Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.

It's Bullseye, I'm Jesse Thorn.

Can you draw a through line in the work of Adam McKay?

Are there common elements?

He's had a pretty eclectic career. He started in sketch comedy, first as one of the founders

of the upright citizens brigade, then as a writer on Saturday Night Live. He worked on the

show between 1995 and 2001. He started at Second City too, so throw that in.

Then he started working in movies. He collaborated with Will Farrell to do some stone-cold comedy

classics, Anchorman, Step Brothers, Taladega Knights.

Being in the 2010s, though, his work got a little more serious, topical, political.

A few years back, he wrote and directed The Big Short, which deconstructed and explained

the 2008 financial crisis.

I guess if there is a common thread in McKay's work, it is that he sells it. It's never

boring, never forced. He'll take an extremely dumb joke like, I don't know, stinky perfume

that smells bad, and frame it in a way that's so clever and compelling, you lose it.

Or he'll find a way to explain credit default swaps that so funny, bizarre, and novel you

forget your learning about credit default swaps.

Recently McKay has made his first foray into podcasting. Death at the Wing is a documentary

series that takes us back to the 1980s, focusing on a spade of deaths involving young, promising

NBA rookies and prospects. It looks not just at sports, but at the politics and socioeconomics

of the time, and how all of those things were deeply and tragically interconnected.

When McKay and I talked in 2019, he'd just directed Vice. Vice is a biopic about Dick

...