Have you heard the one about the football player trying stand-up comedy?
After Tom Brady’s deadpan appearance in the February 80 movie for Brady, rumors surfaced that the NFL legend might try stand-up. His recent divorce, his second retirement from professional football, and his upcoming commitment to a roast TV sitcom made the prospect seem credible enough.
Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen, co-hosts of the popular Dudesy podcast, had similar reactions to many others. “He has really lost his mind,” Sasso said. “I thought, ‘Okay, this is a midlife crisis.'”
Dudesy is an impromptu comedy podcast completely powered by AI. Sasso and Kultgen co-hosted a show called ten minute podcast for years, before a tech company they definitely can’t name approached them with the idea of reformatting their odd-couple dynamic around a bot that would be part actor, part producer, and all-powerful. Dudesy could tell Will to read a news list he’s added in the voice of Hulk Hogan, or assign both hosts to watch 80 for Brady so they can discuss it on the mic.
The advantage is that it takes all the legwork out of production. The downside is that Dudesy is incredibly invasive: it relies on its human hosts’ emails, text messages, social media accounts, and browsing and purchasing histories. You may also remember the expansive work of the hosts, from Sasso’s memorable role as Tony Soprano on MadTV’s “”.edited for network tvfrom the mob drama, Kultgen’s forgotten feature film called Pizza: The Movie, which is exactly what it sounds like. “We just introduce ourselves and he starts talking to us,” says Kultgen. “And we do what he says or we don’t do what he says. That’s basically all. We are there for an hour and a half and then we leave.
When Dudesy asked the co-hosts to talk about Brady doing stand-up, they had a lot to consider. “There are other football players, super famous in some cases, who have gone on to comedic careers, like OJ Simpson,” Kultgen said on the March 28 episode. “[Brady’s] He’s not someone known for being a fun person, and now he thinks he can do this if he outdoes everyone.”
Sasso and Kultgen thought they had said all there was to say about Brady’s investment camp of a record $375 million payday at Fox Sports, and moved on to other topics. But not long after that episode, they returned to their Los Angeles studio and were blown away by an hour-long YouTube simulation of Goat QB, aka Brady, doing standup that was independently generated by Dudesy AI.
“We don’t know how he put all that shit together,” says Kultgen.
aptly titled It is too easythe set opens with an introduction by Dudesy, who explains that the special was created from “thousands of hours of interviews with Tom Brady and hundreds of thousands of hours of standup comedy to generate the first one-hour simulated standup.”
The final product, delivered in Brady’s trademark monotone and legitimately hysterical despite the pacing being off, is creepy, to say the least. It accurately references the highlights and less highlights of soccer. (“Someone messaged me about Bumble saying, ‘You look like Tom Brady.’ I said, ‘I’m Tom Brady.’ She said, ‘Prove it.’ So I went over to her house and let some air out of everyone.” his footballs.”) Jokes abound at his expense. (“People say, ‘Tom, that wasn’t really acting [in 80 for Brady]. You were just playing with yourself. It is not very exaggerated. But it was harder than people realize because I wasn’t just playing myself. I had to play myself with a winning record… Method acting. Sorry Bucs fans; I had to go there”). As the simulation launches verbal jabs, a slideshow of AI-generated footage of Brady plays.
The hosts released the first 12 minutes of the special alongside that week’s episode, and it quickly took the sports world by storm. “There were a couple of interesting Tom Bradys in there,” said professional gambler-turned-chat show host Pat McAfee of the AI-generated images of the future hall of famer.
“I thought it was pretty cool,” former cornerback Pacman Jones said of the snippet he saw. “He sounded very close to me.”
Earlier episodes of Dudesy make big changes to the cross-pollinated synthetic comedy, leading to Sasso impersonating Robert De Niro as a raven, for example. But Brady’s special is the most perfect human-machine synergy yet. “Tom Brady is kind of a cyborg,” says Sasso.
But then there are times when Brady sounds also robotic “He has this part where he talks about money,” says Kultgen. “And it only lists like 100 fucking slang terms for money, machine gun style.”
On Brady’s special, Dudesy seems to just be riffing along with his quick-witted hosts. But instead of relying on a fun premise for a minute or so, he takes the core of an idea and fleshes it out.
Still, in its endless search for material, the AI can go too far. One time, Sasso says, “he got footage from my cell phone when I wasn’t recording and then played it back on the show. And I was like: I think this is actually beyond the bounds of our actual contract.”
It’s not so much the comedy that’s divisive in It’s Too Easy; is what it portends for creative professionals. “We are on a whole new horizon of copyright law,” says Kultgen. “He’s basically dead at this point. Within the next three years, I think everyone is going to have media tailored to whoever they want to talk to or act in, and an AI will just perpetually screw it up.”
There is nothing stopping Dudesy or similar AIs from creating content around other prominent voices and removing actual humans from the process entirely. For Sasso, a master impressionist, the prospects are certainly daunting. “It’s like, do you want steak? [from the cow] or lab-grown meat? he says. “I’m just terrified for the future that Dudesy could do this with Tom Brady.”
If It’s Too Easy turns out not to be a difficult act to follow, it could be that we humans are left to fumble. “I would hate for a comedian named AI Smith to have specials like Every Dick Joke, Ever 15 years from now,” says Sasso. “And it’s a three-hour long Avatar blitz. It could explode comedy. The sound of the live studio audience is not people laughing and clapping. It’s screaming and screaming until someone’s head explodes.”
