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Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher, more commonly known by their sketch-comedy name BriTANicK, may be best friends, but their funniest jokes usually emerge after a long, drawn-out battle.
“I want option A, and Brian wants option B,” Kocher says. “We fight for a week straight, and neither of us gives up. So we finally come up with option C, which is better than both A and B.”
McElhaney chimes in: “We’re both incredibly stubborn. We don’t relent. We want to win over the other person.”
McElhaney and Kocher’s combative dynamic is paying off at SXSW this year, where the duo has two films debuting — “Pizza Movie,” a wacky college comedy, and “Over Your Dead Body,” a dark dramedy about warring spouses trying to kill each other. As if that weren’t enough, they’re finding time to perform a live comedy show while in Austin.
“Pizza Movie,” which McElhaney, 39, and Kocher, 40, wrote and directed, is about a group of college friends (Gaten Matarazzo, Sean Giambrone and Lulu Wilson) who take a hallucinogen that sends them on a seemingly endless quest down one flight of stairs to retrieve a pizza that’s been delivered to their dorm. It’s an absurd premise, but despite sounding like “Half Baked” meets “The Odyssey,” the film tells a surprisingly heartfelt story about friendship.
“From our early sketches, we realized we should ground them in some sort of emotional truth,” McElhaney says. “Start in a place that is maybe even dramatic. We’re talking about jealousy. We’re talking about what it feels like to fall in love. We’re talking about being scared — something we can really anchor on. Once we get that, we can go off into crazyland.”
Finding a way to make something both deeply relatable and hilarious is a cornerstone of BriTANicK’s work. Their videos, which send up everything from dinner parties to morning routines, attracted a large online fan base early on. From there, the pair got gigs writing on shows like “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and “Saturday Night Live.”
McElhaney and Kocher grew up near each other in Atlanta — they went to the same preschool, played in the same little league and performed at the same arts camp — but didn’t get to know each other until the end of high school. When they wound up at NYU together, they started collaborating. Taking inspiration from other NYU sketch groups that found success on YouTube, like Donald Glover’s Derrick Comedy, they secured a regular show at the comedy launching ground Upright Citizens Brigade and found representation soon after.
After college, the pair landed work as the voices of Cartoon Network’s commercials and interstitials; when the gig ended, they sent out a flurry of pitches and got the job on “Sunny” in 2016. While they were only there for a transition season — when star Glenn Howerton was toying with leaving the series — they received an education in sitcom writing from a show that revels in bad taste and boundary-pushing.
“Often for comedy shows, the writers’ room is so funny, and the things people pitch are insane. But then [the writers or showrunners] go, ‘We can’t do that. This show is not that style,’ or ‘The network wouldn’t want it,’” McElhaney says. “We’ve been in rooms where it’s been heartbreaking because great storylines are too wild, too out there, too R-rated, whatever. But at ‘Sunny,’ everything went. We actually tried to go too insane and couldn’t get there.”
The duo moved to “Saturday Night Live” in 2016, after friends who made it onto the show urged them to submit for writing jobs. It was a trial-by-fire experience, having to satirize pulled-from-the-headline moments — their first episode, for instance, took aim at Donald Trump’s presidential debate with Hillary Clinton — but that experience taught them the importance of flexibility.
“One of the best lessons we took was to just get it on the page. It’s going to change a billion times,” Kocher says. “You just throw it out there and see what works. We labor over where the commas will come in a script, but we have to keep reminding ourselves to just get the first draft done. This whole line will be gone, let alone the comma.”
That education was essential for “Pizza Movie,” their first feature as directors. “Making these movies, it was very much the case of, you lose a location like that” — Kocher snaps his fingers — “and then all of a sudden, you have to completely change the scene.”
McElhaney and Kocher are well acquainted with how audiences respond to their humor from both killing it and bombing through the years with their live sketch shows.
“We know when something just isn’t there,” McElhaney says. “There’s no worse feeling than having your lame joke not really hit. That just sucks so much that we want to put in the work where it doesn’t happen.”
Because they like feedback, they’re the rare writers who value test screening — in fact they ran focus groups for “Pizza Movie” themselves.
“You have a good idea of how an audience will react, but you’re going to be surprised,” Kocher says. “There are certain jokes that we would have cut that did really well, and other ones that we would have kept that were good to cut.”
Billy Rosenberg, a producer on “Pizza Movie” and the co-CEO of All Things Comedy, sees the same DNA in BriTANicK that he does in other sketch creators who become major filmmakers, like Jordan Peele and Zach Cregger.
“There is this goofy spirit, this freedom of silliness and over-the-topness, but it’s so grounded in character and relationship storylines that you never lose the audience,” Rosenberg says. “That’s something that’s really hard to achieve in comedy. You’ll never see another movie like a movie they do.”
With their other SXSW film, “Over Your Dead Body,” the duo had a different challenge in adapting the script of the 2021 Norwegian film “The Trip.” Their English-language version, starring Samara Weaving and Jason Segel as a feuding couple who each plan to kill the other during a remote vacation, is directed by Jorma Taccone of comedy trio The Lonely Island. Because the project had a preexisting plot to adhere to, McElhaney and Kocher looked at it as a unique challenge.
“The original structure was great,” McElhaney says. “The house is already built. We get to change the walls to decorate it. It comes with limitations in that you’re dealing with someone else’s story. But at the same time, there’s something so relaxing about saying, ‘We can play jazz with the characters and make them our own.’ But also, ‘Let’s let the story guide us here, because it’s already happening.’”
Ever the perfectionists, the pair are excited for the debut of their films at SXSW but admit that one thing gets them nervous. “What we’ll be mostly stressed about is our live show the Sunday after,” Kocher says. “I don’t know …” He pauses, teeing up a joke for McElhaney, who deadpans, “Why we’re doing it.” Then they both laugh.
English (US) ·