AVC: How do these kids' parents feel? Do you show them the show?
VC: When we audition, they see the show; they know the content.
JL: If we don't get along with the parents, we don't bother dealing with the kids. The only way we relate to the kids is personality. We see if they can read lines and we just start tormenting them, kind of the way we're tormenting you. If they handle it, they're good, and if they throw it back at us, they're awesome. I think we asked Trevor, "Would you want to go to Times Square and yell at people?" And his eyes lit up.
VC: He's like, "Let's go to Times Square and yell: 'I'm the king of this town! I'm the king of this town! Kneel before me!'" The kids we go for are the kids who, when we say, "Would you like to smash a guitar against a brand-new car?" are like, "I've been dreaming about this, please let me do that!"
AVC: There's a lot of anti-meat sentiment on the show. Are you guys vegetarians?
VC: No. Meat is visually compelling. Meat works. Meat works for America. Meat is like a diamond. It's the perfect metaphor for whatever you need. Do you need a new metaphor? We'll hook you up.
JL: Meat is pretty compelling to look at. It's just solid murder, rock-hard murder. It's murder crystallized into pure meaty form. And that's just fun. When we do research and watch PETA videos, we're like, "Okay, we're not eating meat for a couple weeks."
VC: When you see a pig just kicking and looking in the camera, and blood's pouring out of it, and it's looking you right in the face…
JL: But ultimately, all the deliciousness beckons, and you gotta go back to meat. It's a siren song. It's kind of like alcohol, but in a more solid form.
AVC: Do you have to chase down the people you bother on the street for releases?
JL: It depends on the bit. The amazing thing about those kids' bits that we've learned is, it's really hard to offend somebody through the vessel of a cute child. So we keep pushing further and further. Even though they see us whisper in the kid's ear, and the kid turns and says the biggest insult, they're just like, "Oh, look, it's a cute child that just said that." It's really hard to get people mad through a child. You should try it.
AVC: They do seem to get mad at Clarence, the puppet.
JL: Clarence is totally different.
VC: We're doing Clarence naked. You can't see that offscreen, but that's why. The whole idea is to try to get people angry, to get unwilling straight men.
JL: People actually get angry at Clarence. We'll have people put their hand over his mouth to stop him talking, or cover his eyes so he can't see them. We don't look at the guy, we just stare at the puppet like, "What the hell is this kid doing?" And it's maybe one out of every three people who get angry. Certain people, there's just some magic that they believe in the puppet.
VC: They believe in it enough to hate it.
JL: They kind of realize, "I'm not gonna get a rise out of these two guys, but somehow this puppet should be responding to me, so I'm gonna direct my anger to him."
VC: I think they're right to go after the puppet, because if we didn't have the puppet and we were doing that to people… We should do one where it's just a bare hand and see how they respond. But people who block his eyes, people who just have real anger—it's not like they say, "Clarence, you're getting me riled up," although people have—there's some people who just truly hate puppets. I assume that something happened to them as children.
AVC: Have you ever been physically assaulted while shooting?
VC: We've had knives pulled on us about three times. We've been punched, I don't know, 20 times. And kicked.
JL: Some guy had his forearm against my neck and had me pinned against a wall.
VC: I remember that, because I was running, about two blocks away.
JL: My favorite moments are when you see someone lash out at the puppet, and then we have the guts, after he hits us, to move closer. There's so many times that someone hits us and we just run away like babies. There's a guy who pulled a knife on us, and we kept going toward him.
VC: We ran away, and then from a distance, we said, "Okay, now let's learn to love each other. What will it take? We'll take baby steps."
JL: And he's holding the knife out.
VC: And then we took little steps closer, and within five steps, he started to go for us, and we took off.
JL: That guy was saying to himself, "I just don't want to go back to jail." And that was our protective bubble.
« Previous | 1 | 2 | 3
- Comments