You might not be able to tell by looking at them, but Nate Fernald and Steve O’Brien are hilarious. To be fair, you can’t really tell by looking at most people whether they’re funny or not. Most visual indicators are misleading. Clowns and owners of Hawaiian shirts may purport themselves to be funny but are often the opposite. And certainly an unfunny individual may hide behind a fake mustache. No, the way you find out that Nate and Steve are funny is by listening to their debut CD, Correctamundo!

As Team Submarine, Nate and Steve plume the depths of hilarity and leave listeners breathless…literally. The CD is so funny that one reviewer was seen grasping at the air as though reaching for imaginary guardrails to hold onto to keep himself from falling over due to laughter. Correctamundo hits such great heights that it reaches even the double-laugh — when one’s laughter is interrupted by another laugh, folding onto itself like a laugh burrito, which leaves one sighing with satisfaction before being caught up in yet another guffaw. The album is as rich as it is funny, with each listen revealing nuances, unnoticed details, and a clear indication that Team Submarine has arrived. AND IT’S ONLY $5!

Ben Kharakh: How did your partnership begin?

Nate Fernald: A mutual friend gave us each other’s phone number when we first moved to Chicago. We talked on the phone a couple of times and it was super awkward, and then six months later, we forced ourselves to hang out with one another because we didn’t have any friends.

Steve O’Brien: We met in a diner and read each other sketches. I didn’t think it was going to work out, but then Nate read me a sketch that used the word “balljazz” over 30 times and I thought it was hilarious and was completely sold.

NF: That was actually Steve’s sketch. I just read it to him.

SOB: And it was hilarious.

BK: How do the real Steve and Nate compare to their onstage incarnations?

SOB: The roles are actually kind of reversed. Nate, in real life, is very responsible and usually takes care of booking and all the administrative work.

NF: And Steve, in real life, is an idiot who can’t read words.

SOB: Nate, what are you typing? Read it to me.

NF: I said you have cool hair.

BK: Was it intentional for all the tracks to flow into one another as though they were a single cohesive show as opposed to a collection of tracks?

NF: Yes, it actually was a single show. We edited out a couple of chunks here or there, but the CD is basically the show start to finish — warts and all.

SOB: We didn’t actually realize you could record a few shows and edit them together. We thought you just had one go at it and that was it. Also, we weren’t sure if we could get enough people to come to multiple shows.

BK: Where would you perform when you started out?

NF: When we first got together, we applied for a run at the Second City, but for whatever reason, the most esteemed comedy theatre in the city didn’t want to give a show to two 21-year-olds who have absolutely no idea what they’re doing.

SOB: Then we watched a documentary on The Kids In The Hall, and their first shows were put up in a bar or something in front of nine people, so we rented out a classroom in a community center and invited our friends.

NF: From there, we were able to get shows in theatres, but we were doing sketch shows so it was pretty standard, as far as what an audience expects.

SOB: But with the two-man stand-up thing we do now, sometimes, when we do a stand-up room, people will be like, “Why aren’t they telling jokes? And why are there two of them?” and when we do a theatre, people will be like, “Why are they just standing there and talking?” But we’ve gotten much better with getting the crowd warmed up to us as opposed to just jumping right into it.

NF: The first time we did a comedy club (like a tourist attraction, two-drink minimum type of place), it was awful. Five minutes in, people weren’t aware that we had started doing our set yet.

SOB: What we do takes a little bit of time to set up, and when you’re only given a six-minute slot, there’s not really enough time to do that. But we’re learning how to get them on our side a little earlier in the game so they’ll bear with us through the set-up.

NF: We’re making a How To Enjoy Team Submarine DVD that people have to watch before they come to a show.

BK: By the way, how is it that you refer to one of your routines/sketches?

SOB: We usually refer to them as “bits.”

NF: Or gooferz & spooferz.

SOB: Sometimes we call them masterpieces.

NF: “Guys, for our next masterpiece, we present a little number called ‘Peanut Butter and Smelly.’”

BK: It seems like, if it were to be taken as a whole, your show is about putting on a show and failing at most of the things you attempt, which is where a lot of the laughs come from. By making it a show within a show in which you portray characters with your own names, you end up making the show even more exciting and surprising than it already is because you heighten the sense of, “This is happening right now.”

SOB: One thing we always talk about is that if Steve actually got his way, it’d be the most boring show in the world.

NF: If Nate didn’t mess up the show, Steve would just come out and sing a song, and then the show would be over. Steve never intends for it to be a 40-minute show, or for it to even be funny.

SOB: With the newer stuff we’re writing, we’re taking it even further in that direction. We love the idea of the audience thinking that something’s actually going wrong. Eventually, we’ll get to a point where we pretend Nate’s sick, cancel the show, and call the audience two weeks later to tell them it was just a joke.

BK: A significant amount of the CD is about failure — failure to write jokes, failure to write jingles, failure to prank call, failure to communicate, etc.

NF: There is something really amusing about utterly failing at something.  I also enjoy when things completely lose their original vision, like straight-to-DVD sequels or when TV shows jump the shark.

SOB: I love straight-to-DVD sequels and when shows jump the shark. Along the lines of failure, the most memorable shows we’ve had are the ones where something actually goes wrong. I think it’s funny that, in a lot of our stuff, Nate is failing but with complete confidence about it.

BK: How is it that you create one of your bits? Do you tend to write more on stage or off stage?

SOB: We’ll write a bit off stage and then flesh it out on stage. We’re constantly adding stuff.

NF: The “Jingle” bit — track 3 on the CD — started as something I would say around the apartment (”Pizza ready for some football”). Then we worked it out for the stage and it was about three minutes long. And now, after doing it so many times, it’s over six minutes long.

BK: There’s a lot happening in your bits, and I wonder if you employ any sort of comedy jargon or system of keeping track of what’s going on in them.

NF: We have a tape recorder that we forget to turn on before every show. After our shows, we’ll always be like, “What was that funny thing you said in the middle?” And sometimes we just can’t remember and the joke is lost forever.

SOB: We forget stuff all the time. In that sense, it’s nice to have two people, because if one person forgets something, the other can try to remind them. But sometimes it’s really tough to try and subtly communicate stuff on stage, like, “Hey Nate, didn’t you have something funny you wanted to say next?”

NF: And I’ll be like, “We’re on stage right now?!”

BK: Even though there are track names, every bit itself is segmented into different parts. How do these pieces evolve?

NF: Some of them are just shorter bits that we combined because they had similar themes.

SOB: And sometimes we’ll just have a one-line joke that we’ll find a way to work into a bit.

NF: A lot of our bits we just write using a Ouija board.

SOB: Talk about ghostwriters!

NF: We have 11 of them.

BK: There are times on the album, like on the track “Jingle (Jangle Bingle Bangle)” or “Joke of the Century,” where I think of the comedy of the Marx Brothers or Laurel and Hardy because of the quick exchanges, but to me it seems like you’re tripping over your own misunderstandings and then hitting one another with your misconstruals to do to one another what the Three Stooges do.

SOB: We would do physical comedy, but Nate doesn’t like being touched.

NF: Or hurt…so we have to replicate it verbally.

SOB: We do try to make it a rule that anything “mean” Nate does is never malicious or intentional. He usually thinks he’s doing the right thing.

BK: How much are you conscious of where a joke is going to go when you’re writing it? I ask because there are times on the album where it almost seems like you know where I, as an audience member, might expect a joke to go or what the joke is, and then you end up using the set-up differently. That’s actually the form, as Dana Gould explained in a recent episode of “The Sound of Young America,” that many of the jokes on The Simpsons take. “The thing you think is the joke is not the joke; it’s a set-up to the joke.”

SOB: I’m not that conscious of where a joke is going before I start writing it. I usually start with a basic premise and then it just starts to take a lot of different turns. Then I clean it up afterwards and just keep the good stuff.

NF: I usually have a good idea of where things are going. I’ll usually think of some sort of a game or joke first and then write out the different beats of it. But things really take form when we join forces on them. We work out everything together before it hits the stage.

SOB: When we read bits to each other, we start thinking of places it can go, and then things will gradually expand.

NF: For example, the college tour bit (”Success To Raunch”) had a brief mention of Jay Leno in the original draft, but we thought it was funny so we just kind of blew that out, and that became one of the main parts of the bit.

SOB: Things also really take shape on stage. When doing shows, we end up making weird asides, and if they work, we’ll just run with them and keep them in the act.

NF: Believe it or not, the word “Fucklesauce” (from “Joke of the Century”) was not actually written in the first draft but was something I accidentally said, so we kept it.

BK: A comedian’s sensibility is constantly evolving. Having released your first album, how would you say you’ve changed since you first began performing to where you are now?

NF: We’ve changed a lot. We actually started off as a sketch group — scenes, characters, blackouts and all that, but we’d always write bits where we introduce the shows as ourselves.

SOB: We planned on having a few more people join, but then we just started tailoring our stuff for two people.

NF: But it was hard for sketch groups to get much stage time, so we would we take the parts of our sketch shows where we played ourselves and put them up at stand-up rooms.

SOB That’s where we really started to evolve. Our stuff became gradually less theatrical and more conversational. We’re not kept to a script anymore, so things naturally become looser. And then, of course, the fact that, over time we’ve, gotten more comfortable on stage. Even in the year since the CD was recorded, things have changed even more. Both characters are getting dumber.

NF: So we argue less. There’s less “Why I oughtta!” and more “Really? Tell me more.”

BK: Who do you cite as your influences?

NF: We have a lot of different influences for different aspects of what we do. As far as the two-man thing goes, Mr. Show and The Smothers Brothers are two big influences.

SOB: Earlier influences are sitcoms. I grew up on sitcoms — shows like The Simpsons, Seinfeld and even Friends have influenced how we write the back-and-forth dialog.

NF: Conan [O'Brien] is a huge influence as well. That was the show that introduced me to silly, absurd humor. When I was in high school, I would stay up every night to tape Conan, and I’d pause out the commercials and interviews so I just had these tapes filled with jokes and sketches.

SOB: I was obsessed with [David] Letterman all through junior high. I made a deal with my mom that if I took naps in the afternoon, I could stay up and watch the shows. Then there are stand-ups. Nowadays, we see more stand-up than anything else, because that’s mostly where we perform. Comedians like Louis C.K., Patton Oswalt and Mike Birbiglia — and how they take one topic and really wring out everything you can get from it.

BK: How did decide when it was time to record a CD and when these pieces are “done,” if you ever feel they are done at all?

SOB: Basically, when we’re sick of doing them.

NF: A CD is kind of an excuse to retire a bit.

SOB: But even some of the ones from the CD that we still do are totally different now. We know the bit is done when my father would never approve of it.

NF: Also, we recorded it just as we were leaving Chicago for New York and thought it’d be nice to kind of archive that chapter of Team Submarine.

SOB: On our next CD, we’ll archive the next chapter of Team Submarine. It’ll be called  ”We’ve Made A Huge Mistake!”

NF: It’ll be a triple album. We don’t want to give too much away, but think Andrew Dice Clay meets Better Than Ezra.

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