Jason Mantzoukas on setting out to be Taskmaster's Ugly American villain

JM: It was less “I could get on this.” And it was more “I want to get on this.” Once I watched a bunch of it, I loved the tasks, and it’s so funny to watch people succeed or fail and all their personalities and everything. But what I really loved was the studio. I was like, “Oh, the studio reminds me of improv shows that I do or live podcasts that I do.” Taskmaster onstage is not unlike doing Comedy Bang! Bang! onstage or How Did This Get Made? Everybody is in the moment, everybody’s kind of going after each other. It’s very fun, collaborative, ensemble-based comedy. And I was like, “Oh, I know that very well, so I would love to be a part of this.” I had my manager reach out to be like, “Would they be interested in talking to me?” Because I knew they’d never gotten an American comedian to come over and do the show. I was genuinely like, “They might not be into this. They might have thought of this type of a setup already and deemed it not what they want to be doing.” But they were very open to it, and especially once I got on a Zoom with Alex, and he realized I was a massive fan. And then it all very quickly turned into, “Oh, great. How quickly can we get this done?”

AVC: Had you seen the American version of the show?

JM: I tuned into it when it came out, because I knew people on it. Which, I think, was around the time that I saw a bunch of U.K. Taskmaster as well. And I’ll be honest: The U.S. version, I didn’t like it very much, for all the reasons that have been discussed ad nauseam. It didn’t work, even with an incredible cast, even with Alex—it just didn’t work. The changes they made were too detrimental to what is wonderful about the show. But boy, do I hope they try it again. Now, with the successes they’ve had—Australia, New Zealand. Now that they’ve kind of perfected it, I hope they get another bite at it.

AVC: Let’s get into your first episode. What’s it like to show up, as a fan, to the Taskmaster house?

JM: Maybe one of the coolest things. You watch something, and especially something like this, that is really quite limited in its scope. You’re at the house, or you’re in the studio; I’ve watched hours and hours of only those two locations. I get dropped off at the front gate, and the gates are like [boooop] open wide. And I’m like, “Oh my god, that’s the house.” There was a funny kind of dissonance on the first day or so, because even though I had been very solicitous of joining the cast, even though I’d been like, “I love the show,” I still think that they—in a very kind of polite British way—I’m not sure they quite believed me? But they kept catching me taking selfies, with certain things that to me, were like, “Can you believe it? I’m in here!” And they were like, “Wow, you really do like the show, huh?” It’s cool, man. It’s so cool to be inside of a thing that you love, to be able to be given the opportunity to walk in the door. So all of those firsts, that first opening of the task, all those things, it’s so wild to be like, “Oh, I’m inside the show.” It’s cool as hell.

AVC: Alex both runs the show and is a sort of “character” in the tasks. What is he like on filming days?

JM: Without pulling back the curtain too much, everybody is playing a character. This is not a documentary, you know. Alex Gibney didn’t shoot this. If you are a fan of comedy, most of your favorite comedians have a comedic persona that they lean into or or use primarily as their kind of point of view. Is Alex playing it up? Absolutely. But is he, like, a piece of shit? Yeah. I mean, like the worst, the absolute worst human being on the planet. An infuriating presence on set during tasks. Purposefully so!

AVC: One of the first things audiences see you do, in the first task [where contestants had to move full jars of vinegar while spilling as little as possible], is screw up.

JM: Yeah!

AVC:  What goes through your head when that happens?

JM: [Chuckles] It’s funny. If you watch Jeopardy!, you’re like, “I know the answer.” But when you get inside of the thing, and there’s so much going on, especially that first day, there’s such a cacophony of input. And part of it is I’m also insanely jet-lagged. When we would watch it in studio, I would be like, “Oh, I can see in this one”—not in the vinegar one, but there are a couple of tasks later in the season—where I can tell that I am, like, basically asleep on my feet. I am just short-circuiting completely. My brain is fully jet-lagged. But messing up, it doesn’t get in my head that much, because I think I’m much more there for the comedy show than I am the competition show.

AVC: When you watch the show, do you spend a lot of time thinking, “I know how I would have done that”?

JM: No. I don’t, really, unless, unless I think of some clever way around it. Because, I want to be clear: These tasks are purpose-built to make you fail. This is not rewarding. Because even if you succeed in completing the task in a manner that you think is correct or clever, without stepping on any of the arbitrary rules or nonsense, you’re still at the whim of fucking Greg. We are at the whim of this giant. There are certain ones that I’m infuriated that I did poorly on or I made some mistake or whatever. But more often than not, the doing of the task is just the raw materials for you to be onstage advocating for yourself or getting attacked. All of it is just fodder. Which I love, you know. I love having all of that raw material to then watch in studio and then do battle.

AVC: You’re friends with Nish Kumar. Last night I re-watched the clip of him on the show, scoring a basketball shot without using his hands. It’s one of the meanest edits the show has ever done.

JM: That’s the thing. You can’t count on them. They are actively working against you in the edit, in the creation of the tasks, in the doing of the tasks, and then onstage. They have four to five opportunities to absolutely fucking destroy you, to make you look a fool. You have to know going in that you can’t actually play the game to win, because there is no winning. We’re all losing. We’re all losing every day. I think that’s what’s fun about it. Who cares about points? You could nail it, and then Greg could arbitrarily decide that he liked someone else’s failure more than your success. So who cares?

AVC: The second task of the episode asks you to do something cool, at which point you pull out a lockpicking kit that you apparently had with you. Watching it, I thought, “That is a very American approach.” Did you play into that element?

JM: Oh yeah! Prior to doing the show, I had some Zooms with Alex and the producers, just to kind of talk it through. Because I think for them, too, they were like, “We’ve never really done this before. Let’s maybe make sure we’re all on the same page before we endeavor to do this very disruptive thing.” And one of the things that I said to them, very, you know, forthright at the beginning, was, “I’m coming on to be the villain. I want to be the ugly American. Please let that be a source of friction and difficulty.” I take great joy in episodes, and I don’t know if any of this made the edit, where somehow the conversation would land on some name they would all be talking about. This guy, and this and then, blah, blah, blah. And they would all talk about it and everybody would get their turn to make their joke. And then, right as it was about done, I would say, “I have no idea who the fuck you’re talking about.” And that would crush. There was a task where I realized immediately upon starting it that I was at a disadvantage because it required me knowing what all the British currency coins are. And I was like, “Fuck this; I don’t know what any of these little coins are. What does this even mean?” That, to me, is an opportunity to be angry. Performatively angry. That’s what I wanted. I don’t want to run roughshod over the show, but I want to be disadvantaged in a way that allows me to be really mad. Which was perfect.

AVC: We talk about playing characters, but one of the interesting things about Taskmaster is the way it reveals people. Is it stressful to be there? It looks stressful.

JM: It’s stressful and it’s exhausting, whether it’s a task day or a studio day. Task days are exhausting because it’s just you. You’re doing 10, 12, 14 tasks a day, day after day, for a week. So you are just obliterated by the end. And in the studio days, you’re doing two shows a day; each show’s three, three-and-a-half hours long of a live performance. It’s brutal. It really strips you down. As time goes on, you start to be revealed.

AVC: You genuinely did have the lockpicks, though and had been playing with a lockpicking kit?

JM: Yes! I didn’t know that would be useful. I really thought about it for a while. I had my little tool kit that I always carry, just a little pouch that has duct tape and a little pair of scissors and just stuff you might need, you know, a little first-aid kit. And in there is the lockpick set. And I was like, “Oh, that’s cool. That’s Magnum, P.I.“

AVC: Watching the show, do you have a favorite type of task?

JM: I like, personally, the ones that reward lateral thinking. But just to watch, I very much like the ones that seem to be physically exhausting to the people, the ones that really ruin people’s days. Which were the ones, truthfully, that I hated doing the most. There’s a task where I had to walk on my tiptoes the whole time. And it’s so funny. But my calves and my legs were on fire. You sweat through everything immediately, and then you have to keep doing tasks. So those are very fun to watch, because you’re watching it break people down. But to do—oh my god, those tasks are exhausting.

AVC: You went with a pretty conservative task outfit. Did you consider anything wilder?

JM: I thought about it for a while—a long while. And I kind of opted for the comfort of “my clothes.” This is my uniform. There’s a bunch of people’s costumes that I love, but I’ve also seen people be undone by their costumes, and I didn’t want to make that mistake.

AVC: Or end up like Phil Wang. [Wang, who competed on the show’s seventh season, wore a bright yellow Bruce Lee-inspired jumpsuit that left very little to the imagination.]

JM: Oh boy. Oh boy. Great. Great one. That jumpsuit is…I mean, every time he walks out of the house on-camera, you’re like, “Fuck. What a genius. This is incredible.” 

AVC: Your third task in the first episode was the Pealympics, which was four tasks in one, the first one of which was a timed puzzle. What’s it like to be at the mercy of that?

JM: It’s crazy, because oftentimes, you know there is a solution, but you’re also working against the clock. The first thing we did for the Pealympics was, you had to find your pea. And I was like, “Oh, I know there’s a puzzle way to suss this out, but I don’t have time.” So I just was flipping over all the cushions until I found the pea. I’m certain I didn’t get points for that, but I wanted to keep moving as quickly as possible rather than taking a minute to be like, “Okay, let me, let me parse this out and figure out why or how this might work.” 

AVC: It’s a show that doesn’t care if you succeed or fail, as long as you’re interesting.

JM: I don’t even know if that’s it. What you’re trying to suggest is that there is something that Greg will respond to, and reward with points, and that’s just oftentimes not the case. Truly, when I say you’re at the whim of a maniac, that’s what’s happening. Greg is a fucking absolute nightmare to try to predict or understand. I don’t think it makes sense to try to advocate for yourself, because I don’t think he cares. He’s just going off of pure whimsy. You just have to keep moving forward and hope, between the edit and the studio, you can figure out a way to come out on top. But it doesn’t really matter. Not really.

AVC: Transitioning to talking about the studio, it’s hard to imagine anything more stressful than the prize task, which is essentially “I brought a joke; please rate it.”

JM: It’s also the part of the show that [weighs] the most on you. It’s up first, it’s everybody’s intro, everybody gets to intro themselves to this audience with this item or this idea. And it’s everybody’s first opportunity to get in, or lose, Greg’s favor. Which is fun. I like the prize task because—and I think a lot of this will not be seen in the edit—the prize tasks have a bloat to them live. The prize task goes long. And there’s a lot of everybody staking out their space so that everybody can give their character game or their persona, so that the audience really can get where everybody stands. These 300 people or so in the room haven’t seen any of the other episodes. They’re seeing this seven-person ensemble do a comedy show. Those prize tasks were a blast because they would often go so off the rails, and get so crazy, to the point that I was like, “These are short! When this gets cut up, it’s going to be quick.” But it was smart because, by the end of the prize task, the audience knew where everybody was and how they played the game.

AVC: You win that first prize task.

JM: It’s the only piece of the show you can have any control over. Everything else happens to you.

AVC: What is the vibe like in the studio? In the outtakes, you can sometimes watch Greg jump between “Taskmaster” mode and being a real person.

JM:  Greg and Alex, they have it really dialed in. And that includes how to make the show, but it also includes, like, how to perform the show.  What was really impressive to me, not just that they’re dropping in and out of persona or character or character dynamic,  but that it’s right there. It’s a very comfortable place for them to be.

And it’s a very loving group; they’re very sweet toward each other. Numerous times… because, again, I was very performatively outraged doing tasks at times, you know? Or what I thought was performatively outraged, or furious that something had not gone my way. And then we’d cut, and I’d go back to my room and a producer, a couple of times, came back and was like, “Hey, I just wanna make sure, is everything okay? If there’s anything you didn’t like in that, we can cut it. Or we…” And I was like, “What? No, I’m having a blast. This is what I came to do. I came to get mad at Alex, so thank you for giving me opportunities to do that.”

AVC: Every episode ends with an in-studio task. As a viewer, what do you think of them?

JM:  Oh, I like them. I don’t always love the tasks themselves, but I like that people have to do the tasks in front of an audience. It’s one thing, as a player, to conquer your “well, I’m gonna embarrass myself”  worries in the shed with Alex and just a couple of cameras. But when you’re in front of like 350 people, and they put some dumb thing on your head and tie your leg behind you, and you’re like, “Oh, I’m about to eat shit in front of a bunch of people,” that’s a different kind of embarrassing.

I like other shows that do this, too: the Netflix baking show Nailed It! that Nicole Byer hosts, or a couple of times I’ve appeared on The Chris Gethard Show. They have a similar element of really chaotic failure at play. And we don’t know how it’s going to go. And that’s something that’s really fun to do in front of an audience. That’s a blast.

AVC: That first episode ends on a task where you have to drop raisins into a wine glass. And it’s interesting to watch because Fatiha just does not participate, because there’s no way to do it without looking foolish. Which is such a strong choice in that environment.

JM: [Laughs happily] Fatiha making strong choices throughout was some of the funniest stuff—I’d come home from those days, exhausted, but having laughed so much. And almost always, Fatiha El-Ghorri was just killing me.

AVC: Taskmaster has failed to cross over to the American mainstream a couple of times at this point. At the risk of getting too philosophical, do you think there’s something inherent that gets in the way of it landing here?

JM:  I think what you’re asking is specific to Taskmaster, but also making a larger point, which is America doesn’t do panel shows. One of the hardest things I’ve had in trying to get people excited about the show, or even before I was even on it, years ago when I was trying to turn people onto the show… Boy, for such a dead simple show,  it is so hard to explain to people what it is and why they might like it. What’s hard is a few things. First, panel shows exist over there; they hold a middle ground wherein a lot of stand-up comedians, specifically, their kind of proving ground, the way they get known or get exposure, is on panel shows. That generation, Nish and Aisling Bea and James Acaster and Ed Gamble and all those folks, their ascendancy, a lot of it is through all the myriad panel shows there. Would I Lie To You?, Celebrity Mastermind, Taskmaster, all these shows that showcase comedians not doing material. That’s the point. It’s not doing stand-up sets.

It’s not like Last Comic Standing. Our stuff that overlaps is all very competitive, truly, winners or losers—or single-focus comedy specials, “Here’s me, doing material.” We don’t go in for, you know, it’s five panelists just goofing around for an hour. And the times we do do it, we’ve just seen After Midnight get canceled, which is maybe the closest you get. Or, I only have a very superficial understanding of it, but I do think what’s going on [at] Dropout seems to me to be very influenced by both British panel shows and improv shows.  They’re maybe exposing an entire generation to a style of show that is, here, most akin to a panel show.

Also, Americans—as is evidenced by almost every interview I’ve given for this with American journalists—are very interested, and consumed with, points and winning. Lot of questions about winning. “Were you disappointed that this didn’t go your way?” And I can’t help but always feel like, “For the comedy show?” I’m there doing comedy. But there is an American mindset that feels very “I’ve gotta win this, or I’m a loser.” We can’t seem to [understand that] panel shows are really just hangout shows. The points are arbitrary.  I wouldn’t go on Taskmaster and be like, “Who cares?” You know? You have to care a little bit. But to care too much is actually to grind everything to a halt. If you really care about winning on a show like this, then you are alone. 

[This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]