There are some things you just can't do on television. Someone forgot to tell the creators of Wonder Showzen

John Lee and Vernon Chatman, the creative team behind MTV2's Wonder Showzen, always remember to say "please" and "thank you." They're clean-cut and punctual, and they silence their cell phones unprompted. When meeting a reporter for an interview, they even bring a little gift. It's easy to forget they make their living spraying children with blood.

Wonder Showzen, their anti-social comedy series, occupies a space at the unlikely cultural intersection of Romper Room and Faces of Death. The duo once offered a woman $25,000 to give birth on-camera wearing a chicken suit, and created a scratchy-voiced character named Aunt Flo to teach girls about their first period. When not punching up tourists' 9/11 memories with morning zoo sound effects, they're sending little boys out on the street dressed as Hitler or the Pope's corpse. With the second season of Wonder Showzen now available on DVD, Radar caught up with the co-conspirators to discuss what will probably be the final season of one of television's weirdest experiments, and why Lewis Lapham is a motherfucker.

RADAR: Your fans are dying to know: Will there be another season of Wonder Showzen?
Lee: It's too soon to tell....
Chatman: We don't want to tell people about the funeral yet.
Lee: I would say it's about 90 percent "no." MTV2's official word is, "We haven't made a decision on that," as of like three weeks ago.
Chatman: It just doesn't fit into their worldview, which is no worldview. It just doesn't fit anywhere. It needs some attention.

But everyone loved Season One. What happened?
Lee: We got good critical response, and we sold more DVDs than any other show on MTV2.
Chatman: The truth of the matter is, we had pretty crappy ratings. You know, ratings are a hard thing to measure on an MTV show because people can download them on iTunes or buy the DVD.
Lee: Our downloads were crazy. The good thing about this type of show, this type of comedy, is that it gets to the right fans because the right kind of fans are all in league with each other and are desperately searching for funny stuff. So when they find it, they're like, "Check it out." And then it just spreads.

What could you have done to get it out there more?
Chatman: I honestly think that if the second season had a controversy, it would have been better for the show. That would have been the best for the show.
Lee: And we tried! We tried with "Little Hitler," with "Little Dead Pope"....
Chatman: The closest we came was "Ground Zero." It was like, "How can we possibly do a bit about Ground Zero?" And I think we were successful for what we wanted to do, but [MTV2] was so freaked out they pulled the episode. It aired just once. It got pushed back a couple of weeks, and they made us write an apology.
Lee: A pre-apology. You know how they do an obituary in advance so it's ready to go?
Chatman: We had to write an apology like, "We're so sorry for what we're about to do...."
Lee: "But we stand behind the show."

Did anyone ask for the apology?
Lee: No! Because the bit is not cruel. There are moments that are really, like, pushing the limits of doing comedy at Ground Zero, but there's actual substance to it.

Was there ever something you decided you just couldn't do?

Chatman: The hardest thing was to ask a mother, "Can we put your baby on a bed of rice and put gravy on the baby?"

Lee: Military-brown gravy.

Chatman: We couldn't even ask. No gravy on the baby.

Lee: She would've let us cover him in gravy, now that I think about it.

Chatman: She agreed to a lot of stuff, including having the baby right next to a meat cleaver on a meat scale, surrounded by meat.

Lee: But we never asked her. We should've asked. I gotta call and ask her if we could at least ladle on the gravy.

Chatman: But you know, the other thing is, like, we'd have to clean it off every time. It would react and cry. It's a production problem, putting gravy on a baby.

Lee: Yeah.

Chatman: Then we were gonna have kittens come and lick up the baby.

Are there any real commentaries on the Season Two DVD? The last ones were jokes.
Lee: What do you mean?

Well, it wasn't you guys. You had Dick Gregory on the dangers of milk, and the robot voice of "Screamin' Jay Hawkins."
Lee: We have Samantha Powers, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. She talks about genocide.

Which episode is that on?
Chatman: The "Justice" episode, of course.
Lee: And Mikio Kaku. He wrote Parallel Worlds. He's a theoretical physicist and talks about time travel.

So, Lewis Lapham dissed you again? You wanted him to do Season One.
Lee: He did, yeah.
Chatman: Motherfucker.
Lee: That's right. Fuck Lapham, man. We got close to, what do you call it? [Noam] Chomsky, right?
Chatman: Yeah. We got a personal letter from Chomsky.

What did he say?
Lee: "No."
Chatman: "I don't have time for you or this."
Lee: He felt like it wasn't relevant or didn't have the weight.
Chatman: He said, "Since I've passed on, I've been doing less commentaries."

How did it feel to be listed as one of New York Magazine's "Influentials"?
Lee: Powerful.

Does that sort of press make you nervous?
Chatman: Well, it's just a small show and people get really into it, but because it's small and not a really popular show, they don't wind up feeling like a loser. People love to champion the little guys.
Lee: The losers.

Is that a comfortable level to be at?
Chatman: It's comfortable, but it's not a goal.
Lee: It's definitely more comfortable being unknown.
Chatman: Yeah, but I would rather have a success.
Lee: You just want to buy an apartment.
Chatman: I want to buy an apartment—like the executives who work on our show all own houses. We call at four o'clock and they've gone home to their boat! We just want to get paid the same.

So, to get that level of success, what are you willing to do?
Lee: Nothing.
Chatman: Nothing.

READ MORE
• Q&A: Grant Stoddard's Experimental Journey
• 100 Years of Breast Obsession
• Today's Top Stories