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Rob Huebel is an American comedian based in New York City.  Huebel and fellow comedians Aziz Ansari and Paul Scheer are writers, actors, and executive producers in the MTV sketch[…]

The mysteries of Tom Selleck.

Question: What’s the best idea you’ve ever had rejected?

Rob Huebel: There have been a lot of things we haven't been able to do but some of that was just due to, like, time and money, you know? We'll have these big ideas and then we sometimes can't do it because it's too expensive, you know? And we don't ever think about that when we're writing it, you know? We'll just write stuff and think, like, oh, this will be great, you know? And then we find out, oh, it's going to be $8 million. What? For a two-minute sketch? No, it's not. So sometimes that's really frustrating. In terms of, like, the standards people at MTV and stuff like that, it's hard to complain about that, really. They've actually, I mean, if you watch our show, you'll see that they let us pretty much do whatever we wanted to do. I mean, they-- you know, even, like, swearing and stuff, we just bleep it and, you know, there are some specific things that you can't do, like, you know, just because kids watch that show, you can't, like, light someone on fire or shoot someone in the face, you know, with a gun so what you have to do is do it in pieces, you know? You show a shot of the gun, you show someone getting hit with the gun but they have this weird rule that you can't show, you know, a gun bullet connecting because then kids think, oh, I'll go do that. So the weird way around that is we just show, you know, we show it in pieces and stuff like that. So violence is a weird thing. They are pretty specific about what you can and can't do and we definitely found out exactly where that line is. But, in terms of, like, you know, other stuff, like, we just kind of do it and sort it out later. There hasn't been too much stuff that we haven't been able to do. We've had celebrities that we haven't been able to get on the show, which we were, you know, really disappointed by. We were doing a sketch that we wanted to cast Vin Diesel in and so I sent an email to Vin Diesel's agent and I was, like, you know, please forward this to Vin Diesel, dah, dah, dah, and so I wrote this really effusive email to Vin Diesel. I was, like, hey, bro, you know, we are such fans, you know, we loved you in, you know, Chronicles of Riddick, we loved you in The Pacifier and we're just, you know, we would love it if you would do this sketch. And so we sent him the script and then we heard back, seriously, like, three minutes later from his agent, he goes-- his agent wrote this, he goes, "Sorry, bro, this one's not for the Dies." So I don't know about that. I love that his agent calls him the Dies.And then we also went out to Tom Selleck for a sketch and we wanted Tom Selleck to do this bit on this show and it was kind of, like, making fun of Magnum and we found out that he doesn't like to make fun of Magnum at all. In fact, he really doesn't like to talk about Magnum, supposedly. And then we found out his email address is, like, magnum101@aol.com, you know? Like, really, the guy that doesn't like to talk about Magnum has Magnum in his email address? I think he likes it.

 

Recorded On: 4/1/08

 

 

 


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