Kristen Schaal

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Kristen Schaal: The toast of American comedy
She made her name as a crazed fan in Flight Of The Conchords. Now she is the rising star of the Daily Show – and an unlikely sex guru to boot
John Patterson
The Guardian,
16 October 2010

Kristen Schaal is best known for being Flight Of The Conchords' superfan, but today she is the one being accosted by enthusiastic strangers. In the 10 yards between the restaurant in downtown San Francisco where she has just had lunch and the bookstore where she's about to do a signing, the comedian gets stopped by no fewer than three fans, one of whom pulls his car up to the kerb and yells, "Kristen Schaal! Oh my God!"

Schaal is in town to promote The Sexy Book Of Sexy Sex, which she co-wrote with her partner, Rich Blomquist, a writer on John Stewart's Daily Show. We sit next to an enlarged version of the author photo, featuring Schaal and Blomquist lounging in white bathrobes, glowering sexily at the camera. It takes a moment to notice that the v of Schaal's bathrobe sprouts as much chest hair as Blomquist's. "That's all me, baby – I drank a lot of coffee that day," she trills in her Minnie Mouse-ish voice, halfway between a giggle and a gurgle. "My dad always used to tell me when I was too little for coffee that it'd put hair on my chest. And see – he wasn't wrong."

Today, Schaal, 32, is wearing a grey frock, purple stockings and dark flats – half geek-chic, half Pippi Longstocking. With her reddish hair in a raggy bob, her Clara Bow lips and saucer-sized green-grey eyes, she has the look of a silent movie star. It is the absolute control she has over her face – the eyes, the narrow-wide mouth – that is the key to her comedy; on television it can contort into a manic weirdness, but in person she's oddly pretty, in the best way.

After a half-decade of stand-up comedy, waitressing, the usual round of auditions and hostile improv audiences, Schaal's career has arrived at a turning point. After Flight Of The Conchords, she played Paul Rudd's crudely ambitious assistant in the Steve Carell comedy Dinner For Schmucks and has just voiced characters for Toy Story 3 and the next Shrek movie (one in the eye for the high-school voice coach who said to her, "Oh my God, you have a terrible lisp!"). She's been the Daily Show's "senior women's issues correspondent" since the 2008 election (the archaic euphemism "women's issues" is classic Schaal) and will soon be heard in Fox TV's new animated show Bob's Burgers. And now she has published a dirty book. "I got it all from Harlequin romance novels," Schaal says, "or at least a lot of my contribution comes from those. When I was growing up, when, uh, my body was changing" – these words are accompanied by a leer – "I would go to the library and grab a bunch of those books, sit in a corner and look for the dirty bits."

She had a nice, if "slightly repressed" childhood on a cattle farm in rural Colorado, not far from Boulder (a region that's half hippy, half religious fundamentalist). Her parents are Lutherans of Dutch extraction and she has a brother three years older, whose porn videos first fired her pubescent imagination. "My parents are pretty religious, devout, but did they force it on me? No, I don't think so. I still think of myself as a Lutheran, just one who doesn't go to church. It's easy to resist religious influence, but I feel like they cared about it so much that I ought to honour them for it in some way."

Was she a strange kid? "I think growing up on a farm in a certain amount of isolation, with not a lot of friends nearby, makes you entertain yourself and kind of grows your imagination – being alone is quite good for all that. You make up stories, talk to the animals, let them be an audience, a bunch of cows. Also, I would make up stories and scare myself a lot, like I would convince myself that all my dolls would come to life and kill me somehow, and I'd hide outside from them till my mom got home. So, yes, I think I was kind of a strange kid."

Growing up on a cattle farm must have given her an edge when it came to indelicate matters like copulation? "Oh God, yes. I saw cows make love for the first time, and it's something to see. The way a bull's penis looks – like a red serpent... it's incredibly hard to watch. Or to stop watching. And a horse gets a grip on a mare during sex by grabbing her mane with his teeth – it's brutal!" There's a photograph in the book of a horse with a giant pendulous penis and the caption: "The similarity to unicorns isn't the only reason that girls love ponies."

Other entries in the book include a list of safe and dangerous vaginal stimulators ("Dil-dos and Dil-don'ts"), "Bestselling Sex Toys Of All Time" (Rubik's Pubes and Horny Horny Hippos) and an illustrated spot-the-fetish gallery. The book is a second cousin to the Daily Show's bestselling faux-textbooks, America: The Book and Earth: The Book and, like them, it's a worthy descendant of the Monty Python books of the 1970s, which she takes as a great compliment.

"It came about when Rich and I would talk on the phone, because I'd be working and he was far away, we would tell each other sexy stories, make them up. The book's a combination of erotic short stories that are hopefully funny, and hopefully erotic, and other stuff, more listy or theme-based, all in the form of a school textbook tome. But you have to know where to hide it from the children. I've already apologised, in advance, to the director of Toy Story 3, who introduced me to his kids."

Comedy was not what Schaal had planned to do with her life. "I thought I would either be an epidemiologist or a Price Is Right model. With the epidemiology, I thought I could stop Aids in its tracks, but it turned out I needed to be better at maths, so I instantly gave up." At Northwestern University in Chicago, Schaal got involved with the city's vibrant stand-up and improv scene, before moving to New York, where she waitressed and auditioned. "Back then, I would have a slice of pizza for lunch and a beer for dinner, because I couldn't afford anything else."

Rescue from waitressing came in the form of a 2005 New York magazine piece entitled The Ten Funniest New Yorkers You've Never Heard Of. "That turned out to be my biggest break, because the people from HBO Comedy Festival started to come see me in the clubs. From that I got spotted for Flight Of The Conchords." There were also some pilots, including for Mad Men. "I was one of the three switchboard operators, the one in the middle. I was smoking those fake cigarettes and I was puffing away like this" – her hand flails wildly back and forth towards her mouth, like a five-year-old imitating smoking. "And [Mad Men creator] Matthew Weiner came up to me and said, 'You don't smoke, do you?' I'm like, 'Uh, noooooo...' So he said, 'Why don't we just leave it in the ashtray when the time comes?'"

But it was Flight Of The Conchords that gave her high visibility. Mel, the deeply damaged, possibly insane stalker/number-one-fan of the Conchords, is one of the creepiest characters in recent US comedy, whose over-friendliness and nakedly sexual pursuit of the Conchords go unchecked, even when her fiance is present. "I know I'm really glad that that person's not following me around like a stalker!" Schaal says. "Mel was based on some of [the Conchords'] experiences with actual fans. There's a lot of stuff on the show that has happened to those guys in real life, and Mel is one of them, or a version of some of them. I made sure that I did it even creepier than the actual people it's based on."

Since the show aired, she's appeared on David Letterman's Late Show, among other chatshows, and in a dozen or so movies. "But it's all over in an afternoon, because mostly it's cameos. People say it's silly money for this kind of work, but they're only right in the sense that it's often so little it's silly. It's all work."

And then there's the Daily Show, which was recently criticised for its shortage of female presenters. Schaal has noted elsewhere that critics signally failed to mention her own sketch just weeks earlier, decrying sexism against Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential run, "presumably because it killed their thesis". "There's two female writers out of, I think, eight writers," she says, "but a lot of the producers on the Daily Show are women, the ones really running stuff. So it's definitely not 50-50 yet, but whatever. I've never been in the writers' room, but I feel like, if I was, I would instantly just whip out all their dicks and see if they could deal with it. I'm around comics and writers all the time, and I've never been offended by men and their salty sex-talk." After all, she asks, before proceeding to pose for the camera with two crab-shaped balloons, grimacing and spitting sexual innuendos ("Crabbbbbbbbbbbssss! Clam chowder!"), "Where would comedy be without bawdiness?" •

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Kristen Schaal
Steve Heisler
January 20, 2011
avclub.com

The larger comedy community was introduced to Kristen Schaal through her work as lovable stalker Mel on Flight Of The Conchords. And only a short time following the end of that show, Schaal became a constant in new and exciting comedy projects. She’s appeared in Human Giant, How I Met Your Mother, and Modern Family, and even popped up in the pilot of Mad Men as a switchboard operator. Her voice graced Toy Story 3, and she can currently be heard in the new animated series Bob’s Burgers on Fox, which also features the voices of Eugene Mirman, Andy Kindler, and H. Jon Benjamin. She also maintains a steady presence on New York stages, performing in occasional improv shows at the People’s Improv Theater and going up regularly at independent stand-up shows, including one she co-produces with Kurt Braunohler. The A.V. Club spoke to Schaal about her piecemeal work on Bob’s Burgers, her ever-evolving definition of “quirky,” and stand-up bits that shouldn’t be repeated.

How do you typically get involved with voiceover projects?
I don’t really shop around. I just need for someone to ask me to do it, and I do it. This one was especially fun because it started years ago when Fox was experimenting with Loren Buchard’s idea. We would go into a studio and record a scene together; six months would go by and they’d ask for another scene. After a couple years of that, I never really considered that Bob’s Burgers would be an actual, realized show. [When they got back in contact,] it was always a surprise, like, “Oh, that’s a thing again?” When I got the email from Loren telling me Fox had picked it up, it was out of nowhere. But it’s been really fun to do, like, a press conference with Eugene. [Laughs.]

You just finished 15 interviews for the show, in a row. How do you stay present during those arduous junkets?
It’s tough. You don’t want to, but you end up repeating yourself. In the beginning you say like, “My character is described as these three adjectives.” Then you wanna give them three different ones, but by the end you’re just like, “Forget it.” If they’re gonna ask the same question, I’m gonna answer it the same way…One of the guys put a funny interview online where Eugene and John Roberts and I lost it at the end of a three-hour junket. John Roberts started doing impressions of every character from The Facts Of Life.

How did you learn to conduct interviews?
Trial by fire. [Laughs.] I’ve learned you have to be a bit more guarded. And also that you can’t really make jokes. They don’t come across in print. Sarcasm doesn’t read sarcastic in print.

You do a lot of writing for yourself. What goes into the decision to work on something you didn’t write?
I love the idea that I have the power to look for the projects I can put myself into, but I’m still at that level of just being happy to have a job. I haven’t been in the position too much where I was offered a job and was like, “This job isn’t going to be fun because it’s something I wouldn’t want to watch.” I’ve been lucky. The projects I’ve gotten to work on are projects I’d want to watch myself. That’s what I try to shoot for. That’s not always the case in this business. Usually the projects I really like watching, I’m not getting asked to work on…For me, my big break was doing Flight Of The Conchords, then people who were fans watched some of the stuff I do. I lucked out on their sloppy seconds.

What I look for in jobs are things that are quirky. But I would hate to say that and then have to take work in a mainstream movie that’s not exceptional. People are so critical of the jobs you take, and I try very hard to do work that I’m proud of, but sometimes it’s like, what do you want? I’d love to be in all of Wes Anderson’s movies. [Laughs.] As far as getting to do Bob’s Burgers and Toy Story, I’m lucky that people who want to do fun and exciting things want to work with me. I’m just not at a place where I said, “Ooh, Toy Story 3: I think I should get involved in that.” [Laughs.]

You maintain a very regular stand-up schedule, where your comedy has been labeled “alternative.” How did you fall into the alt comedy scene?
I realized I wanted to put myself up at least once a week in New York, and so I would write new material every week. It turned out the places I was going were dubbed “alternative” places, so then I was an alternative comedian…[Nowadays,] I’ll find that if I’m doing a college gig, I stick to the stuff I know works, because I’m getting paid. If it’s a show I’m not getting paid for, like the one I host with Kurt Braunohler in Brooklyn, I try every show to do brand new material.

At one of the shows I saw, you and Kurt doused yourselves in paint, then rubbed your bodies against a blank piece of paper.
That never was done before, and that’ll never happen again. [Laughs.] We did a bit about bedbugs; I told Kurt that I had sex with Satan, and he had impregnated me with bedbugs. Then we threw peppercorns into the audience. I mean, if I describe the things to you, you’ll instantly know why they were only done once. [Laughs.]

How did you meet Kurt?
We were both doing improv at the People’s Improv Theater [in New York], and we wanted to do a variety show. I wanted to provide a room for people to come and do even weirder things than I was seeing. In the beginning I wanted to have themes, like everyone who came would have to do something related to “water,” or “blue.” But it turned into whatever we could get. [Laughs.]

What’s your stand-up schedule like now? How often do you go up in a typical week?
Three times. It’s important; I think it refines your work. I’m finding it’s also important to take breaks.

Was there a particular time you burned out?
Maybe now. [Laughs.] I go through cycles: I get excited, then I think I perform too much and I never want to set foot on the stage again, then I’m excited. I think it’s healthy to let it come-and-go. The thing about stand-up is that it’s a show that goes year-round. Everyone else who has a regular gig, you can at least take breaks. You can’t really clock out of stand-up.

Do you find yourself exhausted with the freelance schedule?
I would function better with a regular job. When I do get work—like for example tomorrow I’m working one day. Sometimes I’ll get lucky and it’ll be for a week or two. I’m so happy to be around people. I just really like people, and being a freelancer can be lonely during the day, when you’re at home trying to write anything you can. Flight Of The Conchords was so wonderful because I had a family for two years. Then I lost them!

How do you handle the grind?
I make lists. I’ll get on the Internet for too long, and I don’t have a boss sticking his head in the door like, “Hey Kristen, you probably shouldn’t read that.” I’ll be on the Internet for so long, I get bored with the Internet. I find I don’t get anything done until about four o’clock, when I realize I’ve wasted my day.

Was there a moment when you realized you knew exactly what you found funny?
I can’t think of a specific moment, but I do remember getting more excited when I would watch South Park episodes, when things were pushed beyond what I’d normally hear in a joke.

You mentioned “quirky” earlier. The industry doesn’t really treat “quirky” well. There’s normal, then there’s quirky, and there’s very little middle ground.
All the best movies are the ones that are cut from a more middle ground. That’s why I’m going to write that. I’m trying to get a TV show made right now, but you know. I have no power. I’m just sitting and waiting for them to call and say, “We’re passing.” It’s a comedy Western I wrote with my boyfriend Rich Blomquist. It’s a half hour, kinda ridiculous. It’s a long-shot, but all the characters are quirky, so there’s no going back.

How long did it take to write that script?
It came out pretty quickly. I think we were able to write it in about a week or two, but we had outlined it a few months before. But I pitched the idea a year ago. This has been a fun one. It was one of those things where I didn’t wanna procrastinate on it because I enjoyed it so much. I would get things done ahead of deadline. Whatever happens, it was encouraging that writing was fun again.

You also worked with Rich on the book The Sexy Book Of Sexy Sex. What kind of a working relationship do you guys have?
Yeah the Western wasn’t even supposed to be—it was my project, but then we’d be sitting at brunch and he’d ask how it was going. I’d say, “I have this character, and I’m thinking of doing this and that,” and he’d say, “That’s good, and you should also do this.” Next thing I know, we’d written an outline together. [Laughs.] We both have similar sensibilities that play off each other really well. It’s easy to work with him, too, because we work together. We don’t have to rent an office or anything. And if it’s fun, it’s almost as fun as going out. [Laughs.] I know that sounds so gross.