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

Josh Nasser and Jared Bronen. Photo: Aaron Applebey “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.    View this post on Instagram   A post shared by jared bronen (@jbronen) 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…