Ray Kachatorian

In the living room, “Emerald Rapids” by Kari Taylor is a focal point

Ray Kachatorian

Georgia Michaela poses in her shark dog bed.

Ray Kachatorian

Vilaysack’s Seinfeld Award — for being the funniest female student in her high school — takes a place of pride in her home office.

Ray Kachatorian
Ray Kachatorian
Ray Kachatorian

Aukerman’s office contains his book and music collections ...

Ray Kachatorian

... as well as his two Emmy Awards

Ray Kachatorian
Fill 1
Fill 1
July 23, 2018
Features

Only in L.A.

They met at the taping of an HBO sketch show. Now, some 20 years later, Scott Aukerman and Kulap Vilaysack — husband and wife as well as comrades in comedy — pursue multiplatform projects from their perch on a Hollywood hillside.

Craig Tomashoff

As you enter the Hollywood Hills home of writer-producers Kulap Vilaysack and Scott Aukerman, it's hard to focus on just one thing.

Are you drawn to the panoramic view out the living room window? On a clear day it stretches all the way to downtown Los Angeles.

Within the home, a half-dozen brightly painted pieces of abstract art demand your attention. And who could ignore Georgia Michaela, the tiny terrier mix? This hyperactive furball really wants you to throw her toy somewhere, anywhere, in the 3,300-square-foot hillside spread.

Vilaysack, however, is focused on one unlikely item. Leading the way into her tiny office near the kitchen, she reaches up to pluck a picture frame from the wall. It contains clip art of a guy grinning at what must be the funniest joke in the history of time.

"I got this prestigious award from my high school," she says, laughing at the prized possession. "You know how they give awards for things like Best Couple? I got the 'Seinfeld Award' for being the funniest female student. And that's what set me on my path to comedy! I should be careful, though. I'm not sure if Jerry Seinfeld actually knows about this."

"I would put it out there that, in fact, you were the funniest student and it was not gender specific," Aukerman adds, stepping into the room as his wife proudly cradles the award. "By the way, whatever happened to the funniest male student?"

"I think he became an Abercrombie model. Seriously," Vilaysack says. "Maybe he's out there somewhere being voted Funniest Model."

That guy may be out there giving Derek Zoolander a run for his money, but Vilaysack and her husband are plenty busy.

Her credits include small roles on several network comedies, a recurring role on the Adult Swim cult hit Childrens Hospital, cohosting a podcast, and creating and running her reality TV parody Bajillion Dollar Propertie$. This May, Origin Story, her very personal — and serious — documentary , debuted at the Bentonville Film Festival and CAAMFest.

Meanwhile, he's the creator and star of IFC's cult hit Comedy Bang! Bang! as well as a writer and executive producer on Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis, for which he shared two Emmy Awards. In 2010, he co-launched the successful Earwolf podcast network; it became home to dozens of shows created by luminaries of comedy, music and culture and was acquired by the E. W. Scripps Company in 2015.

If Hollywood handed out a Seinfeld Award for Funniest Couple, this duo would be in the running. "They're very silly people," says their friend Tom Lennon, who worked with them as an executive producer on Bajillion Dollar Propertie$. "Dedicated goofballs is how I'd describe them. They're both as sharp as a couple can be — endlessly funny people who also happen to be tireless workers.

"Plus, they have such great rapport with each other. Being in a comedy partnership is hard, but the merging of that with a marriage — that's even harder, and I'm always blown away by how well they handle both."

Their comedic connection has been clicking for nearly 20 years. In 1998, Aukerman was a writer on the HBO sketch series Mr. Show with Bob and David, and Vilaysack, then fairly new to L.A., had come to watch a taping. They struck up a conversation afterward, but it would be a year before they got around to a first date.

At the time, Aukerman was still trying to find his way around the L.A. comedy scene. He'd moved to Hollywood from nearby Cypress, California, where he says he was the class clown at Cypress High School. "To be honest, I think people found me annoying." The school produced Centurion Highlights, a relatively serious news broadcast on local public access. The host, a friend of Aukerman's, invited him to help produce the show.

"Within a year, I'd turned it into a David Letterman–style deconstruction of a talk show," Aukerman proudly recalls. "For instance, I'd been given an article about the history of Cypress, which was pretty dry and boring. So I did a real Letterman-knockoff piece, where I went to local landmarks and was serious to an extreme about how the city got its name. It got a good reaction, so I kind of took over the show after that, being a smartass to everyone."

His sense of humor may have annoyed some, but that didn't stop Aukerman from taking the act north to L.A. to start a career. Coming up at the same time as people like Galifianakis, Sarah Silverman, Patton Oswalt, David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, he soon established himself as a leader of the pack. He launched a stand-up show at the newly created Upright Citizens Brigade theater and earned the nickname "The Den Mother of Comedy" from Galifianakis.

Vilaysack calls that "kind of a compliment-slash-slam from Zach," but Aukerman likes to focus more on the "compliment" side of the statement, adding that he spent a decade "devoting a lot of my time to finding really good talent in Los Angeles and giving them a showcase. I was figuring out a way to turn them into people this town would notice. I consider it leeching off their talent, but I guess what Zach was saying is, I helped jumpstart careers."

All these connections led to writing and producing gigs on projects like Cross and Odenkirk's Mr. Show, as well as creating Galifianakis's Funny or Die show, Between Two Ferns. In 2012, he returned to his high school roots with IFC's Comedy Bang! Bang!

The show was an extension of Comedy Death Ray, a podcast he started in 2009. The TV version had all the trappings of a traditional talk show — a glib host, bantering bandleader and celebrity guests like Jon Hamm and Allison Janney. But Aukerman developed superpowers on one episode after accidentally microwaving himself with a burrito, and another show featured a Phantom of the Opera parody. Comedy Bang! Bang! was a talk show like Twin Peaks was a cop show.

"I would always say we were a sketch show wearing the Halloween costume of a talk show," says Aukerman, who ended the series in 2016 after five seasons.

"Comedy Bang! Bang! was really just an excuse to do jokes. But because it looked like a talk show, it was easier for people to understand. We tried to fit in as many jokes in an episode as possible. Ultimately, it was just a silly show that was an ode to comedy." (Reggie Watts, who's been the announcer-bandleader on The Late Late Show with James Corden since 2015, held down a similar role on Comedy Bang! Bang! from 2012 to 2015.)

Seinfeld Award notwithstanding, after graduating from high school in Eagan, Minnesota, Vilaysack headed west to start a career in fashion. She spent two years at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles and then went to work as a sales rep for Ed Hardy apparel.

Yet she couldn't shake her will to perform, a will that first surfaced at age four, when a restaurant meal so vexed her that she stood on her chair to demand, "Where's the beef?"

Vilaysack began attending comedy classes, first at Second City and later at her husband's home away from home, Upright Citizens Brigade. She made a handful of sitcom appearances (The Office, Parks and Recreation, The New Adventures of Old Christine) and, when Aukerman launched the Earwolf podcast network in 2010, she began cohosting her own podcast, Who Charted?

In 2014, her life took a dramatic turn that began with the purchase of this two-story, three-bedroom house she and Aukerman now share. First, after years of living together in his Toluca Lake condo, they decided it was time to do the grown-up thing and buy their first place together.

"For the most part, everything — from agreeing to get the house to decorating it to getting the art — was an easy process for us," Aukerman recalls. "She has a better eye for decoration, and I'm good at saying yes. You hear all the time about couples fighting about moving and decorating, but for the most part, Kulap took over and it went great."

The house-hunting process also gave them firsthand experience with realtors, which would eventually provide some inspiration for Bajillion Dollar Propertie$, the first show Vilaysack created and produced. Airing for three seasons on the now- defunct streaming service Seeso (a fourth was finished and they're currently shopping it around), the series was a parody of reality shows that feature quirky real estate agents.

However, it might never have happened if she hadn't first decided to tackle a much more personal project — a documentary about her life, Origin Story. It's a film whose history also connects back to their house.

While they were looking for a place to live and start a family, Vilaysack suffered a miscarriage. That trauma "shifted something in me," she says. "As silly as this sounds, I realized I could produce a life, and that was something I really wanted to do. That's when I knew I had to figure out where I came from in order to move forward if I wanted to be a mom. So I started asking questions about my life I'd never asked before."

Most of those queries revolved around one very specific memory. As a kid, she saw her parents fight on a regular basis. However, when she was 14, one particular row was so intense that she fled to her parents' bedroom to hide. When the battle subsided, her mother came in to vent, and as Vilaysack tried to stick up for her father, her mom said, "Why are you defending him when he's not your real dad?"

And that was how she found out the man she'd grown up believing was her biological father was … not. "That moment was huge," she recalls. "It's what I decided to call my 'origin story.'"

Or, as her husband explains it, "That was like the spider bite that turns Peter Parker into Spider-Man. She told me about it early on in our relationship, and it was clear she'd been wrestling with her feelings about what happened for years. And not just curiosity about the father she didn't know, but also with the parents she did know."

The couple talked at length about the best way for her to deal with these negative memories and turn them into a positive. For a brief time, she thought about fictionalizing her story because, "We as humans shouldn't have exact copies of our memories …. It can be a real mindfuck." Despite the challenge of going the reality route, though, she decided it was more important "to create a record" of what she had to learn about her life.

That's what led her to make Origin Story, a documentary in which she travels to Laos to meet the father she'd never known and come to terms with her mother's lie. "To learn more about me, I had to go home to Minnesota and then to the motherland, Laos," she says.

"I had to explore the idea of home and safety and what family is. I thought it'd be harder to get my parents to speak on camera about all this, but they've been wanting to talk for a long time. And my biological father was really positive about the whole thing. He was excited to have me there and then travel in Laos with me."

It proved to be more than just a trip into her past. Filming the documentary also paved the way for her future. Aukerman says that before she left for Laos, Vilaysack "did a lot of questioning of herself…. 'Do I have the skills to do this? Will people take me seriously?'" When she returned and began putting the movie together, however, he could see she was developing the confidence that helped Bajillion Dollar Propertie$ finally come together.

"Had I not traveled to the other side of the world and — spoiler alert! — had to rebuild myself after being gutted by everything I learned, I might not have been bold enough to do Bajillion," she says. "And the interesting thing is that only by learning everything I did on Bajillion, about how to find a story and tell it, could I finish Origin Story. Everything informed everything."

The film — edited in one room at her new home while she worked on Bajillion in her office a few feet away — is now making the rounds at film festivals around the country. Vilaysack hopes it will wind up on a streaming network or video-on-demand service, but whatever happens, she and Aukerman know precisely which three things made this life-changing project possible. As they say in the world of real estate: location, location, location.

"Buying this house feels like it was a demarcation point for us," Aukerman says. "We bought it literally the day before she left for Laos. Then, when she came back, we were here. And she had so much more information about her life just as we were starting a new life here, so we could start making new memories in a new home.

"So much of life can run together, and you forget the year you did this or that," he adds. "But for us, this house is the real point at which we can see the difference in our lives, before and after."


This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 5, 2018

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