From a Cell Phone Man to 'Crash Test': Rob Huebel Talks His Jam-Packed Comedy Career

Pick a TV show — any TV show — and chances are good that Rob Huebel has appeared on one or more episodes. The UCB-trained comedian’s lengthy résumé spans comedies (The Mindy Project and The League), cartoons (Bob’s Burgers and Axe Cop), and even an action series or two (Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.). “I jump around on a lot of different shows,” Huebel admits. And sometimes those shows overlap.

Case in point: On Jan. 22, Huebel can be seen in Adult Swim’s long-running medical show spoof Childrens Hospital as well as the Comedy Central special Crash Test. Huebel and his frequent collaborator, Paul Scheer, filmed the hour-long show on a party bus, driving around L.A. encountering such comics as Rob Corddry, Aubrey Plaza, Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant (in their Reno 911! duds), and their old Human Giant cohort, Aziz Ansari. Both Childrens Hospital and Crash Test air at 11 p.m., and you can continue your Huebel-fest by heading over to Amazon and streaming both seasons of Transparent, where he plays Len, the well-meaning, but frequently flummoxed ex-husband of Sarah Pfefferman (Amy Landecker). YahooTV spoke with Huebel about the “punk rock” early days of UCB, how long they were stuck on that party bus for Crash Test, and the alternate scene from Transparent’s Season 2 finale that you never saw.

Related: The Best and Worst Series Finales According to ‘The League’ Star Paul Scheer

It’s exciting to be speaking with the one and only Inconsiderate Cell Phone Man.
That still follows me around! But only in New York, for some reason. I think the spots played in other cities, but people in New York really connected with it. You know what’s crazy? Bennett Miller directed those commercials, the guy who later made Moneyball and Capote. It’s incredible that they had this awesome director for literally the dumbest commercial ever. [Laughs] That was one of the first things I ever did, and I just improvised most of it.

Back then, you were part of New York’s first graduating class of UCB performers alongside folks like Paul Scheer, Amy Poehler, and Aziz Ansari. What do you remember about that era?
It’s hard to have perspective on it, but I feel very lucky to have been part of that wave of alternative comedy that hit New York in the late ‘90s. UCB came from Chicago and built their theater from the ground up. In the beginning, it was very punk rock. The first version of UCB in New York was an old strip club on 22nd Street. They had lost their lease, and we came in and took it over and put on comedy shows. For a long time, patrons of the strip club kept coming in expecting to see strippers, and instead they’re seeing improv comedy at midnight. So we’d look out into the audience and see these old New York perverts in their trenchcoats touching themselves inappropriately, and you’d be like, “This is not a comedy audience!”

In another 10 years, someone needs to make the Straight Outta Compton version of the UCB story and call it Straight Outta Comedy.
You just pitched a great name for it right there, Straight Outta Comedy. The only hard thing about that movie is that movies about comedy are sometimes not that great. When I watch a movie about stand-up, it’s often not as funny as actual stand-up, and a movie about improv sounds intolerable. So that’s either a great idea or a terrible idea.

You, Paul, and Aziz later collaborated on the MTV sketch series Human Giant. Fans have been rooting for a reunion over the years, and we get a quick one in Crash Test. Any plans for a longer get-together down the line?
That’s something we always joke around about. It would be so much fun to do, but everyone is doing different things, so there’s nothing on the horizon purely because of our schedules. Whenever we do get together for dinner — Paul, Aziz, myself, and our director, Jason Woliner — we look around and say, “Look guys: Human Giant reunion!” But no one wants to see us eat dinner together.

I dunno — I bet you could pitch that idea to Netflix.
That would be a great Netflix series! Call it Human Giant Reunion, and it would just be us eating food.

Crash Test grew out of the comedy show that you and Paul do at UCB’s L.A. branch. How did you get the idea to put it on a bus?
Paul and I sat down and thought, “What would be the most insane comedy special we could create?” So we put the audience from our live show on a bus and drove them around L.A. to the houses of famous comedians, who came out in their front yard to perform stand-up or do a crazy bit. There’s a bus company in New York called The Ride that drives around Times Square in these very futuristic-looking giant buses. So we paid them a lot of money to drive that bus across the country — and, by the way, I would love to see the documentary of the driving of that bus — and we crammed as many people as we could on it. We released the special on the Internet earlier this year, and it did really well, so Comedy Central decided to put it on the air. We were worried they were going to have to cut a lot out, because it gets really dirty and insane, but they were like, “We’re not really going to cut anything.” I think we’re going to get in trouble with the FCC, but I guess we’ll deal with the repercussions later. [Laughs]

Did you film over multiple nights?
That would have been too complicated, because there were too many guest stars. We could only get them all on one night. During the shoot, Paul and I had zero downtime, because we basically had to be onstage for eight hours straight. We had stuff prepared, but we didn’t have eight hours’ worth! After a while, there’s a lot of us just swinging for the fences trying to keep the audience’s spirits up. We didn’t tell them what they’d be in for, really. We said, “Hey, do you guys want to come and get on this bus and drive around for a little while? We’re going to shoot this comedy special, and it’s going to be really cool!” So they probably got on the bus thinking it would be an hour or two hours. But they were trapped on that bus for almost 10 hours! And there’s no bathroom on that bus, so they just had to hold it for a long time. We had to have a police escort riding around with us and helping us parallel park this giant glass bus. You can tell when you watch it: at first the audience is really excited, and they’re laughing at everything. Four hours later, you can see they’re starting to get a little worried. Cut to them four hours after that and they’re sweating and not laughing and clearly have to go to the bathroom.

Childrens Hospital is coming back for a new season; that show takes long breaks, but it’s always nice to see it return.
It’s so fun to make that show, because the way Rob Corddry has designed it, it’s very low impact. We shoot the whole season in about five weeks, because we don’t have much time with the cast. Granted, the shows are only 15 minutes long, but it’s still a crazy amount of jokes that they pack into it. It’s fast and furious and complete wall-to-wall absurdity, and it’s fun to play around with something like that.

You’ve written episodes in the past and several cast members — like Lake Bell — have directed as well. Any plans to step behind the camera this year?
No, I didn’t write any this year, and I don’t want to direct right now. To me, that’s the least-fun job, and when I got into comedy, I wanted to make sure that I could have the most amount of fun with the least amount of stress! [Laughs] Gradually, as things go along, your ambitions change a little bit. To really have a career as an actor, you can’t just sit around and wait for the phone to ring. You have to start creating things. So I’ve been doing some writing and producing, but haven’t stepped into directing yet. The people who do it well are great at it — if I were directing, I feel I’d be yelling and screaming and slapping people.

Do you know if you’ll be back for more Transparent? Season 2 ended with Len and Sarah in an interesting place.
I just saw a bunch of the writers, and they were like, “Get ready for Season 3! You’ve got a good storyline.” I don’t know if they’re pulling my leg; they won’t tell me what I’m doing, because they’re still writing the episodes, and I think things change a lot. But we start shooting the third season in February. That show is so much fun and such a great mix of people. Amy just blows me away — she’s such a great actor. We shot an alternate version of that nice moment from the season finale where we’re on the couch in my office. She comes in, and I’m all upset because my girlfriend dumped me and said I was boring. She’s very sympathetic, and then they just start making out! I didn’t know which take they were going to use; it’s a little mysterious sometimes, which is really fun.

That version sounds closer to the Season 1 finale where Len and Sarah have sex in the laundry room.
Yeah, maybe that’s why they didn’t use it. They were like, “That’s exactly the same!” [Laughs] I don’t ever really know what’s going to happen in that world. They don’t give you the big picture; you only learn when you start doing the table reads. And you never know about Len, because he’s part of the family but also one of the side characters, so it’s like, is he going to stick around? Is he going to get killed by a bear?

Or, possibly, mauled by a tiger?
That’s right! He could get mauled by a tiger. That would actually be amazing — I would love to see Len get mauled by a tiger. You, me, and three other guys would get it and that’s about it. But man, we would be high-fiving.

Crash Test premieres Jan. 22 at 11 p.m. on Comedy Central. Season 7 of Childrens Hospital premieres Jan. 22 at 11 p.m. on Adult Swim. Season 1 and 2 of Transparent can be streamed on Amazon.