Men’s Health dedicated a week to friendship and interviewed Sam Richardson of Veep and Tim Robinson of I Think You Should Leave who have been best friends for more than 15 year, with a TV show to prove it: The duo’s beloved, and defunct, Comedy Central series, Detroiter. It is a tribute to not just buddy comedies but also their own relationship. (Catch it streaming on Comedy Central.) Here they offer us a peek into their goal-worthy friendship.
How did you two meet?
SAM: We met at Second City Detroit. Tim was my level-A teacher. I was 18.
TIM: Yeah, yeah. I was 21. It was the very first class I ever taught, I think. Our mutual friend was like, “My friend Sam’s gonna be in your class.”
How did you become friends?
SAM: We would go to a bar; there’s a bar right next to Second City Detroit.
TIM: The Town Pump.
SAM: Right down the way. And Tim and our friend Bret would sneak me into the Town Pump. Not like it was super hard to do.
TIM: It was not, yeah. I had been going there for a long time.
SAM: Just make your voice a little deeper. “Yessir.” In the Town Pump, early on, we hit the ground running. We got each other pretty quickly.
TIM: Our last few years in Detroit, we got super close. We did shows together. We would spend long nights together sitting on my porch or at [Sam’s] palace of booze and would just shoot the shit till, like, the sun came up. Then our trajectories kind of went the same. We both went to Chicago at the same time. Got on touring companies in Chicago at the same time. We kind of followed each other around.
SAM: We got hired onto the main stage of Second City Chicago the same day. They hired us together.
When amid all that did you realize, “Oh, this guy is my friend”?
TIM: I don’t know if there’s ever a point where I can look at it and go . . .
BOTH: “That’s it.”
SAM: Because you look back and it’s a whole era of times. We were both super into Christmas.
You bonded over that?
BOTH: Absolutely!
SAM: Just listening to Christmas songs nonstop while we’re at each other’s houses, like, “Oh, this is a great one!”
TIM: I remember calling you one Thanksgiving eve at two in the morning and saying, “Turn on PBS right now. There’s a Jack Benny special on.”
SAM: And then we were on the phone watching Jack Benny together. In Chicago, we’d go across the way to Corcoran’s, a restaurant right across the street from Second City. We’d always get what we’d call the turf and turf, where we’d order a burger and wings and we’d cut the burger in half and split the wings.
TIM: Yeah, we’d look at each other and say, “Turf and turf?”
Did you ever have to define the relationship and say, “You’re my best friend”? Or was it understood?
SAM: There’s not, like, a moment. We’ll definitely still get drunk and be like, “You’re my number-one guy. You’re my best friend in the world. Just got to let you know.”
TIM: Yeah. It doesn’t go unsaid.
SAM: It certainly does not go unsaid. Every phone call ends with “I love you, bud.”
TIM: Yeah. “I love you, pal.”
It can be hard for a lot of guys to say that.
SAM: I just think there’s no airs between us. There’s no fear of lost masculinity. It’s very secure in that.
How did doing Detroiters, and essentially becoming a business partner with your best friend, affect the friendship?
SAM: It helped the show tremendously, because we had such a shorthand that we just knew each other’s thinking. We only had, like, one fight on set, and I think that’s incredibly rare.
What was the fight about?
TIM: I’m paranoid and I have all these ailments, and I think at one point I was freaking out about a bump on my leg. And Sam did just what my wife does: “Well, go to the fucking doctor!”
SAM: He’s like, “I’m not going to the doctor!”
TIM: I think he got frustrated with me constantly being like, “I don’t know what this is.”
SAM: It just got heated. It got to that. Then we were in this huge fight. Like, one of the biggest fights that we’ve ever been in, but we were still filming the scenes.
TIM: Yeah, I recently watched the episodes. I can pinpoint the scenes, but I can’t tell we were fighting. Which is insane.
One of the unique things Detroiters did was implicitly incorporate race. Tim would be the only white guy in the room, and it would go unacknowledged. How has it been a factor in your friendship?
SAM: It really hasn’t, at least not between us. I mean, Tim eats some things only white people eat.
TIM: [Laughs] This just turns into ’90s stand-up.
SAM: “Y’all heard of pastrami? Tim made up pastrami.”
TIM: That’s good. I made up pastrami.
SAM: “Pastrami?! Okay. It’s just chicken. When’s the last time you’ve ever gone into a grocery store and seen a pastrami?!”
TIM: Now it’s just a guy who’s never been to a grocery store.
SAM: But it’s never really been a thing. On the show, we were very specific not to make it “Look at this white man!” Because he’s part of the family. If in real life that was the thing, that’d probably be a rocky relationship.
TIM: Not to throw them under the bus, but there were some Comedy Central notes that were like, Talk about the differences! And we were like, Well, we’re trying to show our real friendship, and that’s not part of our real friendship.
SAM: We had to finally be like, No, trust us. There’s so much more that’s real to the relationship. Because if it was about “Man, you’re so different from me,” then you wouldn’t be friends.
You’re no longer working together on Detroiters. Do you still see each other a lot?
SAM: Weekends. Weekdays. I was just at Tim’s son’s birthday party.
TIM: It’s exactly the same.
SAM: We had worked on Detroiters and the main stage, but outside of that, we’ve always been trying to find something else to do.
TIM: Yeah, but it’s not based around that. It’s based around the friendship first. That’s so important to us. I was just thinking about when we were in Chicago. Sam came over so much that my son, who had just started talking, whenever there was a knock on the door, no matter who it was, would say, “I think so, Sam’s here.”