A conversation with Bob Odenkirk and David Cross from 1999

The Mr. Show duo talk about selling out, doing it for the geeks, making the leap to movies, and why linking sketches together is a pain in the ass

Oct 31, 2024

Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s to present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars. This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).

This is a free newsletter, but if you really like what you see, please consider a donation via paid subscription, or visit my PWYC tip jar!

THE OPENERS

Happy Halloween, everybody! Hope your costume attempt goes better than mine: I bought the Spirits mullet wig to complete my Nick Cave outfit, but I came out looking more like Temu Danzig.
Notes on this week’s additions to the stübermania 2024 playlist:
- King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, “Phantom Island”: The Gizz are about to enter the orchestra-tour phase of their career, for which this new stand-alone single serves as a prelude. “Phantom Island” is a masterclass in the fine art of economical prog, mashing the entire spectrum of pre-punk 1970s popular music—post-hippie sunshine pop, arena-sized art rock, proto-disco funk—into five fantastical minutes.
- Tunde Adebimpe, “Magnetic”: TV on the Radio are playing shows again this fall, but in lieu of any new music from the band, we can look forward to their singer’s forthcoming solo debut, whose electro-punky lead single channels the same white-knuckled energy Tunde brought to the greatest late-night TV performance of all time.
- Chris Cohen, “Sunever”: I’m playing a bit of catch-up on this one, which came out back in July. But last Sunday I had the opportunity to see the former Deerhoof guitarist play an intimate show at Hamilton’s finest record store-cum-venue, Into the Abyss, and I’ve been luxuriating in the breezy art-pop vignettes of his recent album, Paint a Room, ever since. Highly recommended if you spent an inordinate amount of your late-’90s disposable income on High Llamas imports and/or anything with Jim O’Rourke’s name on it.
- LzRDofOz, “Se Lavi”: Speaking of Hamilton venues—some of you may be aware that I recently launched another newsletter dedicated to music listings in the city, and while compiling this week’s batch, I discovered this local indie-R&B artist, whose recent EP, Broken Promises II, suggests Steve Lacy tossed into a hyperpop blender.
- trauma ray, “U.S.D.D.O.S.”: This Texan quintet’s debut full-length, Chameleon, hits a lot harder than most new-school shoegazers coasting on vibes. But on this captivating seven-minute finale, they embark on a slow-motion voyage across the sea of tranquility, bringing to mind the mid-’90s effects-pedal odysseys of Southern Ontario cosmic-rock crew Sianspheric (who deserve to be next in line for a Duster-level reclamation).
  
  Click here for the Apple Music version of the playlist.

THE HEADLINER:
A conversation with Bob Odenkirk and David Cross

The date: February 26, 1999

Location: The Great Canadian Bar and Grill—a.k.a. the former in-house restaurant at the Holiday Inn (now a Hyatt Regency) at the corner of King West and Peter in Toronto.

Show being promoted: The Canadian premiere of Season 4 of Mr. Show on The Comedy Network.

The context: This is nominally a music newsletter, however, when I think of the ‘90s indie-rock era, Bob Odenkirk and David Cross’ sketch-comedy series, Mr. Show, is right there in the mix. Mr. Show premiered on HBO in 1995, but it wasn’t available in Canada at that point; I first heard about the show a year later, when Bob and Dave were featured in the Matador Records newsletter/zine, ¡Escandalo! And then a year after that, Mr. Show became my favourite show that I had never actually seen because of this:

So when The Comedy Network started airing Mr. Show in Canada in 1998, my VCR was pre-programmed to tape it every Saturday night, and I effectively wore those tapes out as I repeatedly got lost in each episode’s labyrinthine collage of inter-connected sketches. And on the eve of the show’s Season 4 premiere in Canada, The Comedy Network flew Bob and David up to Toronto for a press day, and to host a Canadian-comedian showcase (featuring the likes of Shaun Majumder and Gavin Crawford) at the Masonic Temple, of which there appears to be zero online documentation (though I distinctly remember a funny bit where Bob played God and asked David about which artists thanked him at the Grammys).

Needless to say, I was extremely stoked to do this interview for Eye Weekly, and before I could even turn on my tape recorder, we were nerding out over music: Upon sitting down at the table, Bob complimented me on my Spiritualized shirt and started talking about Daniel Johnson and the Railroad Jerk offshoot band White Hassle, while Cross was riding for Spoon a good two years before it was cool to do so.

This being Canada, we get everything, like, five years after the U.S. So I actually first became aware of Mr. Show through the Matador Records newsletter…

David: That was pretty much on schedule, though. When we did that Matador thing, we had only done our second season.

But we didn’t get the show up here until 1998…

David: Well, we just wanted to make sure it was okay first.

And then there was the Yo La Tengo video, which I think MuchMusic played about two times.

David: Yeah, that's more than they played it in America.

What I'm trying to get at is: having come of age during the golden age of American indie rock, do the same sort of politics exist in underground comedy in terms of selling out and worrying about The Man co-opting you?

David: Not really…

Bob: In Chicago, that was the case… although Leno gets slammed constantly by people.

David: Because he’s the personification of that. But he had a good act.

Bob: Well, you know I disagree with that.

David: Did you ever see him?

Bob: No.

David: I saw him live. He was good. He was clever. Good joke writer.

Bob: But the point is, people still do notice it when there's a sense of selling out, but there's also an element of… like when Janeane [Garofalo] did [The Truth About] Cats and Dogs, and even she went, “this script is kind of corny,” but there's an acceptance that everybody wants to get ahead in some way. And sometimes, the way you have to do that is you have to do something that's a little…

Dubious?

Bob: Yeah.

David: I'm sure there's people who think that we sold out by doing Mr. Show, you know? There’s some purist out there who’s like, “ugh, I don’t care.”

Bob: You know what, you're right. There's people who wrote in on our new season to say our new season sucks, right?

Are those the sort of people your Luddie character with the gramophone in the “Fad 3” sketch is based on?

David: In a sense, yeah. There were people in Boston—I came out to Los Angeles from Boston—who were like, “Well, you sold out. You did it—you went out to get that money.”

Bob: You know, people always compliment me on my résumé. I've had a lot of other artists say, “the stuff you've done is all good stuff.” So I think people are sensitive to it, they think about it. But as far as harshly judging each other, in L.A., it doesn't happen as much. In New York, it doesn't happen. When I was in Chicago, it was a fucking drag to do your act, because everybody was in the back, and you felt like if you told a joke three times, it felt like they're going to give me shit. I was so relieved to go to New York and people didn't really care at that point. In the scene that I was in, they didn't care what you did on stage. If you're a nice person and they like hanging out with you, they wouldn't even pay attention to each other’s acts. They wouldn’t watch each other. You could do obvious stuff, or you could do whatever you do, and they didn't judge it, they didn’t really care.

Everyone on Mr. Show has dabbled in network TV or mainstream films, but now that Mr. Show has developed its own success, do you have any desire to do those bigger projects?

David: Just if it's good. If it's right or if it helps.

Bob: I mean, there's good shows on network TV: The Simpsons, Seinfeld. There's not many but there are some.

David: Just because you're on network television doesn't mean you can't have a good show. Look, we did episodes of NewsRadio—it's not a horrible show, but we did it. And it helped. It helps you to do, eventually, what you really want to do.

Bob: David and I disagree a little bit on that. He knows that I have a really hard line about what's worth doing and what's not for me. And I probably have a harder line than other performers. But, I've always made enough money. When I got into this—and I have to remind myself of this all the time—I always said, “If I can just make enough to live, then I'll be happy. If I can do what I want and make enough to buy food and have a place to live… I mean, I own a house now, so it's better than that. But when I'm tempted by money, which occasionally happens, I always go, “How bad is it?” And it's not bad, I mean, I'm doing fine. Maybe I'm stupid—I mean, I've got a kid now, maybe I should be worried and take all kinds of deals. But, in general, with respect to your question, you got to get past that. You really. I mean, it's a very collegy thing.

David: It’s also relative…

Bob: It’s very relative. There's a lot of people, where people go, “you sold out.” But as time goes by, you realize that's really what they should be doing. And what they were doing when they started—because no one gets an opportunity when they start—is being in the clubs where there's this bullshit integrity that exists because you're not making money. But everybody starts by not making money. No one pays you the first day you do anything in the arts. Certain friends of ours—whether it was Margaret Cho or Kathy Griffin—those are people that we performed in all the alternative clubs, and they both have done network shows, and I don’t think either of them sold out. But it would be very easy to perceive it that way because now Margaret gets paid a lot of money to do a network show. But what she does on that show is what she does, comedically.

When the show started, you said all your fans are geeks. Is that still the case?

Bob: Yes.

David: In a lovable way. They're just such hardcore fans.

Bob: I think we turn them into geeks, David.

David: They were such strapping young men… But we were geeks. When I was in high school, I was socially outcast to some degree, hanging with my geeky friends…

Were you in the Dungeons and Dragons club?

David: No, those guys were geeks. We were Monty Python fanatics. We were quoting things and we emulated them, so I can empathize with those [geeky fans]. And it's exciting to me that, to some people, we’re in the position that somebody else was in for me.

Bob: Because our show has got so many ideas in it, and it's kind of cool to catch onto what’s happening, it’s sort of inspired a stronger interest, I think, than other shows. And so you immediately become a geek if you watch it. It teases your brain a little bit, like, “then they did this and then they want here—wow, that was cool.” You start thinking about it and you start bending over and you start wearing glasses, acne comes out… it geeks you up.

You get the Python comparison a lot, but wouldn’t you say in spirit, that you’re closer to SCTV, in that both shows take place in an alternate TV universe?

David: No, I wouldn’t say that.

Bob: But we don't just do TV-show [parodies] by a long shot, which is what SCTV was—it was all TV shows.

David: I mean, we do live sketches like Python did, too, in front of people.

Bob: Yeah, I'd say we're closer to half and half. And what do you think about the film pieces we do? Somebody brought this up the other day, that the Ronnie Dobbs kind of thing is more like Spinal Tap or Waiting for Guffman, where a person has got a story, but they're kind of improvising in character. We have some of that, too, which they didn't have on either of those two other shows. We don't repeat characters a lot. We’ve only repeated, like, three characters in four years, and they've only come back once and they've been in completely different situations. SCTV used its characters in different situations, too, but they also used them in similar situations—they would do Great White North over and over. That was sort of the rule we had: no repeat characters, although we eventually wanted to do certain characters again, once or twice. We're going to make a movie that's going to be based on a character that we've done.

So is that going to be in the same format as a show?

Bob: It's going to be similar, but not the same, in that it's going to return to this character's story in between other sketches. So instead of just going from sketch to sketch, it's going to start with the story, and go to a sketch. But it’ll be all film sketches—no live elements.

David: But there's also something that we do that Python and SCTV never did, which is we come out and talk as ourselves for our audience.

I guess the similarity I see between you and SCTV is there's a common theme of satirizing people who think they're celebrities, but aren’t, like local newscasters….

Bob: Well, there's definitely an element to that. And I think even though we don't do all TV sketches, which is what SCTV was, we do a lot about the media. We do a lot about the way things are presented and the way people think and talk about things. So there's definitely similarities. We loved SCTV. I fucking love it. I'm not going to the Aspen Comedy Festival, but that's one of the things I’ll miss—they're going to have an SCTV reunion.

Are you nervous about making a movie? Because other sketch-comedy have tried to make that leap with mixed results…

Bob: Yeah. Like Kids in the Hall?

What did you think of Brain Candy?

David: I didn't see it.

Bob: Well then I didn't see it either. Why haven't you, David Cross, friends with almost all the Kids in the Hall, seer of movies—two a week, maybe more—not seen the movie your friends made?

David: I haven’t seen a lot of movies that friends made. I didn’t see Jack Frost [directed by Mr. Show executive producer Troy Miller], I didn't see Janeane’s movies…

Bob: I'm not scared. We’re smart, and we’re being careful about what we do. We already wrote a movie that we could have been making. But I felt like, and I think David agrees, the kind of movie that we wrote was, in a way, sort of like the Kids in the Hall movie, in that the movie depended on people really liking the Kids in the Hall and just getting their humour, and knowing where they were coming from. And the fact is: Yeah, their audience knows it and gets it, but when you do a movie, you don't want to just do it for your audience. You want to do it for everybody who goes to the movies, which is a lot more people than those who’ll stay up late to watch you on the Comedy Channel.

Do you worry about being too savvy to connect with general audiences?

David: What do you mean?

Well, I read this interview with Bob where he said, “We’re making this for ourselves, we don’t care who’s watching.”

David: First of all, we're in the luxurious position of being able to do this, because we're just a cheap late night show and HBO leaves us alone. But we can't start thinking about, “Is our audience going to like this?” Because we're the audience—our friends and the other writers on the show, and the performers. If it's not funny to us, we’re not putting it on the show.

Bob: But having said that, we do think about, “What kind of movie do we want? What kind of story do we want to make that we think will work?” Because when we started Mr. Show, we wanted to make a show that would excite us and be interesting to us and let us do what we think is funny, but at the same time, we didn't want to do the coming-out-and-saying-hi part of the show. That was something that somebody suggested to us. And now I think it was really important to do that. Now, if we couldn't have figured out a way to do it that would satisfy us, we wouldn't have done it. But I think it's really important that we do that, because I think that the show moves so fast and has so many ideas in it, it helps people watching to get that grounding and realize, “Okay, this is where the ride starts,” just to know where they're at. So, it's not like we don't think about ways to communicate our ideas.

Do you have to spend a lot of time immersed in TV and film for inspiration?

Bob: I read a lot, watch CNN, I flip around like crazy on the TV…

Even though you don’t do explicit celebrity impersonations, it's pretty obvious who you are targeting, and it doesn't just end there. Like, the camera angles and the whole visual presentation of a sketch is just as important as the performances…

David: We've had a series of really good younger directors who are pretty savvy to that stuff, who get it. We've had really good directors.

The newer sketches I’ve seen, like God recording his autobiography, feel a lot more fleshed out, compared to earlier sketches like GloboChem, which were much more manic.

Bob: Right. Maybe we have more confidence. We probably wouldn't have done that one in our first year. I think this year we had more confidence and a lot of good stuff came from it. I mean, we've always had confidence in ourselves, but we have more confidence in the viewer, and the idea that people aren't going to just turn off, that they know us, that they know the show, and we don't have to dance as fast to make them laugh.

So what media or cultural trend is pissing you off the most now?

David: Hmmmm…

Like, would you say Mr. Show is your revenge against bad culture?

Bob: Yeah. But I also enjoy bad culture because it makes me laugh and I get to make fun of it. I have to think about that for a minute, it's a good question.

David: Even though I'm kind of over it now, I’d say nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. You can market nostalgia, and it's so blatant and people still buy right into it. That's kind of bothersome, but almost passé now, even though it’s been going on for a while. And the proliferation of musicals based on TV shows and movies, like Fame: The Musical, Footloose, Bright Lights, Big City…

[Bob flags a waiter to send back his undercooked French fries that came with his club sandwich]

Bob: That’s so Hollywood of me—send back a sandwich.

Well, you’ve got the suit on—you’ve got to act the part.

David: I just bought a suit for the first time ever. In New York, at the Barney’s warehouse sale. It was more than half off the price.

Bob: All my suits came from the show. I had two suits before the show. Now I have, like, six.

David: I figured, what the hell? I’m getting older, I’m in the process of selling out…

Do your parents like the way you dress on the show?

David: My parents are very proud of me. I mean, I owe all my wardrobe to my parents.

So after four seasons, you’ve established this freewheeling format for the show. But do you ever worry that the open format in itself will become a formula?

Bob: Well, it is a formula and it was from the beginning. But it is pretty open.

David: But how many times have we sat in the room going, “fucking links, dammit!”

In the season premiere I saw, it feels like you’re really drawing attention to the links—like the transition from the medical marijuana sketch to the Electric Underwear bit to the law classroom scene.

David: That was crazy. I suggested that as a joke: “Speaking of the Electric Underwear, I’ve got two tickets!”

Bob: Once you spend a day and a half trying to link two scenes, you start thinking, “You know what? There are better ways to spend our time.” There comes a point where we have to cut our losses on figuring those links out. We spend six to eight hours on them, and it used to be two or three days—for real. Not every one, obviously. But for the hard ones, and there's one every other show, we would spend two or three days on it. And this year we just said, “it's not worth it. There's so much you could be doing. You could be writing a great scene.” And while people get off on the links and really think they're cool, in the end, the scenes are what makes the show great.

ENCORES

So that movie Bob and David were talking about above turned out to be the ill-fated Run Ronnie Run, whose production and rollout did not go well…

…though, in hindsight, Run Ronnie Run is only the second-most unfortunate footnote to the Mr. Show saga.
For a more thorough accounting of music’s outsized role in the Mr. Show universe, check out this interview I did with Cross for Pitchfork in 2015 about the series’ greatest music-themed sketches.