Aziz Ansari, left, and Rob Huebel from "Human Giant."

On a recent Friday night, Manhattan's Rififi lounge is STANDING ROOM ONLY. Three coeds sit to the side, view obfuscated, pressed up against the venue’s blue toilet doors. Other comedy enthusiasts mill about in the shadows. And then—in a flurry of basketball shorts, headbands, and adrenaline—Aziz Ansari and Paul Scheer of Human Giant leap on stage, hurling T-shirts into the unsuspecting crowd. Later, Rob Huebel joins them in the sketch. Everyone goes nuts. As the new rock stars of MTV, the Human Giant guys are busy. The first season of their sketch comedy show comes out on DVD in early March. Season two premieres a week later. They’re also currently on a live tour to promote both. Ansari and Scheer gave us a call somewhere around Colorado to discuss “Osama Bin Diesel,” homemade BBQ sauce, and the Citizen Kane of reality TV.

BLACKBOOK: What do you watch on MTV?

PAUL SCHEER: I love “The Hills.” I honestly do. I love Heidi and Spencer.

BB: Have you seen Heidi’s new music video?

PS: Oh my god, it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life. The video is all about her going higher, yet she stays at sea level.

AZIZ ANSARI: Is it really just her dancing around in that pink bikini the whole time?

PS: It’s essentially what would happen if I took a video camera and started taping you on the beach. Spencer taped it. Heidi has no idea where to put her hands. It’s like she needs pockets.

Aziz Ansari from "Human Giant."

BB: You only had eight days to prepare for your 24-hour MTV marathon. How did you go about it?

PS: We were like, Fuck.

AA: We asked all of our friends from [the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater] to come on and do different bits. We have a great support team to help us out and I think that’s why it ended up working. But, yeah, we didn’t have enough time and I think that actually worked to our advantage. Because if we had so much time we would have over-thought it and it wouldn’t have been as loose and spontaneous as it was.

BB: Do you do any warm-up exercises before a live performance?

AA: Chanting. And we do three hours of Bikram yoga before we go onstage.

PS: We bring the instructor and we actually build a hot room.

AA: And after we do that, we get together with the NYU step team and we just start doing some stepping just to get the energy up. Then we go out onstage.

PS: I don’t know if I want to spoil how the show ends, but I can tell you this: At the end of the show—you know, Aziz, Rob, and I are amateur car mechanics—we bring a car out onstage and we step dance, and as we step dance all the windows on the car break. It’s pretty intense. And we were pissed to see that stunt was stolen for How She Move.

BB: Do you run your sketches past anyone to make sure they’re funny?

PS: We do a Monday night show at the [Upright Citizens Brigade Theater] in New York City where we test out our stuff secretly. We bring in our newest cut, play it in front of an audience, and see what’s working. Some stuff plays better at home than it does in front of a live audience, but at the same time, it’s really good to see where people are laughing, or where they’re not laughing, and it helps us cut our sketches down. We may have a really funny five-minute sketch, but after we show it to somebody, we realize that it’s actually a funnier three-and-a-half-minute sketch.

BB: You’ll be on the road for the release of your DVD and the premiere of your second season. How do you plan to celebrate?

AA: For the premiere, we’re actually doing a thing at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York. And then on the day of the DVD release… something fun?

PS: We’ll probably end up going in drag. I’ll go as Liza Minnelli, Aziz goes as Liza Minnelli, and Rob goes as Liza Minnelli—but all in different stages of her career. And we just do karaoke downtown.

Paul Scheer from "Human Giant."

BB: We’ll be sure to look for that. Other than the U.S., where would you like to tour?

PS: Well Rob and I just got back from Iraq. We went there on a [United Service Organizations] tour. I would actually love to bring this show to Iraq but it’s tough to get over there.

BB: The Academy Awards are coming up and they haven’t had much time to write a show since the writer’s strike ended. What if they called you?

PS: We’d say, Yes, we’ll be there! And, of course, we’ll do a live version of Legends of the Fall onstage. We do about a fifteen-minute version of it.

AA: That’s a movie that’s really close to our hearts. When we’re on tour, we pop it in and it always takes us to a special place.

PS: When we do sketches and stuff we always say, Is this enough like Legends of the Fall? And when we say yes, then we know we’ve got something.

BB: What can you tell us about the new season?

AA: There are these guys called the T-Shirt Squad. They’re those guys who go to basketball games and get people fired up for the game and shoot free T-shirts at them. PS: We have a new thing called the World’s Biggest Gay Porn Star, Bruce Penis. He was alive, and now he’s a ghost.

AA: He ends up haunting me all the time. It’s this kind of creepy horror story about me being haunted by the ghost of the World’s Biggest Gay Porn Star.

PS:We also have a guy who was on a really shitty sci-fi show, like Babylon 5, but he’s one of the aliens on the show and has really expensive makeup on and he decides that instead of sitting in the makeup chair, he’s going to get the makeup embedded in his face and get plastic surgery to look exactly like the alien. And as soon as he does that, the show gets canceled.

Aziz Ansari from "Human Giant."

BB: Who would you love to have guest star on the show?

PS: Mike Huckabee. AA: But he turned us down.

PS: We actually wrote a bit for Vin Diesel—this is totally true, by the way. If you saw the 24-hour marathon, we had this character, Osama Bin Diesel, which was basically Vin Diesel who was bitten by a radioactive Osama Bin Laden. So we decided we were going to actually shoot that for this season of the show. We thought it would be funny if, in the beginning of the sketch, we actually had the real Vin Diesel play himself and in the later part of the sketch we had somebody else play Osama Bin Diesel. We sent [Diesel’s agent] an email and wrote this really ridiculous cover letter like “Dear Vin, we’re huge fans, we thought you could do this sketch, and we just think you’re great and everything,” Immediately, within 15 minutes, we got a response back that just said “Sorry. This one is not for the Diesel.” BB: What is it about comedy that keeps you all coming back?

AA: We have such a good time doing the show. Paul’s real love—and mine, actually—is making homemade barbeque sauce and we weren’t able to take off. Comedy was a good backup. Hopefully we’ll use the Human Giant money to make the barbeque sauce shop again.