The Silicon Valley Boys Aren't Just Brilliant—They're Part of a Comedy Revolution

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The games begin—as they so often do—with a poop joke. ¶ It’s a late-January morning and we’re on a giant back-lot soundstage in Los Angeles, where cast members of HBO’s dot-comedy Silicon Valley are hunched over their laptops, tossing out beta-male insults. Today’s scene gathers four of the show’s actors—Thomas Middleditch, who stars as the flappable app developer Richard; Kumail Nanjiani as the put-upon programmer Dinesh; Martin Starr, a k a Gilfoyle, the fatalist-Satanist tech wiz; and Zach Woods, who plays milquetoast consigliere Jared—as their characters meekly plot revenge against a former ally who’s sold them out. After a few takes, however, the actors start going off script, lobbing improvised one-liners the way 5-year-olds smack around balloons.

“We should mail him a bag of his own poop.”

“We should get him suspended from LinkedIn.”

“We should sign him up for all the podcasts he doesn’t like.”

Are they all gold? They are not. But as the actors become both more drained and more limbered up, the Silicon set becomes a rolling riff-tide of free-form, ever-escalating jokes, even when the cameras aren’t on: The phrase “ding-dong” is inserted into random lines (“Lame City. Population: ding-dong”). Off-key Michael McDonald impressions are trotted out and dueled. For one scene, Woods improvises nearly half a dozen versions of the same line, reshaping and recasting it each time and throwing in references to everything from Harriet Tubman to Anne Frank to the suffragette movement. At one point, an in-character spat ends with Starr shouting, “Go masturbate and cry!” The subsequent response, which involves a trash can and bodily fluids, is so crass that some of the crew members wince.

Most of these on-the-spot flourishes will never make it to air, as Silicon is a twisty, tightly scripted show, one that captures all the dick moves (and dick jokes) of an industry that’s often unaware of its hypermasculine alpha-bro hilarity. But for the cast members, this kind of exploratory effing around would be tough to cork; it’s an almost tic-like reflex, the result of years of late-night legwork. Along with T. J. Miller, who plays the smart-ass sage Erlich, these actors have spent years working in every comedic climate imaginable, from midnight improv gigs to far-flung stand-up sets to network sitcoms. But now their individual paths have led all these thirtysomethings to a blue-chip series with a revered creator (Office Space’s Mike Judge) and multiple Emmy and Golden Globe nominations.

It’s the latest victory for an all-new kind of comedy star: Middleditch, Miller, Nanjiani, Starr, and Woods are all avatars of an emerging upper-middle class of actors, stand-ups, and improvisers. Gone are the days when comedy fame was defined by a ratings-#blessed sitcom or eight-figure paychecks or a huge arena-filling tour. Those opportunities exist only for a shrinking cadre of big-name performers—think Melissa McCarthy, Kevin Hart, Will Ferrell, and Seth Rogen. For everyone else, there’s a new comedy gig economy built on a hodgepodge of podcast appearances, sketch show cameos, commercials, more podcast appearances, indie-film appearances, script work, web shorts, ensemble TV roles—and, if all goes well, a WTF With Marc Maron appearance in which everyone bonds over their failed Lorne Michaels auditions.

“It’s kind of like creating a comedy Voltron,” says Paul Scheer, a writer-performer who has worked on projects of all formats and sizes, including TV shows like The League and the movie-skewering podcast How Did This Get Made? “You have a lot of different segments that connect together to become one big career. A TV star is a movie star is a web star.”

That’s a heretical strategy compared with the ’80s and ’90s, when comedians made a funny-person pilgrimage that, in theory, took them from the red-brick trenches of nightclubs to the stages of The Tonight Show or Saturday Night Live to, finally, a gleaming residuals-strewn paradise offering network sitcoms, movie deals, theater tours, and book contracts. Not every option worked (unless you were Tim Allen), but if you stuck to the one or two that did and made sure you were as mass-appealing as possible, you wound up with a giant fan base and a grotto in Vail.

Such a path is rarely trod anymore, in part because the biggest comedy shows aren’t the cultural monoliths they once were. In a pattern familiar to all kinds of media, the era of huge mass-market tentpoles has given way to a seemingly limitless number of outlets—some well known, others almost secret-society-like in their nicheness—in which performers can reach audiences directly. “With the advent of new media, ultimate goals were torn down and made less important,” says Cameron Esposito, a stand-up, writer, and actress (Drunk History). “Obviously, every comic would still love to be a guest on Fallon or do stand-up on Comedy Central. But all eyeballs are no longer pointed to the same place. You can’t just go on network television or appear on a late-night show and assume you’ll have the attention of Hollywood.”

Besides, to any performer who’s watched their favorite comedian get defanged by some prime-time floater of a sitcom or be reduced to a whiny-girlfriend sidekick role, mainstream domination isn’t as enticing as it was years ago. Instead, the comedy stars—enabled by the web and ennobled by years of do-it-yourself slogging—have become accustomed to making, and controlling, nearly everything that bears their names.

Watch the Silicon Valley guys skewer some real Silicon Valley unicorns.

“Growing up, it was my dream to be plucked from the stage and put on a sitcom that somebody else wrote, where my life would be like Jennifer Aniston’s, and I would get boobs like hers,” says writer-performer Jessica St. Clair, who cocreated and costars in USA’s sitcom Playing House as well as the podcast WOMP It Up! “But after being excused from a few sitcoms, I realized that if I’m going to actually be successful, I’m going to have to write for myself.” Adds Lennon Parham, her Playing House (and WOMP) partner: “When we started out, we said yes to everything—it’s from that hunger, and the fact that you never know where work’s going to come from.”

Eschewing big, dopey sitcoms and movies—or at least being choosy about which ones you surrender to—means not everyone will earn megabucks in this new gig economy. But the rewards, at least creatively, promise to be far greater. “Maybe you don’t get fat and happy and complacent, and you don’t buy a bunch of catamarans,” says Silicon’s Woods, who went from little-seen web videos to a scene-stealing turn on NBC’s The Office. “But in return you get to do your weirdo ideas with your friends, as opposed to some sitcom that you sleepwalk through.”

That communal ethos is part of why comedy has become one of the most skillfully executed pop-cultural commodities we have, a never-ending swirl of Good Stuff, regardless of medium. It’s genuinely ridiculous how much ace comedy is out there, and how it encourages happy gluttony: You could spend an afternoon catching up on The Carmichael Show or devote a weekend to watching nothing but Silicon Valley, Key & Peele, and Broad City or clear your entire week to listen to every single Paul F. Tompkins appearance (121 episodes and counting!) on the Comedy Bang! Bang! podcast. Being a comedy fan now is like being a film lover in the ’70s or an Iran-Contra enthusiast in the ’80s: Every day, it seems, there’s something new and boundary-warping to get passionate about. And it’s all instantly within reach, via a gazillion different (and still evolving) formats.

“I missed the cash-cow film and television years of the ’90s by virtue of when I was born,” Silicon Valley’s Miller says from his trailer one day, during a break in filming. (He’s 35.) “But this is a very Wild, Wild West time—and I mean that in the Will Smith sense of the phrase. Nobody knows what’s going to happen or emerge.”

As he talks, Miller has a half-eaten salad on his desk, a black-and-white Jimmy Cagney gangster movie playing on mute in the background, and a travel agent on hold on his phones. The show’s about to wrap shooting for the weekend, but no one’s taking a day off. Miller is heading to London to promote his role in Deadpool. Middleditch, meanwhile, will fly to Sundance, where he’s premiering a new film, Joshy, costarring many of his comedy-class peers. Woods does regular weekend performances at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, and Nanjiani is off to New York City to prep as host of the Independent Spirit Awards. As for Starr, he’s working on one of a handful of pilots he’s sold to various networks. Making it in comedy these days means wearing a wider variety of hats, but none of them are complaining—when would they even have time to?

“Most of our friends who are successful in comedy are the ones working in at least three different disciplines,” Miller says. “The best way to become a successful comedian in our day and age is to become the most well-rounded comedian, with the strongest and deepest skill set.” To keep up, the denizens of Silicon Valley and their peers have to work just as hard as the ding-dongs of Silicon Valley.

It’s tough to pinpoint the exact moment when comedy (“Wanna come over and watch Seinfeld?”) evolved into Comedy (“Wanna come over and listen to this podcast about Seinfeld?”). But there is one year that, in retrospect, now seems downright epochal: 2003, which saw the arrival of the decade’s most influential sitcom (Arrested Development) as well as its most revolutionary sketch series (Chappelle’s Show); 222,the uncut version of Patton Oswalt’s debut stand-up album; multiple performances of Sarah Silverman’s breakthrough show Jesus Is Magic; and the opening of a brand-new Upright Citizens Brigade theater in Manhattan, the future breeding ground of performers like Woods, Scheer, Ellie Kemper, and Aziz Ansari. For comedy nerds and aspirants, that year marked the multifront emergence of a new and form-busting mode of humor: hyper-intelligent, deeply personal, and occasionally surreal. It was a good time to dive in.

It also happened to be the year that Miller—who started doing stand-up as a teenager, at the urging of a high school teacher—relocated from Denver to Chicago, where there were more live-show opportunities. Some of his earliest gigs did not go well, including a promotional event for a local light beer, which, for Chicagoans, might as well qualify as an alien technology: He tossed out free shirts, only to have them thrown back at him.

Not long after arriving, he met Middleditch, a skilled improviser who had moved from British Columbia. They eventually created a two-person experimental improv show, Practice Scaring a Bear, at the city’s renowned ImprovOlympic Theater. Despite the venue’s prominence and the actors’ growing reputations, there were nights when only one person showed up. “That was disheartening,” Middleditch, now 34, says. “But we were like, ‘We’ll do the show for this guy, because we just want to perform together.’ Everybody in comedy has something like that happen to them: They bomb, or no one shows up. You’re like, ‘Hey, I’m funny, trust me!’ And the world collectively goes, ‘Yeah, you and everybody else.’”

Team Humor

The new comedy order didn’t happen all at once: It was pioneered by a fresh crop of TV shows working with a more fluid form of ensemble. Along with Silicon Valley, these five series have helped to transform the comedy economy. —Peter Rubin

The League (2009–2015)

This FX phenomenon was a filthy first: a successful ensemble show where just about every core cast member—from Paul Scheer to Nick Kroll to Mark Duplass to Jason Mantzoukas—had day jobs. And with recurring appearances by Seth Rogen, it dovetailed nicely with the Apatow-verse.

Children’s Hospital (2008–2016)

One of the first web series to transition to TV—it’s now seven seasons deep on Adult Swim—this deadpan medical-drama satire serves up 15-minute doses of finely titrated absurdism. Creator Rob Corddry is joined by Lake Bell, Rob Huebel, gig-comedy surprise Henry Winkler, and seemingly dozens more.

Party Down (2009–2010)

Starz’ lightning-in-a-bottle cult hit in many ways led to today’s TV comedy landscape. The cameo-packed show not only offered an outlet for sketch comedy veterans like Jennifer Coolidge and Ken Marino (a main cast member in four of the five properties on this list), it brought Martin Starr back to TV.

Burning Love (2012–2013)

Another web-series-made-good (E! aired it on TV), BL skewered Bachelor-type romance reality shows with three seasons’ worth of “Hey, it’s [character] from [cult show/movie]!” comedy fixtures. If they’re in this WIRED story—Starr, Nanjiani, Scheer, June Diane Raphael, Jessica St. Clair—they were likely on this show.

Wet Hot American Summer:

First Day of Camp (2015)

After a 2001 movie that established comedy’s cast-everyone ethos, the creators cooked up a Netflix prequel series. The show was just as star-studded as the movie, but it also boasted a laundry list of gig standouts (Scheer, Bell, Jordan Peele) hanging with the big guns.

Photographs: Byron Cohen/FX (the league); Courtesy of adult swim (children’s hospital); courtesy of starz entertainment (party down); courtesy of paramount (burning love); Gemma La Mana/Netflix (wet hot american summer)

Middleditch was an avid gamer, which is why Miller introduced him to another newly arrived Chicago transplant: Nanjiani, a stand-up who’d recently graduated from college in the Midwest and who would wind up bonding with Middleditch while playing Gears of War. Nanjiani had lived in Pakistan until he was 18; he’d barely even seen any stand-up until arriving in the US, and he quickly became obsessed, spending two years recording and watching every TV special he could. “I was like, ‘You can just tell jokes and make a living?’” he says. “It felt like freedom—you could talk about anything, and as long as it was funny, you were successful. And it’s the easiest of these to get started on, because you can write something in the morning and go try it at night, and you don’t need anybody else.”

Over time, Nanjiani—who was working a tech job by day, helping schoolkids fix their laptops—built up his routine, a mix of personal and cultural observations; in one early bit, he talked about how much harder old videogames were, a spiel that was captured in an early online video (“You’re already a robot,” he says about a transforming, tough-to-kill enemy. “Why do you also need to be a murder boat?!”). YouTube was relatively young at that point, but Middleditch and Miller—like other comedic performers around the country, including Tim & Eric—were already using it to test out ideas (one of Miller’s clips was titled, simply and accurately, “Dick on Face”). “We’d be making weird short films until 4 am, even when we had to work the next day,” says Middleditch, who later found a manager in part because of his online work. “Some of the videos were shit and some were good. But you put your tentacles out as much as you can.”

By the late ’00s, each of the trio found themselves being beckoned to the coasts. Middleditch was doing improv on a cruise ship when he heard Saturday Night Live was holding a Chicago casting call; while he didn’t land a spot on the show, he did wind up with a network holding deal in New York. Nanjiani was soon there too, getting occasional guest turns on The Colbert Report and writing on Comedy Central’s Michael and Michael Have Issues (the show gave him his first acting work but was quickly canceled). Miller, meanwhile, eventually relocated to Los Angeles, shooting a TV pilot and nabbing a lead part in Cloverfield, the first of several film and TV roles.

Throughout these years, Middleditch, Miller, and Nanjiani faced significant setbacks: There were unconsummated pilot deals, canceled sitcoms, apathetic or downright antagonistic crowds. Yet none of them got discouraged enough to quit. And why would they? Everywhere they looked, new venues and avenues were opening up, and many of their peers were getting regular work. Comedy didn’t seem like such an iffy career. “When I told my parents that I was quitting my day job, they were pretty supportive,” says Nanjiani, 38. “It didn’t make sense to them, obviously, because it is a stupid thing to do. But they said, ‘OK, do it and see what happens.’”

On an early Sunday evening in Hollywood, a crowd of nearly 100 twenty- and thirtysomethings—half male, half female, though the amount of hoodies makes it hard to know for sure—has bunched up near the entrance of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre on Sunset Boulevard. Tonight’s big show is ASSSSCAT, a long-running, all-improvised joke-gumbo in which Woods frequently performs. For more than an hour he’ll tag in and out of various scenarioses and characters; one minute he’s a selfish suicide-hotline employee, the next he’s fending off a knife-throwing rabbit. As with all good improv shows, the whole thing is hypnotic in the moment and thoroughly asinine in the retelling.

Woods, 31, has performed in hundreds of shows like these—maybe even thousands. In the early 2000s, he was an unlikely comedy prodigy, riding the train from his suburban Pennsylvania home to take improv classes at UCB’s New York theater while he was still in high school. One night, early on, he and a fellow performer started discussing their futures. “I remember saying, ‘I just want to temp and do improv at night,’” Woods says. He was 16 years old.

Improv performers had always had limited career options—at least compared with stand-ups, who enjoyed the crucial advantage of being able to go on the road by themselves. Improvisers could bask in the fizzy-headed uplift of wowing a crowd at a sold-out black box theater, but when it came to actual paying gigs, options were limited: There was the wide-eyed, slim-margin chance that they’d wind up on SNL or get a recurring gig on Conan, but for the most part, they had to either sweat through pilot season, work on a sketch packet, or undergo an endless, joyless crush of commercial auditions.

Comedy’s New (and Overworked) Standouts

The key to joining the new world of comedy: Work like mad. Thanks to a never-ending parade of ensemble TV series, movie roles, podcasts (especially Comedy Bang! Bang!), online videos, and comedy festivals, there’s always more to do. —Jordan Crucchiola

Early in his career, Woods tried out for a Starburst commercial that demanded he don a Rastafarian wig and feed candy to women—all while shirtless. “I have this weird indentation in my chest, so right away the casting agent looked at it with either undisguised disgust or curiosesity,” he says. “And I would have to put a Starburst in these women’s mouths in this wig under fluorescent light at 10 in the morning on a Tuesday. I was like, ‘Is this how I want to spend my life?’ ”

But as the decade went on, the number of job options expanded—not just for improvisers but for every phylum of comedy performers. The unchecked expansion of YouTube, coupled with the arrival of sites like Funny or Die and CollegeHumor, suddenly provided comedians a chance to give even their most idiosesyncratic notions a wider audience (Woods wound up starring in several web shorts with titles like “Adam and Eve in the Friend Zone” and “Most Awkward Boy in the World Goes to the Deli”). In recent years, podcasts have allowed comics to field-test new characters and talents, develop long-running narrative threads and callbacks (Hey nong man!), and promote themselves directly to audiences—all without needing an actual stage or the approval of higher-ups. “It’s not like I need to have a network say yes to me, then put up all these different hoops to jump through,” says comedian and actress Lauren Lapkus (Orange Is the New Black), who hosts the popular podcast With Special Guest Lauren Lapkus and is a regular on Comedy Bang! Bang! “I can record a show on Tuesday and put it out on Wednesday, and people get to know what we’re doing, even if they don’t live in a place where comedy is accessible.”

Yet one of the biggest game-changers for comedians came courtesy of the most old-fashioned medium of all: television. In 2009, the year before Woods popped up on The Office, his future Silicon-mate Starr was appearing in a new sitcom that proved to be a harbinger of things to come. Party Down was a smart, bawdy ensemble show about a group of squabbling cater-waiters that, in its own quiet way, led the radical transformation of television—however one defined it.

Starr was no stranger to TV; he’s the veteran in the Silicon Valley cast. He began working as a child, making commercials and infomercials, before finding himself on NBC’s Freaks & Geeks, the Paul Feig–created, Judd Apatow–produced comedy that documented with alarming exactitude the awkwardness and unease of adolescence (Starr, then 16, played the gangly, Dallas-loving Bill Haverchuck). With a cast that included Seth Rogen, James Franco, and Jason Segel, Freaks would inadvertently become a farm team for the brainy-bro comedy wave of the 2000s. But from the moment the show premiered in 1999, it seemed almost comically doomed: Freaks was simply too innocent and fragile to live, like some cherubic urchin who starts coughing halfway through a bad British drama.

When Freaks was canceled after 18 episodes, Starr took it reasonably well; the biggest bummer, he says, was that someone broke into his car on the last night of taping and stole all his personal photos from the set (not to mention the weed he’d hidden in the glove compartment). “I think I just assumed that there would be an infinite amount of work from that show,” Starr says one morning in the Silicon living room, which is decorated with pot magazines, dog-eared sci-fi novels, and empty candy wrappers. “Judd and Paul were very protective of us, because we were all really young and naive to what this business was.”

In the years that followed, Starr did guest turns on shows like Roswell and Undeclared, even starring in a multicamera pilot alongside Seinfeld’s Wayne Knight (a k a Newman), where he quickly learned that mainstream sitcoms weren’t his thing. (“The show was called Frozen Chunk Guy,” Starr says, in a very Martin Starr deadpan. “It didn’t get picked up.”) By the time he was 22, Starr—frustrated and depressed over the lack of work—had fired his agent and decided to quit acting for good, even spending a day trying out for a barista job. (He didn’t get the job but walked away with $2 in tip money.) A few years later, he got an offer to appear in Apatow’s Knocked Up, which led to more studio comedies (Walk Hard) and an acclaimed indie drama (Adventureland) before he landed Party Down.

The show premiered on then-obscure pay-cable channel Starz. Its bereft-of-the-dial status wasn’t a demotion, though, but an indicator of how most small-screen comedy would soon be consumed: on countless channels and platforms at a time, regardless of when or where it first aired, by sensibly sized—and this is important—ultraloyal audiences.

In the years since Freaks’ demise, the big networks’ grip on audiences had begun to weaken, with cable emerging as the source of a weirder, more idiosesyncratic kind of comedy. Adult Swim had debuted with late-night oddities like Aqua Teen Hunger Force; FX was experiencing an unlikely smash with the legit nutso It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia; and a pre-Portlandia IFC was running the cult sketch-show hit The Whitest Kids U’ Know. Each of these series—brazen, silly-smart, and outré—reflected the sensibilities of its creators, who clearly had been given enviable creative leeway. But they also satisfied the desires of their young, advertiser-adored viewers, who were more likely to glom on to the more rugged kinds of comedy they’d seen on the web, which was making the sanitized 22-minute sitcom look archaic.

Where to See Comedy’s Hottest Gig Workers

Hey nong man! Are you tired of everyone you know spouting nonsensical comedy-cool-kid catchphrases you don’t understand? Generally just looking for more funny stuff? Either way, here’s where to find the laughs. —Brian Raftery

1. SF Sketchfest

Every January, this three-week San Francisco confab brings together big and gonna-be-big names for performances and panels; this year’s lineup included everyone from Maya Rudolph to a mostly reunited Kids in the Hall. sfsketchfest.com

2. Largo at the Coronet

The LA theater—a hub for both music and comedy—features stand-up and improv shows hosted by the likes of Judd Apatow, Sarah Silverman, and Pete Holmes. largo-la.com

3. Riot LA

The weekend festival is a well-curated alt-comedy shindig that includes stand-up (Janeane Garofalo), live shows (Paul F. Tompkins’ No, You Shut Up!), and even a roast battle. riotla.com

4. Earwolf

All joking a salad, the indie podcast studio/network is the home of not only the long-running Comedy Bang! Bang! but also such hit shows as How Did This Get Made? and improv4humans—and a few dozen others besides. earwolf.com

5. SXSW

The three-in-one Texas festival (interactive, film, and music) has in recent years become a hub for performers and podcasts, as well as networks—the Silicon Valley pilot premiered there in 2014, as did Girls two years before that. sxsw.com

6. Bonnaroo

What’s that? You don’t want to watch Wayne Coyne ride a giant bedazzled inflatable giraffe? Then head over to the festival’s Comedy Theater, where past performers have included Hannibal Buress, Reggie Watts, and Natasha Leggero. bonnaroo.com

7. The Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre

With multiple venues in New York City and LA, this theater and school was the early home of every comic you love—Aziz Ansari, Silicon Valley’s Woods, and SNL’s Kate McKinnon. ucbcomedy.com

Today, nearly every major (and minor) network has at least one original comedy in its portfolio, from cable stations like BET (Real Husbands of Hollywood), truTV (Billy on the Street), and USA (Playing House) to streaming services like Hulu (Difficult People), Netflix (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt), and Amazon (Catastrophe). And that’s in addition to YouTube, sites like CollegeHumor and Funny or Die, NBC’s all-comedy online service Seeso, and the countless other online venues putting up new sketches and series every day. None of these shows are a drop in the Big Bang Theory–dominated ratings bucket, but all have devoted audiences.

“Even my bathroom mirror is now emerging as a really exciting outlet for new content,” says June Diane Raphael, a writer and actress who’s appeared on big-network shows like New Girl as well as streaming series (Netflix’s Grace and Frankie) and web programs (the hit Burning Love). “There are a million ways to get your work out there, albeit with varying pay scales.”

That onslaught of options, and their fluctuating salaries, means that many comedians diversify their career portfolioses by using a steady gig—a sitcom stint, a writing-room spot, regular stand-up engagements—to let them do whatever they want. “I always hear this story about the Will & Grace cast getting Porsches when they got picked up for a second season,” Scheer says. “We’re not in that world anymore. But when you have a bigger anchor, it allows you the freedom to not have to worry about making ends meet.”

It also relieves comedians of the pressure of tailoring their act for one monolithic, mainstream audience—a near-necessity during the four-network era that resulted in so many anemic sitcoms. Instead, “everybody can work on what they want to do and what works for them,” says Ron Funches, a stand-up and writer who stars on the NBC sitcom Undateable while also touring regularly and appearing on multiple cable series (Drunk History, @Midnight) and podcasts. “Not every comic has the personality that you want to build a whole show around. It was different [years ago], because there were fewer options—there were only so many networks and only so many ways to be seen. Now you can have a show on YouTube that still gets enough of an audience for you to tour off of and live off of. You’re not waiting in line for NBC or ABC to decide you’re worth something.”

Party Down, alas, arrived a bit too early for this revolution: It was canceled by Starz in 2010 despite nearly unanimous good reviews. (If it had premiered just a few years later, in time for the rise of show-saving Twitter laughtivists, it likely would have survived far longer.) For Starr, it was the second time a beloved show he was working on was prematurely killed. By the time he was offered the Silicon part in 2013, he says, “I knew that it was a great possibility that this show will not be as appreciated as perhaps we feel it deserves to be. You know that everything’s fleeting, everything’s passing.“ (He was raised Buddhist, which may explain all that equanimity.)

But, he says, that also helped inspire the Silicon cast members’ sense of camaraderie, as evidenced in part by the group’s on-set playfulness. “We all just care about each other, and we all want the show to be funny,” he says. “You have ideas for other people, and that brings value to the whole group. I mean, it’s just as much fun to watch someone else nail an idea that you had as it is to fuck around and find something for yourself.”

“jesusgawdalmighty!”

About 15 minutes before he’s due onstage, Miller is calmly bulldozing his way around a beat-up backstage area, looking for an opening act. He’s about to perform an evening headlining set at Riot LA, a four-year-old comedy festival in downtown LA. Dressed in jeans and a MILE HIGH TILL I DIE T-shirt, he’s wandering the halls trying to track down some comics; the ones who were supposed to appear before him tonight are currently stuck in traffic. At one point, he tries to cajole a friend to take one of the slots, even though she’s never done stand-up before. “You’ll bomb,” he says, “but it’ll be great!”

Every few minutes, Miller takes a handheld mister out of his back pocket and sprays his face—a prop he uses in his set, though one that no doubt comes in handy as he’s running around the venue. Though he doesn’t look it, Miller is exhausted: He spent part of the week finalizing a Super Bowl ad for Shock Top beer and has just flown in from London. Since he got to LA years ago, Miller has worked in almost every modern pop-cultural milieu and genre imaginable: commercials, network sitcoms (Carpoolers, Goodwin Games), family movies (Yogi Bear, Big Hero 6), talk shows (Chelsea Lately), a Transformers sequel, podcasting, even a comedy hip hop record (Extended Play, in 2011). This is all while doing stand-up that, in recent years, has laid bare his interest in philosophy, with digressive bits about death and idioms.

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