NYLON - January 2008 - (Page 128) LAST LAUGH With a new comedy album and a bevy of new projects, Michael Showalter is plotting his own revenge of the nerds. By April Long. Photographed by Alexander Thompson Onscreen, Michael Showalter is a superlative nerd. He was nerdy, lovelorn camp counselor Coop in 2001’s Wet Hot American Summer (which he co-wrote with David Wain) and nerdy, lovelorn accountant Elliott in 2005’s The Baxter (which he wrote and directed himself), not to mention just-plain-nerdy Michael in the now defunct Comedy Central show Stella. So you can’t help but expect him to be a little bit like that in person—shuffling, awkward, prone to uttering non sequiturs such as “I like cookies!” at inappropriate moments. Instead, when Showalter strides into a Brooklyn coffee house wearing jeans, black Wayfarers, and a vintage Snoopy T-shirt, he looks serious and self-possessed, more like a cool college professor than a professional dork. Which, it turns out, he kind of is. After ordering an iced latte and leading me to a table in the back garden, Showalter explains that he’s recently attached a new hyphenate to his tongue-twisting career description (actor-writer-director-producercomedian), and taken up teaching a senior thesis screenwriting class at NYU. “It’s a little weird to me that I’m doing it,” he admits, “like, ‘What am I doing here?’ But my students are great, and I love helping them develop their scripts. Plus, there’s no such thing as tenure in comedy, so it’s good to have something dependable. I’ve realized that the pot of gold—that whole, ‘I’m going to do this movie and it’s going to shoot me into the stratosphere’—isn’t… well, you’ve got to hedge your bets a bit.” If Showalter hasn’t yet become the household name he deserves to be, it’s certainly not due to laziness. He currently has two pilots, which he co-wrote with Stella chum Michael Ian Black, testing at Comedy Central, and he has his own show, The Michael Showalter Showalter, on collegehomor.net (guests have so far included Andy Samberg, Paul Rudd, and David Cross; Showalter has lost his temper and thrown something at nearly all of them). And then there’s his new album, Sandwiches and Cats (available on Jewish label JDub records, also home to such acts as Balkan Beat Box). Recorded live at a series of shows at Brooklyn’s Union Hall with some elements added in the studio, it’s a characteristically smart, absurdist ramble through Showalter’s imagination, featuring some hilarious erotica-meetsadventure-travel stories as well as a pugnacious little ditty called “The Sandwich Commandments,” in which he lists such incontrovertible laws as, “Mustard goes with everything…and if anyone tries tells you the same is true of mayonnaise, you tell that person that they are a liar, a fink, and a fucking asshole.” The “cats” part of the title comes from a six-minute rant that ensued after he discovered that a woman in the front row at one of his shows had two of them in a cage under her seat. “I was like, ‘who does that?’” Showalter says, laughing. “I actually berated her for about 18 minutes. I wanted to put it on the record because I think it walks the line between being awkward, angry, and funny—and because it sort of exposes my neuroses a bit.” Comedy albums, as Showalter observes, are experiencing a comeback—Eugene Mirman and David Cross have had LPs on SubPop; Black has just released one, too—which he attributes to the fact that stand-up itself has changed. “Most of the comedians I work with are more like musicians in the way we tour and the places we do shows,” he says. “And the people who like us tend to be the same people who listen to indie rock, so we’re basically doing indie-rock comedy records.” Showalter will be touring Sandwiches and Cats all winter, then he’s going to take his own professorial advice and buckle down to pen a new movie. He’s still a bit bitter that The Baxter, brilliantly funny and achingly sweet as it was, wasn’t better received by critics—but he’s trying to get past that. “I’m starting to accept that, no matter what, there will be people who just don’t get it,” he says ruefully. “And it sucks. It makes you second-guess yourself, and think, ‘Maybe I’m not funny.’” He drains his iced coffee. “I do however want to say that Roper [as in Ebert and ] has…no, I’m not going to say bad things.” He considers for a second, stubbing out his cigarette, then continues: “OK, my thing about Roper is that his pubes are salt-and-pepper gray, super tightly coiled, and so ultra-brittle that if you touch them they all crack. There, that’s my revenge on him. That observation, based on nothing, because he did not like my movie.” He grins. “But really, I’m not taking it personally.” http://collegehomor.net
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