It's not every day you get to hear the voice of Spongebob Square Pants drop the F bomb.
Such is the splendor of Comic-Con.
Gonogeek was invited to the press session to hype Comedy Central's new animated show, "Brickleberry", which is best described as a raunchy comedy set at a rundown national park which debuts tonight at 10:30 p.m.
The voice cast, in addition to Tom Kenny (Spongebob), includes David Herman (who I best remember as Michael Bolton from Office Space), and former SNL cast member Jerry Minor.
"It's an equal opportunity offender," Minor said. "Everybody gets it."
You can also check out the audio of my chat with the two Brickleberrys creators, Roger Black and Waco O'Guin, which is attached below. They co-wrote the show and are also executive producers.
The show originally was conceived as a live-action product. Then when they learned the average budget to produce the show would be in the millions of dollars, they changed the concept to make it an animated program.
And now... transcription ahoy!
What do you think is the hook for fans to tune in? Why should people tune in and check this show out?
MINOR: It's funny. It's a funny cartoon.
KENNY: Waco and Roger are pretty insane, envelope-pushing guys who don't mind getting their hands and their jokes dirty. It's fun, for me I do so much stuff in the kid realm. You know what I mean? It's kinda fun to take off the gloves and revel in something a little more scatalogical. It's a nice release.
GG: Is voice-over work more fun than acting on camera?
KENNY: Yes. Way more.
HERMAN: Yeah, it is.
KENNY: Actors are stupid.
MINOR: It doesn't take all the prep, and it doesn't take all the down time. I think it's the worst thing about acting in live-action acting, it's the down time.
KENNY: That being said, it's good because a lot of on-camera actors can't do it. Are unable to do it. They don't know how. They're not good at it.
GG: So what's the challenge involved?
KENNY: I don't know if it's so much challenge as it is a different skill set from being on camera. It's all oral. I realize listening to the Sirius/XM classic radio show channel, a lot of times when they have a big name like Humphrey Bogart or Jimmy Stewart doing these dramas, they're not that good. It's like, oh wow, these character actors who did 80 shows a day, they were way better than these giant stars. You're using just the sound of your voice to paint the picture of the character or fill in the lines of the character.
HERMAN: As opposed to your entire anatomy. There are movies, Tom, where they use their entire anatomy.
GG: We just call them movin' pitchers back in Tennessee.
MINOR: Talkies.
GG: Right.
HERMAN: People just don't have the experience with it, too. They come to it and it's like, "I am emoting this!" Then realize it's all got to be funneled through your voice. Solely through your voice.
GG: Do you feel it's unappreciated? You don't see "Best Voice Actor" at the Emmys.
KENNY: That's OK. No, no, it's good. I don't want anybody else's job. Being famous is a pain in the ass, right? You kinda go and just have fun and play and then get in your car and go do another one.
GG: So are the conventions like this the only place you get recognized? "That's the voice of so-and-so!"
KENNY: At Comic-Con? Oh, at Comic-Con, we're Elvis. Then you leave and it's like bleh blah. D-List, party of three? It's a great way to make a living, and I like animators. It's funny, after you've done voiceover a lot, it kind of ruins on-camera in a way because it seems just so glacially slow. You know what I mean? There's a guy with a big pan of flash powder taking a photograph in 1882 and you've got to stand there forever.
HERMAN: It's also, the voice stuff is so much closer to the play as a kid. You can literally be doing two voices together. It's totally immediately satisfying.
GG: Is there prep involved? Other than reading the script...
MINOR: I have a lot less experience than these guys, so for me it was working with them trying to figure out what the voice was going to sound like. For me. They've done a lot more. We had to work and do a couple of things to try and figure out what this guy was going to sound like, what it was going to take, what I could do without straining my voice. Then we found it.
KENNY: I think with a show like this, really our job is to bring Roger and Waco's show and their vision to the screen in the way they want it done. There's a performance and a style they have as the people who fought all these battles to get their show on the air, from a live-action pitch to the animated pitch it eventually became. It's hard to get something on the air so we defer to their vision of what they want this "Brickleberry" show to be.
GG: Do you get a lot of requests to do people's voicemails and stuff like that in a certain voice? Do my voicemail, call my kid ...
KENNY: I would say, except for the guy who did the default voicemail message on the answering machine when you buy it, I've probably done more outgoing messages than anybody but that guy.
HERMAN: When Patton Oswalt was doing Ratatouille, I e-mailed him and asked if he would get Peter O'Toole to do my outgoing message.
KENNY: And now he's retired. Now it's too late. Did you get it?
GG: The motto of our website is that everyone's a geek about something. So what do you guys geek out about?
MINOR: Well, I want one of those wizard hats. This is the only place I feel like I'm more entertained by everything else going on than anybody would ever be entertained than what I have to do.
KENNY: I'm too geeky about too many things. Records and crazy old rock and roll and jazz music and comic books and newspaper strips and fucked-up underground art. Remember newspapers?
HERMAN: I like to go to a horse race.