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'Like A Supervillain Whose Superpower Is Bullsh*t': Peter Serafinowicz On Comedy In The Age Of Trump

By Tori Preston | Miscellaneous | August 16, 2017 |

By Tori Preston | Miscellaneous | August 16, 2017 |


The Hollywood Reporter recently spoke with Peter Serafinowicz, a very hilarious human being who has popped up in everything from Shaun of the Dead to Guardians of the Galaxy. He even voiced Darth Maul in the Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Ostensibly the British actor was promoting his starring role in Amazon’s new The Tick series… or at least he was, until the interview took a turn toward the Trump.

You see, Serafinowicz is also the man behind those “Sassy Trump” videos you may have seen on Twitter. Here’s a sample from the recent “on many sides” speech:

They are wonderful, and terrifying, and Serafinowicz has been dedicated to producing them consistently for over a year. When asked what his reasoning behind the videos was, this was how he explained it:

Well, Donald Trump…in a way he’s like a supervillain whose superpower is bullshit. I really mean that. I know it’s a jokey thing to say, but it’s definitely a thing. He is an expert…possibly the best bullshitter that mankind has created.

To anybody who is in comedy, they say, well you’ve got four more years of great material. And every comic I know, every comedy writer is like, fuck, no, you don’t understand. It’s like he’s nigh-invulnerable, like The Tick. He’s beyond parody because he’s so exaggerated. That’s a major way that people make fun of somebody — taking a trait of theirs and exaggerate it to an absurd level. But with Trump, every trait of his is exaggerated to 100. And the things he does are so out of the realms of reality that even in a comedy they would be like, OK guys, come on, you’ve got to rewrite this, nobody is going to believe it.

So with Sassy Trump, and it certainly wasn’t the intention at the start, I realized as I went on that by adding this layer of a silly voice over this man’s actual real words, it strips away a layer, weirdly. The words are concealed by his bullshit. By adding this layer it reveals them. And you realize, shit, he is the president of the USA and these are the actual words he is saying.

He goes on to discuss the reaction he’s gotten from the U.S. (surprise — journalists love the videos), and muse about whether Trump will start to out-sass him, making it impossible to continue. The whole article is worth a read, because he is a gem of a guy with a lot of great stories. The Tick launches on Amazon August 25th. And in the meantime, here’s Sassy Trump discussing North Korea: