"That magic bucket of waffles is me": my conversation about storytelling and comedy wth Brennan Lee Mulligan
In 'Never Stop Blowing Up', Brennan is "putting pieces of a story puzzle together while tumbling down a hill at full speed".
Some very minor spoilers for Never Stop Blowing Up are included in this piece, but like, if anything they’d only make you hungrier to go and watch it, I wouldn’t worry. Don’t stress!
“You can watch an animated film about a talking bucket of waffles that learns sorcery, and if there is an emotional core that points to a True North for that character, you will go, oh my God, that bucket of waffles is me, and I am it. And that's groundedness to me,” Brennan Lee Mulligan muses, rounding out a particularly delightful moral to our conversation about comedy and tone - and it’s a testament to his sublime control of comedy and storytelling that this is both a funny line, and an illuminating and meaningful point. One of the better waffle-bucket analogies I’ve heard recently.
I’m interviewing Brennan at 2am (not in a warehouse, but in my apartment), and it feels fitting that my energy is somewhat unhinged and excited from both the hour and the sheer excitement of talking to one of my favourite comedy people, because we’re talking about his latest show ‘Never Stop Blowing Up’ - which is equally unhinged and excited.
It’s difficult to choose my favourite moment from Dimension 20’s action-film inspired new show. Is it the moment the White House rips itself from its earthly shackles and takes off into the atmosphere? Is it when Ally Beardsley’s character Jennifer Drips must roll to “get away from that plane that’s trying to rob me”? Was it the insane yet ultimately successful “bean slip” plan by Rekha Shankar that used beans to destroy a couple of stealth bombers? Or is it all of these and more, because why do we try to impose hierarchy on something as ephemeral and beautiful as joy?
‘Never Stop Blowing Up’, like its name suggests and enforces, is a big, absurd, manic show. A group of disparate “losers” who work at a failing video rental store get sucked into an action film and inhabit the avatars of action heroes - very Jumanji meets Empire Records meets Die Hard. It’s so hysterically funny that a very pregnant performer (the marvellous Izzy Roland) laughed so much that she pissed herself during the show at least once.
This isn’t a surprise - there hasn’t been a single Dimension 20 show that I haven’t been obsessed with, that hasn’t been very funny. For the uninitiated, Dimension 20 is a miraculous blend of comedy, tabletop roleplaying, improvisation and longform narrative storytelling, hosted on comedy streaming channel Dropout. It’s very much a new format of show, and one that is uniquely designed for my specific style of story-based nerdery.
Now in its 22nd season, the offerings range from the D&D/John Hughes mashup ‘Fantasy High’, to a Game of Thrones inspired fantasy world populated by different food groups, to a show featuring iconic queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race called ‘Dungeons and Drag Queens’, to more and more.
No two seasons really resemble each other, but even for Dimension 20, ‘Never Stop Blowing Up’ is pushing the boundaries of this new form again, with a gaming system that is perfectly designed for these huge comedy moments - which is why I was incredibly excited to talk to creator of Dimension 20, comedian and comedy writer and performer Brennan Lee Mulligan, and poke his huge beautiful brain about comedy and storytelling.
“There's too many pies and we're slipping on banana peels”
I start off the interview by taking the chance to sincerely and earnestly thank Brennan, as discovering Dimension 20 during Melbourne’s lockdown era was pretty much the only thing that kept me sane.
I remember convincing my friend to join me in my new obsession by describing it as the perfect lockdown show because it is a “full meal” - the comedy I needed to cut through the crippling depression, the immediacy and joy of the improvised performances to remind me of what having funny friends is like, and the commitment to storytelling truths and stakes and pathos and meaning that I required to be fully immersed in a time where my attention span was absolutely shot to hell.
I’ve always been curious as to how that “full meal” effect is created - and why Brennan decided to pitch a delicious D&D/ tabletop roleplaying game storytelling fusion to a comedy channel in the first place. Traditionally, people have laughed AT people playing Dungeons and Dragons, not with them.
“My God, I love this question so much, Patrick. Thank you,” Brennan says.
“I refer to this in my work as the Casablanca Effect. Casablanca is one of the all-time great films. There's a lot of conversations in current media, film, television, content creation around tone. What is our tone? What is the tone we're striking? And there's something incredible when you go back and watch some of our most classic films like Casablanca, that tone is something that gets moved through at a rapid pace. That movie is a romance. It is intrigue and espionage, it has wild moments of comedy, moments of sudden shock or suspense, violence and, you know, death and things like that. And it's incredible.
I think when you look at that and go, oh, right, occupying a single tone for an entire work - we have a word for that - it's called monotone, one tone. It's not good, and it's not, I think, true to life.
So I really appreciate you saying that because I think that we strive in Dimension 20, especially in the long form of these two hour episodes, which, you know - actual play by virtue of being improvised scene length - usually about doubles or triples from a normal television or movie scene. And you, I think, find within that that you need to vary the tone of the work through all of the experiences of life to be that more multifarious, tonal experience where there's comedy and drama and intrigue and danger all at, you know, all in a single episode.”
I’m nodding so furiously at this point, thinking about my own writing and the confusion and bafflement it sometimes engenders when I refuse to maintain a monotone and skip between tones and genres with gay abandon - but I want to hear how Brennan specifically balances these humours, in an old timey medial sense, in these stories.
“There is definitely a mathematics to it” Brennan sighs, “but I do fear, I have to say that it is largely an intuitive and instinctual math, especially depending on the performers that you're playing with. I don't know how to describe the feeling, but I do know that with my favourite collaborators, we are all almost on a shared internal clock that goes - ‘Okay. We've reached an apex moment of sorrow or tragedy here’. And occasionally we'll get to that apex moment and say, we need to let that fully rest and we need to get soft. But sometimes you'll say, actually, this needs to be punctured, we need a laugh here to come out of this. Occasionally the reverse will happen: you'll be in something so silly and slapstick.
I think about it in terms of what we in long form improv call editing, which is sometimes like ‘how do you get out of a mood or a tone’? Not because it's time for it to be over, but because you want to keep forward momentum or pacing. So, oh my God, we're in a scene. There's too many pies, we're slipping on banana peels, and there's a certain amount of slipping on banana peels, then you slip on your 10th banana peel and under that banana peel is the secret door that you can see an ominous red light coming out of. It's those tonal shifts that actually allow you to propel the story forward, and switching the tone becomes a way to communicate to your players “let's advance the story in a new direction”.
It’s honestly like Brennan just wandered under the box that I’ve propped up with a stick to get the juicy carrot inside, because I was gearing up to guide this conversation to how much improv comedy plays in the unique recipe of Dimension 20 storytelling. Out of all the disparate elements that make up Dimension 20 shows, it’s the improvisation that I think provides the jet fuel, the spark of immediacy and stupidity that perhaps makes it unique. For my sins, I too am a longform improviser, and have been using the narrative and storytelling lessons I’ve learned from various improv schools in my own writing for almost a decade now, so I’m keen to ask Brennan how much of his improv practice informs his storytelling.
“Wow. That's a great question” he says. (I’m leaving all of his compliments in the article because I’m not above being chuffed by them.)
“So fundamentally - the bizarre part about my biography is that it's actually the reverse. You know, I was playing D&D for 10-15 years prior to engaging in a formal improv curriculum. I studied at the Upright Citizens Brigade and became a house performer there and a teacher there, and it was the joy of a lifetime. I mean, I really, really value and honour that time that I spent at that theatre and loved the work that we did there. What's so fascinating is the honing of awareness that I think improv really helps with. To know when you have found something funny, to understand what it feels like when you and someone click into a shared knowledge of something unspoken… I think in all those years performing on those stages, I know when a player knows that we've both arrived at something important.
Because of course, the whole thing with improv is that you can't check in with other performers because the show is live, the audience is there. So you have to find all these ways to check in under the surface of the water. Your characters can't say it, but you know how to have characters act in a way where you're pinging sort of your sonar off each other like, yeah, we got it right, we know what we're doing.
But of course, the funniest thing too, is what improv tells you not to do, at least in the UCB curriculum, is you're not supposed to pursue plot. And the funniest thing about that for me was like, okay, well, I'm coming from LARP and tabletop games, which is basically about improvising the MOST plot. The plot is what we're here to do. And so I think there's always been a fun thing about marrying that game focused comedy forward improv style with heavily plot driven forms like tabletop or LARP.
Tumbling down the hill at full speed
As much as I’d like to discuss the absolutely punishing intricacies of improv and storytelling for another three hours, that actually segues quite well into ‘Never Stop Blowing Up’, because my fascination with this season has been how comedy weighted it is, and how chaotic the plot is - just like an improvised scene.
I remember the first moment that I realised this show is a very different beast from other D20 shows was when Jacob Wysocki’s Dang drove a car into outer space - successfully. The rules not only allowed that to happen, they encouraged it. And the show only got much crazier after that. The commitment to the absurd, to the hyperbole of action films, is infectious to watch. I had to wonder if Brennan expected the show to go so unhinged, to make him say multiple times that he felt like he “was in a fever dream” or just “unwell”. Or if that was the plan all along. Was he sick of of being the dungeon dad and wanted to let loose?
“Going into this season, we got this crew together for this side quest and knew we wanted to do action-comedy and knew we wanted to be in that genre. It's almost funny how these different sort of, creative, parameters fell together very organically. ‘Okay, we're going to do action comedy, but D&D doesn't really quite work for that, so we're going to go to Kids on Bikes. Actually, is there a way to adjust that too?”
Kids on Bikes is described as a “collaborative world building storytelling rules-light tabletop role-playing game, set in small towns with big mysteries”, which was further adapted by the team for Never Stop Blowing Up. It’s less crunchy and mechanics focused than Dungeons and Dragons, and the modified version features a “blowing up” mechanic that not only enables the insanity of the pace, but rewards it. In improv we’d call these kinds of moves “big choices”.
“I think with the cast we had, there was something really exciting about that on a creative level, if we say that the bar for achievement is that we ‘Yes, And’ as much as we can, and try to get into that hysterical comedy mania to to the utmost… Do we still have the ability to put pieces of a story puzzle together while we are tumbling down a hill at full speed? And delightfully, the answer is yes.
And it was really delightful to take a player like Ally Beardsley, who constantly has thrown chaos my way, and go, I'm not reffing anymore. I'm not the referee. I'm engaging in the madness with you. So if we're going to have this make sense, you're going to meet me as we surge forward.
To their incredible credit, all the players did an amazing job of seeing the wonderful freedom and comedic limitlessness in this space and still adding in pathos and character motivation into that spree.”
The magic bucket of waffles
‘Never Stop Blowing Up’ really is magically manic - all the players, including Brennan match each other’s freak, escalating each episode into mind-boggling feats of stupidity. But at the same time, there are still some beautiful and emotional and even profound moments scattered throughout the chaos.
There’s a strong commitment to character in all these shows, and I think that the high-absurdity concept of the plot and setting makes it all the more important for the characters to have truths and transfiguration at their core.
And it’s no surprise really that the format helps set this up - ‘Never Stop Blowing Up’ exists in the tradition of stories like Jumanji and even Narnia, where ordinary people are transported into a magical or fantastical world, in order to learn lessons about themselves to take back to reality. Throughout the season, there’s a lot of discussion through character growth around modern malaises like loneliness, community, and purpose. We have teenagers unsure of their futures, older people left adrift after divorces and heartbreak, and the oldest woman in the world who invented the first joke. There’s a heart to each of them, no matter how ludicrous they get.
There’s even a whole thesis we could write about the metatextual nature of this kind of show, with stacks of avatars on avatars, going all the way up to the performers themselves - most players of D&D and other TTRPG’s can confirm that the character’s we play in these worlds are a shard of our subconscious, and that we learn things about ourselves from our level 2 halfling rogues.
It’s no coincidence that I spent my teenage years roleplaying a drunk bisexual elf who didn’t know how to fight, only to essentially become that guy at university. I didn’t say we had to learn GOOD lessons from our avatars.
But I’m interested in how Brennan works to ground the story amidst exploding chaos enough to achieve this kind of emotional alchemy.
“I am still very much myself a student of this form. And every time we do a season, I think we try to take creative swings, because one of the most exciting parts of this that keeps the fire lit for me is, what more can we learn about this relatively new medium? What I would say to any aspiring DMs is groundedness gets mischaracterised as - I think a lot of newer artists will hear grounded and go, got it? Boring. Don't have exciting stuff happen.
The amount of friends I have that go to commercial auditions where it's like the line is like, ‘God, I love my new Doritos Scoop flavour blast’. And a director will look at you and say, ‘don't say that animated, say it like you would say it in real life.’ And you're like, ‘say I love my Doritos Scoop flavour blast like I would say it… I would never say that?’ And what do you mean ground that, right? What does grounded even mean in this context? And I think grounded as a byword for low energy, boringness disaffectedness is the death of joy, and also of truth.
To me, what groundedness means is do characters feel attached to the stakes of the story? You can be in total slumberland, dream world, phantasmagoria, and if someone's emotional core has a true north, all of that is going to be parsed pretty effortlessly. Right? The groundedness is not coming from physical danger. Physical danger has no limit on it in this world. Cars are crashing through fruit stands every day. Every corner has a new world ending plot of international cabal of criminals and, you know, wild card, you know, loose cannon law enforced like that's happening in every square inch of the world. What stays grounded is how these characters relate to getting back home, and how they feel about their own lives, now that an element of chaos has been introduced. So you see, like dang discovering Wolfman Ann and the secret radio. That is always going to feel grounded in house stakes, not only because Jacob Wysocki is such an incredibly talented performer, but because you see that the players are locked in on their true north.
I don't need the stakes of this magical VHS tape to be grounded. I need my character to understand that I'm trying to get home, and that this these wild events are making me think very carefully about my life. If that's there, all the other stuff goes away.”
I think this is the heart of the “full meal” that is Dimension 20 - as much as I delight in the big, crazy moments, the big-tittied dinosaur ninjas, the fight scenes, the explosions - I wouldn’t care about them if it wasn’t for the fact that they were happening around characters who have that internal truth. There is an alchemy here, and it’s not about whether comedy detracts or adds from storytelling - it’s about what you value, and I think it’s clear that Brennan values empathy, and people’s stories and their truths. It’s the people, the characters, who stay with us.
“I would like to put one last point in this room that we're almost out of time,” adds Brennan. “But to put one last point on this. I have watched movies in which nothing supernatural or surreal happened. I've watched student films at film school that were autobiographical, about things the filmmaker had experienced earlier that semester. All of the events were true to life, but it was still deeply ungrounded. The story did not feel real. But you can watch an animated film about a talking bucket of waffles that learns sorcery, and if there is an emotional core that points to a True North for that character, you will go, “oh my God, that bucket of waffles is me, and I am it. And that's groundedness to me.”
We’re all buckets of waffles really, at the end of the day, I answer.
“At the end of the day. Who am I, if not a bucket of waffles?” agrees Brennan.
‘Never Stop Blowing Up’ is available on the Dropout app, and i really recommend it!
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"drunk bisexual elf who didn’t know how to fight" - love you. and love this so much!! BRENNAN!!! (screaming)