Metal Lungies

Outside of the Cinema Tent at Bonnaroo, director Jeremy Konner sat down with us, burger in hand, to discuss Season Two of Comedy Central’s Drunk History which debuts July 1st at 10 P.M.

What are your plans for Bonnaroo?

We’re doing this live thing, showing clips from our new season, that [co-creator] Derek [Waters] will be hosting. We’re really excited because this season is good, man, I am thrilled about it. Drunk History is fun because as a director I feel like I’m allowed to say shit like that because the narrators are really the ones that are doing everything. The stories that they’re telling and the way they’re telling things is so good that I feel like that it’s ok that I get to be like “wait until you see [Jen] Kirkman’s Edith Wilson story”.

I know the Detroit episode was one of your favorites during Season One. Going into Season Two, is the Edith Wilson story your favorite?

Ugh, I LOVE the First Ladies episode. I think Jen Kirkman is the queen of Drunk History at this point. Molly McAleer is telling a story about Francis Cleveland, which is so funny, and then Jenny Johnson tells a story of Dolly Madison saving the fucking White House. It’s so good! Casey Wilson plays her and I mean… it’s the story that the White House is burning and she’s saving fucking George Washington and the Declaration of Independence!

It sounds like you’re changing the format a bit this season.

Just a tiny bit. Last season the Wild West was our only themed episode. We had these stories that you just couldn’t smash into a city because so many of them are a little funky when you sit back and think about it. Like… wait, Detroit is Houdini? He never lived there but he did die there. Actually, he got punched in Montreal, I think, and then he ended up in Detroit where he finally died but it’s really tough to call that a Detroit story. I don’t think that’s an issue to me, honestly, he died in Detroit so it fucking happened in Detroit. But the themed [episodes] really open things up.

Have you had any sort of fact-checker fans jump in with comments on the show?

Absolutely! We get that all the time. Not trying to be a braggart but we get historians being like “Yeah man, that actually did happen, they told the truth!”. Usually we’re going off of the most recently believed thing and we don’t do too many topics that are controversial. We do have a staff of fact checkers, if the narrator says the date and it’s wrong then we just don’t have them say it and we put the real date up on the screen.

You know, we’re not trying to tell wrong history, we’re trying to tell drunk history.

When you have [a narrator] saying “Lincoln was like ‘fuck you’” it’s actually pretty historically accurate. Yes, it was like a 30 page speech but essentially it was a ‘fuck you’.

Is there anything from Season One that didn’t air?

We had some [stories] that were about murderers that we couldn’t quite figure out how to make funny. We filmed somebody talking about H.H. Holmes from the Chicago World’s Fair who was just super grisly. We toyed around with the idea of putting that into a Halloween episode and making it really campy to try and lighten it up a bit. But, yeah, we’ve found that when there are stories that are just a little too real and end with very little hope… it’s hard.

So, these unaired bits, are these the same narrators that have done other stories? How many stories does one narrator typically tell you?

In Season One we were really figuring out what the show was and how we were going to do it. How it was going to translate from web series to television. We thought at first that we were just going to focus on quantity. We were having every narrator come to us with, or learn, two stories. Each would take about three hours [to film] and then we would film two narrators in a night which meant physically going to two people’s houses.

That’s a grind.

Yeah, we would end up going to bed at like 5 AM and the crew was just in pain. Derek, while he’s not getting wasted, he’s drinking with the narrators… it’s part of the camaraderie and nature of the show. So, we realized we couldn’t keep doing this. In Season Two we were much smarter about honing in on one story that we’re going to tell. We have one thing to do today and that’s to get this story from this person no matter what. If they don’t know a part of the story, we will sit with them and learn it. We’re not going to walk away having half a story.

Last thing, you’ve had musicians as narrators in the past, are there any rappers in Season Two?

I would love to have some rappers on the show. I’d be lying if I said we didn’t approach some rappers this season. Depending on time in the show we do today we might be showing the story of ‘Rapper’s Delight’ that we shot for our American Music episode [in Season Two]. Which will be very cool.

Check out Season Two of Drunk History, airing on Comedy Central, on July 1st, 2014 at 10 P.M.

Chances are David Geffen has had some sort of effect on your life (HE BIRTHED ASYLUM, THE LABEL GUCCI MANE IS SIGNED TO), the man is kind of a big deal. PBS dropped a documentary on him last week while you were scrambling home for Thanksgiving, I was floored after watching it out of curiosity. Rappers talk about hustling, but David Geffen was doing real hustling, venture after venture with the most powerful people. If you have an interest in pop culture, the workings/history of the entertainment & music business give yourself two hours to watch this. You might even get motivated to achieve more things with your passion, like I did. The outakes PBS has posted on their site are also worth a look as well, I mean, how can you not be interested in that Tiffany lamp story told by his good friend/Bruce Sprinsteen’s manager, Jon Landeau.

Watch Inventing David Geffen on PBS. See more from American Masters.

Holy crap, when the first digital short epic known as Lazy Sunday dropped about 6 years ago(!!), I played it countless numbers of times for nearly all my friends. With out doubt, it was one of the first things made for TV with the real intention of going viral. Sidebar: Metallungies was still on *blogspot* when we mentioned it in passing (it was so big, that it didn’t need a post, everyone had already seen it, word to my HS teachers).

Well, with Andy Samberg doing his last SNL episode, he called up the homie Chris Parnell and did what can best be described as a very worthy followup/sequel. The 101st installment of SNL Digital Short, wraps up the era nicely.

Shouts to Knobbz for picking up the brilliant ‘Welcome to Atlanta’ reference.

New York Comic Con! Baby Boba Fett with a tiny red lightsaber! Unabashed anime love! Sexy Asian Mario with big boobs! Hispanic Captain America! Comic Con, where we nerds come to roost! I wandered the floor on Thursday and Friday drinking in the sights and sounds and playing video games.

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We’re back at it! Sorry we missed you guys last week, we had to skip last week to handle some lavish travel. 8PM EST like always (we hope you adjusted your clocks, flava flav.). You can also join by using #mlamazingrace, but this week will also be picking up things with #tar & #amazingrace

Note: We might skip next week, too. Stay tuned (ML is going to SXSW, check for more info on that this week.).

We’re back like cooked crack, as Fat Joe Juelz likes to say, for live blogging action of The Amazing Race 18, Episode 2 at 8PM EST. Clear out your Sunday evening social calendar and join us. Don’t even bother DVRing the Oscars. Don’t forget that you can use the twitters with the tag #mlamazingrace, and your brilliant thoughts will be added to our feed.

So, this is kind of a random/last minute thing, but ML is teaming up with Phil Dzikiy (who our hardcore readers may recall from his chilling thoughts on our ‘Trapped in the Closet’ reviews) to live blog The Amazing Race 18 ALL SEASON LONG (unless we get our TVs stolen repossessed). You might find yourself asking, “what the hell is this about?”. Well, let me explain, as I descend into old man age demographics, I have become fond of CBS’ programming including the globe trotting The Amazing Race. This past fall, The Amazing Race 17 was my first season, and I was hooked… like Biggie’s first album hooked.

If you join us tonight, at 8pm EST (All Star? Heritage Classic? That’s why you have DVR). You can also use the twitter hashtag #mlamazingrace to get your comments added to our coverage. Note: this is the first season in HD.. word on the street is it’s pretty hard to film people running around all over the country with HD cameras (I’m not talking your flip cams), so you don’t have to suffer with Standard Def footage, like I did last year. Lastly, don’t be intimidated if you haven’t seen any prior seasons, The Amazing Race is a show you can pick up with any season, without knowing anything at all.

So join the conversation..or just read the gems that we drop on y’all, below.

I might be trying to wife MNDR. She and Q-Tip get down like long lost siblings on the Late Show stage. Neither acknowledges the awkwardness of their pairing, but the song is so dope that it almost never occurred to me that the guy who produced “One Love” is on David Letterman with an electro-dance-pop Brooklynite who looks like she could be a Charlie’s Angel. Like I said, I might be trying to wife MNDR.

Yeah, yeah, this sounds like a paid post (what is the blogger term for payola, anyway?). Well, it’s not, it’s more like a plea. I came across Lone Star (a new drama on FOX) this past week.. I DVRed it, and got around to finally watching it a few days ago and was really compelled to stick it out for the long haul. Being the exciting person that I am, I decided to google to see what the internets were saying about the show. The reviews seemed positive but it put up abysmal TV ratings (going up against such intellectually stimulating shows such as DWTS (Dancing With The Stars, duh– Situation got this!). So here is my plea, watch Lone Star on Mondays at 9pm to save it from the brink of cancellation. There is nothing worse that investing time in a *good* show to only have it cancelled like the ’94 World Series (I see you, Expos fans). Being the kind that I am, I’ve included the embed for the pilot episode below. When you are done watching, check out some press about the show’s uncertainty.

On Friday evening (I know, I know) I was aimlessly flipping through the ol’ cable box, ready to turn the TV set off, when I saw RZA’s face on NBC.  Apparently, RZA was guest starring on a new NBC show starring Jimmy Smits (of NYPD Blue fame). I only saw the tail-end of the episode but RZA was playing.. a wait for it..a person jailed for a crime he didn’t commit. Anyway if you care to see RZA’s acting the embed is below.

Now, these days, a rapper appearing on a TV series are more common than bedbugs in Manhattan, but then I stumbeled across this on youtube.

Late pass please.

RZA co-starring with Joe Jonas (Jo Bros!!), Jake Gyllenhaal, & Lil’ Jon in a video for indie darlings Vampire Weekend’s Giving Up The Gun?

Yeah.. all of that combined let me to ask the question that you see in the title of the post. I’m not in the least bit upset or worried about RZA doing all this stuff, I’m just saying, hopefully there is enough beats to do a 2nd Beat Drop this decade.