“He’s the shittiest puppet ever.” - Robert Smigel, creator of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog
Robert Smigel was one of the writers at Saturday Night Live during a seminal period for the show in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. He created the animated “Saturday TV Funhouse” segments, but now he may be best known as the voice of Triumph the Insult Comic dog. Triumph debuted as a character on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and later made his own comedy appearances.
Now Triumph himself is getting his own show, on Adult Swim’s The Jack and Triumph Show. The sitcom stars Jack McBrayer as a former child star who acted with Triumph in the hit family show Triumph’s Boy, a spoof on Lassie. Jack himself hit hard times but he’s recovering, and Triumph moves in with him, now a has-been trying to get back in the Hollywood game.
Adult Swim brought The Jack and Triumph Show to the Television Critics Association for a panel in which Smigel performed Triumph, roasting many of the critics at the press conference. He put the puppet away to answer some real questions, and we got some time alone with Smigel after the panel to talk about the past and future of Triumph, which had surprising ties to a sketch from a 1991 SNL hosted by Christian Slater. The Jack and Triumph Show airs Fridays at 11:30 PM on Adult Swim.
Suicide Girls: Is Triumph more of a spoof of insult comedy than trying to legitimately insult people?
Robert Smigel: Started as one. It started entirely as a spoof. It was a bit that I started on the show four years earlier. When we started the Conan show, we wanted to do everything Letterman didn’t do. He was all about reality based comedy. He had Westminster dogs run up the aisles, real Westminster winners and I thought let’s do Westminster dogs that are puppets and say they’re more talented every year. So the first couple years we would do it and it was like this dog sings the theme from The Bodyguard and these two do Dueling Banjos and this puppet lights his own farts and this one does a Jack Nicholson impression. We had the paw doing this, remember that old hackey thing where the guy would pull his hair back, “I’m Jack Nicholson.”
SG: You didn’t write that SNL sketch, did you?
RS: I did. With Christian Slater. It was an apparatus.
SG: It was a fan attached to your forehead.
RS: It was a fan that blew your hair back so you didn’t have to use your hands. I can’t remember what it was called.
SG: So you’ve been obsessed with that for years.
RS: Yes, I have been obsessed with it. Nich-Aid I think it was called, I’m not sure. Then really four years into the bit, I wasn’t even at the show anymore, we hadn’t even done it in a year and I called [Late Night head writer] Jon Groff and I said what about an insult comic? All I had was in my head, it’s just a dog and all he can say is “for me to poop on.” He just says something nice and then says “for me to poop on.” That was 90% of what the first Triumph appearance was and it just killed, so we brought it back. Then we realized, John Tesh is on and this dog can provide a catharsis for the audience because Conan’s too polite. He’s hysterical but he does not like to do that kind of comedy. That’s part of his charm. He’ll do it within the context of funny desk bits but he won’t do it right in someone’s face. It provided this great catharsis for the audience that after he would interview John Tesh, he’d bring on this insult comic dog who didn’t even have a name yet and the dog would do what everyone wanted Conan to say.
SG: Is there a meta layer going on doing a sitcom about a sitcom?
RS: Well, it’s a sitcom about a Lassie kind of show. But are we commenting on sitcoms as we’re doing them?
SG: Is there a self-referential rabbit hole you go down?
RS: All of that happens but not like meta in the sense that we’re winking at the audience and not really presenting characters that are committed and believe in the reality of the sitcom. We’re doing a conventional sitcom in that regard. There are a few moments where Triumph turns to the camera, like he says a joke that’s so corny that he’ll turn to the camera and we’ll have a rimshot. It does happen once in a blue moon where we take it away, and then we’re right back into it. One thing we wanted to do was, we didn’t want to put Triumph into a sitcom that seemed heavily packaged and edited. We want to keep the feeling of spontaneity that people like with Triumph, so it’s very important to us to have the sense that the audience is there and you really feel them. Hopefully the show has a quality of fun where you kind of wish you were there. That’s what we’re going for, the way the Jimmy Fallon show has that feeling, and late night talk shows in general have that feeling of anything can happen, even though this is a scripted show. Like I said in the room, sometimes throwing jokes at celebrity guests and they don’t know exactly, even though it’s within a scripted format, they don’t exactly know what the joke is, what Triumph’s going to say.
SG: Are Triumph’s flubs sometimes funnier than the scripted stuff?
RS: You know what’s funnier than some of the scripted stuff is when I attempt to do physical comedy within the limitations we’ve established with Triumph. He’s the shittiest puppet ever in terms of the quality, the expense. When you think about every other puppet that’s ever been on television and how they can blink their eyes and make expressions. There’s two guys under there in plaid shirts and redheaded beards operating them with four arms. Here’s this one idiot doing this and I’ve got a stick that’s supposed to be his paw. We make it whatever length is required to get the joke across. If I need to pull a phone from four feet away, I just grab the phone.
SG: Does the dinner scene become more about how little the puppet can do than whatever it was originally scripted to be?
RS: No. That does happen, like the thing where I went for the cake, we were doing a second take and I just decided I was going to try and eat June’s cake now that June’s away. That was all just us playing and then we ended up putting it in the show because it was fun. But ultimately, the idea is that we don’t fuck with the integrity of the story and the characters. They have goals and plot lines that are meant to be taken seriously on some level, even if they’re absurd. These things happen where they break the fourth wall and show you the seams, but they’re not meant to take you out of the show entirely.
SG: Is this show more puppet work than you ever imagined it would be?
RS: No, I just kind of imagined it but I chose not to think about it going into this project. It was like yeah, that would be a problem but let’s not focus on it. You know what? We had an amazing crew of people, our DP and these guys who were real problem solvers. It was inspiring. It made it easier for me because they worked so hard at trying to hide me and make me comfortable at the same time. They were the wind in my sails. I said it ironically, but it really was gross. You know what? Sometimes gross things are true.
SG: Are we going to see more Jack and Triumph’s past?
RS: We absolutely want to do it. We only had seven episodes and we’re trying a lot of different kinds of things. We have storylines that involve more flashbacks. We just haven’t gotten to them.
SG: So we know Triumph moves in, they play poker with Joey Fatone. What else?
RS: Joey Fatone, Leonard Maltin’s a poker buddy once in a while. Tay Zonday’s been one. Vincent Pastore. I want to get Joe Lieberman. I’m close to getting Joe Lieberman, I’m not kidding. People who were big in the ‘90s is the idea. Not Tay. We pick up Tay in the first episode. Tony Little was in one. Remember that crazy guy with the pony tail, the exercise guy? It’s sort of a rotating thing.
SG: What other adventures do Jack and Triumph get into?
RS: I’d say half are based on Triumph wanting to get back into show business some way and it’s a very Lucy/Ethel dynamic. The difference is that Ethel is this person who Lucy needs because Ethel is the one, like Jack is the child star that everybody loved and Triumph was not the star of that show. He needs Jack somehow to become famous, so he tricks Jack in some episodes. “Let’s go on a vacation” and then they end up going to Siberia because the show is popular in Siberia. They wanted Jack and Triumph to film a commercial there, some dubious product.