Bob Odenkirk got a chance to dust off his comedic chops this week, after what must have been an intense experience filming the sixth and final season of Better Call Saul. (And not just because he suffered a heart attack on set, though that surely didn’t help!)
During a visit to The Late Late Show with James Corden on Wednesday night, Odenkirk and fellow guest, Righteous Gemstones star Edi Patterson, played a game of “Improvised TED Talks” with Corden and house bandleader Reggie Watts. After Patterson gave a thoroughly entertaining pitch on flamenco dancing your way through a divorce (“get your bodies going in a way that reminds you of when you liked sex”), Odenkirk was given an unusual assignment involving bananas.
“I’m here to tell you something that matters to your life right now,” said the Mr. Show star and co-creator. “I’m Bob Odenkirk, and today I’ll be talking about the benefits of eating the banana with the peel — it’s not what you think!”
“It’s not sexual, it’s not an innuendo,” Odenkirk continued, nearly embodying the motivational speaker character Matt Foley that he wrote for Chris Farley. “I’m talking about bananas, the fruit, that you buy at the —”
The 59-year-old then flipped to the next slide, which was a Fast & Furious 9 poster. ” — at the cineplex,” he finished.
From there, the TED Talk only managed to get wackier, as Odenkirk made his pitch for why bananas (peel-on, naturally) make a better movie snack than hot dogs or nachos, to explaining why the method is relevant to “the whole [bleeping] culture, to pivoting to showing how much of the human body is “one-half banana,” and finally finishing with an explicit lyric from Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B’s “W.A.P.”
It was an outstanding show of improv and return to form for Odenkirk, and as much as we love Saul, it’s definitely got us looking forward to his next comedy project with longtime partner David Cross.
