TV's Funniest Frenemies

Martin Crook / Comedy Central Jessi Klein writes for Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black’s new sketch show, Michael and Michael Have Issues—now, she talks to the Michaels about their petty quarrels, Kashi addiction, and delicious sandwiches.

I wish I was allowed to write a review for the new Comedy Central show premiering tonight at 10:30 ET, Michael and Michael Have Issues, but journalistic ethics prevent me from doing so. Full disclosure: For the last four months, I have been writing on this show, created by and starring longtime friends, collaborators, and comedy heroes Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter. I also have a small onscreen role as an uptight nerd, which for some mysterious reason the guys felt certain I could play. So obviously it would be inappropriate of me to write a straightforward review. Therefore, I’m gonna be honest and do the right thing: just tell you to watch the show anyway. Because (full disclosure again): I genuinely think it’s hilarious. Please understand, I promise you I wouldn’t say this if I didn’t mean it. I mean, over the years as a freelance writer I’ve worked on my share of stuff I wouldn’t breathe a word about to anyone. But this isn’t one of those shows. I want to breathe words about this to you.

Some brief history on the Michaels, if you’re not familiar: Black and Showalter have been working together for the better part of two decades, making their first big mark on the cult hit MTV sketch show The State, a show perceived by its rabid fans as a kind of comedic equivalent of The Clash. The projects they have worked on since then have only inspired more fervent devotion most notably with the summer-camp movie sendup Wet Hot American Summer, and the comedy trio Stella (co-starring former State member David Wain), which lived for years as a perpetually sold-out live show in NYC and for one season as an inspired, if somewhat abstract, television show (also on Comedy Central).  In the last few years, they’ve worked on a variety of endeavors apart, but once again, they’ve found themselves in cahoots on a TV show. And this is where we arrive at the “issues.”

When I asked Showalter to describe the show in the Hollywood parlance of “the show is blank meets blank,” he replied, only slightly kidding, “It’s Die Hard in a sketch-show office.” The show takes place behind the scenes of a sketch show starring two guys named Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter, creative partners whose vanity and insecurity turn even the most petite of meaningless decisions into epic power grabs. The weapon of choice:  petty undermining. Black, when asked to describe the top three issues referenced in the show’s title, responded: “Pride. Jealousy. Gluttony.” The ongoing joke is that their volatile emotional tensions are detonated by such trivial minutiae as what to buy a coworker for his birthday or who will give an interview to an office intern writing for his college newspaper. Peppered throughout these escalating squabbles are sketches from the actual Michael and Michael show, among them a broadcast from a sport called Bunny Stomping and a documentary about a teen of precarious sexuality who’s amazingly successful at sticking to his abstinence pledge.

Black and Showalter confess to playing heightened versions of themselves. But the million-dollar question is, how much heightening—or how little lowering—is required to play these two backstabbing frenemies? I can report that the thoroughness of the yin-yang between their personalities is inherently amusing. Black is calm and quiet—more like a cat. Showalter is emotional and passionately verbal—more like a dog. Ironically, Black owns a dog. Ironically, Showalter owns several cats. Watching them brainstorm is like watching an intense tennis match: Jokes fly back and forth like long volleys, with the desire to top the other’s last laugh essentially becoming the match point.