The Good Liars pivot to truth telling

By Brian Braiker

Like what you’re hearing? Subscribe to us at iTunes, check us out on Spotify and hear us on Google, Amazon, Stitcher and TuneIn. This is our RSS feed. Tell a friend!

There’s a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln that seems apropos to today, broadly speaking: “I laugh because I must not cry. That is all. That is all.” I’m thinking of it because my guests “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast” this week have been mining humor from our contemporary political landscape since 2011, when they crashed an Occupy Wall Street demonstration dressed as bankers in a satirical attempt to occupy Occupy Wall Street.

Since then, the duo has been known as The Good Liars. They are comedians Davram Stiefler and Jason Selvig and they have been doggedly traveling the country, most notably to presidential campaign rallies for both political parties, trolling attendees and politicians in fearless interviews that often go viral, all with an eye towards exposing hypocrisy, hubris, absurdity and just plain stupidity.

“This group of people is supporting the guy that refused to peacefully transfer power last time. So there’s so much to talk about there,” says Stiefler of the Trump rallies the two frequent. “But that’s not to say that we don’t keep our eyes open for opportunities on the other side of the aisle, for sure.”

In February Stiefler and Selvig launched a new podcast, “The Good Liars Tell the Truth,” which replays and re-examines some of their more viral moments — like being on the scene during the January 6 insurrection, or, more recently, attending a Trump rally and trying to sell their own satirical version of Donald Trump’s bible to his supporters. They’ve also taken their live act “The Good Liars Fix America” on the road — first performed here in Brooklyn at the Bell House. Through it all, they deftly unpack the political landscape with a little despair and a lot of humor.

“What else can you do at a certain point other than laugh?” asks Selvig. “It’s very, very difficult sometimes. But, that doesn’t mean we’re not going to try.”

The following is a transcript of our conversation, which airs as an episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast,” edited for clarity. Listen in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.

You guys are Brooklynites, liars, self-proclaimed good guys. You have a new podcast, the Good Liars Tell the Truth, so why should we trust you? It’s in the name, “liar.”
Jason Selvig: It’s in the name. We would never lie to you. You should know that. Well, yeah, we’ve made a career, or at least just been doing it for 10 years, being liars in one way or another, but we decided we’re going to do a podcast, tell the truth. Tell you the behind the scenes stories of some of the stuff we’ve been through on the road, some of the crazy experiences we’ve had, but also there’s a lot going on with the 2024 election, so it’s a podcast you can listen to, to try and dissect some of this stuff, and not lose your mind of trying to follow the news, adding a little bit of comedy to it. So hopefully, it makes it easier to digest.

It’s been interesting. I’ve been listening to what you’ve posted so far. It is brand new. It seems like there’s a mix of greatest hits of the Good Liars over the years, but then you pull the curtain back a little bit, and then you’re also doing newer things. Last week you were at the Trump rally in Pennsylvania, very important swing state. We can talk about that specifically, but I wonder broadly, has the tenor or quality of these rallies changed recently, or have they evolved over time? The Trump rallies, specifically.
Davram Stiefler: We were just talking about this, going to Pennsylvania. The first 15 minutes we were there, we’ve looked at each other and said, “Wow, these people are so angry. This is such an angry bunch of people. What’s going on here?” Eventually, it kind of took on the feeling of a typical Trump rally, which means that there’s a little more of a mixed group. You’ll still get the anger, but there’s also a lot of people there to have fun. Maybe it was just because a crazy storm had just blown through and everyone was in a terrible mood. All that to say, they’ve changed surprisingly little over the last eight years now. As we get closer to this election, maybe it’ll get a little more high intensity, I guess, but for the most part, it’s like we’re stuck in a vacuum a little bit, and that’s worthy to note as well. They’re stuck in 2016. They first fell in love with this guy and they’re still feeling that way, so it’s kind of remarkably unchanged in certain ways.

Not your first rodeo. Have any of these actually been at a rodeo? I’m sure they have.
Stiefler: I’m from Colorado, I grew up going to rodeos. I would love it. I would be right at home. So no, I can say for a fact they have not been. That’s a big miss, Trump campaign.

Maybe they’ll pick it up if they’re listening. To your point, you’ve been going to these since at least 2016, 2015. At what point does Stockholm syndrome become a factor? Do you ever start feeling warmth towards these people? Like, oh, it’s a comfortable place because I’ve been here so much.
Selvig: At a certain point, we looked around and we started to recognize people, whether it be the people selling merchandise, we’re friendly with a couple of the people that sell merchandise that we’ve seen all across the country.

It’s like following the Dead almost.
Stiefler: Exactly is.
Selvig: And it’s funny you say that. There was a guy that I’d interviewed, here in New York actually, who said that his friends used to be Deadheads and now they’re like Trump heads.

Oh, god.
Selvig: They were following the Dead around for years, and years, and years, and now they’re like kind of stoner-ish people and now they’re following Donald Trump to all of his rallies. That is a perfect analogy, because some of these people are Deadheads.

That’s crazy. That’s not a Venn diagram I would’ve envisioned.
Selvig: No. No.

Specifically, to this last week, outside of Allentown …
Selvig: Schnecksville. Schnecksville.
Stiefler: Seems to be the case: You find a medium-sized town and then go a little outside of that, and then you’re at a Trump rally.

Were people playing the Billy Joel song ever? I would be singing it non-stop.
Selvig: Oh, no. They weren’t.
Stiefler: There was one guy jamming out really hard playing the national anthem though, and he was awesome.
Selvig: He was a little bit of a stoner too. Bluebeard was his name, and he was just like, “Yeah, man, how are you doing, man? Could you not put the microphone in my face?” He wanted to be interviewed, but whenever I’d put the microphone [up], he would be like, “Man, come on man. The microphone.”

I love this. You’re selling Trump Bibles that were not the actual Bibles that Trump was selling. Walk us through the bit a little bit. You’re selling these fake Bibles as if they were Trump bibles. “Thou shall put no one above Trump. Thou shall commit adultery,” whatever it was. Tell me what the Trump Bible situation was.
Selvig: We should preface it by saying that Trump right now with Lee Greenwood is selling $60 bibles. $60, 59.95 or something. It’s just made-for-TV, infomercial style commercial he has for it. Just saying how the bible’s great. “We’re going to make America pray again. We’re going to do it folks.” And he’s selling them for 60 bucks.
Stiefler: Forced prayer. Forced prayer.

And these are basically Gideon Bibles that he’s wrapped in his own cover, right?
Stiefler: You have to add the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Selvig: And the Pledge of Allegiance. So that’s worth at least $40 right there.
Stiefler: Yeah, so it’s a bargain is the point. But he’s out there, he’s selling them and people are buying them. Which seems to quite obviously be taking advantage of people’s religion and patriotism to just fill his pockets. So we created the Trump Bible, which is a new Bible, a new better updated Bible. The old Bible is kind of out of date and old. These are stories of Donald Trump, the new savior. These are stories of Donald Trump and all the things you can learn from his life.
Selvig: Parables, really.
Stiefler: And we were selling ours generously for 90, because we thought as a grift, you have to go for it price wise. So we were doing our own grift.

We sold “Trump Bibles” at the Trump rally yesterday. pic.twitter.com/BoveGNKBKA

— The Good Liars (@TheGoodLiars) April 14, 2024

And you actually sold a couple.
Selvig: We sold them. But we should say, since we’re telling the truth now, and we want to be able to plug our podcast in an honest way, we sold them for $10 there to the people. Even though we were asking for 90.
Stiefler: We were willing to negotiate.
Selvig: And people actually bought them. There were like three women, they could not get the money out of their wallets fast enough, and were like shoving it in my face being like, “We’ll take it. Trump Bible?” Yes. That’s all they needed to hear, and even after I read them a couple—
Stiefler: You were like, “Hold on.” And then you read a passage, and they’re like, “Yeah, yeah, we’ll take two. We said, we’ll take two.”
Selvig: Yeah. I read the Trump Commandments and the first one is like, “thou shall commit adultery” and “thou shall lie.” And they were like, “Yeah, give me this. Give me this. Give me this.” It was interesting to see that people would spend the money on something called a Trump Bible, just not even thinking, “Oh, Trump’s name was on it. That’s great.”
Stiefler: I was filming, and Jason was 15 feet ahead of me and I’ve got the line to my left, and I heard a woman say to presumably her husband or someone, “What are these guys doing?” And the guy turns to her and says, “It seems to be some sort of satire based around Trump’s followers’ willingness to pay for things that make them feel comfortable with their nationalism, and Christian nationalism and patriotism.” It was just the most lucid, in-the-moment, exactly what we were doing. Basically it was like, “So let’s not pay attention to them.”

You guys are well known enough that, even if people don’t recognize you from past rallies, do people know who you are? They see you coming and they’re like, “Steer clear”?
Selvig: It’s actually the opposite of that. We’ve seen it at the rallies that sometimes people will recognize us, and we’ve had people come and be like, “Can I get my picture taken with you?” While wearing Trump hats and things like that. And a lot of times they’re like, “Interview me.” And they want to say something like outrageous, because they want to be in a video that’s going out, that people see them online. We’re not looking for people to say something that they’re trying to get famous, saying something wild. We want to hear people’s honest thoughts, and so it’s the opposite of what we’d want from an interaction with somebody.

At first, we would have these interactions and we were kind of happy about it. We were like, “Oh, this is nice.” People on the right are enjoying our comedy, and maybe comedy is the unifier for all of us. And it was a little Kumbaya moment and Davram and I would feel great about it. And then we talked to somebody else who is much more famous than we are. We told them this story, and they were like, “No, no, no, no, no. That’s exactly what got us into this mess with Trump in the first place. These people are just drawn to what they see as celebrity, and they see the D-minus list internet celebrity, and they’re like, ‘I want to get my picture with them. I want to have an interaction with them.’” It’s the same thing that drew them to Trump. “Oh, they’ve seen this guy in ‘Celebrity Apprentice’.” So that kind of burst our bubble, the one thing that made us feel good about everything.

The flip side to that is, does it ever get antagonistic? Have you ever gotten into fights, or felt physically threatened, or arrested?
Selvig: Those are three separate questions.
Stiefler: Those are very different. We talk to a lot of people. Sometimes it gets antagonistic a little bit. People don’t like the media. I wonder where they got that from? We don’t have some microphone flag that says CNN. They don’t know who we are, but they know that they don’t like us sometimes because we’re holding a microphone, so there’s that. Then every once in a while someone will recognize us, and they’re upset, which happens every so often, and we’re happy to move it along. We’re not trying to get into anything. There’s plenty of people to talk to, so we can avoid that. Have we been arrested? Yes, we have, but not at a Trump rally.
Selvig: It’s actually a very New York, Brooklyn thing that we got arrested for.

What was that?
Stiefler: We got arrested for trying to shut down SantaCon.

You’re doing the Lord’s work. I can’t imagine.
Stiefler: It was worth it. For anyone who doesn’t know out there, everyone dresses like Santa, and then just hooks up on the street and throws up everywhere.

Yeah, drinks all day.
Stiefler: We posed as concerned citizens and tried to shut down SantaCon. Told everyone to go back to New Jersey or Long Island, or wherever they came from, and just leave please. And I think we got arrested right as they were going to kick off, right as their pub crawl was going to start in Madison Square Park or something. We got arrested there.
Selvig: The angle was that Davram was wearing a MAGA hat and he was a Republican, and I was wearing a hat that said “Finance Feminists,” and I was a Democrat, like the most liberal liberal and the most conservative conservative. And the one thing we could come together on was that we hate SantaCon.
Stiefler: SantaCon sucks, yeah.
Selvig: We yelled into bullhorns and told them to go back to Long Island Railroad and everything, that the day was canceled. And then we got led away by police officers. We thought we were just getting led away like we’ve been at all these campaign rallies, and then we felt handcuffs going on behind our back. And we were like, “Oh, we’re getting locked up now. Oh, this is fun.”

Going to the pokey.
Stiefler: Going to the big house.
Selvig: That wasn’t fun, but stand for something fall for anything. No regrets.

@thegoodliars The time we tried to cancel santacon. #fyp #funny #prank #nyc #cancelsantacon #foryoupage #xmas #holiday #christmas ♬ original sound – The Good Liars

Do you get nervous still? I mean, you guys are very brave-slash-stupid what you guys do sometimes.
Selvig: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. No, it’s objectively stupid sometimes. Of course, we still get nervous about things. You need to know where you are on people’s annoyance at you, and you can tell if there’s somebody you just don’t want to mess with because they are quick to anger. You can tell these things from just interacting with the thousands of people we’ve interacted with. It is stupid, but we try and be smart about how we do it, and anger is not fun.
Stiefler: There are a lot of conversations leading up to these things, whether it’s in a car ride, or on the phone in the days leading up to things. Okay, what are we hoping to get? Trying to put ourselves mentally in this situation to know what chances we want to take and what chances we don’t. So there is a lot of thought that goes into getting the funny thing and not putting ourselves or anyone else at risk. There’s a ton of thought that goes into it.

You actually talk about that on the podcast, where you guys were there for January 6th. And I think it was Jason, your mom called and said, “You better not be going down there tomorrow.” And you were already there. So you’re like, “Of course I’m not going there tomorrow.”
Selvig: I’m already here.
Stiefler: Technicalities.
Selvig: And then my dad texted me right after that and said, “If you’re in D.C., leave.” They figured that out, and we were already there.
Stiefler: Like eight hours later your dad was like, “Wait a second. What exactly did you text him?”
Selvig: January 6th was one of those things where, yeah, we were there. We experienced all this. That was not a good thing for us mentally and psychologically to go through that. There’s still something I think we’re working through in our own ways, probably through still going to these Trump rallies and doing these videos, because it was a really, really scary scene.
Stiefler: Generally, we try and approach these people like they’re not bad guys. They’re like people we grew up with, or family members. These Trump supporters are a big part of the country. That day, it got so bad, so ugly. It’s hard to classify that alongside anything else we’ve really ever done, with the feeling of watching people actually break into the Capitol, break through the windows. Watching cops actually getting physically beaten up, not far away from where we were. The panic in their eyes, because they saw the crowd was definitely going to overrun them, and this was not going to get under control. And it hasn’t really compared to anything else we’ve ever done, those few minutes after watching that happen.

Because you’ve been studying these people and going to their rallies, and around the scene at a ground level for so long, did it feel like a culmination, or a dress rehearsal? Or some sort of evolution?
Selvig: In the moment, I would say it felt like a culmination and this was it. And then now, of course, three-and-a-half years later, you’re like, “Oh, no, no, no.” Trump’s still here. These people are still here. Now it seems like a dress rehearsal. And this is something we talk about a lot in conversations and with other people. If that wasn’t enough for Republican leadership to be like, “This is not our guy,” then what is it going to be? If you’re denying the election results and not peacefully transferring power, if that’s not enough and then a storm of people, and people die — your own supporters die — and you’re still doing this and still saying these things, then what is going to be enough? It is scary. It is really scary, and it makes me very nervous about the 2024 election. I’m not excited about this. I was hoping Trump would lose in the primaries, and people would come to their senses and then we could move on to somebody else, for comedy’s sake too.
Stiefler: And the only thing that’s happened in the last few years is anyone who was reasonable around Trump is gone, because it was clear they had no future. And then anyone who’s stuck with him is more extreme than they were. So just piggybacking off of what Jason was saying, there was an opportunity to go away from Trump, but the fact that it really didn’t happen, and he’s really still the face of the Republican Party makes it feel like a dress rehearsal. It’s all these officials that are in power that are going to parrot the lie about the election. All that stuff’s in place now, so it’s hard to imagine that it’s going to go away when it didn’t last time. Why would he be more restrained in his response this time? There’s no reason to do that.

To expect some sort of different or same behavior out of this person at this point would be … the track record just isn’t there. Given what you do, or the mandate of mining these situations for humor, how do you mine humor out of a situation? You have a whole episode on despair that both parties are feeling about their candidates in this situation. Where do you find humor there? And do you see your role as finding humor?
Selvig: That’s something we ask ourselves all the time. It’s funny that we have to ask ourselves that question, actually. I think a lot of Democrats are nervous about this. We’ve got Joe Biden. Is this our best option right now with the stakes of Donald Trump, given everything we just talked about with what happened after 2020 and what’s still happening right now? It’s hard. It’s definitely hard. But I think our point of view is, and Davram has said this before, where people are able to stay involved in some way with politics and know what’s going on, through us they are able to laugh at the situations, even though they’re tragic. What else can you do at a certain point other than laugh? It’s very, very difficult sometimes. But, that doesn’t mean we’re not going to try.

And you do it well. I enjoyed the bit where you were asking what movie sequel you think it would be if this election were a movie sequel? And I guess you landed on “Speed 2: Cruise Control.”
Stiefler: Not until I had pitched “Leprechaun 2” pretty hard.

Can I give you a pitch?
Selvig: Yes, please. I’d love it.

Mine is “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.”
Selvig: Oh, yeah.

From the early ‘80s. The original did very well, but this is “Biden 2: Election Boogaloo,” and “Breakin’ 2,” the plot we have feels familiar. It’s a little played out at this point. There’s a struggle by the B-boys to stop the demolition of a community rec center. because a developer wants to build a shopping mall. But in this case it’s Biden struggling to stop the demolition of democracy by a developer who wants to build a dictatorship on the mall. So that’s my pitch.
Selvig: I don’t know. That might be stronger. Wait, what’s the tagline? Electric Boogaloo? Okay, that works. Isn’t that the name of some militia group too?

Yeah. I don’t know how that happened. The Boogaloo Boys or something, and “boogaloo” became somehow fascisit-ized. Whereas, I think of it as dance music and Latin salsa, funky.
Stiefler: This only strengthens your pitch, by the way. This is all working pretty well.

So you guys are feeling this despair then?
Stiefler: Definitely, daily basis. We have six more, seven more months or whatever it is, to just kind of watch this very slow collision that’s happening, just the way our elections work. We have to pay attention to this, and it’s going to take so long to get a result. We’re stuck in this slow motion train collision. We see the tracks are crossing. We see the trains headed toward one another, and we all just have to watch, and watch, and watch. And for us, it means we have to go to these things. We have to talk to these people. I know it’s going to be arduous, but I know we’re going to try and get some funny stuff out of it. And like Jason alluded to, we’ve had people contact us and say that we are their only link to politics.

That’s wild. Do you tell them that that’s a bad idea?
Stiefler: Yeah, yeah. Generally we’re like, “Okay, you should probably broaden your news sources, because we’re not news.” It’s too stressful otherwise. This is the only way to plug in, hear about what’s happening, and at least laugh a little bit, and then go back to their regular lives. So we appreciate that. We appreciate hearing that. And I guess that keeps us going a little bit, to know that some people are relying on us to tell them about what’s going on. So many more months of this.
Selvig: We’re going to make videos even after the 2024 election. We’ve talked to some lawyers, and we’re pretty sure we can bring phones into Guantanamo Bay. It’ll mostly be interviewing the guards and the other prisoners there, but there should be some other celebrities there, so it should be fun.

So the purpose of the podcast then is, I imagine as we go deeper into the election season, you’re going to be keeping it more current, as opposed to revisiting old viral clips and going behind the scenes.
Selvig: I think that’s the goal is, as the election heats up, we’re going to be on the ground more, number one. And be filming at some of these events, both Democrat and Republican. And then also, we are going to be dissecting what’s happening with the trial that’s happening right now. The former President is on trial, which is just wild. We were down there earlier this week.

Did you go to jury selection?
Selvig: I had jury selection on Tuesday, and they looked at my social media and they said, “That’s fine.” So now I’m a juror. I’m one of the six jurors right now.

Did you go out to the court for the jury selection day?
Selvig: Yeah, first day. There was probably about 10 or 15 Trump supporters. Five of them were just people pretending to be Trump supporters, trolling. And then there was probably about, rough estimate, 5 million members of the media there, who were just talking to every single one of the Trump supporters. So it was a circus, a media circus.

To your point of people trolling, do you get people sort of imitating what you do? Or do you see knockoffs of what you do out there? It seems like, especially as social media has completely blown up, that there’s got to be more and more people that are trying to get a rise.
Stiefler: We see other people out there interviewing people, but I don’t know. We’ve developed our routine and our thing that we do. We don’t pay much attention to it. We’re just like, okay, when’s the next rally? Sometimes I suspect, like in Pennsylvania, that one of those people has talked to the crowd just before we have, when people are extra angry.
Selvig: We ran into Jordan Klepper.

Do you go take the air out of his tires while he was filming?
Selvig: No, no. We actually have the same representation. We were like, “Oh, people were so angry.” And then he was like, “Oh yeah, we were in Allentown.” And I was like, “Oh, maybe that’s why.” He just talked to all the people. So to answer your question about the other people can’t stop other people, we’re not the first people to go interview people. I mean, “The Daily Show” has been doing this for 25 years or whatever, or almost 30 really. We’re not the first people. We’re not going to act like we invented the wheel with any of this stuff. And even like the pranking of politicians, other people have done that before, but we’ve done it a lot. We’re proud of a lot of the quote, unquote, “work” that we’ve done over the years.
Stiefler: It’s work.

How much do you research before going into any of these? I think a lot of your analysis that I’ve heard is very interesting and astute. I like when you sort of unpack the Trump follower mindset, their support of authoritarianism and intrusive government as long as it’s not intruding on them. They have these flaws in their thinking that you guys are so capable of pointing out right to their face, and they still don’t see it, or just refuse to see it.
Selvig: Well, we have a worldview. We obviously follow the news and all that stuff, and there’s a good deal of preparation that goes into every one of these every time we go out. Sometimes we don’t do the prep. You can tell afterwards, because it’s just like, oh, we’re not prepared for this. But you never know what somebody’s going to say. You can do all this prep and then it’s just thinking on your toes. Davram talked to somebody in North Carolina who said that Biden wasn’t president, something we ran into before. He very succinctly was like, “Well then who’s the president now? And why are you mad at Biden if he’s not the president, if you think Trump’s president?” And you can see in real time the thought process being like, “Oh, there is a gap in my logic here a little bit.” There is a lot of preparation that goes into every single time we go out.

I know Davram does; do you both have improv background? I know, Jason, you went to study acting at one point. Talk about how you got into this. I know that your first viral pop was during Occupy Wall Street, but can you walk it back before that a little bit? You’re not political commentators. You’re not strictly speaking comedians, but you’re somewhere in the middle, and you have training in both.
Stiefler: I came to New York and did a lot of the Upright Citizens Brigade classes, all the improv classes. I was just loving meeting people, and it was something I’d never done before. I thought it was so cool. And then that led me into just wanting to be in the comedy scene, and hosting standup comedy shows that I was producing and hosting myself. Got some great guests, and one of them was one Jason’s friends, so I connected with Jason. Then we didn’t do comedy for a few years, and basically became basketball buddies for a few years. But I won’t step on Jason’s origin story to get up to that point, but that’s kind of how we met.
Selvig: I went to school for acting, and then I did sketch comedy as well in New York City. And it was through that comedy scene through a guy who was on my team and somebody I went to college with as well, Davram met that we started hanging out. We did a couple sketches and things together and then, like Davram said, we would just play basketball together in pickup games all around the city, and a couple of the rec leagues in the city, and that was basically our friendship. That, and we would drink some beers. Every once in a while we’d have some beers.

Who’s got better game? Jason, you’re clearly taller.
Selvig: We’ll get into an argument if we do this.
Stiefler: It’ll be a big argument. That’s the thing.
Selvig: I’m going to start with a compliment. Davram has a very good three-point shot.
Stiefler: Thanks. I appreciate that. That’s it? That’s all? That’s all you’re going to say?
Selvig: I’m not going to get into the flaws of his game. Yeah, that’s all I’m going to say.
Stiefler: We played a bunch of basketball together. We both respect one another’s games highly. And then like you said, Occupy Wall Street came around. We were like, “Let’s go film a funny sketch there. This cultural moment is happening. There’s got to be something funny to do with this.” So we’d been friends for a while. Like Jason said, filmed a couple of non-funny sketch things, but we were kind of primed for this moment, and we got some thrift store suits, went to Occupy Wall Street, and we represented the 1 percent.

You were Occupy Occupy Wall Street.
Stiefler: We were Occupy Occupy Wall Street. We said if they caused us to make any less money, we wouldn’t be able to have our third houses, or our season Yankees tickets, or our cocaine that we love so much. We’re saying outrageous things. And to our shock, some people thought that we were real bankers, and that, yes, we were being over the top, but that it was 100 percent real. And it culminated with us having real bankers join our protests, and say the stuff that we were saying.
Selvig: That’s actually not the culmination. The culmination was, we’d went down there again, and we were doing our protest or whatever, and then somebody noticed that my shoelaces were frayed, because they were my dress shoes that I’d had since high school,. And somebody was like, “He’s not a real banker.” And then MSNBC just happened to be recording that, and then Rachel Maddow did a whole thing on us that night.

Were you already calling yourself The Good Liars? Where did that come about?
Selvig: From Occupy Wall Street, we ended up with a development deal for a show, a TV show. We needed a name. And I was in a movie, and heard somebody say, “You’re a good liar” in the movie. And I was like, “That’s a good name for us. The Good Liars.” Because there’s like a double meaning to it. That’s where it came from. It was just that random movie.

Was it a random movie? I know you were a small role in “Wolf of Wall Street.” That it wasn’t it, was it?
Selvig: That was Davram.
Stiefler: Very small role, but a meaningful role. Very small.
Selvig: No, the movie was “Safe House” with Ryan Reynolds and Denzel Washington, which I don’t think anybody ever thinks about ever, that movie. Not even an important line in the movie. It was just something that clicked when I heard it, and I wrote it in a notebook.

I’m going to watch it.
Selvig: Okay. That’s on you, man.
Stiefler: We’ll watch “Boogaloo,” you watch “Safe House,” we’ll report back here.
Selvig: I would say watch “Taking of Pelham 123.” If you want up a good bad movie with Denzel, “Taking of Pelham 123” is a very fun.

The original I’ve seen, of course, Walter Matthau.
Selvig: If that’s good. This is not good. It’s very bad. It’s very bad, but in a good way.

We talked about differences in your basketball style a little bit. What I like about the way you interact is that, Davram, you’re incredibly dry, which resonates with me. I like that. Jason, you’re maybe a little more puckish. What would you say each of you bring to the table from a either performative or interview standpoint, when you’re interacting with people in the field?
Selvig: I don’t put a lot of thought into it. Try to be as natural as possible with the interviews, I guess. We’ve done a couple movies where we’ve played characters, and I think there’s a little bit of the ego game with it, where my characters always think they’re very high status, but they’re low status. Davram is kind of the opposite. Where I’m like the arrogant clown and Davram wants everyone to be happy. And we’ll go along with anything. And that’s kind of his tragic flaw. And mine is, I always think that I’m right. And maybe some of that bleeds into our interviews too with the way that we do it.

You did a movie called “Blow Up My Life” last year.
Selvig: And we didn’t have anything to do with the creative of that. Our friends, Ryan Dickie and Abi Horton directed that, in the middle of Covid in 2020. And I’d done two short films with them before, and they’re super talented, and talented at everything as far as filmmaking. And they asked me about being in this thing two years before that, and they were like, “We’re going to do it.” And then they were like, “Do you think Davram would want to do it?” And I was like, “I’m sure he would.” And we ended up both in that. I got to kill Davram, spoiler, but I killed Davram in it.
Stiefler: Still thinking about that, Jason.
Selvig: Fantasy fulfillment type of deal.
Stiefler: Can’t believe you went through with it. We were talking about a couple movies undecided that we made for the 2016 election, and then “The Supporters,” which was our pandemic project about the 2020 election, and filmed bits and pieces of it, and kind of in the heart of Covid, finished up this movie. But like Jason said, we kind of play these different types of characters that may or may not bleed into our interview styles. We both try and just be ourselves. I guess I’m a little drier, and he’s a little more puckish. It works. There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work that gets us to these rallies that he and I do that compliment one another. So 95 percent of the work is logistics of getting to these things, getting the right place at the right time, and so we both do that.

And to be clear, we’ve talked a bit about the Trump supporters and the Trump rallies. But you go after everyone. You’re going to the Biden rallies, you’re going after Andrew Yang, and it’s all fair game.
Selvig: I’m trying to think what the ratio is now. As far as presidential candidates go, we’ve definitely been equal in our pranks. I think every Democrat, there’s only three in 2016, but I don’t know how many of there were, like five or six in 2020, maybe more? When we were in Iowa, I think we went to every single one of their rallies, and at least attempted to do something at every single one of them. And I think some of the funniest ones we’ve done have been with the Democrats actually, to be honest.

That was my next question: Where is it easier to mine humor?
Selvig: It depends on the subject matter.
Stiefler: I think overall, it’s easier to mine humor on the right right now, which is why we end up at these rallies. I mean, there’s this incredibly eager, huge group of people gathering every couple of weeks, and will be through this election. So it’s hard not to go there and talk to people. But the heart of it, this group of people is supporting the guy that refused to peacefully transfer power last time. So there’s so much to talk about there. But that’s not to say that we don’t keep our eyes open for opportunities on the other side of the aisle, for sure. As you mentioned, we’ve done a lot of those pranks.

Jason, you asked Biden at a rally or speech for advice because your wife was leaving you, and he shut you down pretty expertly.
Selvig: Maybe that’s how you look at it.
Stiefler: He made a fool of you, Jason. He made a fool of you in front of all those people.
Selvig: And I want to be clear, he made a fool of my character. I was playing a character in the supporter whose wife had left him, so I was in the mind of my character.
Stiefler: That was some of your best acting of all time though, you looked so hurt.
Selvig: It was very method.

Why do you think, broadly speaking, that conservative people are less funny? I think you can say that objectively, or you can question my premise.
Selvig: I mean, it’s interesting. Because there’s a pushback with comedians and some of them are just terrible. Terrible takes, like anti-trans and all this stuff. The takes that you have from formally very liberal comedians. It’s kind of swapping where things used to be in a weird way, where it’s pushing against norms. It is kind of like a right wing thing now, less than it was before. I don’t know, with the comedy. It comes from a very ugly place, the anti-trans stuff. And I keep saying that because every comedy special has something like that. But as far as why it’s less funny, it’s weird, because Donald Trump is, I think — and I think Democrats are wrong to say he’s not — I think he’s funny. He’s funny. And he does funny stuff.

Not always intentionally funny.
Selvig: Not always, but I feel like this is a problem with liberals sometimes, as they pull the clips of him being mean and terrible, and don’t show the clips of the jokes he’s told. He is self-deprecating. He has a well-rounded humor that you don’t see if you only are watching the clips that are pulled by the news and things like that. So I would say the right wing are leaning on comedy harder than the left right now. Not a comedy that is just making fun of Donald Trump, which we do.
Stiefler: I think there’s a lot of truth to what you’re saying. I think pushing back against norms has become this right wing rebellious thing to do.

But when you’re talking about the norms they’re pushing back on, it’s generally accountability and acceptance, and bigger tent stuff. That’s where that quote, unquote, “woke” bugaboo comes from.
Stiefler: I do think though, that when a big part of, if you’re going to say right wing or conservative, a big portion of the people you’re trying to appeal to are religious people. There’s a lot that is off the table it seems like, or a lot of rules you have to play by. Whereas if you’re liberal, you maybe are playing by a different set of rules, a more comedy-friendly set of rules, I guess. I don’t know. Trying to think about your question in general, it seems like the sides are swapping a little bit. I don’t know what to say more than that. It’s muddier than it used to be, I think.

Which could be good for you guys.
Selvig: Maybe bad for the country.

What else is coming up next? I know you guys have a show in DC on May 23rd. “The Good Liars Fix America. Is that going to come to New York?
Selvig: I think we did four or five shows here in Brooklyn over the last year. We’re going to do another one, might even be a new show, we haven’t decided yet, in Brooklyn later in the summer. Like you said, we’re going to be in Union Stage in Washington DC on May 23rd. “The Good Liars Fix America.” Then we’re going to be out on the West Coast on the 25th and 26th in LA and San Francisco. And then in Nashville on June 6th. It’s a fun show. We solve all of America’s problems.

Thanks.
Selvig: Yeah, of course. But you got to come see the show, or you won’t know what to do. It’s a very important work, but you have to buy a ticket to the show to know how to fix America.
Stiefler: And when you do the math, buying a ticket versus not fixing America, you should probably show up.

I’ll endorse that. All right. So you’re both in Brooklyn. A typical day, I like to ask my guests, do you want to shout out any spots?
Stiefler: It’s nice to be in Brooklyn. People know us. If we walk around, people will give us a shout-out. That’s really nice. Every regular day is a lot of Jason and I meeting at Barclays Center, because it’s kind of halfway between where we live. And then just walking around and talking about the next thing we may or may not do. Debating prices of plane tickets, and if we each have it in us to go to another Trump rally right now. Where we’re at mentally just walking around the neighborhood. That’s most days that we’re in town. We’ll meet up and walk around and talk.

What is the next rally or spot where you might pop up? This is coming out on the 22nd. When are you hitting the road again?
Selvig: We don’t know. Sometimes there’s stuff that we’ll see months out and be like, “We’re going to go to that.” There was a flat earth convention in Las Vegas that we saw about. I don’t know even know how I found it. I was Googling.
Stiefler: It was awesome.
Selvig: It was called Flatoberfest. It was in October last year.
Stiefler: We have some great footage we haven’t put out. Just a little taste. This woman got up, I don’t know what her credentials were, but she said, “Who drinks their own pee?” And 60 percent of the crowd raised their hands.
Selvig: That was like the 15th craziest thing that we saw. It was wild. It was wild. So we knew that one months in advance. But usually, there’s big things like the RNC and the DNC and all that stuff that you know about. Sometimes it’s just like, oh, Trump announced a rally three days before the rally. And we’re like, “Should we go to wherever the hell North Carolina this weekend? All right, let’s do it.”
Stiefler: We were invited to possibly be there for Satanists invocation or something. So we would love to go to that just to see what it’s all about. I don’t know if it makes sense, the cost, and the time of getting out there to see this.
Selvig: It’s Church of Satan. They’re not like really worshiping Satan. I don’t know if you watched the “Hail Satan” documentary. They’re doing it for the separation of church and state to prove points.

Okay. I was going to say, where does that fit in with your brand?
Selvig: Oh no, we’re both Satanists. We both worship the dark Lord Satan.
Stiefler: A little factoid about us.

That’s why I had you on.
Selvig: Yeah, that’s where he gives us all of our fuel. And obviously, we drink the blood of children as well, for their adrenochrome.

And your own pee.
Stiefler: Mm-hmm. That’s just for safety.
Selvig: George Soros makes us do it, so we have to do it. It’s part of our contract.

Is there anything you want to add before we go?
Stiefler: We have something called HeroHero. You can go to herohero.co/thegoodliars, and we’re putting out ad-free full podcast episodes, plus additional bonus episodes on there. So it’s a $5 a month subscription thing. But we’re building it, and we’re excited to put out exclusive content on there, so join us on there for things you can only see there.
Selvig: It helps us go to all these terrible, terrible places that we go to.

You must have seen a huge chunk of the country that you otherwise never would’ve gotten to. Can’t be all bad.
Selvig: There’s been places that I’ve been surprised by. All in all, we’ve been to Detroit three times. We’ve been to St. Louis. It’s not a lot of stuff that we haven’t maybe been around.
Stiefler: We were going to go to Alaska, and that didn’t work out. That would’ve been so cool.

That would’ve been cool.
Selvig: Greensboro, North Carolina I thought was actually a lot better than I thought it was going to be. So sometimes I really like some of the places we go. Quincy, Illinois. I liked too. There was a Trump rally there.
Stiefler: Loved it.

Check out this episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast” for more. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts.