(Intro by UPROXX contributor Nadia Chaudhury, who also quizzed Mirman with our questions.)
Comedian/actor/festival namesake Eugene Mirman, who you ought to recognize as Yvgeny Mirminsky from Delocated and the voice of Gene on UPROXX favorite Bob’s Burgers, will make Friday evening TV bearable tonight, in the form of a Comedy Central special, Eugene Mirman: An Evening of Comedy in a Fake Underground Laboratory (it airs at midnight, so set your DVRs). Expect tales of Internet pranks, rants against Time Warner Cable, memories from his high school notebook, rocking out on a theremin, and Kristen Schaal, who portrays his little sister Louise on Bob’s, which airs its final episode of 2012 on Sunday, with special guest Zach Galifianakis.
Eugene was also nice enough to take a few minutes out of his busy schedule recently to answer a few of our questions.
1. You walk into a bar. What do you order from the bartender?
A Macallan neat.
2. Who’s your favorite person to follow on Twitter?
There’s so many. Rob Delaney, Kumail Nanjiani, Michael Showalter, Al Jazeera English, Associated Press, Kurt Loder. That’s probably a good place to stop.
3. What’s currently waiting for you on your DVR/TiVO?
The last episode of Bob’s Burgers. I haven’t had a chance to see it yet. Homeland, that I’m going to hopefully watch later today. Arrow, the show Arrow.
4. It’s your last meal, what are you going out with?
A four-year sandwich.
5. What websites do you visit on a regular basis?
The AV Club. That’s one of my favorite places to read stuff about movies, TV shows, and stuff. They just assess things really, really well. If it’s a dumb action movie, they’ll tell you if you might like it, and I like that about it.
6. What’s the most frequently played song on your iPod?
I don’t know off-hand. I wonder what it is. Probably something by Robyn Hitchcock or Swamp Dogg.
7. The first face that comes to mind when you think “punchable”?
Would it be inappropriate to say some little kid at Target? Maybe I’ll just say some little kid at Target around the holidays.
8. What’s your favorite meme?
That Cooks Source thing. This woman in Western Massachusetts, who ran some culinary magazine, plagiarized someone’s article. That person reached out, “Hey, you published my article without permission.” Then the editor wrote what is probably the world’s most condescending letter that was also wrong about everything it was saying. It was amazing. The whole Internet rose to, maybe excessively, destroy this small magazine in Western Massachusetts that had plagiarized an article. But it did teach people the important lesson of not being condescending to strangers when you’re totally wrong.
9. Dogs or cats?
I would’ve said dogs, but I recently had a cat because my girlfriend had a cat. I wonder if there’s a third neutral animal. Like a wolf. You know, some people take wolves in and then they have to give them up once the wolf is a year old and they realize they have a wolf.
10. Best concert of your life was…?
A really, really amazing concert of my life was my first concert: seeing Guns N’ Roses on the Appetite for Destruction tour open for Aerosmith.
11. What book are you most likely to give as a gift?
Fables or Astro City, one of those two graphic novels.
12. What’s the nicest thing anyone has ever done for you?
That’s hard to answer, because of the range of things. It would be absurd to compare my parents raising me and sending me to college as not as nice as someone doing a pretty nice thing. So I don’t know where to begin the scale of niceness. I will say that when I was in college, before the Internet was as popular and it was so easy to reach and get in touch with people you admire, I came from Western Mass to New York to see Emo Phillips at a comedy club. I gave him a package with a VHS tape of my stand-up and a long letter about how much I loved his stand-up. A month later, I received a seven-page typewritten response from him and it was maybe one of the most amazing things.
13. South Park or Family Guy?
[Laughs] That’s a really funny question, because you picked two things with a somewhat similar tone. Of both of them, maybe South Park, but they’re both pretty good. It’s like The Bourne Identity or The Bourne Supremacy. I know that they’re different, so maybe South Park.
14. You have an entire day to do whatever you want. What would you do?
Just to be clear, not like I could choose to hunt people on an island? [No.] Okay, just making sure. I would go to lots of different awesome ethnic neighborhoods and try different foods. I’d go to Chinatown in Flushing, Jackson Heights, and Brighton Beach.
15. What movie can you not resist watching if it’s on?
One of the Bourne movies, the first three Bourne movies. Or something like that. A fun action thing.
16. Android or iPhone?
Well, it used to be an Android and now I have an iPhone.
17. Where did you eat the best meal of your life?
It’s a few places: The upstate Blue Hill at Stone Barns, an hour out of the city. A place that I don’t know the name of that I was in, that me, Leo Allen, and Todd Barry went to in Barcelona, there was a really great place. And there were probably some other places like that I’m forgetting because I don’t write it down and I don’t have a camera. Maybe some buffet in Israel.
18. The last movie you saw in a theater?
Skyfall.
19. Who was your first celebrity crush?
Either Erin Gray, who was in Buck Rogers, or Lynda Carter, who was Wonder Woman.
20. What would you cook if Nic Cage was coming to your house for dinner?
An indiscriminate movie role.
(Previously: Zane Lamprey. Banner via Nadia Chaudhury)