The last time Gil Faizon and George St. Geegland came to Chicago they were selling hot dogs to police at the Democratic National Convention of 1968. They’re a pair of self-proclaimed “racist liberals” who met in Toronto while dodging the draft during the Vietnam war, and they bonded over a shared love of wearing turtlenecks with blazers. That’s the basic story of these two characters, or at least it is according to their creators, comedians Nick Kroll and John Mulaney, the latter a Chicago native.
How did that come about?
What is George and Gil’s origin story?
NK: We saw these two older men at a bookstore and they were both buying Alan Alda’s autobiography, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed. We followed them and watched them read that book together, each their own copies. They were the personification of the kinds of guys that we had been obsessed with. We started talking to each other like them in our free time. Then we hosted a show together in New York at Rififi, where a lot of us got our start in comedy, and we started hosting a show together as those characters. We just started building it out from there.
JM: On my end of it, I remember someone asked me what I was going to do next when I had nothing lined up, and I said, “Oh, Hello on Broadway.” Then I was like, “Oh yeah, we should do that.”
How did you guys decide to take the show on the road?
Fri 3/18-Thu 3/24: 7:30 PM, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, athenaeumtheatre.org, $60.
