character who seemed so real and so true, and then suddenly he kept flying.
KM: You know what was funny, was Santa Claus: "Buddy, we have to talk."
ST: So really what they're saying is, I'm the only one who went too far.
KM: No, no, that's just the one thing we remembered.
DF: We probably all had at least one thing we did.
ST: Oh, we did. "Pickle!?"
DF: Yeah, I admit that.
ST: We did. I know you do.
MM: Mine is "Standing In The New Style."
ST: Absolutely.
DF: "Standing In The New Style"? Ah, yeah. Well, now that's become the thing: pirate talk.
MM: Has it?
DF: Yeah.
ST: I refuse to believe that.
DF: Ever since Pirates Of The Caribbean.
AVC: Do you still feel confident in dresses?
MM: Less and less.
DF: I don't feel sexy in them anymore. I used to feel sexy.
MM: No, I think that's a hard one. You really have to pick the moment and really, really like your character.
MM: I feel somewhat confident. I still think we can do specific characters, but not everything we used to do.
DF: I still like it. We used to do that thing for your short film.
ST: Yeah, Dave and I did a short film where we played women, but like Anjelica Huston. But she's a handsome woman.
DF: "She is," he said politely.
AVC: Is there a common thread you see among sketch troupes who claim you as an influence?
MM: What I like about them is they behave, or their comedy seems to be inflected with—like they're rock bands. They're not people who are gunning for a slot of the network pie. You get a sense that they came together voluntarily—no one put them together.
KM: Like an indie band.
MM: They have that ethic.
KM: And there's superficial things, like they play women, but that's like you copy Led Zeppelin just by taking your shirt off.
DF: But even when we were doing our show, there was an influence that started the show off in Saturday Night Live.
ST: And they mocked us, with the "Gap Girls."
KM: With the strippers. But they all started playing women.
DF: They started doing sketches that were more like what we were doing.
ST: Did they really?
AVC: Did you talk to Lorne Michaels about that?
ST: No.
KM: "Good job, Lorne!"
ST: "Good job, Daddy."
DF: But obviously, there's a ton of stuff that influences what we do.
AVC: Was it difficult to get your collaborative muscles working together again?
DF: Oddly, it wasn't at all.
AVC: Did that surprise you?
KM: Yes. We talked about it.
DF: We were fairly nervous coming in. I think everyone was a little nervous the first time we did that. I know I was. When we did the first writers' meeting at the Steve Allen Theater, I really thought, "All right, if this doesn't go well, this is the last time we're going to work together." And it went really well.
ST: And then you took your dark glasses off and things were better. Yeah, we were scared, but it worked out.
DF: Yeah, especially when I saw the pile of scripts Scott had. It was this tall.
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