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.
Scott AukermanI'm a huge Bob Hope fan, up until about the late '50s. I've seen so many of his movies up until then, and they're a big influence on me and a big influence on Woody Allen, who is basically just ripping off Bob Hope for his first five or six movies.
Scott AukermanThings go away and projects crumble and disappear, or you make your movie and it comes out and no one watches it.
Scott AukermanWe 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..."
Scott AukermanWhen we came to the network, it was a very interesting time where Portlandia had just come on the air and had been very, very successful. I think people had Portlandia-sized expectations for Comedy Bang! Bang!, especially after the first episode was sampled by quite a large number of people. I remember getting the ratings after the first episode, and the network was over the moon about it. And then the second episode tanked so hard. Like, no one watched it. It was a resounding, "Hey, a bunch of people tried your show, and they all hate it!"
Scott Aukerman