Brian Baumgartner’s An Oral History of ‘The Office’ is not the only shiny new podcast out this month. Over on Team Coco’s podcast network, they have added Rob Lowe’s Literally! podcast to go along with another podcast from a Parks and Rec alum, Nick Offerman’s In Bed with Nick and Megan. Recently, Rob Lowe debuted his podcast with his first guest, Chris Pratt, the blockbuster star of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, as well as the Jurassic World series.
Turns out that Chris Pratt and Rob Lowe have remained very good friends post-Parks and Recreation (in fact, Pratt’s wife, Katherine Schwarzenegger, also appears to hang out regularly with Rob Lowe’s wife, Sheryl Berkoff). In addition to talking about Pratt’s success since Parks and Rec, as well as their love of certain movies (including Lowe’s St. Elmo’s Fire), the two reminisced at length about their time together on the Amy Poehler sitcom, including a story “that’s been told a thousand times” within the show’s family about the “single greatest ad lib in the history of Parks and Rec.”
“It’s the flu season episode,” Chris Pratt recounts, acknowledging Rob Lowe’s ad-lib, “Stop pooping!” in that same episode may have actually been better, or at least the second best ad-lib in Parks history. In any respect, everyone was sick in that episode, so Andy was taking over and “sitting at Jim’s desk, and I was sitting in Jim’s position. Ben is walking Leslie out saying, ‘You have a fever. You have the flu. You need to go.’”
“And then Tom [Magil, the director of photography] says, ‘Hey Pratt. You wanna say anything? We might catch you in the background, so you might want to improv a line or two.’ So, they stuck a mic on the desk and when they were walking out, I improved the line where I had a computer in front of me and I said, ‘Leslie, I typed your symptoms into the thing up here, and it says up here that you could have network connectivity problems.’”
“Mike Schur [the show’s writer and creator] gets so mad about it,” Pratt says, “because he writes jokes, and he’s very generous, and he writes amazing jokes all the time, but he’s always been very effusive and complimenting of that joke.”
“It’s the perfect joke,” Rob Lowe continues, “because it’s hilarious, it’s story-point driven, and you are the only character who could have said it. That’s why it’s so great. I mean, in theory, anyone could have said, ‘Stop pooping’ and it would have been funny. Andy is the only person — other than Jerry, who is an idiot — who could say, ‘You have Internet connectivity problems.’”
“I know it’s a good joke,” Pratt adds, “because every once in a while, I’ll repeat it to myself and laugh. A joke that makes you laugh every time you hear it is a good joke.”
“When I need to stop pooping,” Rob Lowe concludes, “I say to myself, ‘Stop pooping,’ and then I laugh, and then I continue to poop.’”
Source: Literally! with Rob Lowe