How Bill Hader Helped Turn Kanye West Into South Park’s ‘Gay Fish’

Week two of Bill Simmons’s new HBO show Any Given Wednesday didn’t contain anything as fired up and unhinged as Ben Affleck’s take on #DeflateGate. But it did feature some great stories about LeBron James and Kanye West.

Following a conversation with Mark Cuban and Malcolm Gladwell about NBA team owners and government subsidies that was far more boring than it needed to be with two generally interesting people, Simmons welcomed actor Bill Hader—or as he described him in the intro, LeBron James’s doctor, for a speed round of showbiz stories.

Hader, who appeared opposite the newly-crowned NBA MVP in Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck, said about “90 percent” of people actually think he is responsible for James’s health. “We didn’t keep in touch,” he admitted, adding that before he played one-on-one with James in the movie, he hadn’t been on a basketball court in decades.

But it was after Hader cycled through impressions of Dateline’s Keith Morrison and Collateral Damage-era Arnold Schwarzenegger that he arrived at his most hilarious celebrity tale. As not enough people know, Hader has been quietly writing on South Park since its thirteenth season. The very first idea he came up with for the show, during a writers’ retreat in Seattle, was the infamous Kanye West “fish dicks” episode.

It was Trey Parker who first ran with the idea that Cartman should come up with a joke about how putting “fish dicks” in your mouth makes you a “gay fish.” When the joke becomes a big deal worldwide, they needed someone who “doesn’t have a sense of humor” to not get it. Naturally, they all settled on Kanye West.

“Right there in that moment the whole episode came together,” Hader said.

And that’s how the world got this brilliant, auto-tuned “Gay Fish” song by South Park’s Kanye West.

He’s come a long way from there to sharing a bed with the biggest stars in the world in the video for “Famous.”