Front Burner - Nathan Fielder’s awkward comedy revolution

Episode Date: July 22, 2022

On This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Nathan for You and HBO’s new comedy The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder has played a stiff, socially inept agitator that can barely get through a conversation. The amount that Fielder’s real personality informs his character is a mystery. But Fielder has used his bizarre comments and awkward silences to destabilize his interviewees, joining a wave of comedians that try to get authentic reactions in an age of careful-crafted “reality” television. And now, on The Rehearsal, Fielder is adding a layer of absurdity, as he helps people rehearse difficult social situations with paid actors and perfect sets of real locations. With the second episode of The Rehearsal out today, New York Magazine features writer Lila Shapiro joins us to discuss how Fielder’s over-controlling personality is paradoxically creating some of the most spontaneous moments on television.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Obviously, you've gone through the first three questions now. Did that make sense to you in that order? It makes total sense. Okay, good.

Hey, I'm Jamie Poisson. And if you find the conversations that we have on this show every day, even somewhat natural and casual sounding, that's actually not by accident. And I think that's the deal here, that he leaves the awkward silence so long that people just start talking to fill the deal here, that he leaves the awkward silence so long that people just start talking to fill the void, because

it's unbearably awkward. That would be me. I would do that. Some of them are really sad, too. We have this pretty long planning process, where our producers call up guests, and they ask them all sorts of questions. Oh my god,

she interviewed him at the Universal Studios Waterworld show? Hell yeah. Then the producers write up their favorite questions and ideas and we all hop into a meeting where we workshop how the conversation should flow. So there's a kind of a vein of comedy that he's kind of in the middle of, I think? Yeah, that's it right now. Okay. She calls it the quiet revolution. That's not to say there aren't real surprises when we sit down to record. And the fun that I have every day definitely is not fake. But lately, I've been thinking a lot about how the reality of this podcast, as you hear

it, is sort of rehearsed, a crafted conversation that is in some ways practiced. And how that shares something with Canadian comedian Nathan Fielder's new HBO show, The Rehearsal. Everything that's happened today, I've rehearsed it dozens of times in a replica of your home. This is what we can do for you, you, and you. In the show, Fielder tries to guide people through complex social situations by letting them practice over and over with actors and fancy sets.

And in the process, Fielder raises questions about the authenticity of both television and our everyday interactions. While we were practicing, I also had Kor rehearse the aftermath of his confession beyond the actual night. Whether it be the torment of a friendship lost or the joy of a friendship strengthened,

where his confession opens the floodgates to actually talking for the first time. Fielder got his TV start right here in Canada on This Hour Has 22 Minutes in the 2000s. This helicopter is hovering six feet four inches above the ground. Now, if you were that tall, that's about how tall you'd be. But the Vancouver-born comedian perfected his stiff character with his Comedy Central show, Nathan For You. My name is Nathan Fielder, and I graduated from one of Canada's top business schools with really good grades. It was a sort of parody of those business rescue

reality shows, like a less angry Gordon Ramsay. He'd tell people to do all sorts of stupid things to save their businesses, and he'd do it with this deadpan awkwardness that kept them completely off balance. With our sign now on display, my plan quickly began to work, as people started coming in thinking it was an actual Starbucks. Oh, dumb Starbucks. Okay. Oh, you thought it was Starbucks? I did. Oh, you thought it was Starbucks.

I did. Fielder is an understated leader in the style of comedy that thrives on situations so awkward sometimes you can barely watch them. Think Borat or Eric Andre, how they hijack social norms. And today, the second episode of his new show, The Rehearsal, is out, which is taking it all to Charlie Kaufman levels of absurdity. Well, this is the perfect replica. I mean, that's not even the Funhouse version of it. It has, it looks, wow. So joining me is New York Magazine features writer Lila Shapiro,

who just wrote this incredible cover story on Nathan Fielder. And we're going to discuss how the man behind this obsessive, over-controlling personality is paradoxically creating some of the most authentic moments on television. Hi, Lila. Thank you so much for coming on to FrontBurner. Hi, thank you so much for having me. I wonder if we can start by just catching people up, people who might not know very much about Nathan Fielder. And what is his MO? Like if I turn on an episode of Nathan for you,

what's like a quintessential Nathan scenario I could expect to see? Okay. So he's presents himself as a guy who went to study business at the University of Victoria, which he really did do. And he goes to business owners and he presents them with absurd ideas. And like the wildness of watching it is that they in every episode, these business owners at least like attempt these ideas, you know, and it'll be things like he'll go to a frozen yogurt shop. My mission was to fill Yogurt Haven with customers. My plan, a crazy new flavor that will get people talking. That flavor is poo. Is that serious?

Yeah. I feel like a poo yogurt flavor might be a news story. Could bring like hundreds of thousands of people in here maybe? Just to try that flavor. Or to like go to like a hotel manager and, like, I designed this special box so that, like, vacationing parents can, like, can find their children in it while they have sex. But before committing to anything, he wanted to see a working prototype. So I got to work constructing our first isolation chamber that would be large enough to house a child up to 16 years of age. But since the most important part was the soundproofing, we layered the inside walls with six inches of rockwool batting and then added a cork-lined inner chamber with a pressurized seal that would eliminate vibrations. Because the box

had to be airtight, I also installed a self-contained breathing system that would pump oxygen in while scrubbing out the CO2 so the child wouldn't suffocate. And as a final precaution, I created a rainforest soundscape to play inside the box with custom animal calls that would hopefully camouflage any sex noises that happened to get through. But like in one of my favorite episodes early on in the show, he meets with this realtor and he suggests to her that she market herself as the ghost realtor and specifically try to like sell homes to the, you know, 50% or 51% of Americans who believe in ghosts. And the incredible thing is that like,

she not only like embraces this idea completely but in the middle of it like she reveals that she had this like close encounter with the ghost it's a ghost that'll have sex with someone until they die wow that's like what i experienced when i was in switzerland what happened in switzerland when i was being choked by an entity like that, I felt like I was being... What, a ghost choked you in Switzerland? Yes. And there's this, like, exorcism on her.

In the mighty name of the Lord Jesus Christ, come out, you spirits. Making people believe you are spirits of dead humans, huh? Liars. And you can sort of see Nathan in this episode just sort of, like? Liars. And you can sort of see Nathan in this episode, just sort of like holding on, like he wasn't expecting this revelation. And then the episode just unfolds in this incredible way. And you're like, wow, like this person really revealed something like incredible that like,

it's hard to imagine another circumstance where that would have come out in the same way. it's hard to imagine another circumstance where that would have come out in the same way. And tell me more about that concept and what the show is trying to accomplish, essentially to try and make moments that feel unexpected, right? Yes. So Nathan Fielder has this very strange persona on the show where he's like, he's incredibly awkward. He doesn't kind of go along with many of the mechanisms that most of us use to make another, like a conversational partner feel comfortable. So like he will let a silence like stretch and stretch or he will stand too close to someone or he will ask them really inappropriate

and uncomfortable questions. Have you ever posed for a painting before? No, not actually, not for anything like that. You'd make a good model. You're very beautiful. Well, bless your heart. Thank you so much for saying that. You're welcome. So is that enough small talk to make you comfortable? Yeah, I guess so. Or, you know, he'll present them with these ridiculous ideas.

And then the cameras are there capturing their uncertainty to like how to respond because these business owners who are like in the Los Angeles area, like they, they're being told, you know, a variety of things, but usually something like he's making a show about small businesses. So they're kind of imagining a certain kind of reality TV show that they're agreeing to. And so he uses all of these different tools to like put people off balance. And like, he watches a lot of reality TV and he really understands the genre. And there's something like really formulaic about like what we all kind of come to expect for like what we're going to see on a reality TV show. And it's like, and people who go on reality TV show have an idea of like how they're supposed to act.

But when he does these various things, they don't know what to do. They don't know how to respond to him. Javier wanted a contract with a major hotel, and I had the perfect method to win him that deal. Rather than making it look like the hotel has an exterminator visiting, why don't you instead make it look like the hotel is winning an award? All right, you've done this before, you know, you're a business major. I mean, what's the worst that's going to happen? And that's really his intention, like that's what he's trying to do when he does these things. It's to get this, get this authentic, strange, genuine reactions out of people,

which like as he sees it can often be really endearing and like something that we don't really get to see on TV. I know he's reluctant to describe any sort of deeper layer to his comedy, but I know his mom isn't, right? And like, how does his mom describe this approach? Right. So he told me that like when his mom first watched his work, she was like, what are you doing? His mother is like a social worker. But then she told him that she'd like kind of gotten to the bottom of it. And she was like, what you do is ethno methodology, which he was like, I've never heard of it. And he couldn't remember the word, but he like texted her. He's like, I've never heard of it.

And he couldn't remember the word, but he like texted her. And the guy that like founded this discipline, I think it was in the 60s, Harold Garfinkel, he set out to study society through constructing experiments that would like disrupt social norms in order to see how people would respond to them. Or like in one of his famous experiments, he like had his students go home to their families and pretend that they were like lodgers in their own homes, just see what would come out of that. And it's like, it is similar to what Nathan is doing. It's like he is disrupting these social norms in all these different ways. And like out of that comes something strange and interesting and like revealing about like human nature and like, you know, and society.

And this is, is it fair for me to say kind of like a genre of comedy now? Yes, I think so. You know, Sacha Baron Cohen being one of like the most pioneer of the form. My name is Borat. I come from Kazakhstan. Can I say first, we support your war of terror.

The New York Times ran a story recently calling it like a quiet revolution in comedy and basically making the argument that like in this era of like, yes, fake news and like bullshit, these people are going out there and oftentimes they're deceiving their subjects in some way. But somehow out of that comes this like, yeah, truth. Mm-hmm. You spent quite a bit of time with Nathan when you were working on this profile. And, like, just tell me a little bit about him.

Like, is he this awkward guy that we see on TV? Like, what do we know about him? I know that he went to high school in BC. I mean, I think that, like, in some ways he is and in some ways he isn't. Like, he's not as awkward as he is on Nathan For You. Like, he doesn't do the things that character does. You know, he's actually, like, very good at, like, making conversation, even charming. But one thing I think he does share with his persona is this desire to sort of control a dynamic and to control sort of how much

information is revealed about him. Something a lot of the second, like a lot of my, his friends brought up is like, you know, he did train as a magician in high school and worked as a magician, like at birthday parties for a number of years and like worked at a master's store in the mall and like kind of this whole thing of like, you know, a magician doesn't like to like reveal how they do their tricks. And that's very much where he's at. You know, it's like when I first asked him about his, you know, his new show, The Rehearsal, he didn't really want to talk about it. He was like, you know, the thing is the thing. Like, I don't want any extra context. I need to talk to a bunch of other comedians for your piece, like Tim Heidecker from Tim and Eric and H. John Benjamin, the voice of Archer. And what did they

have to say about who he is? Well, I also talked to Seth Rogen, who just happened to be like on his high school improv team. Right. They both, they both grew up in BC. And he recalled, like, he was, I asked him for his like most his clearest memory about Nathan. And he was like, what I remember about Nathan is like, during warmup exercises for improv, we were all supposed to act like we were burning in lava. And like, there was no way that Nathan was going to do that.

You'd look at him and he'd just be standing there and it'd be like, absolutely not, not his thing. There's this feeling of like, you know, he was doing his own thing at that point. And I saw A. Sean Benjamin compared him to Stanley Milgram, the psychologist who tricked people into thinking they were giving other people electric shocks, right? Which is interesting. Yeah. I thought that was such a great comparison. And also similar to Harold Garfinkel, both have been described by their peers as visionary men. They had a vision that they were trying to achieve. And people who were participating in that vision didn't necessarily feel so good once they realized what was really going on. Yeah. And I guess let's talk about that for a minute now,

because going back to Nathan, for you, like, he often seemed to embarrass business owners. Do you find this drawing funny? If you answered yes, you're probably caricature artist Greg Dolan. He was the one that drew it. And after two decades of doing caricatures, he has yet to make a name for himself.

We're customers on camera. And I know that there are people that you talk to who felt like manipulated by Nathan and by the show, like this was a really negative experience for them. Yeah. I mean, of course, right? He's going out there and he's not giving people the full picture of what they're about to participate in. I mean, part of the point of the show is that he presents the business owners with of reasons why someone might do that. Like maybe they feel like they have to because they're a struggling business owner and they're going to do whatever they need to, to try to like secure their business. And a lot of those small business owners are, you know, people of color, immigrants, and they are struggling. And like, that's why they're doing the show. And so like there are moments as a viewer viewer and this has been talked about a lot where it can just feel really uncomfortable and upsetting when it feels like there's a real disparity in power

between Nathan and frankly kind of kind of mean too you have this one example in your piece of a young woman who I think she owned like a house cleaning or a cleaning business. So yeah, I mean, she, she owns this business called the health cleaning service and he went to her and he told her as she recalled it, you know, that he, he wanted to just profile her business success. She's like 22. She's a Mexican immigrant. She's so proud of this business that she's built. And she's like really excited by this opportunity. And she like called her family and was like, this is so wonderful. This is such a big deal. And then, you know, his proposal to her was, you know, to offer some kind of like turbo clean.

By offering to clean houses 40 maids at a time, Candy would not only double the amount of jobs she could do in a day, but her customers would likely pay a premium fee for a service that allows them to have a spotless home in the time it takes to go out and grab a cup of coffee. The plan? And she just found it to be humiliating.

Like when she realized what it was, because, you know, the producers would usually tell people that they were doing something for MTV Networks, which is Comedy Central's parent company. When she realized that it was like a Comedy Central show, yeah, like she felt humiliated and she told her family not to watch it. There's always a chance that people would feel that way. And in fact, like, you know, people who were like the subjects of like the ethno methodology experiments felt bad too. Like Harold Garfinkel wrote in his like the founding text of the field, the families of my students, like who are being experimented on were like most often like not amused.

And like the sister of one of the students like begged the student like no more experiments we're not lab rats right is this real trade-off to get these you know seemingly or more authentic moments there's collateral damage right and and when you asked him about this like what did he have to say about that? He has a couple of main beats. One of them is that he's like, I'm the fool in everything I do. And there is some truth to that. He's willing to make himself look extremely foolish. But I think that the issue with that is that as a viewer, sure, the character looks foolish and ridiculous and almost like sociopathic in his mannerisms and what he's

trying to get people to do and his conviction and the way he talks to people, but you as a viewer know that he's also like the guy that made the show. And that guy invariably like looks smarter than everyone around him. And another piece of it is like, you know, he, he, he's like, I always try to make people feel comfortable. Like I would check in over and over again, you know, to that point, like he and Michael Komen, like both told me, you know, like only one person has ever dropped out, you know, but, but at, in one of our conversations, like he kind of, you know, pointed out that like, you know, perhaps part of the problems that like the,

the show does critique a sort of power dynamic that is present in all of these reality TV shows that are, that are, he's parodying, which is like a guy goes in with a camera and people will say, yes, perhaps this power dynamic that the show is parodying is also like operating within the show itself. You know, and he said like, you know, we do sometimes get it wrong. So, the show itself. And he said, we do sometimes get it wrong. But when I was talking about this with him, he seemingly was not aware that people had been upset. He was surprised to hear it from me as I'd been interviewing the business owners. Right. Because some people also thought it was pretty funny. Yes. Some people just thought it was really fun and really cool and also thought he

was like a genius and like kind of got that it was a joke right away. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. their own household income. That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples.

I want to talk to you a little bit before we go about the new show that you mentioned earlier at the rehearsal, one of the reasons why we're talking today. The first episode is last Friday. It's really like kind of deranged, right? The whole premise of it. And just tell me a little bit about how it sort of continues to push this bizarre comedy experiment forward. So in the show, what he did is he put an ad on Craigslist, like looking for people with problems in their lives that they wanted to solve. And he asked for video submissions. So like the first guy in the pilot episode, which aired last week, he had been carrying around a lie. He told a friend on his trivia team about

his educational background. I feel like we all have one of those. Yeah. Yes. Like we all have a problem like that. You know, he, what he is presenting to these subjects is a rehearsal. And so what that means, you know, in similar fashion to Nathan for you, like where he'll take these ideas to the like absolute limits as far as they could possibly be taken. You know, he creates like a perfect replica of the bar in Brooklyn where this guy and his friend play trivia together. It'll be like walking in at a normal level and then being able to know my bearings. When you show up on the actual night, it'll feel just like this. Yeah.

No surprises. No. You know everything that's going to happen. mentioned to him at one point that they thought that like the replica of the bar was like more expensive to make than the bar itself because of like labor laws and whatever. But it was, it was perfect down to the hinges on the door. And he was describing this to me and he was like, yeah, there's something that got really obsessive about it because they're like emailing me about like the hinges. And I'm like, yes, they should be exact too. And he turned to me and he was like, because who knows what matters?

So there's something like that's deranged, right? Like what are the hinges on the door have to do with this guy's apology? But that's like the place that he takes it to. Then they practice the apology over and over and over again in the bar. And as a viewer, I think you're like, what is he saying about how we should live? Like the guy in the first episode, like compares Nathan to Willy Wonka.

You're the, you're a Willy Wonka in the chocolate factory. I'm the bad guy? Well, he's a dream maker. Okay. And you're doing, you're making some dreams happen for me. But kids died in the factory well they the subject points out like but he's also a dream maker and that's like kind of the tension it's like nathan is like spinning these fantasies but like you can't help but feel like

kind of like how as a viewer you're you're imagining how he's feeling. And you kind of can't help but wonder if he's not feeling like some of those innocent people who are subjected to Garfinkel's experiments, like they're lab rats in Nathan's ever increasingly elaborate and marvelous maze. Yeah. Lila, the other thing that I was thinking about is what is trying to say about how we can control authentic experiences, right? Like, in a way, it's not so different from even how we produce the show, right? Like, I want to have a really normal, cool, authentic conversation with you. But also, we do a lot of prep work to make sure that it turns out the way we want to, right? Like our producer, Derek, talked to you. He did a pre-interview. And I don't know, what do you think about that concept? Yeah, I think that there's this way where on the rehearsal, while watching it, you're aware that

these rehearsals are insane, kind of, and deranged and weird and like don't make sense to actually do in your life nobody would do this in their actual life and there's a sense that's implicit in that that there's like it's a foolish endeavor at the same time like it did grow out of like Nathan's actual preparatory process for making Nathan for you. And as one of like his colleagues pointed out to me, I think these are tools that Nathan would like to have in his life. But I think that there's a question and the question just grows like stronger and stronger as the show goes on. I mean, I've seen now the first five episodes, like, as the show goes on, I mean, I've seen now the first five episodes, like what, why would someone do this? And what does it mean that we want these kinds of, we want to try to have this control and

is having that kind of control good or bad? Yeah. And what you could gain and what you could lose by doing that. Lila, thank you. This was super interesting and also a lot of fun. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. This was great. Come with me and you'll be in a world of pure imagination. Take a look and you'll see into your imagination.

All right. That is all for this week. Frontburner was produced this week by Derek Vanderwyk, who actually produced this very fun episode that you just listened to. Imogen Burchard, Simi Bassey, Ashley Fraser, Allie James, Katie Toth, and Lauren Donnelly. Our sound design was by Matt Cameron and Sam McNulty. Our music is by Joseph Shabison. Our executive producer is Nick McKay-Blocos.

And I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening, and we will talk to you on Monday. If you want to view paradise Simply look around and view it Anything you want to do it Want to change the world There's nothing to it For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.