Trying To Eff The George Lucas Talk Show’s Ineffable Charms
There comes a moment in every episode of the George Lucas Talk Show — and somehow it always rolls around organically, as “Retired Filmmaker George Lucas” and his sidekick, hype man, best friend, digital fragment, complicated Jewish son and all-blue deli-meat uber-stan “Watto”, delve deeply into their celebrity guest’s complicated feelings about the Star Wars prequels — where George will calmly state that he was cuckolded by the glazier who installed a lavish stained glass dome in the Skywalker Ranch study. “My first wife described me as ‘sexually unimaginative’,” he will admit in his clipped, monotonal manner, slate-blue eyes coolly piercing through the Zoom screen, grey beard pandemic-wilding, and the celebrity guest will shift and chuckle and a vague waft of awkward sympathy floats through the air like delicious steam from a shameful pie.
And you’re watching and you think, well, poor guy, but God, at least he’s owning it. He’s clearly a sweet person. Kind of into his own stuff a little bit? But hey, that beard is really working for him, and he seems content. Good for him.
Then he will be suddenly possessed by David Lynch, or savagely slash the gas guts out of a BB8 inflatable with a Mickey Mouse penknife, or sing Ke$ha word-perfect with no prompts, or talk to his cohost, a man dressed in a blue skintight onesie and a bumbag stuffed with condoms — which he uses as a “facemask” for the child’s dress-up blue elephant trunk strapped to his very human face — who calls himself “the flying space Jew” and once prank-called someone with such disastrous consequences that the recording of the show at that point ripped itself out of the space time continuum and vanished, and if the lucky few who were watching live at that point ever inadvertently think about it, their eyes will turn into death-black spirals and expand and swell and swallow the universe in under a picosecond.
And you think, oh, yeah. That’s not really George Lucas.
But sometimes you forget.
And that’s only one of the things that makes this show so beautiful.
So the George Lucas Talk Show is, at base, an online streaming weekly talk show; albeit one borne out of the brains of Connor Ratliff, who melts into his George Lucas persona like it’s a exquisitely tailored Savile Row suit, and Watto — Griffin Newman as a whipsmart, growling caricature that tiptoes along the city wall of taste and decency that the original Watto death-plunged off of into the concrete jungle of “Really, That Is The Nose/Voice Combo You Want To Go With, George? Like…Really?”. But with their guests — writers, comedians, royalty of improv podcasting, real big lads of the acting world, Kevin Bloody Smith — buying into the dizzying unreality of being in the presence of the actual Creator Of Star Wars, the interviews inevitably careen into a joyful discussion of how fun it is to be a tiny part of a world of popular culture hugely influenced by one man’s space westerns.
And Ratliff and Newman are galaxy brains, clearly great fans and scholars of not just the whole Lucas back catalogue but also seemingly any entertainment conceived, birthed, died and rotted in the last 50 years; so industry tea is spilled, the worth of the prequels is re-litigated, everyone has a great time just shooting the shit about the basement levels of their IMDb credits, and Lea Thompson roots around in her cupboards to show off her Howard the Duck crew sweatshirt like a proud mum.
That’s beautiful thing number two.
But that’s just the base. GLTS has its roots as a live show from the UCB theatre in New York, known for alternative sketch and improv comedy, and thus, in a little twist that will make you shed your clothes and shit your pants in wonder and anger, it is also an improv comedy show. And the dude in the blue tights and the guy with the beard full of talc are really very very good improvisers, so that base is smothered weekly by a 100-layer dip of riffs’n’bits. A huge web of internal lore has built up, around George’s love for Norman Rockwell’s paintings of weird elderly children and in turn their love of butter, around the existence of a Star Wars animated comedy series that was made and stored ON A SHELF never to be aired, around the complicated Inception-like structure of main shows and aftershows that have built up to fill the GLTS runtime of an Irishman+ (their short shows are at least one minute longer than the Irishman. Their long shows run to several days.)
All of which could be daunting for a new viewer or a certain type of less gregarious guest, more used to the niceties of late night sofas — though some will drink down this broiling chaos like it’s your milkshake, case in point recent guest Jason Mantzoukas, who needed no invitation to stay on camera for nigh-on five hours delivering his signature brand of good-natured feral barking, and was a complete ecstatic joy from start to finish — but here’s where GLTS secret weapon and Beauty no 3 comes in.
Patrick Cotnoir. The producer of the show, the sometime frazzled straight man and punching bag, the Bob Hoskins in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. And he’s the guy who, when “George” and “Watto“ threaten to plough the show into oncoming traffic by launching a pitching session to add to his ever-growing list of derogatory nicknames or wandering offscreen to cook some pasta, will clamber over them to wrench the steering wheel straight and keep everything between the white lines. Over the eight months of the show’s online run, his vibe has developed from vaguely reluctant support truss to diving all-in on a full-on mania three-way, all while managing to book guests far beyond the reach of a relatively tiny voice in the big discordant choir of online streamers. He’s the viewers’ way in, he’s just as keen and sharp as the main hosts, he sometimes calls his mum on the show and it’s charm personified, he once accidentally revealed his password live on stream, he’s a messy bitch who lives for the drama and he goddamn rules.
Ah, but eight months, there’s the key. This show was thrown into its new streaming existence in May this year when most governments asked us if we wanted some buttered wanton mismanagement on the side of our seared once-in-a-generation global pandemic, starting with a mammoth Star Wars watchalong of all nine movies and various sundries which lasted 31 hours. 31 HOURS. And since then, GLTS has been ever-evolving, unlike the vast majority of Suddenly Online Talent Showcases — the never-ending, samey, self-satisfied aw-shucks-I’ll-throw-this-together Zoom reunions and Instagram reels of the first period of lockdown, all internal-Airbook-mic’d voices bouncing off the shiny white walls of rooms in the wings of their mansions they’d never even been in before, and, my God, so much worse, the more recent development that “being bored while being a household name and occasionally talking to your mates who are also bored while being household names” means that God has anointed upon you the holy and righteous task of “doing a podcast” (I mean, if we’re gonna talk good pod, I’d like to introduce you to my friends, balled up fist number one and balled up fist number two)
It’s been going for months and is fresh, inventive and surprising every week. But not only that — and this is the real central nugget, the shiny kernel of beauty that makes GLTS both a comfort and, weirdly, an inspiration in this truly wretched, lonely world we’re stuck with — you feel like, unlike the shiny mansion-dwellers, they’re stuck in that world too, and really trying with every sinew to make the best of it. I mean, look at this:
They’re the “How it started/How it’s going” meme made flesh. But in the best possible way. Because they’ve turned up every week, no matter what they have personally been dealing with, which has seemed, at times, to us parasocially-addled weirdos who don’t actually know them at all, a lot. And they’ve created this manic world of in-jokes and exuberant silliness, and they’ve gathered a small but hardcore familial fan community in the Twitch live chat who flood their social media with insanely creative fan art, and once a month they raise money for charity with watchalongs of anything from Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip to Muppets Tonight where Patrick will slamdunk booking thousands of related guests, and they keep coming back, every week, for three, four, 12, for christ’s sake 31 hours, and look what’s happened. They look hotter and have much more cool stuff. The best possible way.
Listen, we’ve all grabbed onto something to get us through this stupid, stupid year. Alcoholism, worrying about alcoholism, Joe Wicks, anthropomorphising our sourdough starters, falling in love with our sourdough starters, worrying about over-worrying about alcoholism, murdering our sourdough starters. This is mine, and I only wish that it was more people’s. Having such a chunk of jubilation to look forward to at the end of each week has more than helped propel me through the mud pit anguish of 2020. In fact — and I can only apologise for a sudden handbrake turn into the tragic and personal, but I’d like to assure you I’m only doing it for attention and the dead dad who’s about to be abruptly brought up would approve — when, during the dregs of autumn, it became suddenly and surprisingly clear that my father wasn’t just euphemistically “a bit poorly” and was in fact non-euphemistically “about to actually die”, I had to go and stay by the side of his full and then terribly empty bed for two of the worst weeks I’ll ever go through. And when I eventually got home, waiting for me was a brown envelope, and inside the brown envelope was a George Lucas Talk Show personalised signed print, that I’d pledged charity money for months before on one of the rare occasions I could stay up and watch the show live, and then completely forgotten about.
And it was a lovely surprise, and it reminded me of three things: one, that the concept of happiness hadn’t blinked out of existence when my dad did; two, that I had a good amount of GLTS to catch up on, and that was going to be the same kind of distracting balm it had been since May, but now it was going to feel like I’d smeared it right on my soul, cos by God, I needed to lose myself in several hours of this stuff; and three, that I needed to write about it, to try and crystallise why it zapped my serotonin centres with such pinpoint precision. I tried. I failed. I don’t know. I just, in the immortal words of the quote section of the Know Your Memes “Marge Simpson says I just think it’s neat” page, think it’s neat.
The George Lucas Talk Show. Described elsewhere rightly as “the internet’s coolest talk show”, wrongly as “the worst podcast in the world”, and now, by me, as “neat”. But it is honestly impossible to encapsulate. It is a crazy, joyful, irreverent but respectful, whimsical without being twee, mostly earnest, occasionally furious, unexpected sack of insanity. Born from a global crisis causing untold misery, to be the thing that distracts from the untold misery. A spawn of Satan doing what it can to keep the lights on in Heaven. Nature healing itself. Just three very, very, very fucking funny guys making a very, very, very fucking funny show.
Which doesn’t fit well on a poster. Ah well. Hey, George Lucas Talk Show?
Thanks.
