Crazy
OR Genius?
By Tom Lanham
photo Shervin Lainez
T
o outsiders, it might have seemed
surprising – Panic! at the Disco
bandleader Brendon Urie’s participation on a recent installment of Jimmy
Kimmel Live’s Mashup Monday segment,
wherein he gleefully belted out a campy
rendition of Sisqo’s 1999 “Thong Song”
smash alongside Sisqo himself, under the
banner of Panic! at the Sisqo. But the silly
skit was de rigueur to any fans already
familiar with the curious multi-faceted
career of Urie, to whom there is nothing
more sacred than the meticulous craft of
comedy. When it comes to humor, he’s just
not kidding around.
Take, for example, the rocker’s zany
clips he posts on Vine, many featuring him
interacting with his pampered pets, a
frisky fox terrier named Bogart and a more
stoic Boston terrier dubbed Penny Lane,
named after one of he and his wife Sarah’s
favorite Beatles songs. In one segment, he
greets them cheerily upon his arrival
home, a tone that quickly changes, when
he surveys the messy living room, into a
sternly reprimanding, “I thought I asked
you to clean up!” He cites former Mad TV
funnyman Will Sasso as a huge inspiration.
“When Vine first came out, he had all these
great little bits that there were so funny
and totally original,” he enthuses. “So the
whole reason I got into Vine was because
of comedians.”
Watch Urie’s snippets long enough –
like ones featuring him skateboarding to
the recording studio, while breathlessly
describing how excited he is to be heading
to that studio – and the effect can be dizzying. “But who I act as a person on Vine is
totally different from who I am in real life,”
he wants to clarify. “I’m just being some-
body else, using this manic, hyperactive
character to get an idea or a joke across.”
Same goes for his recent cameo in the web
series Good Cops, he adds. One of his
friends happens to be its creator. “And he
just asked me, ‘Hey, man – I know you’re a
fan of the show. You want to be in it?’ And
I said, ‘Hell, yes!’ I do random stuff like
that, like the Vine character and some other
characters, a lot of times because my
friends are like, ‘Let’s film something.’ So I
do.”
Get Urie going on standup comics, and
he’ll rattle off a slew of hilarious favorites,
like cutting-edge British humorist Jimmy
Carr, and the late, lamented avitator-shaded pundit Mitch Hedberg, who would
throw out a stream of brilliant non
sequiturs, like a waitress asking if he wanted a receipt after selling him a doughnut,
to which he’d drolly respond, “Let’s not
bring ink and paper into this transaction.”
“Seriously, Mitch Hedberg was one of the
funniest, most soft-spoken comedians of
all time,” he says. “He would say one sentence, and it would take you about five seconds to understand the joke. And then ten
seconds after that, you’d be laughing,
rolling on the floor. He would say things
like, ‘It’s interesting to note that dogs are
forever in the push-up position’ – just little
quips like that, that were so funny.”
But don’t get Urie wrong. He isn’t harboring any grand delusions of launching
his own standup routine. “I would never
do that,” he sighs. “It’s usually like, any
time that I find myself being somewhat –
or even remotely – funny is in a situation
where I just feel incredibly nervous and
awkward, and I try to lighten the mood.
It’s usually when I’m out with friends, and
22 illinoisentertainer.com march 2016
there’s either a heated debate, or somebody says something dumb, so I try to
break the awkwardness with something
funny, until we’re all laughing, going, ‘Oh,
yeah – that just happened.’” He enjoys listening to comics discuss their process, h B