Ike Barinholtz may play degenerates well, but, off screen, the writer, comedian and star is something of a trivia savant. In fact, as his Studio co-star Seth Rogen likes to tell everyone who comes through their Apple TV hit, Barinoltz has won Jeopardy! – both the celebrity and non-celebrity versions.
Now, the man who plays Sal Saperstein on the Emmy winning comedy will bring his vast and eclectic knowledge to his latest project, Funny You Ask, a weekly comedy-trivia podcast that will be available on all major podcast platforms beginning March 25. The premise is simple: Barinholtz will invite his funniest friends, including Jimmy Kimmel, Mindy Kaling and Kate Hudson, to engage him in customized trivia battles. In Kaling’s case, for instance, her questions pertain only to her interests: fashion, food and 1980s Boston Celtics. In between, they’ll riff on, well, everything.
“I’m not saying this to be soap-boxy, but we live in an era now where people question facts and have alternate versions of what is true,” he says, momentarily serious after a long day of filming The Studio’s second season. “So just to be able to have really funny conversations centered around knowledge and facts felt like something that I’d want to listen to right now.”
Barinholtz, who’d been on stage accepting The Studio’s best comedy ensemble at the Actor Awards the evening before, hopped on a Zoom to discuss his latest project as well as his role in Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming AI movie and the devastating loss of his Studio co-star Catherine O’Hara.
Congratulations on yet another best comedy win …
Thank you, thank you. [Swivels around in his office chair.] Oh my God, I don’t have [the statue] there. I have it in the house.
Have you made clothing for him yet? I know you and the cast were discussing potential outfits backstage…
No, but we’re looking into it. I have to find someone who knows how to work with dye metals and bronze.
Oh, we’re making real clothes. I was thinking, like, doll clothes.
Oh, that would actually be much cheaper. All right, when I get off the call with you, I can make some phone calls and hopefully stop payment on a check.
Perfect. Let’s get into this new project. Your endless knowledge of trivia is once again proving fruitful…
I’m not letting go of it, I enjoy it too much.
Now when is Hollywood going to cast you as an actual smart person?
Every role I play is just some kind of degenerate. I mean, Sal Saperstein, I guess, is a clever guy, but he’s it. Everyone else? God help us.
And yet I still feel like the world would be surprised to know that the guy behind Sal Saperstein has won Jeopardy!
God bless Seth, he tells everybody that I won Jeopardy – no matter who’s on the show, whenever we’re doing a scene and there’s a lull, he’ll say it. I think it’s part just filling the space of awkward silence, but also I think he’s genuinely proud that I’ve done well on Jeopardy! and [Who Wants to be a] Millionaire.
So, talk to me about the genesis of this podcast.
I figured I really wanted to test the market, and it feels like podcasts are going to be a thing, right? No, for years, I was always like, “God, I’d love to do some kind of fun show where I can be with funny friends, but I didn’t have a hook for it.” And then one day it just kind of came to me. Oh, I can sit down with my funny friends and I can ask them trivia questions and them have them ask me trivia questions. I was really just combining two of my favorite things to do, and before I knew it, we were in a cute little studio in Hollywood sitting across Jimmy Kimmel and Kate Hudson and Mindy Kaling.
I remember talking to you years ago when you were toying with other podcast ideas. I believe there was a history pod idea that centered around the Billy Joel song, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” But you were not nearly as busy then as you are now. How does this fit in today?
It would’ve been better had I figured out this idea about five years ago, but things happen when they happen. And if you have an idea and one person in this business says, “I like this, let’s do it,” you gotta ride that momentum train. But yeah, I was a little worried at first because we’d just finished shooting Running Point [the Netflix comedy that he co-created and writes] and we were about to start The Studio, and I was a little stressed out, but the minute I sat down and started doing this, and Mindy was one of the first people I talked to, I was just like a kid. I was giddy because obviously I’m talking to people I love who are funny and they’re making me laugh. And obviously I love to answer trivia questions, but I also got a real thrill out of writing trivia questions.
Wait, you’re writing the questions too?
Oh yeah. I’m always intrigued when you have a friend and one day, out of nowhere, you’re like, oh wow, they know a lot about cows. Or, oh my God, they can name every capital city in the world. I just love that we all have these little streams of information that we’ve repressed and suppressed. So, when I have someone on the show, I reach out beforehand and say, “Give me some topics [you know a lot about].” And then I craft the questions for my guests [pertaining to those topics] and I really love it. Obviously, the questions for me are not written by me.
What’s the pitch to talent, and how many are genuinely nervous about getting stuff wrong? Once Mindy realized she wasn’t going to nail 1980s Celtics trivia, I watched her panic a bit …
The pitch is you won’t look bad. If anyone’s going to look bad, it’s me. There’s an episode where I got my ass kicked, where the questions just missed me like Neo dodging the bullets. But the whole purpose of the podcast is just to have fun and riff on stuff. I really just wanted to do a podcast where it was a little different from the conventional, “So, where are you from?” I think a lot of people do that really, really well, and I wanted to figure out a way to kind of gamify it a bit.
Your Wikipedia page says, “to date, Barinholtz is the thirteenth highest-earning game show contestant of all time, having accumulated $1,635,000 on his game show appearances.” I have no idea how accurate that is…
It’s Wikipedia, it has to be true.
Right. But that has to be intimidating to some.
It is, but the scoring is pretty arbitrary here. If I like the way you answer the question, I’ll give you bonus points. Even if you get the question wrong, you could walk away with half a point. So, it’s more like a game and less like a contest. I really just wanted to do something funny that is also kind of informative.
The podcast business was once an audio-only business; increasingly, it’s a visual one. How did that impact or shape the way you produced Funny You Ask?
I listen to a lot of podcasts and, more often than not, I find myself watching the video link on YouTube. So I wanted [to be able to offer] the full audio, so if you’re driving in your car, you can listen to it. But I also wanted to have the full episode available on YouTube, so you can sit and watch me and the funny faces that I’m making with my guests. And then also, like everyone, I find myself at 9:47 at night being like, “All right, Reels, what do you got? Show me clips of people being funny and labs being obese.” So, I wanted to be able to take these conversations – ones that I think are very fun and easy to watch or listen to as long form [entertainment] – and clip them so that people get super fast, digestible, 30 to 60 second nuggets where it’s just Kate Hudson talking about what band she would actually want to be a band aide for or Mindy Kaling calling me a fraud.
You’ve already recorded a slew of episodes. Anybody that you’ve had on sneaky great at trivia?
I was pretty impressed with Dave Franco’s knowledge of ’90s movies. Jimmy Kimmel, I know he’s low-key good at that stuff. He pretends like he’s this kind of dumb guy, but he’s really not. And Tiffany Haddish is always a wonder. I’m obsessed with her mind, which is so radically different from mine.
Who’s still on the dream guest list?
I always look for people who are trivia heads. Like, I know Emma Stone is a huge Jeopardy! fan, and I think she’s super funny, so she’d be really great. I’d love to do a multifaceted one where I’m bringing on a bunch of people that I faced on Celebrity Jeopardy!, like Patton Oswalt. And then I’ll say Timothée Chalamet just because my kids would lose their shit. I mean, I love him too. I’m acting like, “Oh, my kids love him.” I love him too, all right?
How about your father, aka “Nepo Dad,” are we going to see him come on too?
Oh, there’s a whole family edition, that’s coming. And it’s my mom, too, not just my dad and [actor] brother.
Are you the trivia king in the family?
Honestly, all four of us are pretty good, and we all know weird things. Like, my dad could name any band pretty much from 1958 on. My mom could tell you who painted what painting. My brother knows weird science stuff and I know history. And we get very personal and nasty with each other, so that’ll be fun for the audience.
Can’t wait. I’m curious how your involvement in The Studio has changed your experience as you move through Hollywood these days? A few years ago, you famously described your “water bottle meeting tour” to me, but I suspect the experience has changed.
Because I’m doing The Studio and working on Running Point, I don’t have as much time to go out and pitch stuff. But I did Artificial [the forthcoming Luca Guadagnino film starring Andrew Garfield as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman] last summer and that probably does not happen unless someone shows Luca The Studio and he’s like, [in a thick Italian accent] “I like this guy. I like Sal Saperstein very much.” Whenever you’re on a show that does well, or is well received, whether that’s a lot of people watching it or critics love it or both, it helps you find the next thing. And for this show, in particular, it’s for us [the industry], so I feel very different now at, like, award shows. For years, people would be like, “Oh, that guy’s like Jennifer Lawrence’s security guard, who’s clearly lost.” Now, they’re like, “That’s Sal Saperstein!” And it’s very nice. People are shouting “Sa!” or I had like Benicio [del Toro] point at me and shake my hand the other night and none of that would happen without The Studio.
