I Think You Should Leave put in some hard work flopping all of those coffins
Corncob TV's premier reality TV series required special coffins and dedicated stunt people
As it turns out, showing “over 400 naked dead bodies” on TV, whether in reality or through one of I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson’s best sketches to date, is a truly difficult endeavor. In order to investigate how the show’s creators managed to film all those spread blue butts crashing to the ground, Vulture talked to the people who made it possible, learning that the segment required a lot more than “just shooting funerals and showing the ones where the bodies fly out.”
They did, in short, rig all of that shit. After being faced with a script that had Robinson monologue about the injustice of Coffin Flop’s cancellation for “like six, seven pages,” directors Jeffrey Max and Zachary Johnson got to work figuring out how to break the number of coffins they’d need for the bit. They turned to lead prop maker Joe Holliday, who was challenged by the fact that coffins are usually both very heavy and filled with potential dangers since they’re “designed for people that don’t feel pain anymore.” (Or, as the sketch itself puts it: “They ain’t got no souls.”)
Stunt coordinators then got to work finding “small people that fit the coffin,” who would be capable of dropping “off of the special railings Holliday had added to the insides of each [prop] coffin and then break through the wood below.” These people were relatively hard to find since falling out of a coffin a whole lot isn’t the most glamorous stunt work. They landed on a guy named LJ LaVecchia, a stunt person “recruited for his ability to fall down stairs really well,” for some of the hardest shots.
The crew worked quickly, Holliday stating that they smashed through more coffins in a single day than the number of desks broken when he was working on The Eric Andre Show’s fifth season. In the end, they accomplished what they set out to do, giving us all the dead bodies falling through coffins that we could want.
Read the rest of the article for more, including photos and videos of stunt coffins and LaVecchia falling all over the place. And then, knowing how hard Coffin Flop was to pull off, write those bastards at Spectrum to let them know what you think about their decision to drop Corncob TV from their cable offerings.
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