The Creators of ‘Drunk History’: “You wouldn’t believe how much history has happened. I mean, it’s insane!”

"When we did it, it was just for a onetime thing at UCB in Los Angeles where I perform and I was showing it there." Drunk History creator Derek Waters

Comic-Con: The creators of Comedy Central’s Drunk History, Derek Waters and Jeremy Conner, were at Comic-Con to talk about the upcoming season and I had a chance to join them in oine of their roundtable interviews.

The show, based on the web-series of the same name, is the “liquored-up narration of our nation’s history.” It’s hilarious and has some really terrific guests who pop-up through each season, including Taran Killam and Paget Brewster.

Also, here’s something really funny. In the video, Waters is asked about his favorite dirty joke. He tells the exact same joke that Taran Killam tells in this video. Watch his response towards the end.

Some highlights to the interview:

Derek Waters: We just find the best stories and then we figure out would that work as a theme?

How do you go about finding stories?

Derek Waters: We have a team of researchers that work for about 2 months before we start working with the narrators and letting them learn what we found.

Jeremy Konner: And we’ve been collecting stories over the years and people have come to us about stories. In this two months is when we narrow it down and figure it out what the stories are. A lot of times, we have a story that we love and we’re so excited about and we give it to the researcher and it turns out that is not a true story.

Derek Waters: Which sucks. It happens all the time.

Do you think the show could have happened without the internet?

Derek Waters: No, I don’t. Because pitching the show was the hardest thing without anything behind it. It was very confusing to anyone to be like, “Well, I don’t get it. So, you have to pretend to be drunk?” And it was just very confusing. I understand because it’s a visual idea.

When we did it, it was just for a onetime thing at UCB in Los Angeles where I perform and I was showing it there. It was at a time where internet comedy I was a real big snob and I felt like people were judging comedy on hits and not the content. So, I didn’t want to do anything with the internet with comedy. So, I passed it around, no one responded to it. And then it went on the internet and got on the front page of YouTube.

Drunk History returns to Comedy Central on September 15th!

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