Celebrity Interview
Comedy group behind Super Troopers brings the “shenanigans” to Seattle
Posted by: Laura Dannen on Nov 17, 2009 at 08:00PM
Clockwise, from top: Kevin, Paul, Steve, Erik and Jay put their game faces on for Beerfest.
They go by Broken Lizard, but you might know them better as the prank-pulling cops from 2002 cult hit Super Troopers. Or the guys who chugged beer out of a boot for Beerfest. The Colgate University-bred comedy troupe — Jay Chandrasekhar, Paul Soter, Steve Lemme, Erik Stolhanske, and Kevin Heffernan — bring their witty, oft-raunchy brand of stand-up and sketch comedy to the Moore Theatre on Friday behind the release of their new movie, Slammin’ Salmon, out in select cities December 11.
Before starting their “Pacific Northwest Tour,” as Heffernan likes to call it, he and Chandrasekhar conference-called Seattle Met about their wildest shows, “positive hecklers,” and what kind of craziness to expect at the Moore.
Have you ever been to Seattle before?
KH: I’ve been a bunch of times. Actually, my sister lived there for a long time… she worked for the Seattle Times. Does the Seattle Times exist, or did it fold?
It’s still going. The Post-Intelligencer folded.
KH: Gotcha. So she was up there for a couple years. We actually started our Super Troopers tour there. It was our first date.
How was the local audience? We’re kind of notorious for being less than friendly.
KH: It was awesome. It was kind of weird, because back then no one had seen anything or knew who we were, so we had to go out and drum up an audience. So we were at the University of Washington – is the University of Washington there?
Haha, yes. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh. [Jay Chandrasekhar joins phone call.]
KH: And we handed out postcards trying to get an audience… We flew up there and FOX had gotten us this rock ’n’ roll tour bus, like, it was the Allman Brothers’ old bus. They put our pictures on the side of it.
JC: Yeah, that was fun – it was a great crowd, which kind of shocked us because no one knew who we were.
What’s your show going to be like this time around?
KH: We try to do a lot of different things. We do some sketches, and each guy also does stand-up – like, 10 minutes of stand-up. And we’ll do some audience participation — people come up on stage and get into a Super Troopers scene of a Beerfest scene. We also do songs, we show a clip from the new movie, so there are a lot of different kinds of entertainment.
You guys started out as a comedy group at Colgate. With movies like Beerfest, is your audience still mostly college kids? Or has it grown since?
JC: It’s grown. What happened was, all the people who saw Super Troopers when they were in college have grown up and are now eight years out of school, and they’ve shown it to their dads and their uncles — and sometimes their mothers. So the crowd is stretched older now. Frankly, we’ve found that if the crowd is at least 25, that’s when our best audiences are. College crowds, they don’t get all the references, and they’re also no longer allowed to drink openly, so it sort of reduces their wildness. You get a crowd that’s a little older, and it’s wild.
What was the wildest show you’ve been a part of?
JC: In a good way, or a bad way?
Either, both.
KH: We had some really great shows so far on this stretch – Milwaukee was great, where it was just a really rowdy crowd. Like Jay said, usually if there’s a bar in the back of the theater, it tends to feed the audience pretty well [laughs].
JC: Several people wanted to be part of the show and part of every joke, so they would just yell, and yell, and yell. I mean, you literally have situations where people are like, ‘Shut the f*** up!’ and then they’re quiet for a few minutes, and then they want to yell a little more.
KH: It’s a weird kind of heckling that we get. Usually, a comic will do their show, and if they get heckled, it’s by some abrasive guy. With us, our fans just want to yell out our lines to us, so it’s like a positive heckling.
What do they yell the most? What movie do they quote?
KH: It’s between Beerfest and Super Troopers, I think.
JC: It depends on what party they’re in. Democrats yell out Super Troopers lines and Republicans yell out Beerfest lines.
[All laugh.]
You’ll probably get more Super Troopers lines up here then. Can you tell me about your new movie, Slammin’ Salmon?
KH: It’s kind of our return [to independent films]. We made it during the writer’s strike last year. Basically, we play waiters in an Italian [sic – seafood] restaurant owned by this crazy former heavyweight champion of the world, like a Mike Tyson type of guy [played by Michael Clarke Duncan]. He’s our crazy boss, and we find out in the course of the night that he owes a bunch of money to the mob, so he starts this contest in the restaurant. He tells the waiters that he’s going to give the top-selling waiter $10,000 and the lowest-selling waiter he’s going to kick the crap out of. It’s a very basic Glengarry Glen Ross kind of comic plot…. [The idea] was like, what if you worked in a restaurant, and Mike Tyson was your boss? And you never knew if he was going to hug you, or beat the crap out of you? And it’s just this bipolar personality, so it became very easy to write. We kind of wrote it in Mike Tyson’s higher voice [laughs] and it created this great character.
We’re not done! We got Jay and Kevin to play an improv game with us, and talk about their latest projects (hint: Super Troopers 2 is on the horizon). Read part two of our interview here.
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