five questions: scott aukerman

We first saw Comedy Bang! Bang! last year around this time when a friend from out of town came to crash and wouldn’t stop talking about how radically hilarious the show was. Five minutes into watching we were hooked and wondered why Scott Aukerman looked so familiar. A quick search revealed that this dude was in one of our all-time favorites Mr. Show with Bob and David and the movie Run Ronnie Run. It turns out the triple threat writer-actor-director also co-created the hilarious short Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis. We’ve established the fact that we were Aukerman fans before we even knew it, so when we got the chance to go five questions with him we jumped. We are so stoked for season two of Comedy Bang! Bang!, which returns to IFC with all new episodes July 12! Until then we’ll try to hold you over with our five questions and some clips from last season below.

What was your favorite cartoon/TV show as a kid?When I was a kid, ANY cartoon fascinated me. If it were animated, I would make time to watch it. This meant getting up at six in the morning on Saturdays and, after careful planning regarding which show on what network took precedence over the others, watching close to five hours of cartoons.But if I had to pick one, I would probably say Super Friends. I would always get angry that Jayna had the limitation of only being able to changeinto an animal, while Zan could be ANYTHING, as long as it was made of ice. A ladder, a slide, a jet engine – come on, man, that’s cheating!

What was your favorite cereal?Again, if it had a cartoon character on it, I was in. What an ingenious form of marketing. If Fiber One Bran Cereal put a cartoon character on the box, kids would love it. My absolute fave was Count Chocula. A cartoon vampire on the box? Sold.

What was the first record you bought?My brother and I belonged to one of those Columbia record clubs, where you get nine albums for a penny. We would get the albums then never pay them for anything else. And there’s no way to bust us for it, because we were kids! The perfect crime. The first album I got from them was Bill Cosby’s “Himself.” I memorized that album backwards and forwards, and would even performsome of the bits some times for friends.

What was the first live show/concert you went to?The first REAL concert I was allowed to go to was Oingo Boingo’s Halloween show of 1985 at the Pacific Ampitheatre in Orange County. But I don’t really count that, a few years earlier, my parents let me go to a Stryper concert, because it was Christian music. I caught a yellow and black striped cup that the drummer threw out into the crowd, and a star struck kid paid me twenty dollars for it! That was twice what I paid for the ticket. It almost made going to see Stryper worth it.

What posters were hanging on your bedroom wall in High School?In high school, I became obsessed with finding the “right” Smiths poster. To me, the right one was the one that was hanging in my friend’s bedroom. I’m sure the other ones that I found were perfectly fine, but that one was the first one I saw, and it was so striking, I had to have it. I never did, which is probably for the best, since my friend was already pretty creeped out that I bought the exact same color denim jacket that he always wore.