Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone: Comedy's Top Power Couple

If you stuck with Bridesmaids until the lights came up, you might remember Melissa McCarthy and real-life husband Ben Falcone making sexy time with some deli meat. The scene wasn't in the script. Falcone recalls his wife summoning him to the set: "Melissa was like, Hurry, take your shirt off and put on this lunch meat. I'm like, I guess this is what we do on Thursdays?"

That improvised game of hide-the-$5-Footlong nicely sums up their romance, which began at The Groundlings and has since spawned two kids and this month's Tammy, the story of a woman-child following her worst day ever. (She stars; he directs. They wrote it together.) The film's two-second pitch: After getting fired and discovering her husband is cheating, Tammy robs a fast-food joint and hits the road with her alcoholic grandmother, played by Susan Sarandon. McCarthy describes the film as part road movie, part "coming of age—at weird ages." We describe it as their bid for Hollywood's Funniest Couple. Your move, Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally.

All That's Left When You Die

Last month my dad turned seventy-eight years old. A few days before his birthday, I drove down to San Diego to see him.

“What do you want for your birthday,” I asked, as we sat in his living room.

“I want to talk to you about something. Let’s take the dog for a walk,” he said, as he grabbed a leash that sat next to his recliner. “You take the shit bag,” he added, handing me a bundled up plastic baggy.

We headed up his quiet suburban street as his large brown Rottweiler mix walked ahead.

“The human body wasn’t meant to live this long,” he said.

“Seventy-eight is not that old,” I replied.

“Do we have to sit here and dignify a clearly horseshit statement such as that, or can you cease to pander to me and just have a conversation?”

“Okay. Seventy-eight is old.”

He hiked up his sweatpants and quickened the pace of our walk.

“I’m not complaining. I’m just saying people peddle this ridiculous idea that you can be an old person and go water skiing and fuck whenever you want and it’s bullshit. It’s fucking hubris that’s specific to humans and no other species,” he said, as he yanked the dog’s leash, pulling it away from the neighbor’s lawn right before it trampled their flowers.

“Well, the other option is to just accept that death is coming for you,” I replied.

“It is coming for you. You can’t beat death. It’s un-fucking-defeated. And if you fight it, it will humiliate you. It’ll chain you to a bed and make someone have to wipe your shitty ass. It’ll make you forget who your own fucking kids are. It takes your dignity and it whips its’ dick out and pisses on it. When you’re younger and it comes for you, it’s worth it to fight it and suffer through the humiliation. When you’re older, what the fuck does it get you to go through that?,” he said, then took a deep breath and stopped on the sidewalk.

I looked at him collecting his thoughts and every muscle in my stomach contracted in fear. I could barely get out my next words.

“Are you dying?” I asked.

“What? Fuck no. If I was dying I’d just call you up and say ‘Hey, I’m dying.’

“I would prefer you didn’t do it like that,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief.

“Like I’m going to give a shit what you prefer when I’m dying,” he laughed, as he began walking again.

“So then why are you bringing this up?”

“Take a look at the dog,” he said, pointing at his best friend. “The dog gives a shit about three things, in this order; Living, fucking, eating. Now, if he’s eating, and the opportunity to fuck presents itself, he’d stop eating so that he could fuck. And if he’s fucking, and something threatens his livelihood, he’d stop fucking so that he could protect himself. What does that tell you?” he asked.

“I don’t know, isn’t that, like, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs or something?”

“I’m okay with you just saying ‘I don’t know.’ I’d actually prefer that to a dumb answer.”

“I don’t know, dad,” I said, getting a little annoyed.

“The dog, just like every other animal including us, thinks first and foremost about staying alive and passing on their genetics. It’s in our DNA to do so. You spend all your time when you’re young making sure you do all the best eating, fucking, and living you can. But then you get old like me and you can’t even tell if you farted and nothing in your body works like it used to. And you start to think, or at least I do, about how you can spend all your most effective years on this planet, which is filled with billions of people, not giving a shit about anybody but the ten or so motherfuckers that share your blood. And I think human beings are capable of more than just that. And we should want to be. Because when you die, all that’s left of you is the people you gave a shit about. Everybody loves to say how much we’ve evolved, but the real measure of whether or not a species has evolved is if they can look their DNA in the eyes and say, ‘Fuck you, I can do better than you think I can.’

We turned down his street and he wiped his forehead with a handkerchief.

“That said, I want a nice bottle of bourbon for my birthday because I’m your fucking father.”
arnold schwarzenegger

10 Essentials: Rainn Wilson

No longer Dwight Schrute, The Office star talks about sexy custom vans, sad men with guitars, and Vitamix

Rainn Wilson's tastes tend toward the moody: indie singers, burnout actors, film noir. Not what you might expect from the man who for nine seasons starred as Dwight Schrute, the nitpicky, egomaniacal assistant manager on The Office. Or the funny guy whose media website, SoulPancake, hosts a talk show where he asks actors things like, "If you had a magic bus, where would you go?" and, "Draw a picture of your soul." Wilson's site is also home to the Internet's favorite child politician, Kid President—the black third grader who met Obama in the Oval Office—and a slew of other original content. So Wilson's creativity will clearly outlive Dwight…but in what form?

Wilson is reticent to say. Now is a fresh phase, and he's excited to do something new. There are indie film projects he's involved with, and he starred in a pilot for the CBS crime drama Backstrom, as an offensive criminologist whose only commonality with Dwight is that he's also a curmudgeon. He'd also like to get back to New York theater, where he got his start in acting at NYU. But in the meantime, the former Mr. Schrute told us about Orson Welles, swaggy custom vans, and his mini-guitar.

1. 1970s Custom Van
"When I came up with the idea for Metaphysical Milkshake, it was mostly an excuse for me to make a custom van. I've been in awe of them ever since I was a child in the '70s—there's such an air of mystery, like, 'Wow, anything could go on in the back of one of these things.' We're not completely done, but I love it. It's an awesome feeling to tool around town in this mysterious, sexy custom van, and we use it for the talk show."

The Lonely Island's Style

The Lonely Island will never be accused of taking their success too seriously. "The fact that we got a record deal was hilarious and the fact that our album was decently successful was also hilarious," Jorma Taccone told GQ. "And then we decided to make a second one." So, just like that, Turtleneck & Chain (Universal Republic) arrives this week, a fully-committed parody album of the highest order. In flipping through the album artwork, we couldn't help but notice some of the group's, erm, curious style choices. So we grabbed a few minutes with Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer to talk turtlenecks, chains, cults, puns, Pierce Brosnan, and more.

"Turtleneck & Chain"
Schaffer: The title is an easy one for us to talk about, because it was our look in junior high in like seventh grade—because we've known each other since seventh grade—that was actually in the Bay Area and maybe elsewhere, I don't know...it was kind of a popular look, like a cotton turtleneck and a really thin gold or silver chain.
Taccone: It certainly wasn't a look in New York, I've asked people and they did not do that, but it was definitely popular in the Bay Area.
Schaffer: And I mean maybe someone who was 25 was wearing it well, but in seventh grade we were 11 or 12-years-old wearing the stuff. It was a pretty handsome and great-looking look.
Taccone: And it was not a Run-D.M.C. style. It wasn't turtlenecks and giant dookie chains; it was the thinnest chains possible. And I couldn't even afford gold, so it was always silver for me. It's become gold for this look, but it was always silver when I did it.

"Grown 'n' Sexy"
Schaffer: We're conceptualizing everything, giving very detailed directions. But this guy Brian Hemesath, who works at "SNL" and is also the costume designer for "Sesame Street," he's our guy we call on. We tell him it once and he comes back with great stuff for us.
Taccone: So just to clarify, the Emmy-nominated designer of clothes for "Sesame Street" is also our designer.
Schaffer: And so that white one is vaguely modeled off—even though he's not wearing a turtleneck—the Al Green cover.

"Cult Leaders"
Taccone: Those are more like linen shirts from a cult.
Schaffer: They certainly take on a cult-quality with those wigs. It could also be a nice day at the beach, like on a yacht or something.
Taccone: We're wearing almost like hemp necklaces.
Schaffer: Yeah, it could just be a nice Pierce Brosnan Mamma Mia kind of look.
Taccone: It's the symmetry of the hair that makes it cultish.
Taccone: The hair came from Akiva's brain.
Schaffer: Yeah, just from my mind.
Taccone: It's kind of like a Blue Lagoon slash Top Secret, really, because I don't know if I've ever seen Blue Lagoon, I'll be honest.
Schaffer: Oh, but I have.
Taccone: Okay, and Blue Lagoon.

"Ghostbutting"
Schaffer: That's kind of a Weekend at Bernie's look.
Taccone: Oh for sure, Weekend at Bernie's, yeah, big influence. I mean, really, there's a lot of looks we're trying to bring back it seems like.
Schaffer: That one we put it on, because there's this album art thing in our album if you open our booklet or if you go onto our website you can buy the poster, we did a series of fake movie posters. And one of the incredibly intelligent, smart posters was for a movie called Ghost Buttsters, in which there's three guys whose butts are ghosts. That's like an outtake from that photo shoot.
Taccone: Just to reiterate, their butts are actually ghosts. They're not busting, like... Schaffer: There's "butting" happening.
Taccone: We were trying to make Ghost Buttsters look like it was the front of a copy of a VHS tape at a movie store that you would've walked by and been bummed out. It looks like our three butts are a version of Slimer, but butt-shaped.
Schaffer: It's Oscar fodder, you know?
Taccone: And that was Andy's idea.

"The Creep"
Schaffer: The song had already come up, and then we were like, "What's the look of a classic creeper?" And then we were like, "Oh, it's the John Waters look." And it's actually kind of an awesome look, but it's a tight suit with a little bit shorter pants, flooding pants, really tight suit, plaid undershirt-y kind of thing, bow tie, pencil mustache, slicked down hair. We describe it in the video, but it was kind of a John Waters look, and then we were like, "What if we could get John Waters to introduce the actual song and video?" And we psyched that he did.
Taccone: But look-wise, too, that does crossover into being a very cool look. Like that too-tight-for-your-body, awesome, heroin-chic look is kinda dope.
Schaffer: I think you could [get away with it in Williamsburg] easily.
Taccone: It's hilarious, because John Waters was in San Francisco and we had a remote crew go to him because he was on a book tour. And we talked to him on the phone a bunch of times and we trying to clarify what this was going to be. His quote was, "There's a thin line between perv and asshole, and if you could please keep me on the perv side of things." And we were like, "Absolutely, that's not a problem."

"Shy Ronnie"
Schaffer: We were talking about it like, "You know, we're describing the teenage son on the HBO show Hung." So we started pulling that stuff up. We didn't go with exactly him, because it has nothing to do with him, but we were already tip-toeing around it without even realizing it, and then one of us brought it up and were like, "Yeah, that's kind of him."
Taccone: By the way, that's the first time we've actually revealed that in the press, so you if you print that, then that kid's going to be extremely bummed.

"The Perfect Magentlemen"
Taccone: From that first album [Incredibad], all those album covers ended up becoming very bizarre, tangential wordplay titles.
Schaffer: Wordplay is being really generous—terrible puns.
Taccone: This one's from another fake album cover from our first album called The Perfect Magentlemen. And the title of the album was Magentlemen Prefer Bond. And then it was a picture of a blond woman looking on disappointed as we huddled around a U.S. savings bond looking super excited.

"Photo Finnish"
Taccone: Yeah, that's when it really went off the rails, I think I was responsible for that one.
Schaffer: Yes, we were coming up with the worst possible things we could think of, exactly the right way to put it.

"Male Pattern Tallness"
Schaffer: There's also Male Pattern Tallness cooking magnets.
Taccone: That one's probably the best title for an album.
Schaffer: And we also have male pattern baldness.
Taccone: That's when it becomes confusing, we're also bald.
Schaffer: And with all that, we also happen to be pussy magnets.

"The Original"
Taccone: I'm probably the most exited about Turtleneck & Chain.
Schaffer: I like the one where you have that different color turtleneck and I'm lounging on the couch and they're kind of hugging. Most of the turtlenecks we're wearing are women's turtlenecks, because men's turtlenecks are out of fashion and are very hard to find.