Comedian-actor Paul Scheer was one-third of MTV's latter-day sketch troupe, Human Giant, late last decade. Nowadays he bides his time between playing Andre on FX's The League (perhaps one of TV's few shows about fantasy football), moderating the How Did This Get Made? podcast about crappy movies, and prepping the first season of procedural-parody National Terrorism Strike Force: San Diego: Sport Utility Vehicle, slated to premiere Thursday, July 21 at 12:15a on Adult Swim. We gave Scheer a call to flip around his movie queue at random, and found out why sometimes Googling O.J. Simpson all afternoon can be accidentally productive.

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Currently checked out:
O.J. Simpson: Juiced

Right now I am pleased to tell you that I have checked out O.J. Simpson's Juiced, which is O.J. Simpson's prank show in the style of Punk'd. [Laughs.] O.J. drives around and pranks people in the style of his double-homicide. Like he drives around a Bronco with blood on it. He pops out of bushes with a knife. This is not a joke. These are real things that he did. O.J. tried to have his own prank show. I remember when I was younger and heard about it that I thought it was crazy. I was going to buy it on Pay-per-view but it was like $30. But after Christmas I was doing some deep Googling on O.J. Simpson -- because I believe he's innocent -- and then found this Google hole and Netflix had this movie. It just came in today. I'm so excited. It is not a hoax. It is real. Very real.

There's nothing morbid about it. It's more like, "What? This is a thing they made? This is a good idea?" I mean, on some level, someone had to approve this. Like, did O.J. go, "You know what I'd be good at? Doing a prank show." And the second part of it would be someone asking, "What would your pranks be?" "I don't know, maybe I'd just parody things that I'm accused of doing and got off innocently on." That's the second insane thought. And then he has other actors in it. That means people auditioned for it. "Hey, what are you auditioning for?" "Oh, that prank show with O.J. Simpson." It's crazy on every level.

“‘What? This is a thing they made? This is a good idea?’ I mean, on some level, someone had to approve this.”

No. 11: The Heartbreak Kid

Not the Ben Stiller remake. This movie is supposed to be amazing. I've only heard from so many people that it was one of their favorite movies. It was not available on DVD until recently. It was one of the first DVDs made and then they stopped production on it, and now Netflix is streaming it. I love Charles Grodin. I read that book that he did, It Would Be So Nice If You Weren't Here, but then he kinda went insane and hosted his own show on CNBC. He was really funny. Midnight Run is an amazing thing, and the reviews for this movie were pretty amazing. Yeah, it was directed by Elaine May. An amazing cast. And you know, Neil Simon. It's cool. I'm really excited for it.

No. 6: Zach Galifianakis Live At The Purple Onion

I've never seen it, and I just love Zach. I'm friends with Zach, I think he's great, I've just never seen his stand-up special. Yeah, he's hilarious. I do this show with Rob Huebel that used to be in New York but now it's in LA [Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre] called Crash Test. But back in New York me, Rob, and Aziz [Ansari] would host the show. Zach would come and do Crash Test and just be amazing. I remember seeing Zach doing an entire 20 minutes once literally in the crowd, uncomfortably in the aisles in front of somebody. He's amazing. I've seen him perform at Bonnaroo, we've been on the same bill there. I just want to see what he would do for a special. So this is just one of those things that I never got around to watching.

I feel like we all come from this background where you like to test the patience of an audience. Not in a bad way, but I think there aren't bits I would do anywhere else but at the UCB. There have become more fans for absurdist and weird stuff. I think a lot of that has to do with Adult Swim: Tim and Eric, Delocated, even Darkplace. All these shows like that and the original Office, they're kinda pushing very still comedy. It's very deeply ingrained in our voice, and you're either with it or you're not. I think it's fine. It's great. Not everything should be slapstick like, "Boy, uh-oh! I just dropped all my pastries!" So I think it's fun to have a little mix-and-match. I think when you have a network like that or people like this, I mean obviously Zach is a huge mainstream star, but he hasn't changed his persona because of that. It's awkward and it's just funny. Charles Grodin was essentially doing that.

“Not everything should be slapstick like, ‘Boy, uh-oh! I just dropped all my pastries!’”

No. 20: Skyline

I understand it is the worst science-fiction movie ever. It came out last year. Aliens are attacking Los Angeles. This one actually would be in contention for How Did This Get Made? -- we wanted to do it as our inaugural one but it had already left theaters. "After a wild night of partying, Terry awakes to discover he's one of the few remaining people on earth. They have to solve the mystery of what happened to the human race." I just hear it's amazingly bad. The reviews are already getting me excited for it.

Now, you started a podcast to celebrate these kinds of movies, but do you remember an individual movie that got you fascinated or so excited for bad movies?

If anything really crystallized it for me, it was TV Carnage. When I first saw that I was like, "Oh man. This is amazing." If you don't know what TV Carnage is, it's a series of DVD compilations of the most weird, insane footage from TV movies, TV shows, interviews, workout videos. It's really a montage, and they're put together by this guy Derrick Beckles. I remember watching it and thinking, "Wow. This just blew my mind." So I'm always on the lookout for things that engage me in that way. I'm not a person who just watches crap stuff all the time, but when you find stuff that's amazing, you gotta jump into it.

“I'm not a person who just watches crap stuff all the time, but when you find stuff that's amazing, you gotta jump into it.”

Like, Old Dogs with Robin Williams and John Travolta is amazing. It's one of my favorite movies. Like, I enjoy it on a level. Like, this is crazy. Like, Crank 2 is another great movie, but it doesn't make any sense. I'm very lucky that I'm able to create for a living, and when you see some of the roadblocks that come up and they're like, "Oh, you can't make a movie like that," and then you see Crank 2 or Old Dogs, and you're getting notes on your script and plot you're like, "Wait wait, the movie with the jetpack and the attacking penguins? That got made? No one had problems with that script?" I think there's always an odd fascination of, "How did this? What? Why?" So yeah, I'm very into that. But it's so crazy the kind of things that are getting made and getting out there.

No. 2: The Girl Who Played With Fire [Rated R]

I read those books and am almost all done with this one too. Oh, I've watched 100 of 129 minutes of it. Yeah, so I'm a big fan of the books and it was another movie that I wanted to see in the theaters but didn't get a chance to. These are awesome, such good movies. You don't need to read the books to see these movies. The movies are really well done. They're just great films, really well acted and they're dense but they're the best adaptation of a book that I've ever seen. You still feel like you're getting what you want but you're not missing out. You're getting a movie, and not just a direct adaptation. It's really good.

I was very early into The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo before anyone was really talking about it. I just read a review of it a long time ago, and thought it was a great. And I think about six months later, when it became a paperback is when people really started to kinda jump on it. Oh, that's what it was. I was on vacation and there's only one bookstore wherever we were and it was very small, not a lot of things in there. But it had a cool cover. And I thought, "Well, if it sucks, I can just stop reading it when the vacation's over." But it just got better and better and I remembered wondering why no one had really been talking about it.

No. 9: Mad Max [Rated R]

I've never seen this. It's a gaping hole in my film knowledge. I'd say I have a good film knowledge and this is a movie I've never watched. It's often quoted and talked about and I have no idea what this movie is. It's been sitting there for a long time. I haven't watched it yet, so I'm curious. I don't know why. I'm not 100 percent interested in it, but I will watch this sometime. [Laughs.] People talk about it a lot and seem to really love it.

To me, I grew up on the Lethal Weapon movies and stuff. I love it all. I loved those movies when I was a kid. Not so much Lethal Weapon 3 or Lethal Weapon 4. I liked Mel Gibson back then. I saw that new one he just did, that terrible one that was supposed to be his comeback, Edge Of Darkness. I can hopefully separate my vision of Mel Gibson as a crazy, racist potential alcoholic. I don't think it'd be hard for me watch Mad Max and not think, "Oh, that guy hates Jewish people." I'd be able to separate the personal from the professional and give him a fair shake.

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