When Comedy Bang! Bang! debuted on TV, many of the die-hard fans of the podcast it was based on made a fuss. While it certainly shared Scott Aukerman’s comedy sensibility and many of that show’s characters, it’s still an entirely different beast, a hybrid sketch/talk show where sometimes you can’t quite tell what is scripted and what isn’t. The podcast is almost entirely improvised and has a freewheeling style that’s tough to imitate, but the best episodes of Comedy Bang! Bang! are the ones that get their disparate parts to flow together well.
I really liked the Fantastic Voyage/Innerspace spoof that bound this episode together, even though it was very silly stuff that didn’t really have a connection to anything. Scott has a cold, so a team of crack medics (played by Christopher Meloni, Aukerman’s wife Kulap Vilaysack, and Echo Kellum of the late Ben And Kate) get into a shrinking spaceship to go kill the virus. It didn’t have any bearing on Aziz Ansari’s appearance or the arrival of Fabrice Fabrice (Nick Kroll) but we kept cutting back to it and it served as the button for the episode, tying it all together without even having to try too hard.
Aziz Ansari was best when he was the most low-key, either talking about his parents’ real jobs (gastroenterologist/office manager for said gastroenterologist) or replying to Reggie Watts’ query with an utterly straight face. “Do you think cats can be seen in thick fog?” “Depends on the thickness of the fog, the size of the cat, the color of the cat, time of day.” The gastroenterology discussion, which leads (perhaps inevitably) to some butt talk, felt the most conversational and unscripted, which is a good look for this show to have. Its spoof of the conventional talk show style is fantastic, of course, but sometimes it’s nice to cut through the irony for a second.
Another thing that’s nice about Ansari’s appearance is that he doesn’t play himself as a self-important jerk, which can be such a common angle for special guests to lean on when they’re playing themselves. There’s a whole extended bit about Ansari’s entourage (including an over-zealous security guard played to great effect by Cedric Yarborough) but at no point does Ansari begin to fake-preen. Instead, he explains in detail his pitch for an emoji movie which delighted me and, I’m sure, all iPhone users watching at home.