Scott Aukerman

Scott Aukerman
Scott Aukermanis an American writer, actor, comedian, television personality, director, producer, and podcast host. Starting as a writer and performer in the later seasons of the sketch series Mr. Show, Aukerman is best known as the host of the weekly comedy podcast Comedy Bang! Bang! as well as the IFC original television series of the same name. Aukerman is the co-creator of Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis and co-founder of the Earwolf podcast network...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth2 July 1970
CitySavannah, GA
CountryUnited States of America
I think that 'Mr. Show' was a huge influence on me. It was literally the reason I started doing comedy, because I was asked to do a bit at The Comedy Store, and B.J. Porter and I went to see Bob and David - who I'd never heard of - do a live show, which was one of the shows that got them the 'Mr. Show' show.
I remember when I first started, the first movie I wrote that didn't get made I was aghast. 'Wait a minute, that's not how this is supposed to work. You write a move and it gets made!'
I would say we had two goals when doing this CD. The first goal is to introduce people who have never seen the show before to the best comics that are on the show. And goal number two is to introduce people that they never heard of before and give you a bit more flavor of what the show is actually like. And those goals are very much in line with the philosophy of the show from the very beginning. It's the very best people who are out there...
I find I've always been judgmental about comedy (laughs) and it's hard to turn that off, really. But what constant exposure to live comedy does is it makes you give people a second chance.
Intimacy is really good. But then again, the first disk on the record is not intimate in the least. It's a really good CD.
We like to keep the show small. Honestly, where we moved the show to the UCB theater, we moved it to a smaller space. Even though the show has technically gotten more popular. And that is, only because we like intimacy and the ability to experiment more. We don't want to be like, "We can get 250 people in a week. So let's do that. But we have to be careful about who we book..."
You become a victim of your own success. It's what happens in TV when Fox has a big hit with the X-Files. And they start chasing and the rest of their shows suffer. Because the experimentation that made the X-Files a show is all of the sudden lost.
Others may dispute this, we have tried to keep that sense of experimentation and putting new people up alive. And we haven't become a show, where we're like, "We know the 20 comics who are good and we're just going to keep on recycling them."
The show became popular as aspecialthing became popular. And Sasquatch, the guy who runs that site, started coming to every show and reviewing it. And when people start talking about the reviews from the stage. That to me is really self indulgent and we tried to put a caper on that.
You have to pay your dues. And what's nice, after booking a lot of new people... I counted the other day. We're in September and we've already booked between 30 or 40 people who've never done the show before.
Each week we usually have one person who's never done the show before. Last year we had close to 60 who'd never done the show before. We're constantly booking new people, sometimes to the consternation of people who live here who do the show regularly.
But the great thing about shows now is since we've been doing (Comedy Death Ray), they have lightened up on their booking policies a bit more and are booking somebody who isn't famous and who hasn't been around ten years. It's great to see people who've done our show - the first big show they've ever done - now they can play around town.
Thank you for listening to Comedy Bang Bang! My name is Scott Aukerman and I will see you next week.
And that's the thing about our show: what are they going to do put on the poster? I don't know. It's always easier when you have someone like Cedric the Entertainer where you can go, "You know this guy. You love this guy. Watch his sketch show." And then people tune in and go, "I though I knew that guy. I don't love that guy in a sketch show."