Greg Proops on the craziest day of his career

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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SPEAKER_2 (0:16)

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of maximumfun.org and is distributed by NPR.

Jesse Thorn (0:36)

It's Bullseye. I'm Jesse Thorn. How was your day today?

Good? Bad? Typical?

Oh, me? Oh, thank you for asking. I went out to breakfast with my daughter. I answered a few e-mails, did some interviews. Oh, and all pretty normal, not too crazy.

Some days, though, some days aren't normal at all. They are definitely crazy. And crazy days happen in show business, too. And those stories from showbiz about crazy days, they make for great radio, and specifically a great segment we call The Craziest Day of My Entire Career. Recently, we asked Greg Proops what that day was for him, and he gave us a doozy. Now, who is Greg Proops? Maybe if you are around my age or older, you watched Whose Line Is It Anyway, the massively popular improv game show from the 90s. Greg was one of the main recurring contestants, participants, whatever. He also appeared on the original British series of the same name. He's also a very funny and very successful stand-up comic. He has put out nearly a dozen albums to date. His latest is called Kidding, but Still.

Greg Proops (1:50)

It's so nice to be back in San Francisco because everyone is so uncooperative and rude. It's just, it's heaven for me. You know, you go to the Midwest and people are like, Hi, how are you? And I'm like, I am not used to this.

That's why they call it San Francisco. Francisco means I'm going to be nice in Spanish. San means no, lack of.

Jesse Thorn (2:23)

Now, usually when we talk to a stand-up comic about the craziest day of their career, it's like they were booked in a bar in Alaska and then they got chased by bikers and something like that. But Greg's doesn't really have that much to do with stand-up. In fact, almost nothing to do with stand-up. It is actually about a movie, a very popular, very well-known, very big, very divisive movie. Star Wars Episode I, The Phantom Menace.

Here's Greg Proops.

Greg Proops (2:51)

Hello, everybody. It's your old pal, Greg Proops, from Whose Line Is It Anyway. And this is the craziest day of my career.

I was living in England and I was performing at the Edinburgh Festival. So I was doing a show at a place called The Pleasance over the road. My friend Scott Caprura was doing a show also at this. This comes, this will be salient later. So keep this piece of information in your mind. So I was doing my set there and of course, to great acclaim. And a woman came to this show and she was with Lucasfilm. She saw my stand-up set and she saw Scott's stand-up set. And she approached us after and said, would you want to come down and audition for this new Star Wars movie? Well, no one knew the name of it, right? So it was episode, if I'm not mistaken, four, five and six are the first three. And believe it or not, I'm not a huge Star Wars geek, even though it's probably the biggest thing on my resume. So anyways, we went to London and we went to this office and Scott and I sat in an office and we were given a page of dialogue. And we were told it was the pod race. There was a pod race in this picture.

No, they did not tell me what a pod is, but a pod are evidently these racing machines. For entertainment on Tatooine, they have people race pods. And pods are like these like, I don't know, the drag racers of the future past. They're kind of like everything in Lucas's universe, thrown together and a little bit beat up. So anyway, we improvised, and the next thing we know, we're offered this pitcher.

Now we go in for the first fitting.

They tell us what we are now. Oh, you're the announcers for the pod race. And we're like, oh right, the pod race. So we are taken out to a costume shop. There's these men making costumes there. And then they start applying the heads to us. Paper mache. In those days, I swear to you, they took two drinking straws, cut them in half and stuffed them up your nose. So you were sat in a chair with nothing to drink and eat. And two straws stuck in your mouth. And try not to die while we're doing this, was basically the direction I was given. If at any point you stop breathing, let us know. And we won't stop making the model because this is a very expensive process. So try not to die. So I made it through that and that took several hours. Then they cut it in half and took it off my head like a walnut. So now comes the time we're there. And now we're asked to go to the set.