Steve Carell and Amy Poehler Compare Notes on Bombing, Boston, and the Baritone Horn

Steve Carell once waved at a tour bus in Beverly Hills. Nobody waved back. He then, in his words, “shrank into this little ball” and swore off public spontaneity forever. This is the man who played Michael Scott for seven seasons. The man whose face launched a thousand comfort rewatches. The guy who, per the lore of this episode, showed up to a restaurant in Groton, Massachusetts and was so charming to Amy Poehler’s parents that her father secured him as a podcast guest without anyone’s consent. He is not who you think he is. And that gap, between the performer people project onto him and the guy who will not be doing a bit at a Lakers game anytime soon, is basically what this whole conversation is about.

Good Hang has a format: Amy Poehler talks to someone who knows the guest, then talks to the guest. This week’s warm-up act is Stephen Colbert, who roomed with Carell for roughly a decade, understudied him at Second City, and once had to learn the baritone horn in six days because Carell had booked a Brown’s Chicken commercial. Colbert is genuinely funny and genuinely fond, and his question for Carell, relayed through Poehler, is the smartest one anybody asks: is comedy and drama actually different to you, or is it all just the same thing with a different character intention? It’s a question Colbert says he’s never gotten to ask directly, which is a remarkable thing to admit about your decade-long roommate.

The Thing About Failure

The episode is at its best when both of them stop being charming and start being precise. Carell on what made him commit to comedy over drama, back in Chicago: the realization that failing onstage with another person was itself a form of joy. Not a consolation prize. An actual pleasure. He and Poehler keep circling back to this idea, and neither of them is being sentimental about it. They mean it technically. The bombing is the training. The lights slowly fading on a scene you refused to bail on, that’s where you learn something a successful scene can’t teach you.

If it can be this joyful in failure, and there’s also another joy in success, then I’d be dumb not to pursue this for the rest of my life.

Colbert says it, but Carell proves it. His answer to the comedy-versus-drama question is the cleanest thing either of them says all episode. He doesn’t have a process, or he refuses to call it one. His theory is just: the character doesn’t know they’re in a comedy. The moment they do, it’s less funny. He invokes Alan Arkin and Peter Sellers, not as namedropping but as evidence. Equally committed, never winking. “Watch this joke. You’re going to laugh.” That’s the enemy.

If you can tell a character knows they’re in a comedy it’s intrinsically less funny.

Boston Will Not Be Impressed

The Boston thread running through this episode is genuinely funny. Carell grew up in Acton, Massachusetts. Poehler is also a Boston kid. They agree that people from Massachusetts have a specific quality, which Poehler finally names: “there’s just like a you’re not better than me quality about Boston.” Carell’s illustration is the guy who approached him in a supermarket, told him his work was good, and immediately added “don’t get cocky.” It’s the perfect Boston sentence. Love you, don’t you dare grow or change, specifically change.

The bit where Poehler FaceTimes her parents mid-episode, live, so Carell can thank them for booking him, is exactly as chaotic as it sounds. Her father leads with the information that Carell’s wife is beautiful, which Poehler immediately files as grounds for divorce. Her father is in a recliner. It is 10 in the morning or something. It works because Poehler genuinely thinks it’s funny and doesn’t try to produce it into a bit. It just runs.

The Michael Scott Exit, Explained

Carell on why Michael Scott leaves the day before his farewell party is the clearest he gets about character. He pitched it to Greg Daniels: the last day isn’t the last day. Michael slips out early because he no longer needs the celebration. He says goodbye on his own terms. “He’s sort of beyond being celebrated that way.” It’s a two-sentence character thesis that explains seven seasons of a man who wanted, more than anything, to be loved, and what it looks like when he finally doesn’t need to perform that want anymore.

He doesn’t need it. He wants to say goodbye on his own terms and he’s sort of beyond being celebrated that way.

On Rooster, his new HBO show, Carell is relaxed and brief: writer becomes writer-in-residence at his daughter’s university, father-daughter dynamic shifts, great cast, improvisation-friendly set. He loves it. He’s been killed off in his last three projects. So far so good on this one. His parents would probably tell him not to get cocky.

People love to see me killed off. It’s a thing.