Seth Rogen, star of comedy vehicles, cult TV shows, and the occasional international incident, has once again returned to his favorite hobby: Dishing out succulent hot takes to the Twitter-reading masses. Fresh off of getting banned from a steakhouse and feuding with Kid Rock—which, on an interesting side note, gives him the same demographic profile as the front man of an Eddie Money tribute band—Rogen has weighed in to support a Los Angeles-based comedy writer in a brewing conflict with MTV and College Humor.
The writer in question, Van Robichaux, contends that MTV’s new collaboration with College Humor, Middle Of The Night Show—in which celebrities are “ambushed” in their bedrooms and forced to host an impromptu talk show—is a copy of a live program he and several other performers put together at the UCB Theater in L.A. in 2010. That show, “What’s Going On?” forced The Birthday Boys’ Mike Mitchell to host an on-stage talk show with no information about who his guests were, or what topics he’d be asked to discuss. According to a document that Robichaux’s been passing around—and which Rogen has tweeted to his millions of followers with a declaration that what MTV’s allegedly done “IS BULLSHIT!”, the “J’accuse” of the social media world—Middle Of The Night Show producer and College Humor executive Spencer Griffin saw “What’s Going On?” in 2011, and lifted its concept for the web video “Midnight Talk Show Prank,” upon which the MTV show is based.
Naysayers might point out that the web video’s central conceit—waking someone from a dead sleep to host a talk show, with a live band and Scott Adsit streaming unannounced into his bedroom—is already pretty far from the basic idea of “unprepared talk show host,” and that MTV’s tweak of making the celebrities the hosts blurs the lines even more. But that doesn’t matter, as Seth Rogen—who’s worked with Robichaux in the past for a Funny Or Die video—has spoken, and BULLSHIT has been declared. Now, it only remains for us to wait and see which mid-priced Midwestern restaurant MTV executives will be refused entry to, the standard penalty in the world of Rogen-law.