Thomas Middleditch tries to turn an L.A. Kings game into a Comedy Bang! Bang! episode
Professional sports are fine, if you like camaraderie and scoring points and stuff, but the average athletic event is sorely missing the dangerous weirdos and random small business owners that pop up every week on the Comedy Bang! Bang! podcast. Luckily, Thomas Middleditch (the star of Silicon Valley and those Verizon commercials) is here to change that. Middleditch recently appeared on the broadcast of an L.A. Kings game as a character named Tony Babcock, a veteran Canadian hockey broadcaster who was ready with all sorts of weird little vocal flourishes and stories about his (apparently very brief) career. In a post on Instagram, Middleditch directly acknowledged his desire to make hockey a bit more like CBB:
The official Kings website offers some background information, but it’s all written in-universe, which is to say that it maintains the gag that Tony Babcock is a real guy and and not just Thomas Middleditch doing a voice. We can, however, get some backstory elsewhere on Middleditch’s Instagram, which includes this video from 2017 where he’s driving and pretends to be a Canadian hockey broadcaster when he stops at a light.