By Ramona Zacharias.

Waco O’Guin and Roger Black

Brickleberry showrunners Waco O’Guin and Roger Black know what it’s like to write outside their comfort zone. Having met in their University of Georgia days and worked together for years (on The DAMN! Show and MTV2’s Stankervision), they’ve found success more recently as creators and writers of Comedy Central’s hit animated series about a dysfunctional group of park rangers. Co-executive produced by (and starring) funny man Daniel Tosh, Brickleberry unleashes its third raunchy season on Tuesday September 16 and the show’s quarter million Facebook fans can hardly wait. But having originally written the pilot as a live action comedy and had it switched to animated series, it’s been a bit of a learning curve for O’Guin and Black; one the guys talk about candidly and humorously.

Tell me about the inspiration for Brickleberry.

Waco: My father in law was a park ranger. After we got cancelled in 2005 both Roger and I went through a period of depression. Once we emerged from that, we played a lot of video games and lazed and slept a lot…Roger lived with me and in that time he never came out of his room. We were looking for a new idea and really didn’t want to do a family comedy because there were just so many of those around; we were just looking for something that hadn’t been done in a while. We started thinking back to 2003 when I got married; Roger would make fun of my father in law all the time, calling him a tree cop and all this stuff. At my wedding reception I guess he’d had enough of that so he grabbed Roger in this park ranger hold and bent his thumb all the way back and almost broke it and made Roger fall to his knees in pain. We always laugh at that story because he’d get so mad about you making fun of him being a park ranger and we thought he’d have a thicker skin about that – we assumed everyone had been making fun of him about that his whole life since he’d always been a park ranger! But he took it really seriously and we started saying wouldn’t it be cool if we had a show about park rangers who took their jobs too seriously and were a little off. So that’s how the initial idea came up. At first it was going to be live action; that was how we wrote it – a single camera comedy. But then we wrote this script and put in all these car chases and people falling off bridges and explosions and everything else. So Fox was like “this is going to cost 10 million bucks an episode, we’ve got to figure out something else”. And it was their idea to make it animated. So we went back and rewrote it and made it even crazier…and got the pilot made for Fox. Then Fox passed and we got packaged with Daniel Tosh and took it to Comedy Central.

Having done a lot of sketch comedy in the past and now a regular animated series, do you prefer one over the other in terms of writing?

Waco: For writing, what we’re doing right now is the worst! It’s incredibly difficult. You have about six months and you have to just sit there and write every episode in that time…and every episode has three different stories that all have to make sense together. So it’s incredibly difficult. When we did sketches, we wouldn’t even write anything usually, we’d maybe jot a couple of things down on a piece of paper and just go out and film until we felt like we had it; and then try and make sense of it in the edits. We had a sketch comedy show on MTV2 back in 2005, and we wrote a little bit more then. We’d have to write sketches and have them approved by the network…but it was still nothing like actually writing a show with a real story. It’s really tough

Roger: We’d never actually written stories before we got picked up for a series; luckily we got paired with some co-VPs who had the experience, and they showed us how to do it. We learned so much from those guys and still use their layout.

Waco: Somehow they let us be the showrunners, which was probably a huge mistake on their part! But it did all work out and we know how to do it now. It was definitely trial by fire; we just kind of threw ourselves into this thing not knowing what the hell we were doing in Season 1. Slowly we learned how to do it.

Have you learned to enjoy it?

Waco: No! But honestly, Season 3 has been way easier than the first two. You get your Season 1 show and, especially before it airs, everybody’s trying to influence what it is. All the executives have their idea of what they want it to be and we have our ideas…so there’s a lot of headbutting. Especially before Season 1. But once the show airs, it kind of is what it is. So there’s not much change that can be made to it. Every season it’s easier and you get better at the job…and yeah, it is fun sometimes. It’s hard, but anything worth doing takes hard work. And then we do get six months in post, so we’re not writing right now and our lives are way easier! I don’t know how these guys do it, writing 20-something episodes a year. Doing 13 we take six months and have six months off to recover. We’re really happy that we’re not doing 20-something episodes; 13 is good, that’s a good number. 

What is a typical writing day like for you? Do you do the majority of the writing or do you have a team that you’re at the helm of?

Waco: We have a whole staff of 10 total writers, including me and Roger this year. We had a really good team. We came in every day and just start kicking around ideas and seeing what fits.

Roger: The first eight weeks in pre-production we kind of kick around what we want to go for this season; loose ideas, bouncing things off each other. And then we develop a paragraph to send off to the studio and network. Once that’s approved we go to outline and finally the script. With 13 episodes, one person will be working on the outline and another staff writer will be working on a script at the same time. We’re all at different stages.

Do you enjoy voicing characters in addition to writing and producing the series? What demands does that make on your time?

Waco: Not bad…in definitely less than an hour everybody can knock out their parts. It’s probably the most fun we have. We record an episode on Friday…so after four days of writing, it’s refreshing to be able to go and record and have some fun. Tom Kenny, the guy who plays Woody, is so fun to watch. His whole body is a performance when he’s delivering his lines.

You mentioned family comedies; with adult animation, the comparisons to your predecessors are inevitable. Do those comparisons to shows such as South Park and Family Guy frustrate or flatter you?

Waco: They really don’t come up that much any more. I think everybody gets that their first season. It happens to everybody, so we knew it was coming. We did everything we could not to have it happen – like we never did pop culture stuff just because of Family Guy. To this day we rarely do a pop culture joke just so that we can be different. But we knew it was going to happen anyway because our last show was compared to Jackass. But Family Guy got compared to The Simpsons…it’s just what people do when there’s a new show. But then when the show lives on its own for awhile, those comparisons sort of go away. We rarely see anybody say anything about that anymore. Because people have seen that Brickleberry is its own show and it’s completely different from anything out there.

Roger: It’s a pretty unique world. Aside from Yogi Bear, there hasn’t really been a national park show. So we’re trying to pave our own way here. But it didn’t even frustrate us in Season 1 because we knew it was coming. We weren’t surprised at all.

Tell me about Season 3 and the new territory your stories are going to explore.

Waco: We want to bring in a new boss for Woody, because Woody bosses everyone around. So we wanted to bring in someone above him to just put him in his place. And we wanted to meet Woody’s mom; there have been lots of stories about how horrible Woody’s mom was to him when he was a kid – a few flashbacks here and there. So we wanted a whole episode for her to come in present-day and torture Woody. There are going to be a lot of fun stories. We feel like the leash is off. All of the executives just sort of let us do what we wanted this year. I think we gained some trust with the ratings being solid for two seasons, so they kind of loosened up on us. We got to do a lot of stories that we couldn’t have done in Season 1 or 2. We’re really happy with all of the episodes this year. 

You are no strangers to pushing comedic boundaries…and with pushed boundaries come no end of opinions. What are some of the reactions you’ve received?

Waco: Surprisingly…unless Comedy Central is hiding a dumpster full of letters that we don’t know about…we have received very little negative feedback. We always expect more negative feedback and more letters from people who are just flipping by and don’t really get what we’re trying to do. I think there was a website for parents or keeping our kids safe or something that of course hated the show…but I would be shocked if they didn’t. I think they would probably need to get some new people in there if they didn’t hate the show! It’s not for kids, obviously. But we get surprisingly little negative feedback and few people being offended. It was the same thing with our MTV show that we expected to have a lot of people up in arms about – and were almost hopeful for, because that would be good press if it did! But we were actually shocked at the lack of negative feedback. I think the audience tuning in knows what they’re going to be in for. It’s hard to shock people in this day and age.

Roger: It was a lot easier when we first started doing this!

How do you stay competitive in a field where the bar for “shock factor” keeps getting higher and higher? Do you find your writing has changed over time?

Waco: We keep jumping the bar, I guess! Every season gets more shocking. And we’re just doing more insane things that we’re constantly saying, “I cannot believe they’re letting us put this on television”. 

What do you attribute the show’s success in being renewed for a third season to?

Waco: Daniel Tosh!

Roger: We’ve been fortunate enough to work with some pretty heavy hitters in the entertainment world. Daniel being our lead hand and a very funny part of the show has definitely helped us spread the word about Brickleberry. Waco: And we know our audience. That’s the one thing we do know – we know what makes them laugh and what’s going to get those big belly laughs and what’s going to keep them coming back. We don’t go for chuckles now, we like the big belly laughs.

Would you ever want to branch out into other genres? If so, what area would you want to write in?

Waco: My mom wants me to do a kids’ cartoon. But that’s incredibly boring. I feel like we’re doing what we were meant to do; this is what we started doing, this is what we’re good at. It would be nice to make a movie someday – maybe Brickleberry, maybe not. But nah, this is what we always dreamed of doing, so I think we’re happy doing it. We do miss the live action stuff, like we had with MTV. That was a lot of fun, to get that kind of instant gratification where you can shoot something, edit it that day and watch it, you know? But this feels right.

What do you see as the biggest challenge facing aspiring writers today? What advice would you give, particularly pertaining to comedy?

Waco: Screenwriting in particular is tough. That was one of the first things we tried after our MTV show got cancelled; we tried to write a screenplay. With television, they will pay you to develop the idea. And even if it doesn’t get picked up, you get a little bit of money. But with a movie, you sort of just have to spend your own time and write for a month or whatever with no paycheck. It’s really tough – we never figured out exactly how to crack the whole movie script thing. With television, that was a little easier for us…but we kind of did it backwards. Most people move out here and get a job as a PA or something and move their way up, but we stayed in Georgia and just filmed stuff. We filmed and edited as much as we could and kind of learned comedy that way. So we were sort of ready when we got our big break. Everybody kept telling us to move out here and we said we’d move out here when we got a TV show – and we waited until we got a TV show to move to LA. So everybody’s got a different path. I think the thing is to just stick with it and don’t sit around waiting for someone to give you a shot, you know? Just do your own stuff, write your own stuff, film it, put it on YouTube, let people see it…that’s what it’s all about. If you’re good enough and you do that, someone’s going to take notice. There are a hundred different ways to make it – but that’s the way we know. Not waiting on the business, not waiting on Hollywood. Just do it yourself, and if your stuff is good enough, people are going to watch it and people are going to take notice.

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