Dispatches: Andy Samberg’s Tour de Farce

Outside Podcast

Sports, Wilderness

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 5 July 2017

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Nearly every sport can point to a comedy taking aim at its flaws. Hockey has Slap Shot. Car racing has Talladega Nights. Skiing has Hot Dog. And dodgeball has, well, Dodgeball. Now cycling can claim its own: HBO’s Tour de Pharmacy, featuring executive producer Andy Samberg and a laundry list of A-List celebrities. It’s about damn time. Is any sport riper for parody? Besides the rampant doping, there’s the leg shaving, the spandex, the team names, the whiteness, the stuffy British commentators, and, of course, the curiously misshapen bodies. The film sends up all that with a gonzo storyline that clocks in at a breezy 38 minutes and features—spoiler alert—no less than four shots of full frontal male nudity plus recurring commentary by Lance Armstrong. We caught up with Samberg to find out how the film came about, why he chose to pick on cycling, and his fetish for wiener gags.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From Outside magazine and PRX, these are dispatches.
0:07.0	Stories from our writers in the field.
0:10.0	All the best sports movies are comedies. Probably because professional athletes take themselves really seriously.
0:20.0	So they're easy to make fun of.
0:22.0	And almost every sport is at its moment.
0:25.0	NASCAR has Teledaga Knights.
0:27.0	Shake and bag.
0:28.0	Baseball has major league.
0:30.0	Golf has Happy Gilmore.
0:32.0	Nearly every other sport has at
0:35.0	at least an air button. But they weren't ever able to teach a golden retriever how to ride a bike.
0:41.0	And so professional cycling hasn't ever gotten a proper lampooning by
0:45.6	professional comedians. That changes this weekend when Andy Sandberg's
0:50.8	toured to pharmacy debuts on HBO.
0:53.3	Stage 13 of the Tour of France,
0:55.3	quite possibly the most difficult climb of the entire race.
0:59.1	It's a send-up of the Tour to France,
1:01.1	perhaps the most self-serious sporting event in the world.
1:04.4	And when the trailer appeared online a few months ago, our editor-in-chief, Chris Kies,
1:08.6	immediately said, we've got to do something about this on the podcast. If you had to summarize the plot in like a few
1:16.2	sentences, what would your attempt to be?
1:19.2	Okay, I will try, but essentially the plot is that at the 1982 tour to France
	...

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