There was a famous commercial in the ’80s, in which a soap-opera doc hawked a cough syrup with the caveat, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.” Well, things are a lot less cut ’n’ dried on the meta-sitcom Michael and Michael Have Issues, in which sketch comedians Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black play “themselves” creating a sketch-comedy show called Michael and Michael Have Issues.
“It’s a case of write what you know,” says Showalter, who previously co-starred with Black on MTV’s short-lived ’90s cult sketch show The State and its even shorter-lived (and cultier) mid-’00s follow-up, Stella. “Most comedians write with themselves in mind. I could have named my character Michael Blowater but, I figure, why bother pretending it’s not me?”
“Personally I have always found the idea of playing a fictitious version of myself interesting because, as an audience member, I’ve always enjoyed watching people playing ‘themselves’ and trying to discern what was real and what wasn’t,” adds Black, who most recently stole scenes as a gay angel in Reaper. “We wanted to do something that was a true reflection of our lives, at least truer than some of the other stuff we’ve done in the past. It’s not exactly autobiographical, but it certainly comes closer than previous shows.”
MMHI combines a mockumentary-style backstage narrative with scenes from their show-within-a-show. This is not a new trope, of course. Well before 30 Rock and Larry Sanders there was The Dick Van Dyke Show, in which Van Dyke played a writer for a TV star played by Carl Reiner, who’d created the series based on his own experiences writing for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows.
“We thought about setting [the show] in a more corporate setting but thought that the sketches would seem weird,” says Showalter. “Like, why would these stockbrokers be doing live sketches in front of an audience?”
“Although I personally would love to see a show about stockbrokers who do sketches,” Black says, “we just wanted an environment that would allow us to be ourselves but also allow for sketches.”
The format certainly frees up the duo to inject their surrealist humour into a show that might otherwise get bogged down by behind-the-scenes bickering between the passive-aggressive partners. Black calls it “a fun counterpoint to the narrative,” but it’s also often the hardest part of these backstage-set series.
While, say, The Muppet Show made sketches the primary focus, 30 Rock is a workplace farce that rarely shows more than a few seconds of meta TGS segments at a time. The late, unlamented Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip died partly because creator Aaron Sorkin couldn’t write anything funny for his show-within-a-show.
Some of the Michaels’ in-front-of-a-live-studio-audience stage banter and pre-taped sketches relate to the main plot — for instance, during an episode where the pair try to buy their producer pot for his birthday, there’s an anti-drug duologue about just saying no “unless you’re old, depressed, want a pick-me-up, want music to sound better or are just bored.” Other times, the sketches are just weird for weirdness’ sake: a sad store that sells only sweatpants; a very quiet weatherman; professional bunny stomping....
The pair’s absurdist and sometimes mean-spirited humour has kept up their cult cred but has also made it hard to attract a wider audience, even with seemingly accessible projects like the criminally underappreciated 2001 movie Wet Hot American Summer, which Showalter co-wrote and featured in with Black, alongside Janeane Garofalo, Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler and others.
“One nice thing about our careers is that, while people often don’t get what we’re doing when we’re doing it, the stuff tends to stick around and find an audience,” Black says. “We’re hoping with MMHI people discover it while we’re actually making it.”
» Michael and Michael Have Issues airs Wednesdays, 10pm on The Comedy Network