AVC: But they allowed you to cook and eat God.
JL: Yeah, not a word about that.
VC: And they encourage us to show God having oral sex.
JL: We can't do stuff about Jesus, but we can do stuff about God. The rules are so weird. You can say, "Jesus, he's my friend," but you can't say, "Jesus! He's my friend." They don't like exclamation points when it comes to Jesus.
AVC: Do you get a lot of angry letters?
JL: I've been writing Vernon for years, and mine ain't working.
VC: Will you tell John I'm continuing to not speak to him?
AVC: Is there anything on the DVD that didn't get on the air?
JL: We did a "Story Time With Flavor Flav" that was not quite up to our high standards of comedy. Flavor Flav became America's retard; he had a regurgitation of fame.
VC: We shot him right before his little regurgitation.
JL: He stole all the clothing from the shoot.
VC: We're doing wardrobe for The Surreal Life from now on. That's gonna be big for us. Naturally, we have Gordon Lish doing an audio commentary, former fiction editor of Esquire and—
JL: Father of Don DeLillo and Raymond Carver.
VC: And appreciator of old vaudeville comedy.
AVC: Does he have anything particularly enlightening to add?
VC: He does. He actually tells you how to get ladies, and he insults another audio-commentator guy. We think we set a world record—the first audio commentary where the guy giving the audio commentary, during the session, fell asleep watching the show. And the only people doing audio commentaries are over 70.
JL: MTV was like, "Can you do audio commentary with young people?" They're always trying to push us to get young people, so we said, "Perfect," and we got all white males over 70.
VC: White males over 70, except for Dick Gregory. But he fell asleep during the session. You can't really hear it.
AVC: What's in store for the second season?
JL: We're trying to top the annoyance level, and trying not to run the formula into the ground. We're trying to learn to stop hating ourselves and try to love ourselves. We shot this bit in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral called "Little Dead Pope." We had Trevor, our superstar—he'll be more famous than anyone we ever know—dressed up as the corpse of the Pope, and he asked people if he was going to hell. That ended up being really fun. We usually know it's gonna be a good bit when we hire bodyguards.
VC: We've had no incidents. We did have the cops tell us to go away, and then we had a lot of angry Catholic doctors, but what the fuck are Catholics gonna do? And then we shot a hilarious comedy bit at Ground Zero called "Can We Ever Laugh Again," with the stench of death still in the air. So that's pretty wacky.
AVC: How do you guys coach Trevor?
JL: All we do is whisper, "Say some crazy bugged-out shit! Go hog-wild on this motherfucker!" And then he's like, "All right," and he usually gets a little piece of paper and he works out some perfectly honed comedy gem.
VC: With the timing of a whip-crack. A whip cracking a diamond into shape.
JL: Against the eye of the American viewing public. All in the tear of an eagle.
VC: We just give him a camera, and he and his friends make the show. We're just old enough to get paid. No, we feed him lines, but when he's interviewed, he doesn't admit that. I like it, 'cause it makes him look like a badass. I would like to say we don't feed him the lines. He really gets the humor. We try to go around the joke, but he knows right away. He's like, "Oh, that joke's about shitting on a nun's chest." And we're like, "Trevor! Come on!"
JL: Most of the kids don't know. We have them say something, and we know we're gonna cut it together. Most kids don't figure that out, but he's starting to get a little savvy. We're gonna have to cut him loose. Make that the pull quote: "Trevor, we're cutting you loose."
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