2008 Woodie Awards
Vanguard Interviews cast of independent comedy show
Ashley Jones
STAFF WRITER
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Independent Film Channel just handed the "Whitest Kids" license to do whatever they want on television. To Trevor Moore, Sam Brown, Zach Cregger, Timmy Williams and Darren Trumeter, this means shocking and offending as many people as possible, while still inducing side-splitting laughter.
After its first season on Fuse, "Whitest Kids U' Know" will be airing its second go-around on IFC, which is completely uncensored and has no commercial breaks.
"The Whitest Kids U' Know" are known for their hilarious songs. One definitely worth checking out is "Get a New Daddy," where Moore tells kids how to trade their bad dad in for a new model. Sketches parodying history are also in the "Whitest Kids U' Know" anthology.
Spawned from a club that began at their college, the kids turned their extracurricular activities into an exciting career and have not looked back. Member Timmy Williams takes us from the days of being an on-campus club to being able to call the shots on their own television show-and fans are reaping the benefits.
The Vanguard: First off, tell me how you got started in comedy.
Whitest Kids 'U Know, Timmy Williams: Well, I moved to New York City in August 2001, and I didn't really have any plans to do comedy. I came out here to do film school, and I ended up living in the same building as Sam, Zach and Trevor from the group. And on Sept. 11, I was hanging out in the hallway, freaked out of my mind, and I met them there.
V: What is the first joke you ever told?
W: When I was five or six, or something like that, I did stand-up at a talent show. I think the first joke was 'Who lives next to horses?-Naaaybors.' That was the first joke.
V: What were you like in high school?
W: What was I like in high school? I was like a huge nerd. I was in band, and I was on B-team. No one outside of the circle would ever talk to me until tenth or eleventh grade-I was in a punk-ska band kind of thing, so I started getting more popular. I was always a really nerdy kid in high school. I wasn't really outgoing or even that joking in high school. I just kind of kept to myself.
V: How did the idea for "Whitest Kids U' Know" come about?
W: Well, the group formed before I got there. But how it happened was Trevor had been doing comedy for a few years in L.A. for public access TV. He was in New York, and he came in a comedy club. They hit it off and decided to start a group. They started at the college they went to-School of Visual Arts. They started as sort of a college group, and since it was a college group, they had to let anyone in that wanted to join. They had a huge group of people. Then, a year later, they met me, and I joined. A few years after that, we met Darren. Then we narrowed it down to just the five of us, started doing live shows and then we got a TV show.
V: When did you begin working on it?
W: The TV show?
V: Yes, or "Whitest Kids U' Know"?
W: I started in "Whitest Kids" in November 2001, but the group has been around since December of 2000. We started really getting serious about it and started doing a live show every week. We started making videos and playing the videos on the Internet. That is how we started getting popular. A couple of years after that, in early 2006, Fuse found out about us, and that is when they offered us a TV show. Last year, about a year ago-the show was already out on Fuse-we found out we were going to be going to IFC. And that is where we are now.
V: What is the writing process like?
W: Basically, what we do is we all five will hang out at someone's apartment, and then we will each come up with a couple of ideas-just kind of pitches for a sketch. We each will throw our ideas out, and then as a group we will pick three or four that we like the most. Then we all sit around a computer and draft them out. That is pretty much how we do it.
V: How do you decide who plays what part in the sketches?
W: It just kind of happens naturally, because with a lot of the sketches, the characters are always for certain members of the troupe. We are often like, well, that is a Timmy role or that is a Trevor role or whatever. Sometimes there is tension over roles, but hardly ever. We always kind of know while we are writing who is going to play who.
V: How was the process of making the second season different from the first?
W: The main thing was we knew a little bit more about what we were doing. There were a couple of major differences. First, obviously, being on IFC, we had an uncensored show, and on Fuse there was a lot we still had to bleep and blur. On IFC, we really get to do whatever we want. And also, for our first season most of the sketches were sketches we used to do on stage and just turned it into TV. For the second season, we had already used all of our on stage sketches, so we had to write stuff just for television.
V: What is your favorite sketch from the second season?
W: There are two that both came out in episode four a few weeks ago. One of them is called "Forever Puppies," which is a commercial about a service where you can trade in a puppy for another puppy. At the end of the sketch, we kind of reveal that the other dogs are shot. Also, there is a song called "Opus," which is a 12-minute song, and it is just really crazy. There is a wild and crazy story to it. We used to do a lot of short sketches, but then we tried it longer. I thought it worked pretty well. Those are probably my two favorite ones--"Opus" and "Forever Puppies."
V: What should fans expect from the second season? Are there any surprises?
W: Yeah. This entire season there is a lot of crazy stuff. There is something involving the menstruation process. It is probably going to gross a lot of people out. There is still some history sketches coming in-people like it when we do those. There is just a lot of crazy stuff, and we can do whatever we want.
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