"I feel like my best mode is chaos." Jason Mantzoukas on his heel turn in Taskmaster, one of his favorite shows

“I want to be the villain. I'm not here to win.”

Image: Channel 4

While each Taskmaster series features large personalities, few contestants have been able to make an impression on the same level as Jason Mantzoukas. The first American-based contestant on the British panel show, Mantzoukas burst onto the series with his signature comedic style, sowing a path of chaos and destruction wherever he went.

Mantzoukas is also one of the rare contestants to ask to be on the show, rather than vice versa. A long-time fan of the series, Mantzoukas took his shot and reached out to the Taskmaster team, and was rewarded with a spot in the excellent series 19 cast, which also features Fatiha El-Ghorri, Mathew Baynton, Rosie Ramsey, and Stevie Martin. You can watch the season on the Taskmaster YouTube channel.

I spoke with Mantzoukas on a Zoom call about his experience on the show, and what he learned about himself in the process. True to form, he had multiple haunted-ass paintings directly behind him in his house and visible in-frame.

Here’s part one of our sprawling conversation. You can find part two next week on PV Guide.

Pete: I was talking with Alex and Greg about the season…

Jason Mantzoukas: Boo!!!! Boo!!! How dare you start this conversation by mentioning Alex and Greg? How dare you?

Well, they mentioned you.

Of course they did. They’re obsessed with me, Pete. They’re obsessed with me.

They said you reached out to them to be on the show, which is something that doesn't happen so often. So I was wondering what your background with Taskmaster is. When did you get into it?

I have a bunch of friends inside the British comedy world who were all part of Taskmaster and all the rest of the panel shows as well. So I knew about it and had seen some stuff, but it really wasn't until they started the YouTube channel that made all the seasons available. Taskmaster wasn't super easy to watch if you were in the States in the past. But once they had that YouTube channel, it really allowed me to give into my completionist tendencies and watch everything I hadn't seen. I'd seen the stuff that my friends were on — I'd seen season five, I'd seen season seven, the James Acaster season. And so then I went in and filled in all my blind spots.

So that's when I really truly went hard at the show. And for me, it was really those seasons, five and seven, just because I knew some of those folks. But then there's no beating Sam Campbell. That's incredible stuff top to bottom. But everybody: Rhod Gilbert, Bob Mortimer … Taskmaster is one of the funniest shows on television, full stop. Nothing makes me laugh harder than some of these fucking dummies on this show. And so I can't implore people enough. If you haven't checked out Taskmaster, so much of it's on YouTube. They have it in clips, they have it in whole episodes. You can be exposed to it in any way you want. If you recognize some of the comedians, watch that season. If you just want to watch great seasons of Taskmaster, I'm going to just throw out 5, 7, 11, and 16.

The other thing is, a lot of these people who are British comedy icons, like Bob Mortimer, I really only know as a Taskmaster contestant. So it's also been interesting to now go and find all of the stuff that a lot of my favorite Taskmaster people are literally famous for. Watch Aisling Bea’s TV show. Nish Kumar's incredible standup show that he's touring right now is absolutely mind blowing. I mean, Acaster’s recent special, Hecklers Welcome, is phenomenal, as are his previous specials. Ed Gamble and James's podcast, Off Menu. Stevie Martin's standup. Sam Campbell’s standup clips on YouTube are absolutely insane. So what's incredible about Taskmaster is not only is the show itself hilarious, but as a discovery engine for new comedy, it's unreal.

When did it occur to you that you wanted to be on the show?

What became clear to me in watching it was that the nature, the vibe of the show is the same kind of shaggy hangout – comedians kind of chat/roast/[do] bits – that I instantly recognize as [someone who does] live podcasts or live improv shows. I started to feel like, oh, wait a minute. I want to be inside this. What I'm responding to is that the live shows that I do feel very similar to this in how you do it, not the story of it, not the structure of it, but the performance of it. You put seven people on stage without a real understanding of what's going to happen for the rest of the show.

That's right up my alley. I've been doing that kind of a show for 25 years. So I started to really become obsessed with, oh, I want to be on this show. People who live in the UK but who are American have done it, but they've never had somebody come over from the States. They've never had that version of it. I was genuinely curious. I was like, oh, maybe this is a very insular community that they're kind of casting and picking mostly people they know. So maybe they wouldn't want somebody dropped in from that they don't have any frame of reference for. But I got on a Zoom with Alex and he was like, absolutely, let's do it. He was so positive.

It was very funny, because at the beginning of our Zoom he started to try and explain to me what Taskmaster was. I think he thought it was kind of a general meeting type of a vibe, and he started to be like, OK, so the show is this and it works like that. I was like, Whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm going to stop you right there. I know the show. If you think you're trying to convince me to do the show, let me be clear. I want to do the show. I'm dying to do the show. So then we had just a great conversation, and it wasn't easy to make work, frankly, but they were so down to make it work and I was so grateful, because it turned out great.

You mentioned you felt this format was familiar because of your improv work, but an old quote of yours that I found really interesting is the connection between your background as a jazz drummer and improv, and how many of those tools come from the same place. Did you feel like it was similar here, that all of that was coming together for Taskmaster?

Yeah, I think that when you're improvising in a group, I'm speaking mostly now to the live show, the panel show element where the five of us are sitting on stage together, Greg and Alex are there, it's in front of a live audience. So those elements, these are three-and-a-half hour recordings for every episode. You're doing a three-and-a-half hour live show where you're in front of the audience and you're doing bits. There is no script. Once we start the show and we walk on set, we don't know what's going to happen other than that they're going to play the tasks, but we don't even know what tasks are going to be featured in that episode until Alex starts introing it. And then you're like, Oh, this is that one. And sometimes you're like, Oh, I forgot about this one. So it's really, like you're saying about being in a jazz band or being in a band in general, it really is about being a good ensemble player. It's about everybody getting to share focus. One of the central tenets of improv is “I make you look good, you make me look good.” That's the tacit understanding of an improv scene. And in doing so, everybody gets to play with each other and everybody gets to dump on Alex, because that is playing Alex's game.

And so all of those machinations,framing and reframing those relationships, is just endlessly refillable. And once you settle into little character games or personality games, or once we settled into who we all were, because I don't think really many of us knew each other at all, it's about listening. It's about knowing how to set other people up and how to then clobber it. It's really fun.

As a fan of the show, what surprised you about filming it?

It was in the tasks. I had it in my mind that we would all be there. They would've set up a task and we would each exit, go do the task, come back. Everybody would get a shot at the task. So I think I thought that I would be able to get to know the other contestants, I think I thought I was going to be a little bit more integrated with the group, but that is purposefully not what they do. They keep everybody apart. They keep everybody from knowing the other contestants. They don't want you talking about it. If there are personal relationships, they don't want you talking about it. They don't want you telling anybody. When we had team day, they were like, don't tell your teammates anything about how you solved the past tasks. They just want it to be as raw as possible. So that was the thing that surprised me, it really wasn't until day one of the studio that I got to really meet Rosie and Fatiha and Mathew and Stevie. Oh, hello, let's go do a show.

Image: Channel 4

Did you learn anything about yourself doing Taskmaster?

Yeah. I'm not as clever as I thought. There are a lot of Taskmaster fans who talk to me now on the street or wherever at a job or something like that. And everybody seems to think like, oh, when I watched this one, I knew to do that. Or everybody thinks they could have known how to creatively think around this problem, or ‘I would've known where the hints were, all that kind of stuff. And you really can't understand how difficult it is to perform a task that is purpose-built to humiliate you in front of a large group of people who are waiting, hoping for you to fail. And here's Alex Horne, just fucking twisting the knife, just twisting every mistake you make, just gleefully twisting the knife.

So there's a task where it's not even the task itself. It is the setup to the task, someone has taped it to my back. And I'm wandering everywhere looking for the task, and all Alex is doing is saying, ‘You're hot’ or ‘You're cold.’ And I swear to God, Pete, I felt capable of murder. I felt that he deserved to die, and to be clear, told him as much. So there's a real fun kind of mischief element to it. I really love that it's a show where people are messing with each other, but not in a prank or mean-spirited way. In a way that feels a lot more like a group of friends messing around with each other.

I'm glad you brought up that moment of almost violence, because when I talked with Alex and Greg, I asked them to do a little word association about each of the contestants. For you, Alex just went straight ahead with ‘explosive’ as his one word. And then Greg said, ‘I want to add deceptively. He just seems in control, but there's a real danger there. I think you find an old World War II bomb, and then you go, oh God, it's still live.’ How does that make you feel?

Great, great. When I talked to Alex and the producers, just in the very beginning, I was like, ‘I want to be clear. I'm coming there to be the heel. I want to be the villain. I'm not here to win. I'm not here to compete. I'm here for the comedy show you guys are doing.’ And in that regard, I feel like my best mode is chaos. And some of my favorite past contestants are similarly, the more chaotic, the more mischievous. Those are the contestants that I end up loving. And so that's what I enjoyed. I enjoyed being that spoiler, that fly in the ointment.

[Stay tuned for part two of my interview with Jason Mantzoukas, which will go live next Monday.]