Ben Schwartz
speaker
260 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Ben Schwartz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Dude. Up and at them. Incredible. The goggles do nothing. Incredible. UK Office is a top five show for me, I think. Love it. Love it.
No. I've met him.
Oh, I used to. I did some. I wrote for like the Oscars one year. Oh, really? Yeah. So I used to freelance jokes for Letterman's Monologue. Right. And I used to freelance jokes for SNL Weekend Update. So I was writing jokes a lot when I was younger. And so every now and then I get a job to do that for people.
Yeah. Who do you write for for the Globes? I wrote for the Oscars. I wrote for Hugh Jackman. I wrote his musical opening number. Wow. Do you remember that musical opening number? Pull it up. So it was Dan Harmon, Rob Schraub, and I writing it. Rob Schraub? Yeah, dude. He's fucking a genius.
It was when he was trying to cast Community. So Community- Wow. So we wrote this musical. It's going to be too long. But it won an Emmy. So I won an Emmy for writing for the Oscars. Man, he's a hunk, huh? He's great. And- The full callback is that I did a show. I do two shows in New York every year. And he came to one of my shows at the Beacon. Oh! Like I hadn't talked to him in years.
And then he came and watched one of the shows at the Beacon. It's like the best venue ever. Dude. I think I played almost every theater in New York now. Nice. And that's my favorite one. It's classic. Easily. Yeah. I did Radio City, which was fucking enormous. Oh, that's too big, I think. For improv, imagine four people doing improv on there. Yeah, that's crazy.
It went great, but I was like, I think we pushed it. I think we pushed it a bit.
The beacon's huge, but it still feels kind of intimate. Beacon feels like you're talking to friends. Yeah. You don't need screens. You don't need any of that stuff. That's true. Anyway, it was the recession. So we did a recession musical opening number. You wrote this whole thing? Me, Dan Harmon, Rob Trout.
But Dan really did the, I got like, there's a bit that I wrote, which was probably coming up, which is he brings Anne Hathaway on stage. And I wrote that whole part of the song. Wow. And then I wrote a bunch of jokes for him to tell as like a monologue. Yeah. And my joke was going to be the opening of the Oscars. And it was lined up.
And then the writing team, I guess, that wasn't us three, nixed it and put something else there. But I was so excited that I was going to get jokes on too. Of course. But I started my career by writing jokes for Letterman. That's crazy.
That was good. That was good. I wrote this whole thing.
and i did it like ucb where he pulled her up from the crowd and he interacts like because the upright citizen brigade me and hot sauce would always like do like we would before we did a set we would start a heckle uh-huh and i would come out there and we would they would heckle me and then they would join me on stage and then we do an improv show yeah so it kind of starts where like he pulls her up on stage wow they kind of like make fun of whatever anyway how old are you here this is right i bet it was
2009. So I would be... Jesus, you got in the business early. I mean, well, I'm 43. Am I older than you guys? You look young, yeah. I'm 41. Thanks, guys. I'm doing press, so they make me look pretty. But 2009 would be 28? Yeah. Is that right?
I moved to L.A., and I got a job to write for his part of the Oscars. And then I got very lucky when I moved to L.A. A lot of things fell into place. I was in New York. I didn't want to leave New York. My family's here. I'm very close to my family. And I waited until literally the last second, and then I left New York. Were you happy you ended up leaving? Yeah, it changed my whole life.
You live in L.A. now. Yes, but also like I wasn't doing stand-up, so the options for me in terms of movement, like I wasn't going to be a writer on SNL. It didn't look like I wasn't going to be writing for Letterman at the time.
Oh, my God. Everybody who does sketch or improv, it's my head.
I didn't even get an audition. A shoo-in. I don't know if I'd be good because they do like characters and impressions. I don't know if I can do any impressions. Oh, okay. So I was like, I don't know like how, I mean, but writing, I didn't even get to really like give it a shot. Right.
So I was like, okay, if I want to act, I can go out there and there's an Upright Citizens Brigade out there so I can improvise and people who actually make decisions on TV shows can see me improvise. And then I had a lot of short films and that was the way I was going to show people like, so we just like, I got a job writing for Robot Chicken. That was my first writing job.
Hey, we just met Seth Green the other night. I heard that he was at the roast with Brecken. Brecken's the best. Yeah. So that's how I started. I started very much as a writer that did improv and slowly got into commercials and slowly got into all the other acting stuff.
Yeah. Man, what a career. Because your resume is bananas.
Showing 181–200 of 260 · page 10 of 13
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