When Nick Kroll starts his Subaru, the sound of his girlfriend’s voice fills the car. It’s instantly recognizable because it happens to be the voice of Amy Poehler — star of Parks and Recreation, co-host of the Golden Globes, feminist idol. Kroll has evidently been playing the audiobook of her recent memoir, Yes Please.
Amy Poehler with Kroll, 2014
John Shearer/Invision for the Television Academy / AP Images
"Well that’s embarrassing," Kroll flushes, quickly turning it off. "Neither was it a plant nor was I actually listening to it. Not that I haven’t, I just haven’t recently; I was listening to this podcast of This American Life about William Burroughs. This is, like, the only CD I’ve ever had in my car..."
The flush might be from the slight allergic reaction he’d told me about moments ago. Or it's legitimate embarrassment: Kroll’s comedy hinges on his keen observational skills — his Comedy Central sketch show is essentially a collection of precisely realized satires of social types — and no one, especially himself, is safe from his incisive eye.
It's a quick drive from Kroll's house to the trailhead. “Look at that," he exclaims triumphantly, pulling into the lot. "Shade spot!” He’s dressed in a plain white T-shirt and the sort of minimalist Nike sneakers capable of transitioning into casual cool-guy wear. “Hiking continues to be a very useful tool for me in a lot of ways,” he explains as we set off. He walks with a slightly splayed foot that, especially in shorts, makes the 36-year-old seem endearingly boyish. “We drove five minutes, and we’re not on a mountain hike, but we’re climbing a hill amongst nature."
Earlier this year, Kroll unexpectedly announced that he was ending Kroll Show after its third season, explaining that a number of characters’ arcs had been brought “to their natural conclusion.” At the same time, The League, the FX comedy on which Kroll has played ultimate asshole Rodney Ruxin for the last six years, is also wrapping its final season. He has a smattering of acting and voice roles lined up over the next two years: a small part in the next Terrence Malick film that, like any part in a Terrence Malick film, may end up on the cutting room floor, but also a supporting role in the National Lampoon’s Vacation reboot. And then there’s the darling low-budget dramedy Adult Beginners — with Kroll as a selfish douche turned decent nanny — which he developed and produced and will hit theaters in April.
But mostly, Kroll has made a conscious decision to take stock before moving forward: a rare gift in the current world of celebrity and its vortex of brand management. It’s one of many instances of relative ease that characterize Kroll's childhood and present — instances that have coalesced into a palpable ease: about his life, his career, his future.
"There’s another hike that I do near my place that has the 5 in the distance," he says. "I like seeing the functions of humanity while I’m escaping it.”
On his show, in his stand-up, and in the press, Kroll has proven himself to be incredibly industrious and wickedly intelligent. But he also seems to operate without the existential fear of eventual destitution and ruin that animates many comedians. The lack of angst, the absence of neuroses, the freedom from financial concerns — he could’ve been precisely the sort of "Rich Dick" he satirizes so unmercilessly on the show.
Instead, he’s become analytical, charismatic, incredibly likable: Rather than curdling his ambition, comfort seems to have expanded his capacity for self-critique. For most comedians, this moment between major projects would be pivotal, overdetermined with potential and meaning. Most would cling to the opportunity to star in and design a show with their own name in the title — a show that's pushed the boundaries of the form to tremendous acclaim.
But Nick Kroll is walking away.
Photograph by Ramona Rosales for BuzzFeed News
It’s February in Los Angeles and 85 degrees, so as we wind up through the exposed, dusty trails, Kroll is sweating; I’m sweating; everyone we pass is sweating. Kroll grew up in Westchester County, New York, an area redolent with Waspishness, wealth, and potential douchery. Kroll’s family weren’t WASPs — Seth Rogen has said that Kroll “has the scary Jewish face Mel Gibson runs from in his dreams every night” — but he went to all the right and best schools, not because he was a model student, but because, as he explains, his sisters had been “smart, and good, and involved with the community,” and paved the way for him.
Kroll wouldn’t start his biography, or his Wikipedia page, that way: “Wikipedia is a strange thing,” he says. “Whoever gets there first, you know, they decide. Like the picture: You can’t choose it! You can’t be like, 'You know, I hate that picture of me doing stand-up from 2005 — that doesn’t exemplify who I am.' You take it down, and someone puts it back up. Or, you know, my page starts with 'Nick Kroll grew up Jewish in Westchester County.' Now, I openly admit and understand that that’s an aspect of my personality, but it’s not the central theme of my existence.”
Nor, to Kroll’s mind, was his father’s profession. Jules Kroll started the securities investigations film Kroll Inc. in 1972. Over the course of Nick’s life, the firm earned renown as “Wall Street’s Private Eye,” entrusted with everything from vetting potential investors to tracking down Saddam Hussein’s hidden assets. But apart from some police posted at his house during the height of the Hussein investigation (and his family’s expanding wealth), Kroll says his father’s work rarely affected his life. He was an average student, developed a reputation as the funny kid, and spent hours re-creating Wayne’s World bits.
After we scramble up a bald, steep patch of dirt, Griffith Observatory appears before us, a marvel of art deco and lush greenery against the potato-soup backdrop of smogged-in Los Angeles. “It’s particularly bad today,” Kroll remarks, and walks me around to the other edge of the grounds. He points to the far distance where, if you squint and move a few land masses, you could almost see Ojai — where he’s about to go shoot Vacation and that, in his words, “feels like a real mountain town.”
Kroll’s long been drawn to that feeling: During his junior year in high school, he spent a semester at The Mountain School, a program where 45 students from across the country come together, run a farm, and go full Vermont hippie. He spent four days out on a “solo,” reading The Dharma Bums and coming to love the rhythms of hiking. Back in Rye, New York, for his senior year at prep school, he was elected as a graduation speaker (“not because I was valedictorian”). Instead of giving the joke-studded speech his peers expected, he called out the administration for its suspension of a kid who stood up to a “gang” of Jewish kids who drove Ford Explorers and called themselves the Vatos Locos (a name that reappears in a Season 4 episode of The League affixed to a group of washed-up bullies who revel in their most disgusting selves).
But then it was back to the mountains, this time in DuBois, Wyoming — a town with a single street on the Wind River, its general store filled with postcards of jackalopes. His first summer, Kroll worked in a restaurant, living in the Whistling Winds Mobile Village “next to a guy who powered his television from his truck” and drinking underage at the local bar. After a year at Georgetown, he returned for a summer in a ranch kitchen, working the same 5 a.m.-wakeup, barely skimming, minimum-wage job.
Photograph by Ramona Rosales for BuzzFeed News
“There’s very few public places in L.A. where people are just existing together," he says as we decide on a path back down — something, he adds, that he misses about New York. A young woman approaches, and for a second, I think she’s going to ask for a selfie with Kroll, but she’s just flustered and lost: The trails of Griffith Park are complicated, and she has no idea how to make her way down. Kroll walks her through three different scenarios, and after several minutes, they settle on a route that’ll return her home.
Kroll readily concedes the advantages his upbringing afforded him — his admittance to Georgetown, for example, was because “[his] dad was on the board of the law school”; his family’s prominence and fortune continued to expand until, in 2004, Kroll Inc. was acquired for $1.9 billion. His comedy success, though, was of his own making. “The one thing,” he says, not a hint of sarcasm in his voice, “I’ve done completely on my own.”
During his freshman year, Kroll tried stand-up for a “Funniest Act on Campus” show and bombed hard. But Mike Birbiglia (Sleepwalk With Me) saw something like potential and asked him to audition for the campus improv group, which came to define his college experience. After graduating in 2001, he made a home in the New York comedy scene, paying rent by teaching improv at an after-school program. He booked commercials — he has a great radio voice — and got a choice gig playing Andy Roddick’s “mojo” in a series of American Express commercials meant to promote Roddick’s near-certain triumph in the U.S. Open, only to see Roddick lose in the first match. He performed regularly at Rififi in the East Village, where he ran in the same circles as Jenny Slate, Chelsea Peretti, Jon Daly, and John Mulaney (all of whom would later star in his show) and put in time with Upright Citizens Brigade.
Cavemen
ABC Studios
Kroll's break came in 2007, when he moved to Los Angeles for pilot season to star in the ABC series Cavemen, based on the Geico commercials. The show lasted only seven episodes; in full caveman makeup, Kroll is nearly unrecognizable. Still, he credits it as “the most important experience of my professional career” and refuses to ridicule it. During those early Hollywood months, there was no condo purchased by his parents, no bankroll for his own production company. He lived in the Oakwood Apartments, famous as the sad, pre-furnished home to the seasonal hopes and dreams that migrate west every pilot season. Only a couple years later, in 2009, he landed his supporting role on The League.
As we start our gradual shuffle down from the observatory, I ask whether someone who hadn’t grown up struggling — for money, for comfort, for success — could succeed in the comedy world. He turns suddenly serious: “I mean, look, we all suffer in our own way; like, life is miserable. And I’m not, 'Oh, I’m a stand-up who’s sad,’ but the reality is that just about everyone is quietly unhappy. I don’t think that pertains to comedians specifically. I think most people look at themselves in the mirror and are not happy with what they see.”
And yet Kroll hasn't really been scrutinized for his status in the way someone like Lena Dunham has been. As for the stray allegations sprinkled across internet comment sections claiming Jules Kroll wielded his influence to advance his son’s career, Kroll’s rebuttal is characteristically frank: “My father has not paid for my show to be on Comedy Central,” he says. “Although it would’ve been so fucking chill if he did.”
Even Marc Maron, who’s often flummoxed by comics who’ve taken a path to success less fraught than his own, accepted the story of Kroll’s self-described “easy ride” in stride during their 2009 WTF podcast interview. Perhaps (probably) it’s because Kroll’s a guy, and well-ensconced within the protective armor of the comedy nerd fandom. Or maybe it’s because, unlike Dunham, it’s impossible to mistake Kroll’s characters, which at first punctuated and then gradually consumed his stand-up, for Kroll himself.
Photograph by Ramona Rosales for BuzzFeed News
In his 2011 Comedy Central hour-long stand-up special Thank You Very Cool, these characters each show up for between two and 20 minutes. There’s Bobby Bottleservice, a Jersey Shore knockoff with a made-up language of superlatives. There's craft-services worker Fabrice Fabrice, whose sexuality remains dubious, and there's Latino shock jock El Chupacabra — all whirling dervishes of performative masculinity. Their energy is so intense that when Kroll returns to the stage not in character, a visceral mix of relief and disappointment seems to wash over the audience. He effectively steals the show from himself.
While the Bottleservice, Fabrice, and El Chupacabra characters made guest appearances on podcasts and Comedy Bang Bang, the “Rich Dicks” — a collaboration with fellow Rififi alum Jon Daly — carved a presence on Funny or Die . The sketches skewer The Hills-style reality opulence that came to dominate cable television in the late 2000s. Wendall “Wendy” Shawn IV (Daly) and Aspen Bruckenheimer (Kroll) spend their days sexting celebutantes, snorting "schneef," and making statements like “I hope this is, like, a white-person Kanye concert not, like, a black-person Kanye concert.”
Rich Dicks: Kroll and Jon Daly as Aspen Bruckenheimer and Wendy
Comedy Central
When Kroll first started talks with Comedy Central about a potential show, it was for an expanded version of “Rich Dicks.” But the network wanted something broader, and Kroll set to work with “Dicks” director Jonathan Krisel to develop a sketch pilot that would unite, however tenuously, his various characters. According to Krisel, the original plan was to call it Nick Show Kroll — a name that would crystallize the sketch's absurdist humor. But Krisel, who had previously worked on Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job, was tired of explaining bizarre titles, “so we just sorta ended on Kroll Show.”
PubLizity: Kroll as Big Liz and Jenny Slate as Pretty Liz
Greg Gayne / Comedy Central
For the show, Kroll expanded existing characters (Bottleservice, the Rich Dicks, and Oh Hello, a bit with two Woody Allen-esque elderly leches he’d performed with John Mulaney since his time in New York) and developed new scenarios rooted in reality satire. There's PubLizity , a takeoff on E! workplace reality programs, with Kroll and Jenny Slate as publicists Big Liz and Pretty Liz, respectively. There's Wheels Ontario , a spin on the Canadian teen melodrama Degrassi, but with wheelchairs. There's C-Czar’s Palace, a VH1-style reality show following the numbskullery of 17-year-old C-Czar, a punk kid with an infected lip ring, a lisp, a general disregard for civility, and a deep inner sadness.
Kroll says his goal for the show “was to make stuff that’s funny to us, that would help me work down the line with people I respect: Seth Rogen, or Craig Robinson, or Bill Burr — I want Bill Burr to think I’m funny.” According to editor and director Daniel Gray, they aimed for a mix of “the lowest of the lowbrow — just complete garbage,” and “the complete highbrow.” Watching the show is like channel-surfing, but also a commentary on that experience. It’s dizzying and hilarious and incites a sort of semi-nauseous glee.
Dr. Armond
Danny Feld / Comedy Central
Sketches bash into each other; characters spill over from one to the next. A client on PubLizity, Dr. Armond, "California's premier pet plastic surgeon," becomes the star of his own show, Armond of the House, which, over the course of the season, becomes Armond About Town, and then Armond of the House Arrest after he's suspected of murdering the Botox-filled wife he acquired after one dinner date.
Bobby Bottleservice and Jason Mantzoukas as Eagle Wing
Jesse Grant / Comedy Central
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