By JONATHAN REED
The Red & Black

The three minds behind "The Damn! Show" sat down recently with The Red & Black to discuss where their show came from and where they want to take it.

R&B: How did you all get into making this show in the first place?

Waco O’Guin: Lee (Sanders) and I were always coming up with little skit ideas, but we never thought of putting them on TV. But then I saw Ballard’s (Lesemann of Flagpole) show and thought, hey, we could do that. But they wouldn’t let us use their equipment. They said there wasn’t any time.

Matt Chastain: We were starting totally from scratch. We bought a digital camera for $4,000 and learned to edit ourselves. After a month and a half, we went to Intermedia and gave them $75 for a half-hour of airtime. They obviously didn’t screen it first.

R&B: What was their initial reaction to the show?

MC: About 90 percent of the people who saw it liked it, but the 10 percent who didn’t like it hated it. They watched it when it came on again just so they could hate it.

Lee Sanders: It was definitely an attention getter.

R&B: How did you three respond to Intermedia?

WO: We expected our career at Intermedia to last more than one month. But after a while, we decided to go out and make something really raw and uncut, and that’s the sort of thing we couldn’t do on the network. The biggest thing we said was, This won’t stop us – it’ll only help us.

R&B: How do you come up with ideas for your sketches? Where would you say you learned to be funny?

MC: I don’t know if we have any ability yet.

WO: I picked it up from my grandfather. He was a pretty funny guy.

LS: As far as ideas go, a bottle of creativity now and then helps.

MC: Yeah, it’s also how we film the skits, how we edit the skits. It’s hard for us to know how to do this. With so many bands around here, they have someone else to look to so they can know how to go about things. But no one around here has a sketch-comedy show.

R&B: Two of you are seniors. What do you plan to do with this idea once you’re out of school?

WO: We’re not stopping. All of us have majors that center around aspects of it.

LS: We’re actually trying to make millions from it. But we’re a long way from that. We have sent tapes to Comedy Central, MTV, "SNL" and a firm in New York, though. The group in New York has even shown some interest.