Best of Dr. Katz disc released next month

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on November 26th, 2008

They’ve cooked down six seasons of the squiggly, animated series into one disc containing 18 episodes. According to the press release, Dave Attell, Louis C.K., Dave Chappelle, Margaret Cho, David Cross, David Duchovny, Susie Essman, Janeane Garofalo, Kathy Griffin, Denis Leary, Richard Lewis, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Kevin Nealon, Conan O’Brien, Patton Oswalt, Brian Regan, Ray Romano and Sarah Silverman are featured.

And, in a cruel irony, it will hit the stores on December 2, the 20th anniversary of the wedding of the Male and the Female Half. We say cruel irony because, on Feb. 1 of 1996, we found ourselves in the Dr. Katz studio, for the purpose of taping a segment for the popular Comedy Central show. After much back and forth and faxing– only egghead scientists and geeks (like us!) used email extensively back then– we were invited to the offices of Tom Snyder Productions in Watertown, MA, to lay down some tracks. After some tentative attempts to voice the pre-approved scripts, it was decided instead that we should improv some stuff. More specifically, it was requested that we improvise an argument or two between us.

Disaster!

(We have no doubt that our improv skills are adequate, but improvising something so utterly foreign– like an argument– just threw fine-grain sand into our gears.) After several uncomfortable moments and a lot of shuffling, hemming and hawing, it became obvious to all that the afternoon was a trainwreck. No usable tracks were laid. No appearance on the Peabody Award-winning show would be in our future.)

Springing the improv on the actors may well have been the producers’ method for extracting a more authentic-sounding soundbite. And may well have been the secret (or one of them) to the show’s wild success. And, had we had proper warning (and at least a hint as to the subject matter), we may have pulled it off. (And, if we had been called upon to concoct in advance an exchange where we were “fighting and acting as though we don’t like each other,” we probably would have created something that matched the specs quite well.) As it was, the session was an aesthetic calamity!

It goes down as one of the top three disappointments in our career.

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