THE GAMES BEGINas they so often dowith a poop joke. ¶ Its a late-January morning and were on a giant back-lot soundstage in Los Angeles, where cast members of HBOs dot-comedy Silicon Valley are hunched over their laptops, tossing out beta-male insults. Todays scene gathers four of the shows actorsThomas Middleditch, who stars as the flappable app developer Richard; Kumail Nanjiani as the put-upon programmer Dinesh; Martin Starr, a k a Gilfoyle, the fatalist-Satanist tech wiz; and Zach Woods, who plays milquetoast consigliere Jaredas their characters meekly plot revenge against a former ally whos sold them out. After a few takes, however, the actors start going off script, lobbing improvised one-liners the way 5-year-olds smack around balloons.
We should mail him a bag of his own poop.
We should get him suspended from LinkedIn.
We should sign him up for all the podcasts he doesnt like.
Are they all gold? They are not. But as the actors become both more drained and more limbered up, the Silicon set becomes a rolling riff-tide of free-form, ever-escalating jokes, even when the cameras arent on: The phrase ding-dong is inserted into random lines (Lame City. Population: ding-dong). Off-key Michael McDonald impressions are trotted out and dueled. For one scene, Woods improvises nearly half a dozen versions of the same line, reshaping and recasting it each time and throwing in references to everything from Harriet Tubman to Anne Frank to the suffragette movement. At one point, an in-character spat ends with Starr shouting, Go masturbate and cry! The subsequent response, which involves a trash can and bodily fluids, is so crass that some of the crew members wince.