Why Jason Mantzoukas thought his 'big and brash' comedic persona would work on Taskmaster

31:59Jason Mantzoukas wants to be the ugly American villain

When Jason Mantzoukas got the chance to appear on Taskmaster, one of his favourite TV shows, he didn't want to play along normally. He wanted to be the ugly American villain who creates chaos.

Taskmaster is a long-running British panel game show that follows five comedians as they attempt to complete a series of unique and ridiculous challenges, which are then scored by comedian Greg Davies (the titular Taskmaster) in front of a live audience.

"It is such a dumb, silly, funny show to watch," Mantzoukas tells Q's Tom Power in an interview. "To explain it seems like a Byzantine series of roundabouts … when in reality, it is so dead simple: it's a comedy show. It's a comedy show masquerading as a game show."

Though Taskmaster mostly features British and Irish comedians, Mantzoukas is not the show's first American contestant. He is, however, the first contestant to not be based in the U.K. at the time of filming.

As a longtime fan of the show, the American actor and comedian reached out to creator Alex Horne to express his interest in appearing on the latest season (or series, as they say in the U.K.). His pitch, he says, was to be as combative and difficult as possible.

A lot of the characters I play are lunatics and maniacs.- Jason Mantzoukas

"My comedic persona is big and brash and, you know, it can be very outrageous," Mantzoukas says. "A lot of the characters I play are lunatics and maniacs…. I'm a heel, in wrestling terms. I am quite often taking shots, being a villain, and I felt like that would work on the show."

At times, Mantzoukas drops the ugly American persona (he says all of the comedians occasionally drop their personas because they're genuinely having so much fun), but his Americanisms are always on full display. Throughout the show, he's regularly ribbed by Davies and Horne for his American pronunciation of words like "vase" and "route."

"This happens throughout the whole series — or season — which is I'm saying an American pronunciation [and] they correct me with a British [pronunciation]," he says. "I don't know how many were edited out, but it gets played a lot because it works and it's always a surprise."

During the COVID lockdowns of 2020, Taskmaster started uploading all of its episodes to YouTube, which helped the show become a global phenomenon. But the panel show format has never quite caught on across the pond in the U.S or English-speaking Canada. An American version of Taskmaster was created in 2018, but it only lasted one season.

Mantzoukas thinks the reason why the American version of the show failed is due to structural changes that eliminated the "freewheeling banter" of the original show.

"I don't think it was an audience problem," he says. "[Comedy Central] messed with the architecture of the show so much as to make it, I think, untenable…. I think Americans make the mistake of trying to apply too much structure and too much attention on points, when in reality the points are meaningless and the structure is loose. By focusing on structure and points, you strangle what's funny about it."

The full interview with Jason Mantzoukas is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Jason Mantzoukas produced by Ben Edwards.