Texas Sufficiently Messed With: A SXSW Roundup

Thatotherpaper.com has a nice assortment of interviews from the comedians who stormed Austin for the SXSW festival.

Highlights include:

Zach Galifianakis: "I think comedy is so subjective. I may think someone is not that great, but that does not mean someone else will not like them. It’s like music: Some people like Toby Keith, and some people like music."

Jon Benjamin: "At one point, I actually wanted to be a rabbi. That would have been dreadful. (Sorry, rabbis.) I had a rabbi who was this diminutive, soft-spoken sweet man, and he would come around once a year to our Hebrew school class and talk about being a Holocaust survivor. Then he would show his tattoo, and I really thought that was amazing. At the time I just thought tattoos were for ruffians. But my rabbi had one. Later I understood that the tattoo wasn’t voluntary. So, in short, I guess I always wanted to be a Holocaust survivor."

David Cross: "I guess I believe in doing unto others as you would have them do to you. And I believe in an eye for a tooth and a tooth for an eye. I like to mix it up like that. I would love to give two of my teeth so that I might blind some asshole who done needed him some blindin’!"

Brian Posehn: [Question: What’s something that you’d like to see anthropomorphized and given its own feature length film?] "Can I say my balls?"

Michael Showalter: "I always felt that I was funny but that no one really knew it. When I was in middle school they had “Funniest” and “Class Clown” [awards]. I remember I counted the votes — I don’t think that I got a single vote.”

Jonah Ray: "In a way I’m scared for the zombie apocalypse, but at the same time, I’m very excited for when it happens because I’m f@cking prepared."

B.J. Porter: "I started writing an unofficial sequel to the sports movie Miracle, which was about the 1980 US men’s Olympic hockey team. Mine is about the 1992 men’s basketball team. “Do you believe in inevitabilities!?” Oh, I shouldn’t have ruined the last line in the movie for you."

Scott Aukerman: "I seriously sat around trying to plot a movie starring lamps for about a day and a half. Then a light switch went of in my head (pun INtended) and I realized there are better ways to make a living."

Mike Phirman (of Hard N' Phirm): "Years ago, Chris and I came up with a very nerdy equation that we called The Phirman Principle of Comedy. It was: “A. B. *C. I’m kidding. ~B”. It means you assert thing A, then thing B, then an absurd thing C, say “I’m kidding” and negate thing B. (Example: “Today I went to the market, ate a cheeseburger, and had sex with a chicken. No, I’m just kidding — I stopped eating cheeseburgers years ago.”) We were unstoppable. We used it to get out of parking tickets, make girls laugh, even fend off angry dogs. Then one night we added the Hardwick Addendum: Rather than negate B, end with an even wackier C. (From the above example: “I’m just kidding — it was an emu!”) With that, we immediately turned into light and have since remained on Earth completely by choice."