This podcast Extra is part of your Slate Plus membership.

Now it is time, if you're still here, you are a Slate Plus member.

It's time for your exclusive bonus segment.

We're going to talk about sports and comedy with a man who is an expert on, I think, both of those things.

I'll be charitable.

Thank you.

Over the weekend, HBO premiered a bizarre and quite funny 45-minute mockumentary called

Seven Days in Hell.

Andy Sandberg starred as a drug-addicted, blonde-mulleted underwear impresario with a dramatic

rise and fall from the top ranks of the game of tennis.

It was strange and funny, I thought, in a way that comedies that have anything to do with sports rarely are.

I think maybe because it was so weird.

I don't know if that – I'm having a hard time putting my finger on it.

So perhaps the comedy slash Andy Sandberg expert can explain to me what was different

about this episode. Well, I think it, you know, sports is a little bit tricky for comedy because

you are always aiming at some level to entertain as many people as you can. And if you're not a sports fan,

you're probably not going to watch this. Now, that calculus changes a little when Andy does stuff

because Andy has a lot of different fans and a lot of different arenas. He's got fans who came to him

for his music or his Lonely Island videos that he does with his comedy partners, Yormit Tacone and

Akiva. And he's also got S&L fans, and he's got hopefully Brooklyn Nine-N-N-Fans. He's got a lot of fans from a lot of different places. So doing something like this makes more sense. But really, what it comes down to is he thought this idea was funny. And he wrote it, this guy named Murray Miller wrote it, who's a longtime friend of his, who's a hilarious guy. And in this case, I think that it, because it has this, it has a real-life precedent, right? It's the Eisner Mahoot match from the, from Wimelan in 2010. Did I pronounce Mahoot right? Is that how you say it? I think you didn't pronounce Isner right. Isner, I got Mahoud and Blue Isner. All right.

Isner Mahoot.

The precedent is the isner mohut match from it from wimbledon and that was a story that like kind

...