clockwi se from bottom left: dave mccary, nick rutherf ord, beck bennett , and kyle mooney.
“Kyle’s dress is hiked up and I’m basically fucking him from behind,” says Nick Rutherford. He’s squished into a booth at a diner in Times Square with Beck Bennett, Dave McCary, and Kyle Mooney. They’ve come here on a break from their new job to talk about their work as Good Neighbor. “At some point I take my pants off and shit in the yard.” “Fake shit,” interjects McCary, the man behind the camera, always. “This is broad daylight,” adds Rutherford. “The simulated sex was very explicit and on-point,” says Mooney. By way of example he clutches the table and banshees a primal moan. The wholesome ears of tourists twitch. “You blew me at some point,” says Rutherford, pointing over an enormous kielbasa to Mooney. “Anyway, we’re wrapping when the cops show up. Someone had told them we were shooting a porno in the front yard.” The police demanded to see the footage. “We were like, ‘This is an Ethernet camera; you got a Cat-9 cable?’ We just gobbledygook-techno-talked them out of it.” Eventually they left with a warning: “Watch what you’re doing,” they told the Good Neighbor crew. “There are kids around here.”
Naughty, raw, tricky, clever—this is Good Neighbor. And the deft commingling of these elements in over 50 videos has entertained millions. McCary, Rutherford, Bennett, and Mooney met at the University of Southern California. Their onscreen chemistry is a similar combination of unlikely elements: Bennett’s frat-boy looks; Rutherford’s watchful frailty; Mooney’s geeky abrasiveness; McCary’s seamless sleight of hand. After USC they formed Good Neighbor in gritty South Central Los Angeles and quickly developed an online following, racking up millions of views for their work. “I think of our YouTube experience very much like a gym,” says McCary. “We were practicing and getting stronger with each rep.” Even their early videos showcased a vision that complicated sketch comedy and carried a subtle commentary on their chosen medium. “What if we could make a video,” says Bennett, “that people didn’t even know was a sketch.” “We like the idea of confusing people who stumble across our shit,” says McCary. In the beginning the group admits to aping the style of The Lonely Island, the comedy group—formed by cover star Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone—that rose to celebrity with viral videos such as “Dick in a Box,” made for Saturday Night Live. “We thought
PHOTOGR APHED BY ERIC HELGAS
that’s what you needed to do to go viral,” says Rutherford. McCary adds, “The path that Lonely Island took got us excited to think we could get somewhere legitimate by making little videos.” So it’s either ironic or prophetic that SNL hired Good Neighbor in 2013 to replace the outgoing members of Lonely Island. Despite the major leap forward in exposure, credibility, and budget that comes with network television, Good Neighbor has experienced some growing pains since relocating to New York, and it’s not just the difference between life on opposing coasts. “A lot of our videos would play well on the Internet,” says Bennett. “But they test first in front of a live audience.” “What we do is so nuanced that you want to watch it a few times, but it’s put up on these little monitors after a big musical sketch,” says Mooney. “We don’t really make it easy for an audience to come in. You’re either on board or you’re lost.” “It’s kind of frustrating,” says McCary. “But laughter has become something I’m so much more aware of. We have to adapt. We still have a lot of work to do.”
