The ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ Writers (and Brothers) Making the World Safe for Gross-Out Comedies

Incoming is full of shit — well, one scene is, anyway. The high school comedy, which starts streaming on Netflix on Friday, concerns some uncool male buddies starting their freshman year and trying to navigate the first blowout party of their young lives. In one sequence, a couple of the friends, through some crazy circumstances, end up driving their school’s most gorgeous girl home. She’s really drunk, though, and, well, let’s just say an impromptu trip to Taco Bell turns out not to be a good idea at all. The result is one of the most revolting gross-out scenes in modern comedy. It’s a moment that the writer-director brothers Dave and John Chernin have had in their back pocket, waiting for the right opportunity.  

“Man, that was an idea that we’ve had for a long time,” Dave, 39, says over Zoom, laughing. “We didn’t quite know what it was going to fit into, but we knew we had something really weird and funny there that, by the way, was never going to be taken from us. We sat on that (idea) for 15 years just knowing, ‘Well, no one’s ever going to do that — we’re never in danger of getting beat to the finish line on that idea.’” 

Laughing next to him is his older brother John, 41. “We’ve just been watering and nurturing it for years,” he says, mock-ponderously. 

“A lot of it comes down to subverting tropes that we’ve seen before,” adds Dave. “When we knew we wanted a stereotypical ‘hot-girl character,’ we then started thinking of ways that we could make her the least-hot hot girl that had ever been seen in one of these movies.”

“I don’t want to say just anyone shitting themselves in the backseat of a car is funny,” John says. “But it’s funniest when it’s the person you don’t expect that to happen to.”

Incoming is a proudly vulgar comedy — the kind we don’t get much anymore — which may explain why it’s playing on Netflix rather than in theaters. R-rated raunch-fests have mostly vanished from the big screen, but the Chernin brothers, who are making their feature directorial debut, are doing their best to make sure they don’t vanish from the world entirely. This isn’t a surprise if you know their previous work: They spent several seasons as writers on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and then went on to create the sitcom The Mick, which starred Kaitlin Olson. These native Angelenos, who grew up around the industry, have long been in thrall to comedy’s most outrageous and shocking practitioners. Along the way, they’ve learned how to deal with a Hollywood that’s less receptive to their brand of humor than it once was.

Dave has never forgotten his first day of high school at Harvard-Westlake. “I remember walking around a corner, entering the school with my backpack on, and a senior throwing a water balloon that hit me in the face and did not break from about two feet away,” he says. “I just remember going like, ‘Ow, dude’ — it put me back on my heels from the jump there. It was a first-day ritual for the seniors to peg the underclassmen with water balloons — I’ll report that a water balloon hurts far worse when it does not break.”

When writing Incoming, the brothers drew from their own adolescent experiences but also took inspiration from classic high-school comedies. Specifically, they looked at the moments from those films that didn’t ring true, giving them a comedic tweak. “There’s a scene at the end of (Incoming) where (one of the characters) serenades his crush in front of the entire school,” John says. “We never saw that happen — because, if that happened in real life, it would not go over well. It would crack us up when we would think of those high school movies where someone does that and it succeeds.” Dave jumps in: “I think that honestly stemmed from watching 10 Things I Hate About You. There’s that great scene where Heath Ledger serenades Julia Stiles and it works out — there’s no way that would go down so smoothly.”

These guys got a sense of how Hollywood operates from an early age. Their father is Peter Chernin, who ran 20th Century Fox for more than a decade. (Titanic and Avatar happened under his watch.) Since then, he’s been a producer on hits like the first three Planet of the Apes prequels, Spy and The Greatest Showman. (In addition, he received Best Picture Oscar nominations for Hidden Figures and Ford v Ferrari.) Chernin has overseen his share of comedies, but you wouldn’t necessarily associate him with the type of irreverent humor to which his sons gravitate. 

“Our dad’s very funny, but I do believe he’s funny from hanging out with us more than us him,” says Dave, chuckling. “Our mom is so funny, and her brothers and sisters were so, so funny. Our first exposure to comedy was through their side of the family. We always had a really funny family, but I think our dad has had to catch up.”

It was Peter Chernin who turned his boys onto Richard Pryor as kids. Their mom Megan showed them Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. They adored In Living Color. Early on, it was clear that Dave and John had an affinity for the rude and the coarse. “We shared a bedroom,” says Dave, “and we must’ve been like five, six years old — every night we would go to bed listening to Dennis Leary’s No Cure for Cancer. Which I don’t even think we understood at the time, but we would just cackle.”

Perhaps the eureka moment occurred when their mother’s sister slipped them something when they were around seven or eight. As John recalls, “I remember her giving us a bootleg tape of the Jerky Boys when it was still just being passed around in New York City. From that point on, we became obsessed with prank phone calls. Sometimes, we’d recruit our mom to play a role on prank phone calls that we were making. Our parents were always very cool about encouraging the moronic stuff that made us laugh.”

Each of the brothers found their way to comedy writing on their own terms, eventually teaming up. Dave took a screenwriting class while he was at the University of Southern California after reading endless books on the craft, but he didn’t like the experience of reading his work out loud amidst a sea of students who were more focused on dramatic work. As he puts it, he was the one guy doing “fart and cum jokes. It was traumatizing. I still get chills thinking about it because I was the only one writing comedy. I look back on that as just one of the worst, most uncomfortable days ever.” 

Meanwhile, John worked for Peter Farrelly (one-half of the Farrelly brothers) and Bradley Thomas, who produced several of their films. Talking about the Farrelly Brothers, he says, “Those are the best guys in the world. In addition to being so unbelievably funny, I’m not sure I’ve ever met more generous, kind-hearted people — I love those guys dearly. Working on their movies was going to summer camp for a few months.”

It was Dave who first got a chance to write on It’s Always Sunny, a sitcom he adored, turning his brother onto it. (John says, “I remember Dave telling me, ‘You have got to see this show!’ and then me quickly falling in love with it.”) Dave got a co-writing credit on the show’s fifth-season finale, “The Gang Reignites the Rivalry,” which aired in December 2009, but come the sixth season, the brothers were writing episodes together, like “Dennis Gets Divorced.” Soon, they’d be responsible for “The Gang Goes to the Jersey Shore,” “Mac and Dennis Buy a Timeshare” and others.

Reflecting on what made them first get into It’s Always Sunny, Dave says, “That started airing at a time when we both had aspirations to write. But (we were) all about feature stuff — that’s not because we didn’t like TV, but we just didn’t see ourselves on TV. We were huge Seinfeld fans, but we couldn’t really relate to Jerry Seinfeld and Jason Alexander and these 35-year-old singles in New York City. But the moment we saw Sunny, it was like…” Dave starts to laugh sheepishly. “I hate to say we see ourselves in those characters, but we saw our sense of humor in those characters. We’re like, ‘Oh, these guys remind us of what us and our friends joke around (about).’ Suddenly, TV felt really possible to us.”

Of course, It’s Always Sunny also helped raise the bar on the kind of knowingly inappropriate comedy that writers could get away with on the small screen. Those foul-mouthed cretins who ran Paddy’s Pub — such moral voids, such hilarious company — “really do represent the worst of humanity,” Dave says, smiling affectionately. “It’s fun tapping in and getting to say things that you would never be able to say in real life through those characters.” Suddenly, shocking humor was no longer the domain of movies. As John puts it, “When we were growing up, Something About Mary was the funniest thing you saw that year. And then, 10 years later, the funniest thing you saw that year wasn’t necessarily going to be in theaters — it could have been an episode of 30 Rock, it could have been an episode of Always Sunny. The culture just changed, and the way people consume entertainment changed.”

Since the brothers spent seven seasons on It’s Always Sunny, I was curious if there was one character who was especially difficult to write. “Charlie was hard, always, because he’s so funny,” Dave replies. “He was, in those early years, the fan favorite for a lot of people. He’s also so weird — it was tough walking the line between what his character would actually do and what’s too weird. There’s just a lot of pressure with Charlie — the audience needs him to deliver the wildest of all the characters.” 

“Also, Charlie the human,” John adds, “when you’re in the writers’ room, he is the most wildly creative and imaginative of all those guys. He’s the one with pitches that come out of left field that you’re like, ‘Oh my god, how does your brain work like that?’”

But from the jump, the Chernins felt a special kinship to Olson, who plays Dee. “Her skill set jives with our sensibilities in a great way,” Dave says of the actress. “We’ve always been huge fans of slapstick and physical comedy, and she’s one of the all-time greats when it comes to that stuff. But she’s got it all, man — she’s got this combination of toughness and sweetness. She’s such a good actor, she’s so funny. She’s such a good hang.”

“When we first started on the show, Kaitlin was such a revelation,” John says. “It almost felt like, because she was a woman, that not everyone was clued into ‘Do you realize how insanely funny and talented this person is?’ So, I think in many ways we just wanted to hold onto her while we could before the entire world clued into ‘This woman is outrageously gifted.’”

Beyond that, though, the brothers recognized how working with Olson helped broaden their comedic perspective. “Especially at that time, we were young and we were writing a lot of characters who kind of felt like us, and that amounted to a lot of teenage-boy characters,” admits Dave, before adding with ironic deadpan, in reference to Incoming’s astoundingly immature hijinks, “As you can see, we’ve grown a lot since then. But Kaitlin changed the way we approached female characters. Kaitlin brought a female perspective that we had never seen on TV before and that we have constantly written for. I’d say 80 percent of the time when we sit down to write a female character, it starts with Kaitlin Olson: ‘How would she play this?’ She brings so much funny to every character she plays, but always more than what’s on the page. By picturing her in any role, it helps us find the funniest version of that character.”

That collaboration continued when the Chernins left It’s Always Sunny to make their series The Mick, which starred Olson as a crass ne’er-do-well forced to care for her rich sister’s kids. Initially, the sitcom, which debuted on New Year’s Day 2017, was going to be about a man, but after the brothers learned that Olson was interested in starring vehicles, they decided to change the main character’s gender. That allowed them to reunite with their It’s Always Sunny star, but it also, unexpectedly, made the project feel closer to home for the brothers.

“Once we switched it to a woman, it started to remind us more of our mother,” John says, “who was just so clever and crafty in her parenting and who, in retrospect, was always a step ahead of us. We thought if we took that to the extreme, that could be really funny.” Not that Megan necessarily loved hearing in the press that The Mick’s foul-mouthed Mickey was based on her. “I think our mom always blanches a little bit,” John notes, laughing. “She’s like, ‘I read an interview where you guys said that character’s inspired by me. I am not a degenerate alcoholic.’ But the only word I can use to describe her is she was a very clever parent.”

“A worthy adversary,” adds Dave, smiling. 

The Mick only lasted two seasons. After spending years every day around one another developing the series and then being showrunners, they decided to take a break from each other before they figured out what the third season would look like. John recalls, “There was this plan of like, ‘I’m going to Slovenia, Dave’s going to Norway, and we’ll meet in Copenhagen. We’ll get some relaxation in and we’ll blow off a little steam and that’ll be fun.’ And then we got canceled while we were (over there). Being that far from Hollywood and being out of the country, it was pretty easy to pivot to, like, ‘Well, let’s just have a vacation and enjoy ourselves.’” 

The letting-go process of The Mick was more literal for Dave, who happened to have a backpack full of ideas for potential season three ideas with him in Europe. But after news came of the show’s cancellation, “I remember at one point just taking my backpack off and stuffing it into a trash can and continuing walking,” says Dave. “Somewhere in a trash can in Norway, there’s Season Three of The Mick.”

Comedy always goes through cycles, with different genres or styles constantly coming into or going out of fashion. The Chernins were at an impressionable age when the Farrelly Brothers ruled big-screen comedy, that mixture of gross-out and sincere proving to be a winning formula. “I still remember being in a packed theater the weekend Dumb and Dumber came out,” John says. “To this day, I don’t think I’ve ever laughed harder in public.” 

But now that they’ve been professional comedy writers for a while, how do Dave and John perceive the shifts in the industry? “In the last 10 or so years, there seems to have been a widening of the gap between creatives and the audience, which has led to less great comedies, in my opinion,” Dave says. “It’s one of the things why I think stand-up has entered such a golden age — I can’t help but feel it’s because they don’t have to wade through this giant machine of executive notes and all that stuff. It’s the quickest connection between their brain and the audience, which is why I think they’re thriving so much.”

Working in television, even in a more permissive era, they’ve had to deal with notes from nervous executives and the folks at Standards and Practices. But even those objections can lead to funny ideas. “Standards and Practices was something we welcomed,” explains John, “because those are hard-and-fast rules about what you can and cannot say. That forces you to rethink things: ‘Okay, well, let’s get creative and try it this way.’” 

One concrete example of an improved workaround occurred on The Mick: “We could not say someone sticks a booze-soaked tampon up their butt,” says Dave. Turns out, though, you can say, “Let’s soak these tampons in booze and sit on ‘em.” The guys laugh at the memory. “It’s like, ‘Well, that just sounds funnier anyway, so we’ll take it,’” Dave says. “If we can get that on Fox at 8 p.m. on a Tuesday, great.”

Incoming (which co-stars Olson) will only be on streaming, so audiences won’t be able to laugh in the theater with their buddies, which is how the Chernins saw their favorite R-rated comedies when they were younger. “We’re really grateful that this movie is on Netflix and is going to be seen by a lot of people, we hope,” says John. “But it’s disappointing that you can’t have the communal comedy experience watching this movie, because I think that it is so fun.” He thinks again about his heroes the Farrelly brothers: “Good for those guys for having more fortuitous timing than us.”

“There are no guarantees anymore that a comedy in a theater is going to get eyeballs,” Dave says. “I do think that’ll change — I think audiences are really thirsty for comedy, so I’m hoping someone changes it.” 

As they wait for Incoming’s release, though, Dave and John Chernin have other things on their mind. They’re speaking to me over Zoom from the It’s Always Sunny offices. Season 17 — the first they’ve been involved with in about eight years — is just getting underway. How is it going after being gone so long?

“We both just feel so grateful to be back,” John says. “The idea that this show is still on the air and that we have the opportunity to come work with such talented people who’ve all become very good friends of ours, I just feel so lucky and fortunate in that regard.”

There are some challenges, though, when working on a show that’s been around since 2005. Jokingly, John asks me, “Do you have any ideas? We’re in the writers’ room right now trying to talk up things, and every idea that gets pitched, someone is like, ‘We did that already.’” Dave adds, “Lots of areas have been covered. But Rob McElhenney, who’s the showrunner, he’s got such an entrepreneurial approach to storytelling. What’s so great about writing for that show is it’s limitless — they never tell you that it has to be this one thing. It’s quite the opposite, where they really push you to think outside the box and think of something we’ve never done before. They’re just really encouraging of pushing the show beyond what the audience knows.”

Even though the Chernins have been away from that writers’ room for nearly a decade, the approach hasn’t changed: Find horrible things for the Gang to do, and then laugh at how awful they are. “It’s funny because Rob, Glenn and Charlie, those guys are such goodhearted, decent, empathic people,” John says. “When we’re trying to make each other laugh in the writers’ room, it’s pretty obvious what is okay and what isn’t, even when you’re really trying to push the bounds of good taste.”

“Audiences are incredibly savvy,” Dave adds. “More so than they’re often given credit for. That’s an important lesson that we learned from Sunny. There has to be this unspoken agreement between the audience and the creators — the creators aren’t the characters, and they’re poking fun at the worst impulses of people and society. Audiences totally pick up on that.”

Dave and John love finding that line between appropriate and what’s out of bounds. When they went back and watched some teen comedies for Incoming, they were struck by how cringe-y some jokes in beloved 1980s films were. “There were some movies, like Sixteen Candles or License to Drive, where a situation happened (that) didn’t age that well — guys taking advantage of the hot girl passed out in the back of their car,” Dave says. That prompted Incoming’s most outlandish moment. “We’re like, ‘What’s the least-hot situation we could put this girl in? Instead of exploiting her, how can these guys actually help her?” We wanted people to think it was going to go one way and then, hopefully, surprise them.”

In a few days, they’ll hear from audiences whether their gross-out gag worked. But they trust their instincts. “We were very fortunate to grow up within this sense of humor,” John says about his and Dave’s brand of comedy. “This was the kind of stuff that would make our parents laugh or our sister laugh. We played a lot of sports growing up — this was the stuff that would make your teammates laugh. 

“Whenever we sit down to write or make something,” John continues, looking at his brother, “we’re not trying to figure out, ‘What’s going to please the most people?’ It just always comes from a place of ‘What’s going to make us laugh?’ Hopefully, there are other people out there who might be as demented as we are.”