Name: Staff Favorite Moments: Writers Carter Bays and Craig Thomas | Letterman
Uploaded: 2023-05-09T15:06:42.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Staff Favorite Moments: Writers Carter Bays and Craig Thomas | Letterman' from Letterman on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-05-09. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Staff Favorite Moments: Writers Carter Bays and Craig Thomas | Letterman' from Letterman on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-05-09. Transcript available.

Hi, my name is Craig Thomas. I was a writer for Late Show with David Letterman
from 1997 to 2002.
And I'm Carter Bays. I was a writer for The Late Show with David Letterman from
1997 to 2002.
One of the fun things about writing for the show, and it taught a good lesson
for writing,
was the joy of writing within parameters. There was one night that Bruce Willis
wanted to be on
the show via satellite. We came up with this dunce via satellite. If ever there
was a moment
that Bruce Willis proved what a movie star he is, or what an action star he is,
specifically,
he sold it. And he sold it in such a way that it was thrilling to watch. You
really thought
that he was putting himself in danger. Show, I'm going to jump off a six-story
building.
Oh my God. Jump right out there. And you're going down to an airbag or
something, Bruce?
No bag, nothing. Just going to go sailing right out there.
All right. Bruce, if you're ready, here we go. Anton.
Come on. Anytime, Bruce. Good luck, buddy. Oh.
Oh, oh.
Wow, that's amazing. Bruce? Bruce? Bruce? Bruce?
Bruce? How'd it go?
It is pretty spectacular. Are you all right?
How's my hair look?
Woo! Are you okay?
I think I might have bitten the tip of my tongue off, Dave.
But I'm okay.
All right. Bruce Willis, ladies and gentlemen.
Kenny Sheehan and Pat Farmer were two of the stagehands for the show.
And they had such a natural sort of like comedic duo energy.
And so we had this idea.
You could order through mail paper copies of written transcripts of the Oprah
show.
And I began this sort of business weekly, monthly of just compiling like sacks
of Oprah transcripts.
And right away you're tossing 90% of them out.
And finally you would get to like Barbara Streisand just ravenously paging
through this with a high letter.
Just trying to call out the most absurd lines of dialogue for Pat and Kenny to
perform.
There was never a debate that Pat was Oprah and Kenny was the guest.
There was never any question.
She's open and honest and funny.
Please welcome the world's greatest star, Barbara Streisand.
Thank you.
Miss Farber, when we watch you kiss on screen, girl, you can do some kissing.
I'm a good kisser.
Tell us about James Brolin.
He's a really special human being, Oprah.
We lie in bed every Sunday with videotapes and food and each other.
It's so much fun.
I read you wear pajamas, Miss Farber.
I don't wear pajamas.
I wear nighties.
Oprah had this three-minute opening sequence to her show where she sings her
own theme song.
And we said, well, Pat and Kenny need this.
They were in like the recording studio.
We like recreated shot for shot.
Pat and Kenny were wearing like colorful, flowy garments and like doing like
crazy like choreography.
To get them loose enough, I believe there was some drinking involved.
Pat and Kenny, they would just do anything.
They were, they were fantastic guys.
They really came to take on this kind of like celebrity sort of aura.
They really came to take on this kind of like celebrity sort of aura.
And so we kept on doing weird pieces with them.
Nothing as great maybe as Pat and Kenny read over transcripts.
But one of them was this piece called Pat and Kenny's It Kind of Sounds Like a
Joke.
So Ken, you do anything interesting last weekend?
Well, Pat, I took the wife to a baseball game.
Oh, really?
Did she like it?
Like it?
I'm not even married.
That only works with tuxedos, by the way.
There were so many fun bits that we did with Pat and Kenny.
This was just a fun piece that we did for Mailbag.
You know, we wrote it to be silly and stupid.
I found it actually genuinely moving and his performance in it was like, it got
to me.
Well, D-Clan, the simple fact is that this is a television studio, so it would
be really,
I think, irresponsible for us, frankly, inhumane to keep wild animals here
instead of out in
their natural habitat, you know, where they belong.
It's just as simple as that.
That's the only reason we don't have the wild animals.
Dave's right, Kenny.
I know, Pat.
What a fool I've been.
It was wrong of me to keep you here, Swifty.
You belong in the in-touch splendor of the wild.
Come on.
It's time to go.
You belong in the in-touch splendor of the wild.
You belong in the in-touch splendor of the wild.
You belong in the in-touch splendor of the wild.
You belong in the in-touch splendor of the wild.
You belong in the in-touch splendor of the wild.
You belong in the in-touch splendor of the wild.
The writers on the show, it was just a lovely bunch and we were all really good
friends.
But there was like a little bit of pranking here and there.
There was this one time when we had this new writer and everyone was kind of hazing
him a little.
There was this one night when I think the Oscars were playing on another
network.
Basically, that meant that nobody's going to watch CBS tonight.
The top ten list was top ten things I can say tonight on air because nobody's
watching.
This one writer decided that this was a good opportunity to haze the new guy.
So this writer, let's call him Jeff.
One of the jokes that he wrote was, "My phone number is 212-975-6628."
This other writer, DJ, we'll just call him DJ because that's his name.
It was DJ's number.
And as soon as he reads that joke, Jeff leaps out of his seat and turns to DJ
and like points
him with a finger in his face, "Aha, I gotcha."
Everyone laughs and DJ's like, "What, I don't understand."
He's like, "That's your number, I just put your number.
Your number's going to be on national television and everyone's going to be
calling your phone."
DJ just kind of leans in really close and looks and he's like, "That's not my
number."
And you could just see the look on Jeff's face.
It was this great, like, movie moment of him, like, as the worm turning and him
realizing
that it had been a double cross and the head writer had replaced DJ's number
with Jeff's number.
His phone rang for two months straight with just fans of the show calling up,
asking to talk to Dave.
And it's like, "Oh, well, Dave's not here, but, you know, we're the writers of
the show."
We actually ended up sort of adapting that story into an episode of "How I Met
Your Mother."
Carter and I wrote several different pieces where Buzz Aldrin would appear on
the show, seemingly very confused.
The most starstruck I ever was on the show was Buzz Aldrin.
He would appear on the show dressed as an astronaut and he clearly thought he
was on the moon.
Since the dawn of time, man has looked up at the balcony with wonder and awe.
Buzz, is everything okay, Buzz?
I found this piece of gum stuck to the surface of the balcony.
Who knows how many mysteries of the universe it will unlock?
Marvellous.
This truly is America's finest hour.
The daytime Emmys were happening at Rockefeller Center.
We had the opportunity to go to the red carpet and do some sort of funny remote.
We just immediately thought of Buzz Aldrin for that.
So we put Buzz Aldrin in his space suit.
He was in this big bulky astronaut uniform so we couldn't put him in a car.
So we just, Carter and I and like maybe a segment producer, maybe the camera
guy, we all just had to walk to Radio City.
So we were walking an astronaut suit wearing Buzz Aldrin in this big clunky
thing like just down Broadway.
People didn't know this was like the second man to set foot on the moon.
That sums up the experience of writing for Letterman and just the joy of
working on that show.
Just being in the middle of New York doing all this crazy shit.
It just like, it was such a dream and I'm so grateful for it.
How many seasons have you been on Guiding Night?
For eight seasons.
I walked on the moon.
There's no red carpet to the moon, you know.
It's a grueling four day ordeal.
Wow.
Are you excited to be here?
Yes.
I'm very excited, are you?
I was excited that time I walked on the moon.
How many seasons have you been on Guiding Light?
Let me put it this way.
I walked on the moon.
You know, sometimes astronauts have no choice but to urinate in their space
suits.
Ew.
Craig and I left the show in February 2002, about three weeks before we left.
The message came around from the head writers that we need more ideas for act
one.
Just fun, active things to do in act one of the show.
The Stangle brothers, they would do a thing where they would drop things out
the window and play
a game.
Will it break or will it bounce?
Craig and I started talking about break or bounce.
And somehow we came upon sink or float.
And then I think it turned into will it float?
We handed it in and then sort of like, okay, that's it.
We're done.
We're done with our late show experience.
It was very sad and we left thinking, well, we didn't really leave anything
behind.
You know, the show goes on without us.
Will it float?
After we left, there were 200 installments of it.
I think that's one of my favorite contributions that we made.
Time for an exciting new segment.
We call it, will it float?
Velveeta cheese.
Velveeta cheese.
You think it'll float?
Well, I don't know.
I don't know how much air there is in Velveeta cheese.
There may be some.
I think it may float.
Yeah, my thought is that it should float, but I'm guessing it doesn't float.
All right.
All right.
All right, girls, take it away.
Does it float?
Let's see.
There goes the Velveeta cheese.
All right.
Thank you very much, girls.
Obviously, the Velveeta cheese doesn't work.
One of my favorite things that we used to do was these fake musicals on the
show.
We did Fresh Step, Craig and Rodney Rothman and I.
Paul wrote these gorgeous hit songs for Fresh Step.
There was the up-tempo song.
F is the Fresh, 'cause that's what we are.
R is for reality, we're living large.
E is for emotion, 'cause we know how to feel.
S is for the beat, 'cause we're keeping it real.
H is for my homies, 'cause we got a bad breath.
But you gotta be fresh to fresh.
With the Fresh Step, do the Fresh Step.
And then there was their ballad, which was from a fake movie called
Talk to the Hand, starring James Van Der Beek and Sarah Michelle Gellar.
And I swear to God, I still wake up at two in the morning some nights
singing Talk to the Hand.
Girl, you're high class, like a song by Mozart.
Don't talk to the hand, it's all fresh.
Angel, just talk to my heart.
Craig had the idea of calling them Fresh Step,
because that was like the name of a kid illiterate.
We loved the challenge of like, let's see what people are willing to believe.
We created a website for the band and had their content on there.
And really made it seem like it was a real band.
And things weren't as debunkable then.
And MTV invited us to have Fresh Step on Total Request Live with Carson Daly,
who was in on the joke and was interviewing them with a straight face as if
they were a real band.
We don't know a whole lot about you.
It must have happened really fast for Fresh Step.
Tell us a little about, you know, your story here.
Well, see, Carson, you gotta understand that Fresh Step's all about diversification,
you know?
So we tried to get something real cool together for everybody out there.
So, you know, we got Brad, he's my man from Minnesota.
We got my cousin DJ here from Tallahassee.
You know, three of us are from Orlando.
You know, we used to work at Universal Studios and stuff.
We just kind of got together, you know, figured, hey, man, this is easy.
We could do this.
That's right.
We also did a musical called Homecoming that was very fun.
And my favorite of the ones we did was one called One Small Step,
a musical version of the Apollo 11 landing.
We can see from afar.
We're living or we can't believe you're there.
We're living or we just can't believe you're there.
Another genius, so funny, so amazing, super awesome staffer,
who sadly we have lost since the show ended, was Alan Coulter.
Carter and I were obsessed with Alan Coulter.
We wrote this piece where it's just Alan suddenly takes over the show.
And suddenly it became this character of this debonair sort of like Robert
Evans type character.
That was the turning point where Craig and I discovered Alan has these
incredible hidden depths.
We wanted to just get inside Alan and explore him.
The world's greatest red-haired freak.
I know what you're thinking.
Why would any respectable individual allow himself to be ridiculed like that?
I mean, it's ridiculous.
This is national television.
My kids watch this show.
And yet I come back night after night and allow David Letterman to make a
complete ass of me.
Thank you, Corky.
Is it the knowledge that someone out there is getting a good chuckle at the end
of a long day?
Warm camaraderie I share with my co-workers?
Frankly, I'd do it for the money.
Beverly, finish this for me, will you?
As an announcer for The Late Show, I make millions of dollars every year.
All for simply coming in for an hour every day and saying things.
So when I get called a red-haired freak on national television, does it bother
me?
What do you think?
All set, darling?
So where are we going, Alan?
Anywhere you want, baby.
Mailbag letters would spring out of, can Alan do this or can Alan do that?
And for instance, it was like, can Alan give an entire speech in Cantonese?
Sorry, excuse me, Alan, Alan, did you say something?
Alan, is everything all right?
Alan, is everything you can do?
Alan, is everything you can do.
Alan, is everything you can do.
Alan, is everything you can do.
Alan, is everything you can do.
Alan, is everything you can do.
Alan, is everything you can do.
Alan, is everything you can do.
Alan, is everything you can do.
Alan, is everything you can do.
Alan, is everything you can do.
Alan, is everything you can do.
Alan, is everything you can do.
Alan, is everything you can do.
Alan, is everything you can do.
Alan, is everything you can do.
Alan, is everything you can do.
Alan, is everything you can do.
Alan, is everything you can do.
Alan, is everything you can do.
Alan, is everything you can do.
Alan, is everything you can do.
I'm sorry, Alan, why are you saying all of these things?
I'm drunk, Dave, don't listen to me.
We did this other piece from Mailbag.
Carter and I were in charge of the mailbag
for I think four years or something.
A viewer mail letter is like,
"Alan Coulter, you suck.
Why are you on the show?"
Whatever it is.
Dear Dave, is it me or is Alan Coulter
just a big red-haired freak?
Is there an address on that letter you have there?
Oh yeah, right here.
301.
301.
9th Avenue.
9th Avenue.
Dave, I'll be right back.
Yeah, one's right here on the west side.
Andrew Majewski?
Yeah.
So it was the comedy of there was no twist.
Like, just when you thought it was going to zig, it zigged.
For some reason, Dave really liked this.
And saying, "Let's do a bunch of those Alan Coulter punch-outs."
"Hey, the guy from the Letterman Show."
"That's right."
He was part of a singing duo with his twin brother.
And they would sing, like Captain and Tennille songs.
They would sing like old school, like 70s, like yacht rock type hits.
And the joke was that they got sort of more and more connected and into each
other as they were
doing their duet.
And then at the very end, they got so close to each other and they got sort of
locked eyes and
started to move in like they were going to kiss.
I think the topmost piece where Alan just sort of hijacks the show into
insanity.
We did this one where Alan is dressed as a sailor.
And it goes into this pre-tape of Alan having an emotional breakdown spiral
that is so
absolutely insane.
Just God bless Alan.
He just was always there for us, always came through.
I'll always be grateful because that was the start of our career.
And part of our success there was due to Kenny and due to Alan Coulter.
"Aren't we going to do my sailor skit?"
Yeah, you know, we're running a little late and we're going to have to
we're going to have to cut the little sailor skit.
I'm sorry.
So anyway, we'll be right."
"Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
We've been rehearsing this all day.
Yeah, I know, I know, I know.
And thanks, by the way, Alan.
I know you brought your own suit from home.
Maybe we can do it, maybe we can do it another time, okay?
Another time.
Yeah, okay.
We'll be right back, ladies and gentlemen.
What?
I think I need to go to my office for a while.
Okay, go ahead, Alan.
You need, take a little time out.
That's what you need.
I need to go.
Yeah, all right, okay.
I told everyone I know to watch tonight,
but the piece is cut.
It's not going to be on.
Is this some kind of nightmare?
No, this is really happening.
This is really happening.
This is really happening.
This is really happening.
This is really happening.
This is really happening.
This is really happening.
We're out of time, Alan.
Sorry, Alan.
No more time, Alan.
No more time, Alan.
You're no good, Alan.
You're so lame, Alan.
Nobody likes you, Alan.
Nobody likes you.
You're an embarrassing to the show.
You can't do any of your own.
You're telling me.
Hey!
One girl makes you two, and the mother makes you small.
And the one mother gives you don't give me anything at all.
Go ask Alice when she's going to be tall.
And if you go chasing rabbits, and you know you're going to fall,
tell them all who the smoking car has given you the call.
And you're going to call Alice when she was just small.
Ladies and gentlemen, how about a nice hand for Alan Coulter?
That was stirring.
How's it going, Alan?
I love you, Alan.
And I love you, you red-haired freak.
Tonight, I celebrate my love.

Staff Favorite Moments: Writers Carter Bays and Craig Thomas | Letterman

Hi, my name is Craig Thomas. I was a writer for Late Show with David Letterman
from 1997 to 2002.
And I'm Carter Bays. I was a writer for The Late Show with David Letterman from
1997 to 2002.
One of the fun things about writing for the show, and it taught a good lesson
for writing,
was the joy of writing within parameters. There was one night that Bruce Willis
wanted to be on
the show via satellite. We came up with this dunce via satellite. If ever there
was a moment
that Bruce Willis proved what a movie star he is, or what an action star he is,
specifically,
he sold it. And he sold it in such a way that it was thrilling to watch. You
really thought
that he was putting himself in danger. Show, I'm going to jump off a six-story
building.
Oh my God. Jump right out there. And you're going down to an airbag or
something, Bruce?
No bag, nothing. Just going to go sailing right out there.
All right. Bruce, if you're ready, here we go. Anton.
Come on. Anytime, Bruce. Good luck, buddy. Oh.
Oh, oh.
Wow, that's amazing. Bruce? Bruce? Bruce? Bruce?
Bruce? How'd it go?
It is pretty spectacular. Are you all right?
How's my hair look?
Woo! Are you okay?
I think I might have bitten the tip of my tongue off, Dave.
But I'm okay.
All right. Bruce Willis, ladies and gentlemen.
Kenny Sheehan and Pat Farmer were two of the stagehands for the show.
And they had such a natural sort of like comedic duo energy.
And so we had this idea.
You could order through mail paper copies of written transcripts of the Oprah
show.
And I began this sort of business weekly, monthly of just compiling like sacks
of Oprah transcripts.
And right away you're tossing 90% of them out.
And finally you would get to like Barbara Streisand just ravenously paging
through this with a high letter.
Just trying to call out the most absurd lines of dialogue for Pat and Kenny to
perform.
There was never a debate that Pat was Oprah and Kenny was the guest.
There was never any question.
She's open and honest and funny.
Please welcome the world's greatest star, Barbara Streisand.
Thank you.
Miss Farber, when we watch you kiss on screen, girl, you can do some kissing.
I'm a good kisser.
Tell us about James Brolin.
He's a really special human being, Oprah.
We lie in bed every Sunday with videotapes and food and each other.
It's so much fun.
I read you wear pajamas, Miss Farber.
I don't wear pajamas.
I wear nighties.
Oprah had this three-minute opening sequence to her show where she sings her
own theme song.
And we said, well, Pat and Kenny need this.
They were in like the recording studio.
We like recreated shot for shot.
Pat and Kenny were wearing like colorful, flowy garments and like doing like
crazy like choreography.
To get them loose enough, I believe there was some drinking involved.
Pat and Kenny, they would just do anything.
They were, they were fantastic guys.
They really came to take on this kind of like celebrity sort of aura.
They really came to take on this kind of like celebrity sort of aura.
And so we kept on doing weird pieces with them.
Nothing as great maybe as Pat and Kenny read over transcripts.
But one of them was this piece called Pat and Kenny's It Kind of Sounds Like a
Joke.
So Ken, you do anything interesting last weekend?
Well, Pat, I took the wife to a baseball game.
Oh, really?
Did she like it?
Like it?
I'm not even married.
That only works with tuxedos, by the way.
There were so many fun bits that we did with Pat and Kenny.
This was just a fun piece that we did for Mailbag.
You know, we wrote it to be silly and stupid.
I found it actually genuinely moving and his performance in it was like, it got
to me.
Well, D-Clan, the simple fact is that this is a television studio, so it would
be really,
I think, irresponsible for us, frankly, inhumane to keep wild animals here
instead of out in
their natural habitat, you know, where they belong.
It's just as simple as that.
That's the only reason we don't have the wild animals.
Dave's right, Kenny.
I know, Pat.
What a fool I've been.
It was wrong of me to keep you here, Swifty.
You belong in the in-touch splendor of the wild.
Come on.
It's time to go.
You belong in the in-touch splendor of the wild.
You belong in the in-touch splendor of the wild.
You belong in the in-touch splendor of the wild.
You belong in the in-touch splendor of the wild.
You belong in the in-touch splendor of the wild.
You belong in the in-touch splendor of the wild.
The writers on the show, it was just a lovely bunch and we were all really good
friends.
But there was like a little bit of pranking here and there.
There was this one time when we had this new writer and everyone was kind of hazing
him a little.
There was this one night when I think the Oscars were playing on another
network.
Basically, that meant that nobody's going to watch CBS tonight.
The top ten list was top ten things I can say tonight on air because nobody's
watching.
This one writer decided that this was a good opportunity to haze the new guy.
So this writer, let's call him Jeff.
One of the jokes that he wrote was, "My phone number is 212-975-6628."
This other writer, DJ, we'll just call him DJ because that's his name.
It was DJ's number.
And as soon as he reads that joke, Jeff leaps out of his seat and turns to DJ
and like points
him with a finger in his face, "Aha, I gotcha."
Everyone laughs and DJ's like, "What, I don't understand."
He's like, "That's your number, I just put your number.
Your number's going to be on national television and everyone's going to be
calling your phone."
DJ just kind of leans in really close and looks and he's like, "That's not my
number."
And you could just see the look on Jeff's face.
It was this great, like, movie moment of him, like, as the worm turning and him
realizing
that it had been a double cross and the head writer had replaced DJ's number
with Jeff's number.
His phone rang for two months straight with just fans of the show calling up,
asking to talk to Dave.
And it's like, "Oh, well, Dave's not here, but, you know, we're the writers of
the show."
We actually ended up sort of adapting that story into an episode of "How I Met
Your Mother."
Carter and I wrote several different pieces where Buzz Aldrin would appear on
the show, seemingly very confused.
The most starstruck I ever was on the show was Buzz Aldrin.
He would appear on the show dressed as an astronaut and he clearly thought he
was on the moon.
Since the dawn of time, man has looked up at the balcony with wonder and awe.
Buzz, is everything okay, Buzz?
I found this piece of gum stuck to the surface of the balcony.
Who knows how many mysteries of the universe it will unlock?
Marvellous.
This truly is America's finest hour.
The daytime Emmys were happening at Rockefeller Center.
We had the opportunity to go to the red carpet and do some sort of funny remote.
We just immediately thought of Buzz Aldrin for that.
So we put Buzz Aldrin in his space suit.
He was in this big bulky astronaut uniform so we couldn't put him in a car.
So we just, Carter and I and like maybe a segment producer, maybe the camera
guy, we all just had to walk to Radio City.
So we were walking an astronaut suit wearing Buzz Aldrin in this big clunky
thing like just down Broadway.
People didn't know this was like the second man to set foot on the moon.
That sums up the experience of writing for Letterman and just the joy of
working on that show.
Just being in the middle of New York doing all this crazy shit.
It just like, it was such a dream and I'm so grateful for it.
How many seasons have you been on Guiding Night?
For eight seasons.
I walked on the moon.
There's no red carpet to the moon, you know.
It's a grueling four day ordeal.
Wow.
Are you excited to be here?
Yes.
I'm very excited, are you?
I was excited that time I walked on the moon.
How many seasons have you been on Guiding Light?
Let me put it this way.
I walked on the moon.
You know, sometimes astronauts have no choice but to urinate in their space
suits.
Ew.
Craig and I left the show in February 2002, about three weeks before we left.
The message came around from the head writers that we need more ideas for act
one.
Just fun, active things to do in act one of the show.
The Stangle brothers, they would do a thing where they would drop things out
the window and play
a game.
Will it break or will it bounce?
Craig and I started talking about break or bounce.
And somehow we came upon sink or float.
And then I think it turned into will it float?
We handed it in and then sort of like, okay, that's it.
We're done.
We're done with our late show experience.
It was very sad and we left thinking, well, we didn't really leave anything
behind.
You know, the show goes on without us.
Will it float?
After we left, there were 200 installments of it.
I think that's one of my favorite contributions that we made.
Time for an exciting new segment.
We call it, will it float?
Velveeta cheese.
Velveeta cheese.
You think it'll float?
Well, I don't know.
I don't know how much air there is in Velveeta cheese.
There may be some.
I think it may float.
Yeah, my thought is that it should float, but I'm guessing it doesn't float.
All right.
All right.
All right, girls, take it away.
Does it float?
Let's see.
There goes the Velveeta cheese.
All right.
Thank you very much, girls.
Obviously, the Velveeta cheese doesn't work.
One of my favorite things that we used to do was these fake musicals on the
show.
We did Fresh Step, Craig and Rodney Rothman and I.
Paul wrote these gorgeous hit songs for Fresh Step.
There was the up-tempo song.
F is the Fresh, 'cause that's what we are.
R is for reality, we're living large.
E is for emotion, 'cause we know how to feel.
S is for the beat, 'cause we're keeping it real.
H is for my homies, 'cause we got a bad breath.
But you gotta be fresh to fresh.
With the Fresh Step, do the Fresh Step.
And then there was their ballad, which was from a fake movie called
Talk to the Hand, starring James Van Der Beek and Sarah Michelle Gellar.
And I swear to God, I still wake up at two in the morning some nights
singing Talk to the Hand.
Girl, you're high class, like a song by Mozart.
Don't talk to the hand, it's all fresh.
Angel, just talk to my heart.
Craig had the idea of calling them Fresh Step,
because that was like the name of a kid illiterate.
We loved the challenge of like, let's see what people are willing to believe.
We created a website for the band and had their content on there.
And really made it seem like it was a real band.
And things weren't as debunkable then.
And MTV invited us to have Fresh Step on Total Request Live with Carson Daly,
who was in on the joke and was interviewing them with a straight face as if
they were a real band.
We don't know a whole lot about you.
It must have happened really fast for Fresh Step.
Tell us a little about, you know, your story here.
Well, see, Carson, you gotta understand that Fresh Step's all about diversification,
you know?
So we tried to get something real cool together for everybody out there.
So, you know, we got Brad, he's my man from Minnesota.
We got my cousin DJ here from Tallahassee.
You know, three of us are from Orlando.
You know, we used to work at Universal Studios and stuff.
We just kind of got together, you know, figured, hey, man, this is easy.
We could do this.
That's right.
We also did a musical called Homecoming that was very fun.
And my favorite of the ones we did was one called One Small Step,
a musical version of the Apollo 11 landing.
We can see from afar.
We're living or we can't believe you're there.
We're living or we just can't believe you're there.
Another genius, so funny, so amazing, super awesome staffer,
who sadly we have lost since the show ended, was Alan Coulter.
Carter and I were obsessed with Alan Coulter.
We wrote this piece where it's just Alan suddenly takes over the show.
And suddenly it became this character of this debonair sort of like Robert
Evans type character.
That was the turning point where Craig and I 