All Hail the Trash King, Who Proves That Fart Jokes Are Back

“What is trash?” Jared Bronen, wearing a black Hefty bag and standing at a podium like a landfill philosopher-king, rhetorically asked his audience. “A trash bit is not ‘bad’ or ‘unfunny’… it’s simply stupid, dumb, and gross. But great.” Resting stage-right was the Trash King’s Trash King, who was topless and hairy with a paper bag over his head.

The conceit of the show is this: Josh Nasser, a Brooklyn sketch/improv comedy mainstay, plays the titular Trash King. The Trash King has only one job: Sit atop a literal throne of garbage and watch six comedians go head-to-head with their most trash bits, in order to declare who is “Trash” and who is SNL. (In case you didn’t guess: the “Trash” advances and SNL goes home.)

Nasser, Bronen, and their third co-host Benny Benedetto, who was playing hooky the night I was there, have tapped into an upswing of something I’d like to call the Trash Revival—a cult resurgence of the stupid shows and movies of the early to mid-2000s that millennials and elder members of Gen Z are rediscovering, while proper Zoomers are falling in love with them for the first time. 

For example, Nasser and his roommates are just one of four sets of straight men I know who are in the middle of a Family Guy rewatch. The long-running ballad of Peter Griffin that my mom claimed “made our brains turn into Swiss cheese” came up organically three times throughout the show—including when the group Business Casual sang parody songs about it to the tune of “Staying Alive” and “Sweet Caroline.”

Southpark, too, is reentering the zeitgeist. Decidedly woke young people are posting Cartman memes and reclaiming his provocative nature in an ironic reimagination. Popular accounts on Instagram and TikTok have racked up millions of views sharing old Southpark clips; the Instagram account @daily.cartman racked up 24,000 followers just by posting one Cartman screenshot a day for 656 days.

It makes sense, then, that every Trash King begins with a literal resurrection. According to the hosts, the Trash King has died of “Huge Balls Disease” and the only thing that can reawaken him is the chants of a passionate audience. We cheered, and suddenly, Nasser was up on his feet, reanimated like Frankenstein’s monster, doing the worm and high-fiving the audience as “Miracles Happen” blared over the speakers. Of course, he was still shirtless.

Speaking of resurrections, this was the first iteration of Trash King in its new home: the reincarnated Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre on 14th St. and 3rd Ave. After shutting down its New York locations during the pandemic, the famed improv factory and unpaid intern exploiter is back with a labyrinthian space and an impressive set of young talent. The venue is so cavernous that it feels more like entering the Basement, the club in Maspeth, New York, than a typical comedy theater. It smelled delicious, like fresh concrete and new building, but as my friend Carolina said at the top of the show: “It’ll get that UCB Stank soon enough.” We can only hope. 

 

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UCB specifically, and the improv craze more broadly, feel like near-perfect relics of the Obama era, cultural artifacts of a time when everything was a “Yes, and” game and the only limit was our collective imagination. But the bits we saw in Trash King were even older—from a time long ago, in a galaxy far, far away. This was pure Bush era comedy in all its glory. It was giving White Chicks, Wedding Crashers, and Borat rather than Parks and Rec or Scott Pilgrim.

Bronen made doo-doo, fart, dick, and balls jokes; Ryan Ciecwisz played the Rocky theme on trombone and chugged a beer every time he fucked up; Dylan Adler pulled down his pants, put the microphone up to his butt, and performed most of his set as his own ass; Julia Zhen wore a real electric shock collar and gave the Trash King the remote control.

And in one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen on stage, Marina Gasparyan and Maarit Hara both walked onstage in jeans and a sweatsuit, only for Hara to get almost completely naked and let Gasparyan silently weigh her tits, ass cheeks, and pussy lips with a kitchen scale while classical music played in the background.

It was a bit like sitting on the couch with my dad and watching a Will Ferrell movie—if any women had ever been involved with writing those. It didn’t make sense and it didn’t have a point beyond the shock of seeing something gross and unexpected—and it was good, not in spite of those things, but because of them.

The trash winner at the end of the night was Jamie Linn Watson, who performed a set called “Boyfriend’s Dream,” in which she stripped to the Sopranos theme song, pulled slices of deli meat out of her lingerie, and yelled, “Thanks for showing me to the Sopranos, babe! It’s sooooo good!” When she was crowned Trash Peasant Supreme, the crowd threw the deli meat back at her in celebration, like a garbage bouquet of roses.

I don’t know exactly what’s behind the burgeoning Trash Revival but I do think we’re living through a moment that resembles the Bush era in more ways than one. There’s another war raging in the Middle East with American support while being against the will of the American people. There’s another reckoning with mass death on a scale not previously imaginable, as nativism and neoconservatives warp our politics. Tits are back. 

Is it regressive? Maybe. But for Trash King, you should turn your brain off for a minute. (It already has Swiss cheese holes from the microplastics and TikTok, anyway.) If making the most base jokes imaginable is what it takes to process a world filled with so much literal, digital, and spiritual garbage, then I say: Keep the trash coming. 

In terms of production, Trash King remains rough around the edges—it’s clearly still figuring out the pacing and choreography on a new stage. Not every bit hit perfectly, and there were silent, stilted moments when it was clear the Trash King couldn’t decide who was Trash and who was SNL. 

In fact, my one true gripe with the show is that I suspect it was rigged in favor of the clout-iest contestants. Watson and Adler, great as they were, advanced fairly quickly, leaving some worthy competitors to the Last Chance Garbage Can losers’ bracket—even if they might have won the popular vote.

Which is, after all, a pretty good testament to the Bush era.

You can follow @thetrashking_show on Instagram updates and check out the UCBNY calendar for more shows.