Paul Scheer
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

Of the four members of Human Giant, Rob Huebel, Aziz Ansari, Paul Scheer and Jason Woliner, Scheer is perhaps the famous face due to his appearances on VH1’s Best Week Ever. But before all of his TV work, Scheer was already one of the most respected comedy improvisers in New York City with the troupe Respecto Montalban, which also spawned Rob Huebel and Daily Show correspondent Rob Riggle.

In this day and age, you have to either run a bunch of people over with your car or do a short film in order to get noticed. Luckily Scheer and Human Giant took the less dangerous approach and started producing short films in addition to performing the immensely popular Human Giant stage show. Now MTV has helped them turn Human Giant into a very funny sketch comedy show.

Human Giant airs Thursdays at 10:30pm EST on MTV

Daniel Robert Epstein: How similar is the Human Giant stage show to the TV show?

Paul Scheer: It’s radically different. I think of the Human Giant stage show as a director commentary track with special guests because we just sit up there with the microphone and we tell stories about the subjects we show. Like we talk about working at MTV. It’s like a three man standup or a director’s track live on stage. I think the best part about it is that we’re under prepared. We just go out there and talk to the audience and talk to each other and make each other laugh.

DRE: I thought that in the beginning Human Giant was just Rob [Huebel] and Aziz [Ansari]. Were you always part of Human Giant?

Paul: No. Rob and Aziz made [the short film] Shutterbugs and they got a lot of accolades for it. Then I was in Shutterbugs II. Then I said, “Hey, I have an idea for one called The Illusionators” and we made that next. But what happened was we never released The Illusionators online. So we had three films Shutterbugs and Illusionators. We were like, “Oh man, we should make more of these.” Then all of a sudden it became Human Giant. So Rob and Aziz made the first one, but the evolution of Human Giant didn’t come about until we made The Illusionators.

DRE: You guys show those sketches on the first episode of the MTV show.

Paul: Yeah, for the first episode, we had some classic stuff like Shutterbugs, The Illusionators and Shittiest Mixtape. Throughout the season, you’re going to see Clell Ticle, more Illusionators and I believe there might be one other piece that I think we shot before that. So pretty much the pilot, with the exception of Shutterbugs, Illusionators and Shittiest Mixtape was all new stuff.

DRE: How is it working with the legendary producer Tom Gianas on Human Giant?

Paul: Tom is amazing. Tom is, for all intents and purposes, our fifth member. He has been so influential in network things, he has the same sensibility as us and he’s really helped us in every possible way. I guess most people get assigned a showrunner and it’s some douchebag who doesn’t know comedy or doesn’t like what you guys have done. But Tom is just on the same page as us all the time. I don’t think either Jason [Woliner] or Tom have been home in the last two weeks. They literally are sleeping in the edit suites. The saddest thing I ever heard was when Tom called his assistant and said, “Can you get me a pillow and some blankets because I’m sleeping here now and I think I should just make up my couch to look like a bed.”

DRE: So he was assigned to you by MTV?

Paul: MTV wanted us to get a showrunner because they didn’t think we could do it ourselves. That’s true, you need somebody to deal with the other things. I knew Tom from a long time ago so I said to the guys, “This guy is awesome. He’s worked with Michael Moore. He did Tenacious D. I think he would fit in good with us.” We all sat down with him and it clicked.

DRE: Is Human Giant in any way an outgrowth of Respecto Montalban because it does have you and Huebel in it?

Paul: The way that the Human Giant evolved was so random. I’ve been involved in so many things in New York and I always think “This is the thing I’m going to put all my money behind. I’m going to put all my chips on this.” But Human Giant was like, “Let’s just do this for fun. Let’s put this short film together.” It evolved very quickly. I still do stuff with Respecto. We’re all out here in LA now. We do a show where we call people onstage, project their MySpace profiles, we interview them and improvise off those. But as far as I’m concerned Respecto are the people I am going to work with for the rest of my life. Right now, I’m working more closely with Huebel but you never know, maybe Riggle and I will be working closely together. We ebb and flow out of each other’s lives. But we’re always working together and we hang out so it’s a cool thing.

DRE: As the Human Giant stage show got popular, were you guys getting offers from all the Viacom owned channels?

Paul: We did the [stage] show Crash Test and that was fun. We made these videos and they were online. I think [MTV Development Executive] Sam Grossman really dug them and brought them to his boss who also really liked them. I think that was the same time that we were doing Illusionators around the city. Then Illusionators was big and then MTV said, “You know what, we want to do the show.” They offered it to us right at the point where I think we would have gotten more offers. They were the first ones that saw it and they jumped on it.

DRE: MTV hasn’t had a sketch show on since like The Jenny McCarthy Show or something like that.

Paul: Yeah, which was actually pretty funny. There were people on that that went off to do other cool stuff, like Brian Posehn, who’s been on our show. Also Jon Glaser and I believe Jon Benjamin worked over there. The executive that we have at MTV is probably one of the coolest guys. His name is Tony [DiSanto] and he wants cool, funny, edgy stuff. He’s trying to bring that vibe back. He was very integral in The Andy Milonakis Show and he runs MTV2 so he was supportive of Wonder Showzen. He was like “How can we take what you guys do and bring it over to an MTV audience?” In that process, they have been very supportive of the idea that we pitched them. We were like, “Oh man, they are not going to go with this idea.” They were like, “We love it. Let’s do it.” So they haven’t reined us in, in any weird way, and that’s been really great. We got really lucky. Your conception of MTV is that it’s full of these guys that don’t know what they want or anything. But Tony saw it and was able to translate it.

DRE: I read an article about how you guys wanted to put a picture of a penis in the show so you had to keep faxing pictures of penises to standards and practices.

Paul: Yeah, We literally had to draw four different dicks. Standards and practices is where we have our biggest battle because MTV is like “Yep, do it,” and we’re like “Okay, so we have this sketched dick” and standards is like, “Whoa, whoa, wait. What does the dick look like?” The note literally was, “You can draw a dick but it can’t have veins, it can’t have a head and it can’t have hair.”

DRE: Just like the real dicks of 11 year olds [laughs].

Paul: [laughs] I agree. We had to draw the most perverted sacs I have ever seen in my life. Just slightly deformed penises. They looked like hand turkeys gone wrong. But it also forces us to be more creative. They’ll be like, “No, you can’t use guns.” So we go “How about a crossbow?” and they’re like, “That’s fine.” We come up with more interesting ways to kill people. They were very harsh on us at one point because we had this one sketch where my character is raped by a dinosaur but it happens off-camera. They were like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. You can’t say raped by a dinosaur. But you can say sodomized by a dinosaur.” We were like, “That sounds grosser, like the dinosaur has a police baton and is shoving it in my ass or something.” We’ll do a car hit and they’re like, “Do a car hit with blood and then do a car hit without blood.” Also we had this tag at the end of one of our sketches in the first episode that was like “Please don’t adopt. A message from the Anti-Adoption Alliance.” They were like, “We don’t want to offend kids that were adopted.” We have to go in to ever single argument and be like, “This is why we think it’s funny.” They do have a sense of humor, which is good. So when they do see the car hit with the blood, they’re like, “Yeah, that’s funnier than the one without.” But we have a lot of alternate safe takes.

DRE: I read that you have some pretty good directors on the show like Rusty Cundieff and Jay Chandrasekhar.

Paul: Yes Jason Woliner is a writer, director, producer and is the fourth member of the group. He works so hard already. There was a thought that he would be able to direct the show. Little did we realize that is a monumental task. We shot 90 pieces over the course of 30 days. It would be impossible for him to direct them all. So we had to bring in some help for him. Rusty directed some of the best sketches on Chappelle’s Show like “The Nigger Family.” Jay has been really successful directing TV like Arrested Development and all the Broken Lizard movies. They totally got our sensibility and were really great collaborators. We didn’t want to work with people we didn’t like.

DRE: I remember back in the day when The State was on MTV and they came up with the catchphrase "I'll dip my balls in it!" because MTV kept asking them for something with catchphrases in it. So they came up with that, which I thought was the worst catchphrase ever. Obviously that was a long time ago but are your executives asking for recurring characters or catchphrases or anything like that?

Paul: They have not asked us to do anything on that level. Occasionally they will say, “We want to see those characters again.” But it’s not like “Bring this guy back and this time he has a job interview at a car dealership.” We are the ones who get more obsessed about catchphrases. We have this short coming up called Spacelords and it’s sort of based on the villains from Superman II. We want to do more with them and MTV’s like, “Okay, we’ve got enough of these guys. Let’s do something else.” We get addicted to them and we want to see them do all sorts of insane things [laughs].

DRE: After you posted a fake obit for your dad on the Human Giant TV show, I read you got a lot of people thinking he was really dead.

Paul: It’s crazy. I would say that 99 percent of our fans are smart, funny and cool. But one percent are the biggest idiots in the world. When we first released The Illusionators on YouTube, we were getting comments like, “This is totally fake.” “Those guys are actors.” “Camera tricks.” Actually in one of our focus groups, one of the kids’ responses after watching The Illusionators was “I wish their magic tricks were cooler.” First of all, it’s not real. Second of all, we brought somebody back from the dead. These kids are just hard to impress. After the first episode aired I got an email from a friend I went to high school with saying “I’m so sorry to hear about your dad. He was such a great dude.” He eulogized my dad in this email, and I was like “Oh no. He’s alive.” A bunch people responded in the same way. Sometimes people don’t realize that we’re joking around, which I like sometimes.

DRE: How did you like the whole focus group thing?

Paul: I’m always leery about them. I’m never there but I’d love to be. It sounds like the focus groups are just a dude asking the most leading questions. They got a bunch of 12 to 17 year olds in a room and their responses were “I think the third act has length issues.” How does a 12 year old even know what the third act of a show is? Focus groups are a necessary evil but if you ask people to critique something, they will find flaws.

I don’t think that people quite understand that comedy works in the way of setup, punchline. Occasionally these knobs they give you to respond to things, are going to go down during the setup and down during the punchline. They’re like “Why isn’t it up all the time?” Well because they had to listen to the first part in order to get the second part. So there are little quirks like that. But our executive at MTV is like, “That’s the focus group info? Who gives a shit.” We got really lucky.

DRE: How many episodes of Human Giant did you guys shoot?

Paul: We have eight episodes that we shot and 90 pieces that may or may not be spread out amongst them.

DRE: When do you guys find out if you get picked up?

Paul: I guess it all depends on ratings. Internally, they are really supportive. But it has to be justified by the people watching it. Our first week was pretty good so hopefully we keep it going and we keep growing.

DRE: So who gets recognized more, you or Rob [Huebel]?

Paul: I think I do only because I’ve been on Best Week Ever for so long. That show is on in everybody’s houses when they are hung over on Saturday or Sunday mornings. But when all three of us were in Vegas this past weekend people were recognizing us as the Human Giant. That is insane. It took two years for people to recognize me from Best Week Ever and now people are recognizing me from Human Giant. But Rob has got a very strong Olive Garden base. Also when Rob puts on sunglasses and a hat, he’s just a normal dude. You got me with the gap tooth and running around in a stripy shirt, you’re going to say, “There’s that guy who looks like a cartoon character.” So it’s easier to pick me out compared to Rob, who is a very attractive man.

DRE: Are you amazed at how many careers Best Week Ever has launched?

Paul: It’s wild. We’ve done over 100 episodes of that show. We go in for an hour a week, we talk about stuff, we get two or three comments on the show and then we call it a day. People really respond to the show and it’s fun to do.

DRE: The Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theater has really turned into a brand in the last few years.

Paul: I think the best decision I ever made in my life was getting involved with the UCB. They have been really supportive. Matt [Besser], Ian [Roberts] and Matt [Walsh] and Amy [Poehler] have just always been looking out for us. The theater has been really cool, whenever we come back into town, they’re like “Let’s put up a show.” Amy is a huge star, Besser has all these great shows, Walsh is in all these movies and had a show and Ian is writing all these crazy big scripts. So I think we’re all in this position where everyone’s coming out of the theater and we all like working with each other. I just came from meeting with Rob Corddry and Ed Helms. They were like, “We should do something together” because we all made a movie called Blackballed a while ago. We’re all at different points now where we might actually get money to do it instead of sitting in a white stinky passenger van every weekend for 12 hours a day.

DRE: At age 31 is it weird to be part of the old guard of improv in New York?

Paul: Right! It’s crazy. When I first got involved, I was a freshman in college. I was like, “I’m the youngest one here. Ha-ha.” Now I feel like Old Man Time. What has happened to my life? But it’s great. I never thought I’d be the old person at the theater.

DRE: What’s your role in Starship Dave?

Paul: I play Eddie Murphy’s ass. The premise of Starship Dave is that Eddie Murphy pilots a spaceship that looks like Eddie Murphy. So there are all these little aliens inside Eddie Murphy. Does that make sense? I have a hard time explaining it.

DRE: Even if it doesn’t, I don’t care [laughs].

Paul: [laughs] My character is called Lieutenant Buttocks and I am in the ass. Judah Friedlander is sort of the Scottie and he’s in the stomach. Ed Helms is up in the control tower with Eddie Murphy. It should be interesting. I’m actually getting fitted for my crazy spaceship costume this week. I am so excited because I am a huge Eddie Murphy fan. Growing up, all I wanted to do was be Eddie Murphy. I watched Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood so much. I had my dad edit out the nude scenes in Beverly Hills Cop I and II, just so I could watch it. Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray and Steve Martin are my big comedy guys. Working with Eddie Murphy is blowing my mind. I haven’t been on set with him yet, but I’m excited to see that side of him.

DRE: Years ago, I got to interview [Starship Dave director] Brian Robbins about The Perfect Score. When he walked in the room, he could see in my eyes how much I wanted to ask him about Head of the Class. I resisted until the very end, when I asked him where the leather jacket is. You grew up watching him too. Is it cool hanging out with him?

Paul: [laughs] Of course, man. Head of the Class was awesome, Howard Hesseman at his finest, Robin Givens. I’ll keep it quiet so I won’t bring it up unless he does. I worked with Billy Bob Thornton on this movie School for Scoundrels. One night he invited me, Sarah Silverman and Jon Glaser back to his trailer. He’s Billy Bob Thornton, the coolest dude in the world but you want to know like cool shit. He tells you these amazing stories, like every question you would want answered. You’re sitting there trying to play it off like “Yeah, that’s cool.” But on the inside, you’re freaking out like, “How cool. I’m hearing stories about what it was like to make Sling Blade” and Angelina Jolie and whatever.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Paul+Scheer/