“Jolly Green Jizzface.”
“Unstable piece of human scaffolding.”
“World’s biggest single-cell organism.”
Credit: Paul Schiraldi/HBO
“Sentient enema.”
“…like someone melted Play-Doh on a flagpole.”
“Walking trisomy.”
Justin Stephens for EW
“Herman Munster’s brother who liked to molest that pudgy werewolf kid.”
“He totally loves it,” Louis-Dreyfus tells EW.
“And I love it.
Colleen Hayes/HBO
And I love thatheloves it.
Otherwise we wouldn’t have continued.
He loved the creativity of it, and the surprises that he got.
He was absolutely amazing about it.
He always encouraged us to do more.
He couldn’t be more different from his character, and that’s what made it okay.
But Tim, as a person, is the absolute nicest human being on Earth.
So that was a strange thing to think that these two people shared the same body.”
“There is no other form of communication on the show.
I remember early on realizing that these insults mean nothing to [these characters].
If you don’t want to be insulted, then you’ve got the option to’t work there.
Nobody ever takes it personally and I feel like nobody knows that more so than Jonah.
“Yes, I know that my body doesn’t make sense,” Simons jokes at one point.
“It looks like I was put together with a bunch of parts from other people.”
Call it: don’t just get irate, get ornate.
“It had to be more interesting than just telling people to f off.”
(Although when it came to Jonah, Selina made that singhereandhere.)
In the hunt for innovative insults, there was ample comedy to be mined from Jonah’s size.
From the earliest rehearsals, Louis-Dreyfus also saw comedic gold in Mt.
We can make hay with that, pointing up at him,'” she says.
(Side note: Jumbo jokes weren’t part of the plan originally.
The insult crafting wasn’t limited to the writers' room, though.
This loose, collaborative time is when the best tragic Jonah magic often happens.
Tim laughs as much as anybody, but it’s horrific in a funny way."
Even though it might be the worst thing you’ve ever heard, I do love hearing it.
And even if it’s directed at me, I do love hearing it.
Or, ‘What if it wasthis?'"
“We spent a lot of time apologizing to each other,” Scott recalls with a chuckle.
You’re totally normally shaped.
There’s really nothing wrong with you.’
And then we’d all have drinks afterward and laugh about it.
Wait a second, he’s a handsome guy!'
That’s what’s so funny about it.
But that tall thing ends up trumping everything else.
You sort of forget that he’s intelligent and handsome."
We’ve called him a shaved Sasquatch already?'"
That last one got crossed off in our last episode.")
and a key one involved creative exhaustion.
“If you want to really talk about ‘Why did we endVeep?’
we just ran out of things to call Jonah,” semi-jokes Mandel.
Gluing them together doesn’t make it any better.'"
That said, they valiantly managed to stick it to him all the way to the surely bitter end.
“We did begin to think, ‘Oh, no, have we run out?'”
“We feared the worst, but we always found more hideous depths to sink to.
We all surprised ourselves with how abhorrent we could be, when pushed.”
Is there a line?
If so, where is it?
“I guess if Tim had burst into tears, we would have pulled back,” quips Mandel.
“I’m not sure we ever thought there was a line.
Honestly, it was always just: If we were laughing, it was good.”
“I have a pretty good poker face,” he notes.
Or lack of it, actually.
Simons deftly played Jonah as if he wields his larger-than-warranted ego as his Captain America shield.
Another go-to move was to become indignant and fixate on the wrong part of the insult.
And Jonah doesn’t care that he’s been called a homonculus.
He’s just like, ‘How do you guys both know that???’
That’s the thing that he’s more concerned about.
Or he gets mad about the plus-size part."
Did Simons have a favorite aural assassin?
And which Ryan rips over the years rank among his most loved?
“He thinks that’s possible: ‘Oh yeah, this might work.’
Of course, it’s not going to work, but I love that he tried.”
“Oh s, is that Jonah’s kid?”
“They’re going to be pulling that kid out of you in shifts.”
(It should be noted that Simons’ wife was pregnant when that episode aired.
“He’s a very tallnuisance.”
Here’s another way to illustrate the bulletproof nature and culturally resonance of Jonah Ryan right now.
“That’s how convinced he is of his own success and superiority.
And perhaps there is something truly wrong with America, because maybe he’s not wrong.”
Will he be right enough to reach that final goal the Oval Office by season’s end?
“One thing I’ve never wanted for Jonah is for him to ever be redeemed.
But I also want them to pay for ever having that reaction.”
