“You know who likes fried chicken? Black people. You know who else likes fried chicken? Everybody.”
Nick Kroll has been doing the fried chicken joke for a while, and wherever he is, whether he’s on Live at Gotham, performing on Jimmy Kimmel or on his home turf at Upright Citizen’s Brigade in Los Angeles, everyone in the room laughs. He has a sharp yet friendly way of delivering it—like he’s doing a bit with you rather than telling a one-sided joke. “I love doing stand up,” he says. “I love that you can grab a microphone and go anywhere in the country and talk to a group of people and make them laugh. And you don’t need props, you don’t need wigs, you don’t need anyone explaining anything. Everyone understands it. Sometimes they’re not gonna like you—but you know, I like that.” Upright Citizen’s Brigade is a home base for Kroll, a foundation to keep the emerging talent anchored as he spins his career through enough media channels to make your head spin. First there was the Internet—his shorts like “The Ed Hardy Boyz” and his audition tape as Bobby Bottle Service for The Jersey Shore were some of the most-watched pieces of comedy online this year. Then there’s television, with HBO’s Life and Times of Tim and FX’s The League. Most recently he’s clawed his way onto the big screen with roles in four movies releasing this year. If Nick Kroll were an outfit, he’d be described as “high-low.” If your shirt is from Target and it looks good enough to wear with your Chanel bag, then not only is it a damn good shirt, it’s also available to everyone. Being high-low is having range. “I came up at UCB and this place called Rafifi in New York and Largo, and it’s a very specific audience that goes to those shows,” he explains. “It’s college educated, upper-middle class white people in their twenties and thirties.” The difference between Nick and most of the comics who come up in that scene, even the really good ones, is that most of them stay there. Being part of this hyper-intellectual community is both exciting and essential for Nick, but he has his eye on a much broader fan base. “The people who I respect a lot like Louis CK, Chris Rock or Seinfeld—those guys can go and make anyone laugh. It doesn’t matter if it’s super blue collar or super rich, or whatever. They’re just funny. There are certain universal truths that everyone can understand, and I think that’s what I aspire to.” On the other hand, he’s careful to qualify, “If I only can make certain people laugh then so be it—I don’t want to tell jokes that I don’t think are funny to get a broader audience.” At the high end of Nick’s “high-low” continuum are the characters he invents for his bits at UCB. “The UCB audience has a very specific point of view on the world,” Nick admits. “It’s very ironic.” Fabrice Fabrice, who was his first character to catch on with live audiences, is the vicious, gay craft service guy on the set of That’s So Raven. He struts on to the stage at the start of every show in a pink polo belly-shirt, pink flip-down Uggs, and two pairs of sunglasses. Another UCB favorite is Gil Faizon, an Upper West side divorcee with an affected accent, an affinity for Allan Alda, and possibly a coke problem. In a skit at UCB in New York, Nick and John Mulaney gave a walking tour of the city in ribbed turtlenecks, blazers, and gray wigs. In front of a picture of Central Park Nick points to an imaginary passer-by and says, “Oh look at that, it’s a brown woman walking around with her white babies,” to which John responds, “Oh that is a genetic mystery.” “We applaud it,” says Nick. They then take the audience to “The hot cultural center, Times Squaaaaare”, where John comments, “You know the problem with an anonymous jerk-off booth, is that you still know who you are.” The audience
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laughs at every joke. They’re New Yorkers, so they get it. Falling somewhere in the middle ground between the Chanel bag and the Target shirt is Nick’s TV work. There’s his role on FX’s The League, which has lately been getting him recognized on the streets by meatheads and bespectacled comedy nerds alike. Then there’s his role as Stu on the animated HBO series, The Life and Times of Tim. Nick describes Stu as “the kind of guy who eats garbage burritos and is totally in love with Tim’s girlfriend and talks about it openly in front of everyone.” The show is mostly improvised, and it was Nick’s first big job—one he got after a casting director saw him perform live. “My first audition literally on a skype internet phone from my friend’s place in Chinatown. We’ve done two seasons and it’s so fucking fun. The guests this year—Will Forte came in and Jennifer Coolidge came in and Super Dave Ozborne came in. I got to improvise a scene with Elliot Gould. Bob Odenkirk and Bonnie Hunt came in. All these people who have been making their living in comedy for forty years—they just come in and I get to fuck around with them on a completely even playing field.” On the mordantly delicious low end of his lowbrow side, Kroll has ensnared a huge audience obsessed with his newer personalities who live on the Internet. Bobby Bottle Service has been getting a lot of play lately—an Italian-American, Vaselinelipped entrepreneur (record producing and pool cleaning) with a giant photo-realistic tattoo of his mother’s face on his back. Bobby Bottle Service has an audition tape for The Jersey Shore in which he promises to “Respect the shit out of those girls, like Snooki, who looks like she’s been smooshed down to the size of a bowling ball with a tan and fake nails, which is very attractive to me.” And the audition tape is a side project for Bobby B, who’s best known for solving crime in “The Ed Hardy Boyz,” an Internet series Kroll writes and produces with with Jon Daly. The first episode is called “The Case of the Missing Sick Belt Buckle.” Kroll’s Internet characters aren’t just for people who work in the entertainment industry or live in a big city and are friends with the guy in the ticket booth at UCB. If you get MTV, you get these characters and you laugh. And then there’s the Target shirt, that golden icon of lowbrow success: The Big Screen. Kroll has landed parts in four movies coming out this year—Get Him to the Greek with Jonah Hill and Russell Brand, Dinner for Schmucks with Steve Carrell and Paul Rudd, Date Night with Tina Fey and Steve Carrell, and Little Fockers, in which he gets to do a scene with Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson and Robert De Niro. “It’s amazing to be in a room with De Niro, but to be able to fuck around with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson and come up with a bit with Owen Wilson. I got to be like, What if we do this and what about that and do you like that? And they were like, Funny, we’ll do it.” If you take Nick’s joke about fried chicken and replace “fried chicken” with “Nick Kroll” and “black” with “nerdy,” you have a picture of where he stands on the map. “I get to do so many different things simultaneously. I get to live and breathe comedy and make living doing it, and get recognized occasionally. There’s so many ways to create things and so many ways to let people know what you’re creating. That’s what’s exciting for me.” It’s like he’s on SNL, but with limitless creative freedom. On trusting his instincts, Kroll says, “What it comes down to is that I’m much more scared of regret than I am of rejection. And that makes me do embarrassing things. But I’d rather do embarrassing things than regret not having done them. And ninety-five per cent of the time I feel right. Everything is a risk at various levels, and sometimes I’ll jokingly say—not even jokingly—that it’s easy to risk failure if you can’t conceive of not being recognized for what you do.”