Magic, Music and Nick Offerman’s Sex Advice: An Evening With ‘Childrens Hospital’
“Childrens Hospital” will head into its seventh
season with four Emmy nods and two wins under its belt, and spent an evening
at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Los Angeles — maybe to campaign a little for
another win, but mostly to celebrate another year of satire, sitcom and medically accurate advice.
The Rob Corddry comedy was born out of the compulsory
idleness of 2007’s Writers Guild Strike, and found a niche to stream online with
The WB before Adult Swim picked up the rights to air, where “Childrens Hospital” has remained since. It stars an ensemble cast portraying the staff of Childrens Hospital – named after Dr. Arthur Childrens – who also star in medical drama “Childrens Hospital,” the show within the show.
After a screening of the show’s Emmy nominated episode,
“Just Like Cyrano De Bergerac,” and the equally droll “Me, Owen,” the audience was treated
to the musical talents Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally with their duet on
boning Jesus and a magical act by David Wain, concluding with a Q&A with
some of the show’s actors.
Ahead, a few highlights from the evening.
Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally are still the greatest.
You know you’re a great couple when people come up to you
for sex advice, and Nick Offerman is definitely well aware. “People often enjoy hearing us
talk about fucking each other,” Offerman said in his introduction to the song
he had written with wife Megan Mullally. “People
come to us from all walks of life to ask for our expertise in the arts of
lovemaking. But recently there was one notable exception.”
Offerman
strummed away on his guitar while Mullally played on a ukulele, harmonizing treasures
like:
“His mercy is infinite, his beard is the tits,
And he exploded, my b-hole to bits.”
And:
“On that day we
nailed more than the cross.”
Maybe we can get an album out of all this.
“I’m actually very shy but when it comes to time to do
it for real for a job, I’ll literally do anything.”
So said Megan Mullally about her character Lady Jane
Bentick-Smith, who plays Chief on the
show within the show, and how Mullally is really nothing like her.
She continued with an anecdote about the day she filmed a make out scene with one of her new co-stars before the two were ever introduced to each
other:
“There was that one scene, it was several scenes ago,
we were talking about it the other day, where I had to go down the line and
make out with everyone. So I don’t know why, but I didn’t get introduced to Armen
[Weitzman] before the shoot. I’m not sure how that happened. And we were legitimately making out with everyone, and I get
to him and he took me and he really laid it on me more than anyone else. And
then they were like ‘Cut,’ and I was like, ‘Hi.'”
15 minutes is a perfect fit for the show.
Creator and star Rob Corddry originally intended to keep the
show online as a web series, because he didn’t really see the point of making
the move to television when he had all he needed on the internet. But the
15-minute format offered by Adult Swim swayed Corddry just enough to see the
show airing on the network for the next six years.
“I think this kind of humor – sort of machine
gun joke – would get, at least it might get tiresome to me after about 15, 20
minutes,” he said. “I think it’s better in short bursts.”
“Childrens Hospital” is in its groove now.
“Tonally now, I feel like we’re in a groove at this point it’s been years,” said Lake Bell, explaining how the show has found its footing. “So I think tonally, we just kind of like lock in.”
Brian Husky added:
“Writing wise, I think they’re in their groove now.
They know what they’re doing. I
wrote a few episodes and it was funny to get notes of like, ‘That’s too insane,
that wouldn’t happen,’ and I’m like, ‘You guys are literally superheroes in one
episode.’ But now the rules of the world are, let’s follow sort of
a thematic, genre specific storyline and add some jokes to support those genre
specifics, and I think that’s where the satire comes along.”
The Los Angeles
comedic community is a love fest.
Which is fantastic for us and for “Childrens
Hospital,” which has been able to snag guest spots from stars like Jon Hamm, Nick
Offerman, Lizzy Caplan and Eva Longoria.
“You know there are certain little packs like, there’s stand-up,
there’s improv and then everything else. And that is very blended and mixed up
now,” Husky explained. “It’s a small community
and a surprisingly, I think right now it’s a much more supportive environment in
the ’80s or ’90s – I wasn’t doing it in the ’80s – but I think that time was the kind of cutthroat like, be a stand-up, get your thing, screw everybody else. And now it is, if you’re going
to do something funny, I would like to be a part of that. It’s very inclusive.
It’s a love fest.”
“Childrens Hospital” airs on Adult Swim and will return for a seventh season next year.
