Suit Allure

by Andrew Goldman

Just in time to fill the time slot slated for Dave Chappelle’s nonexistent third season comes Stella, an absurdist Marx Brothers-esque half-hour starring Michael Ian Black, Michael Showalter, and David Wain as three well-meaning sociopaths named Michael, Michael, and David. They share an apartment and follow virtually none of the rules of polite society, except a fondness for dark suits. Stella’s cast comprised 3/11ths of the groundbreaking sketch troupe The State, which imploded in 1996 after three seasons on MTV and one fruitless tryout on CBS as a potential SNL competitor. Over the last several years—when Showalter wasn’t acting in movies like Signs, Wain wasn’t busy directing Wet Hot American Summer, and Black wasn’t seeing how many hours of the day one man could spend making droll comments on VH-1—the trio made short films to screen at Stella, a long-running weekly comedy show they hosted in Manhattan. The Comedy Central version bears a resemblance to those films, but as the Stella stars recently told Radar Online, don’t hold your breath for any of their trademark man-on-man humping.

RADAR ONLINE: The original Stella shorts were pretty raw. Was there any subject you deemed off limits?

SHOWALTER: Part of the experiment was to see if there existed anything that would be too far. So we just kept pushing further and further to see if there would ever be that joke that the audience would think was too much. It never happened.

What do you think is the closest you got?

BLACK: When we sucked Mrs. Claus’s cock.

Hmmm?

SHOWALTER: See, we decide to go find Santa Claus. We have a Sherpa who leads us there. He dies. We eat him to stay alive. We finally get there, accidentally kill Rudolph, and while Santa is off delivering presents Mrs. Claus reveals that she has a dick.
WAIN: And we suck it.
SHOWALTER: All three of us take turns.
BLACK: We suck it hard.

You guys also engage in a great deal of humping in those shorts. Did Comedy Central give you any notes?

BLACK: Yes. They said, “Please don’t do as much humping.” And we said okay.
SHOWALTER: With the Comedy Central show we’ve found that the silly stuff has started to emerge as the pornographic stuff has ebbed away.

Tell me about these three Stella characters. Have you talked about who they are at great length?

[Black yawns conspicuously.]

Was the question that boring?

BLACK: No, it wasn’t the question that was boring me. I never think of yawning as a sign of boredom.
SHOWALTER: You really should reconsider that. There are qualities of ourselves in the characters. My character is a little sensitive, a little neurotic. He’s got a temper problem. He’s a bit moody—
BLACK:—and hard to work with.
WAIN:—and a shitty writer.
BLACK: I think of my character as a quiet sociopath. Maybe he thinks he’s a little superior.
WAIN: I’m more social than the others.
BLACK: David’s secret superpower is that he can fuck whenever he wants it.
WAIN: But I do get put upon more than the others.
BLACK: So he’s the victim and the fuck machine.

Comedy Central has boldly stated that you guys are attempting to reinvent narrative comedy.

BLACK: We never said that. That phrasing comes from the top at Comedy Central. They feel there’s a mandate that half-hour comedy is dead, at least on network, and we just came along at a time when they’re trying to figure out ways to reinvent it, so they sort of shoehorned us in that description.
WAIN: Not that it’s wildly inaccurate. What we’re doing doesn’t really follow a format that’s been tried before, so maybe it’s a new form of comedy half-hour.
BLACK: But it’s not. Other shows have tried to do this sort of thing. The Young Ones comes to mind.

Why isn’t The State available on DVD?

WAIN: I honestly have no clue. I’ve been in intermittent contact with MTV for years, and they keep saying, “Yeah, we’re going to put it out.” But they never do it. There’s a petition on the Internet with 25,000 signatures asking them to put it out.
BLACK: I just don’t think they think there’s a market for it. If they thought there was a buck to be made, MTV would do it.
WAIN: But apparently there’s a market for 227. That just got released on DVD.
BLACK: I think if Stella does well, there might be a chance that Comedy Central would release it.

In 1996, after you left MTV and right before The State broke up, Details ran a long article about The State’s attempt to get a show on CBS. In it, one of the members of The State quotes CBS’s head of late-night programming making a racist remark in a meeting. Do you think that piece was destructive to the group, or the group’s chances on the network?

BLACK: We were self-destructing on our own.
WAIN: Regardless of that mini-scandal, I don’t think that project would have panned out. I just don’t think CBS really had any investment in us. But I do think that it’s a widely held view among the 11 of us that it probably wasn’t the best idea, leaving MTV when we did.

John Pike, the head of late-night programming, was forced to step down over his comments about black viewing habits. Do you regret that he lost his job?

BLACK: Not really. He’s a cock.
SHOWALTER: [To Black] Um, I really don’t want to have this article be another thing like the Details article.
BLACK: I don’t have any compunction about saying it. He was! And we don’t work for John Pike anymore. I’m not going to mourn for him or for his collection of Arabian horses he constantly talked about.

What’s the biggest difference in the day-to-day atmosphere of doing Stella and the days you three were members of The State?

SHOWALTER: From the very beginning of The State it was very cutthroat, very Skull and Bones. Every minute there was always someone in the group whose job was in jeopardy. It was actually a very tortuous, bad environment to be in.
WAIN: I think that intensity contributed to the quality of the comedy.
SHOWALTER: But this thing is very different. We’re still competitive and we still argue, but it’s a much looser approach. We much more embrace each other’s—
BLACK: —foibles.
SHOWALTER: —foibles, and we’re not nearly as cutthroat. There’s no danger of any of us getting fired. Well, at least there’s no danger of either me or Mike Black getting kicked out.

Stella, Tuesdays, 10:30 p.m., Comedy Central