07/15/09
Text: Sam J. Miller
From 1993 to 1995, MTV's sketch-comedy show The State shocked and confounded and excited America. Absurd, sophisticated, idiotic, juvenile, edgy, and fresh all at the same time, this leaderless comedy collective still has billions of adoring cult-member-intensity fans... but since the show has never been released on DVD, fans have had to make do with shoddy eBay bootleg DVDs of shoddy VHS tapes, complete with circa-1994 commercials. On July 14, MTV will release the complete series on a gorgeous five-disc box set. State member David Wain has continued his comedic genius on the other side of the camera since the series ended, as the writer/director of Wet Hot American Summer, The Ten, and Role Models. His web series Wainy Days won the Webby Award for Best Comedy Series in 2008. This week I got twelve and a half minutes of his time to learn about the DVD, network drama, and the inner workings of The State.
What exciting stuff do you guys have planned, to promote the DVD release?
We're gonna order one, maybe two large pizzas. One's just going to be veggie, but the other... we're going to go all out, it's going to be everything, the works, because this DVD has been ten years in the making and we've earned it.
If the DVD sells well, do y'all have any plans for making other projects happen?
We've always talked about a State movie, or another TV show or special, and we've remained friends over the last twelve years since we've stopped being active as a unit... and of course we've continued to work together in smaller groups on different things, but we've always dreamed of working all together again. It's frankly been a scheduling dilemma, more than anything else.
Reviewing the old footage, as you worked on the DVD, did you see things differently? Did the stuff seem fresh, dated, exciting, stupid in a new way?
[Chewing] I'm eating sushi while we talk. I apologize. You know, it had been a long time since I sat down to watch the whole thing, and for me personally it was a lot of "Wow, we're really old now." That was the big revelation: I'm old. Some of the material held up and was surprisingly good, and in some cases I just kept saying "Wow... I haven't improved at all in the past ten years." Some stuff I didn't find funny anymore, but mostly I'm still really proud of what we accomplished.
Any specific skits that were particularly unfunny, now?
That's a good question. Someone just asked me that, and I couldn't remember. Pass.
The State was really smart. Did you—
Smart? Wait, what comedy show called "The State" were you watching?
The one where William Shakespeare might pop out at random to say "Christopher Marlowe wrote all my plays."
Ah. Good point.
Did you guys get a lot of pressure from MTV to be less smart? Because the 14-year-old boys watching MTV have no idea who the fuck Christopher Marlowe is?
Yes... certainly, especially in the first season, when they were very worried that we were shooting over the audience's head. Famously - or, at least, famously to us - we had a character mention Bob Dylan in that first season, and they asked us to take it out. They felt the audience wouldn't know who Bob Dylan was. So we proceeded to put subtle Bob Dylan references in every episode. By the end of it, however, when we were getting pretty good ratings, they really gave us a lot more freedom. I don't think we appreciated how much freedom they gave us, actually, until we had moved on.
On The State, you didn't have a lot of recurring characters, and you weren't in every skit. Was this a role you staked out for yourself? What appeals to you about being behind-the-scenes?
I think it was just naturally where I gravitated in the group. Remember, we worked together for four years of college before we went into the world, and then eventually ended up on MTV, so we had all found our roles within the group. I was a film major in college, I studied camera and editing, so I gravitated towards filmmaking. That just became more my role―I was often the one holding the cameras, instead of the one in front of the camera.
Wait, I hear typing. Are you typing this? You don't have a recorder?
I don't need one.
Wow, old school. I like it.
State fans, including myself, tend to be a pretty rabid and devoted bunch. With your subsequent projects, have you had resistance from folks who don't want to develop in other directions?
Not really, because, surprisingly, a lot of what we've done over the years is very similar, aesthetically. There is definitely a continuum to our senses of humor, and we've always tried to do material that was true to what we find funny. So the people who liked the State tend to also like Wet Hot American Summer, The Ten, The Baxter, Reno 911...
So how do you characterize that humor? Describe the special brand of awesomeness that The State has exported to American comedy.
It's very hard to describe from the inside, I have to say. It's a collection of everything that makes me laugh. I find things funny that are very stupid. The best way to describe my sense of humor is when something happens that makes you say "wait, what?" I also find very traditional stuff funny, as well as people falling down, farting, facial expressions... Comedy is definitely a very ephemeral thing. And part of what I think was at play in The State, that made it what it was, was that we were mining it from many different angles... Everyone brought something else. You had the Christopher Marlowe references, but you also had a lot of bathroom humor, and people falling down.
And balls being dipped in things.
And Bob Dylan. And pudding.
As a kid, I had crushes on pretty much every male member of The State. Are any of them single?
Wow... [long pause, fingernails drummed on table] I'm thinking it through... I think Todd Holoubek might be single. I'm not sure. At the moment I don't think anyone is single. And most of us are married with kids. Remember, we're all approaching forty, or we're in our forties.
Who inspires your comedy?
I was very into Woody Allen growing up. I also loved movies like Heaven Can Wait, The Graduate, all the stuff from the Buck Henry clique. From a simple comedic perspective I don't think anyone was more important to me than Steve Martin. I'm speaking personally; I think each member of the group had a different set of references.
Who do you find really exciting in comedy these days.
Sasha Baron Cohen I find pretty exciting. Ricky Gervais. Not to be, like, this way, but a lot of the work I'm doing is pretty exciting. In fact, if I had to make a list I would put myself at the top, in terms of who's doing the most groundbreaking and exciting work in comedy today.
Which seems like a really good place to end this.
