They Might Be the Next Giant of Comedy

“They say the hardest part of rollerblading,” explains a sweatband-clad skater in last year’s season finale of the MTV sketch comedy series Human Giant, “is telling your parents you’re gay.”

For Human Giant, the comedy group behind the show, that premise is enough for an entire sketch, and the sketch is all the more funny for giving so much credence to the imaginary relationship that it creates.

“A lot of people don’t get our show,” admitted comedian Rob Huebel in a phone interview. But the executives at MTV do—Human Giant is back for a second season starting Tuesday at 11. “We always have to give MTV props about that,” he explained, “like, they usually let us do what we want creatively.”

The sketch collective known as Human Giant consists of Huebel, Aziz Ansari, Paul
Scheer, and Jason Woliner. Human Giant’s season premiere continues the group’s tradition of getting laughs by playing with viewers’ expectations. In the episode’s first scene, an old woman who appears to be telling her grandson that she’s dying turns out to be confessing that she’s a soldier sent from the future to assassinate him.

Even the recurring sketches defy expectations. The popular sketch “Illusionators,” which is about “dumb magicians who think they’re awesome,” according to Huebel, has a recognizable intro with Ansari and Scheer standing in the desert wearing Satanic garb. Ridiculous magic tricks usually follow that opening, but in this episode’s segment, the Illusionators face charges of racism and have to apologize to every single African-American individually.

“Like, in certain sketch shows where they have, like, a reoccurring character, they’ll just bring them back, and they’ll say the same catchphrases over and over,” noted Scheer. “We try not to repeat a joke that you’ve already seen.”

Human Giant goes for the same effect in “Shutterbugs,” a recurring sketch that started out depicting a pair of talent agents who run a firm for child actors but now is something entirely new. The first installment of this season includes a promo ad for a reality show called Kiditentiary, in which children run a prison. “The adults have had their shot running the place. Now it’s these guys’ turn,” proclaims SNL’s Andy Samberg in the promo.

Samberg is one of many New York comedians who will guest star on this season of Human Giant. The group originally came together through their involvement in the city’s comedy scene—Huebel and Scheer had been improvising together for ten years, and Ansari was an emerging stand-up comic. As the season continues, viewers can look forward to seeing more of their comedy clique, like Will Arnett in a sketch about the Olsen twins (which is already available online) as well as Jack McBrayer, David Cross, and others.

Like with the Kiditentiary promo, many of the sketches on Human Giant contain videos within videos. A sketch from tomorrow’s episode called “Viral Video Sensations” transitions from a man determined to do something that’s never been done before on the internet (“I’m going to cut my dick off,” he declares) to the man’s appearance on a news show to discuss the popularity of his viral video.

“I mean, there actually are guys like that on the Internet,” explained Scheer. “You know, there is a guy that will eventually cut his dick off. There is a guy who always does those big stupid faces on YouTube. So we kind of thought that people would be familiar with those characters, and they might kind of be really familiar, be really funny to people.”

Even though Human Giant released “Viral Video Sensations” online in late February where it has already garnered hundreds of “likes” on collegehumor.com, Scheer insists that the group doesn’t cater to their potential online audience. “To us, we want to be funny more than we want to be, like, an Internet sensation. If something actually works out that people like it on the Internet that’s great, but it’s never, like, our first goal,” he said.

The success of “Viral Video Sensations” lies in its clever writing, though when shooting the sketch the group didn’t feel bound to their script. According to Scheer, “that’s something that’s, like, really important to us in the process. We improvised a lot once we were on the set.”

And improvising off the set is also important for the members of Human Giant, each of whom has continued to perform live comedy during the group’s transition to television. Currently, Human Giant is on a live tour across the country, and Ansari, Scheer, and Huebel each have dates scheduled to perform at the Upright Citizens Brigade theaters in New York and L.A. in the next month.

“That’s just where we came from, so you know that will always be part of what we do,” explained Huebel. “It’s part of who we are.”