The best-dressed dude in comedy
What Danny McBride told me about unlikely sauce, and more Weekend Wisdom
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Here’s a tight selection of 6 fantastic things to read, watch, and listen to this weekend — exclusively for our Classified Tier Spyfriends, who enjoy a better life behind behind the Recon Curtain.
Jonah & Erin
First up —
In the summer of 2016 I called up comedy genius Danny McBride for a Rolling Stone Q&A about the premiere of Vice Principals, his insane HBO series with Walton Goggins.
I remember it as an illuminating conversation with a profoundly amusing dude, relatively low on laughs, but full of introspection that might have surprised people. I can’t say for sure, because my editors were unhappy with the draft, and it never saw the light of day: “Could we get him back on the phone for something… more funny?”
Danny is a true mensch, because I asked him apologetically to hop back on the horn for a redo, he did, and this time he was accommodatingly “more funny.” We talked about how he used to drive a Hyundai Elantra, about bad acid trips, and about the toll it took playing an absolute a--hole for four straight years of Eastbound & Down, among other things.
One exchange I love that got cut, or maybe it’s from another conversation I had with Danny that I can’t find on Google, had to do with the vivid, anthropologically precise, and presciently fire way his characters have always dressed, back to Foot Fist Way.
His kimono-and-unbranded-basketball-jersey combo in Pineapple Express (topmost above) was an all-timer. And this man was rocking outfits on screen in 2006 that I promise you someone in their 20s is trying to dress like in downtown NYC this weekend. That dangling belt over the jorts with the tucked-in denim button-up above right? Exquisite. That blue flame camp shirt above left? Good luck finding one of those at Procell today friend.
I asked Danny to shed some light on his characters’ incredibly f--ked-up fashion sense.
He told me about taking inspiration from people he’d known growing up in Virginia — prominent among them his dad, who he said tried to wear shorts as close to 365 days a year as possible.
“He had his normal shorts,” Danny explained, cracking himself up, “and then he had his dress shorts, for formal occasions.”
So good. And Papa McBride was on to something on this score, which you know if you saw our Spring Shorts Report last week.
All of which brings us to a vital, monumental and extremely funny new triumph of contemporary cultural reportage: