TVSquad

If you tell Doug Benson that you loved him on VH1's I Love the XX's shows, he'll gladly accept the compliment, even though he's never appeared on any of them.

"When people say to me on the street, 'I Love the 90's!', I go, 'I do too!' I don't give them a lecture about how no, I'm on Best Week Ever," he told me a few weeks ago., "because it does all blend together. And as long as they're remembering me, and they have a positive attitude about it, you know, there's no reason for me to be a dick."

Benson's not just the "VH1 guy," though. The veteran stand-up reached the finals of season six of Last Comic Standing, after some notoriously unsuccessful attempts. He also made a documentary, Super High Me, which makes its TV debut today (4/20... get it?) on G4 at 10 PM ET. In the movie, Benson makes like Morgan Spurlock, but he substitutes pot for Quarter Pounders.

We talked about the movie, if the whole 420 thing is over, and his run-in with Ant on season five of Last Comic Standing.

Whose idea was it to do the 4/20 launch: was it yours, G4's, a little bit of both?
Well G4 bought the movie and decided to air it on that night, and then they contacted me to help promote it.

Do you think this 4/20 thing's gotten a bit overplayed now? Because I think when contestants on The Price is Right start bidding $420 on everything, you know, it starts feeling a little over.
Uh yeah. But...for you it might feel over because you've been familiar with what it means for so long, but it's amazing how many people out there aren't on board. Like you say 420 to them and it means nothing. It's still got that weird kind of cult vibe to it. I mean let's face it. G4 is an awesome network, but it's not you know, it's not like ABC or NBC is having a 4/20 celebration. You know, it's really not completely out there in the world just yet.

I know the idea for Super High Me was as a take-off of Supersize Me. How did the notion of doing a movie start?
Well that's just the thing is it started out as a joke in my act, where I just said, if a guy can eat McDonald's for 30 days, why not make a movie where I smoke pot for 30 days? And then once it started, once the wheels started turning to actually do it, I kind of felt like I was in the same position Morgan Spurlock was, in that I got to have it both ways. Because Supersize Me is a very funny movie about a pretty serious subject, that ends up having fairly serious results. So when we set out to do Super High Me, it was like well, we're just gonna be honest and see what happens. We're gonna just record the 30 days, and then put it together and show people.

And in my case, you know, the movie ended up being pretty fun to do and to watch, because nothing particularly terrible happened to me. But on the other hand, the movie does have some serious points to make, because at that time, the federal government was busting in on these dispensaries in California where the voters made it legal to sell medical marijuana, and yet they kept raiding these places. So you see that in the movie, and that's one of the things I'm happy to report, you know, on the night of the movie, you'll see me talking about this, that thanks to the Obama administration, those raids are no longer happening.

You didn't drink at all during the experiment. What was the reason for that?
I just wanted to get, you know, drinking off the table, as it were. Because it'd be so easy for me to just get drunk every night just because I can't get high. And you know, because it is a little bit of a fallback position for me, you know, when I'm traveling and I don't have the opportunity to smoke pot, you know, I'll just have a few drinks.

There would have been a potential to puke in a McDonald's parking lot though, like Morgan Spurlock did, if you were drinking?
(chuckles) Yeah, exactly. No, it's just that, you know, I do like to drink, but I also didn't, just didn't want the movie to be about a guy who's drinking because he can't smoke pot. And I also didn't want to add the extra health issues of having alcohol in my system.

And it turned out that after the thirty days, you were just fine, right?
Yeah. Any kind of testing they did, everything seemed to be the same or better when I was, during the month that I was smoking. And we did all the same tests when I wasn't smoking.

Were people surprised at those results?
Um, you know, I think so. The most shocking one is the sperm count going up, which to me, seems like that might've been like a mistake in the lab or something.

You just don't think that's possible, huh?
But we left it in because it's just funny to be like, you know, to say that even the sperm count, which conventional wisdom says it would go down from smoking all that pot... (laughs). And you know, and something like the psychic test, I just did better because I got luckier that day and it had nothing to do with whether or not I was smoking pot. I'm just clearly not psychic.

If we're watching one of those VH1 shows you're on, would you be able to point at something and say "Hey, that's when I smoked a couple before I went in?"
Well, people jump to the conclusion that I am high whether I am or I'm not. Like I get messages all the time, like on Twitter and MySpace, where people say "Oh, you were so high when you were on that show the other night." Or, "You were so high during that podcast." And sometimes it's true, and sometimes it's not. I'm such a silly comedian that even when I'm not high, but I'm in a public forum of some sort making jokes, it'd be very easy to point and go "Oh, he's so high right now." So it's kind of like, it's kinda reached a point where it doesn't matter.

So now when people ask me, like if I'm on like the red carpet doing an interview or something and they say, are you high right now, I just say, "I wouldn't be professional if I showed up to an event like this and didn't smoke pot first."

A couple of questions about Last Comic Standing. One of the biggest mysteries of the show to me always was, why is a pro like you auditioning with the guy who, wears like a duck costume, you know?
That's the thing, is they invite pros to come down every season, because the show wouldn't work with just amateurs. Because the comedians have to go on week after week, and they have to do these challenges where you have to think on your feet and stuff. And it's just all stuff that, you know, amateur comics can't pull off, whereas like on American Idol, they can kind of like turn somebody into an American Idol over the course of the season. But you can't become a great comic by auditioning for Last Comic Standing, just because you kind of have a sense of humor.

It also sets up a situation where a fellow comedian like Ant, who judged the initial rounds during the fifth season, is passing judgment on you. It made no sense to me.
It was Ant, Alonzo (Bodden), and Kathleen (Madigan). And for that part, for that particular season, they thought it would be a good idea to give each judge a paddle that says "No" on it. And they each got one opportunity to override the other two judges during the course of a day of auditions. I knew Ant and Alonzo and Kathleen already. I already knew the producers of the show because I'd been through it the year before.

So I came out, and I told what I thought were really funny jokes, but in kind of a fairly subtle, low key manner. I just told the jokes, and then Alonzo cut me off at one point, and said "That's great, I think you should move on to the nighttime." Kathleen was "yes, me too." And then Ant pulls out his paddle, and says "you know, you were too low key, it was boring to watch."

Every town they went to, he did that to a good comic, thinking that it would get him portrayed as the villain who's turning down people that should go through. And so the producers immediately called my agent after I got turned away by Ant, and they were like, "We're so sorry that he did that, we didn't expect him to use that paddle on somebody that's clearly a legitimate comic that deserves to perform in the next level." And they said, please come back to one of the other cities and audition again.

So I looked at my schedule, and Minneapolis, the date they had there, you know, fit into my schedule. So I said ok, I'll go to Minneapolis and I'll try again. And then I came out for the audition and did the exact same jokes, but I screamed them at the top of my lungs.

That had me on the floor. Because I just remember you were, it seemed like you were just doing that just to get at Ant, because he obviously said it was too low key.
But that was like what was so funny about it, is his reaction was like, see how much funnier you were when you bring some energy to it? It was like, you know, he feels like he made his point, and you know, and then I did manage to get through. So I don't hate him or anything. We get along ok.

Ant's comedy is so over the top, that's what I mean. It's just like who's gonna be...everybody compared to him is low key.
Yeah, yeah. It's like, does everybody need to be like a flaming gay dude, or can some of us just talk? No, he definitely had his own agenda going on there. And was looking to get, I mean, he's just, that's the thing about his whole approach to everything is he just wants attention.

By the way, it's interesting how, you were on How I Met Your Mother for all of like 30 seconds, playing a stoned Customs officer. It was a really Doug Benson-esque role. Did Bays and Thomas call you in for that part?
Yeah, that I just got cast in. Like they did not call me up and say Hey, we need a stoner. My agent called them and said, you know, set up the audition. And I went in and read for the part along with a bunch of other actors. From their end, it was just sort of lucky on their part that they actually got somebody that is actually recognized as a stoner comic to play this part where they couldn't come right out and say that I was a stoner, but it had to be inferred, you know. Once I got on the set, one of the producers was kind of like "Oh yeah, that is kind of funny that we cast you."

What else is coming up for you? Are those the big projects? Do you have, are you going to have any Comedy Central special coming up or anything like that?
Well there's the special that started airing this year, started airing around January, that that's still, I don't know what its status is on demand, but I'm sure Comedy Central will play it over and over again, you know, for the rest of time. You know, maybe Wall-E will be watching it while he's cleaning up the scorched Earth.