23 years ago, today's guest put a dog puppet on his hand and started making poop jokes in a thick

Russian accent. It's never stopped being funny. This is the last laugh. I'm Matt Wilstein from The Daily Beast, and today I'm

talking to the legendary comedian behind Triumph, the insult comic dog, Robert Smygel.

Robert first brought Triumph to life on Late Night with Conan O'Brien in the late 90s.

Since then, he's confronted everyone from the Westminster Dog Show and Star Wars nerds to Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham,

and he always brings the perfect blend of stupid humor and biting satire.

This month, he produced a new Triumph Benefit Special for Funnier Die called Quarantine Squares,

in which he simultaneously quizzes and mocks celebrities like Jason Alexander, Susie Esman, and Anthony Scaramucci.

It's hilarious.

I could not have been more excited to talk to Robert, not only about triumph,

but also about his many years at SNL, where he wrote and starred in sketches like

Dabers and created the ambiguously gay duo, a concept he readily admits would not work in 2020.

Okay, this is me and Robert Smygel.

I want to talk about the Quarantine Squares game show that you just put out because it was

really great, so fun.

Oh, did you like it?

Yeah, it was really, really funny and just so surreal to see all of those people in little

squares.

It was a pretty perfect use of the technology that we're all using now.

Absolutely. I've been wanting to do a triumph-hosted quiz show for many years. It's one of many triumph ideas I just haven't been able to sell. And I had this idea of doing these Jeopardy-type questions where the punchline is in the form of a question and it just felt like a really fresh way to do triumphs sort of smart-ass humor. I just could not

get it done. But I had this idea in the back of my head and I thought it would make a great podcast.

But I wanted to do it with an audience. I wanted to, you know, go to the Bell house in Brooklyn or a place like that. You know, I tried to sell it to big companies, which turned out to be just another waste of energy. So then I just mounted it myself for the New York Comedy Festival at a place called the Murmur Ballroom. And then the pandemic happened, and I just tabled it.

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