By Louis Chilton

Copyright independent

Is Fred Armisen being serious? I’m finding it hard to tell. Look at all his work from the past two decades – a startlingly prolific oeuvre that includes a long stint on Saturday Night Live, his own cult sketch series Portlandia, and guest appearances in many of the best modern comedies (30 Rock; Parks and Recreation; Brooklyn Nine-Nine) – and it’s hard to find a moment in which he is not wrapped up in some kind of shtick. I’m reminded of a line from John Mulaney’s post-rehab stand-up set, in which he describes his “star-studded” drug intervention: “Fred Armisen was serious. Do you know how off-putting that is?” Today, though, Armisen seems to be playing it straight – and while I wouldn’t go as far as “off-putting”, I must admit I’m a little bewildered.

The 58-year-old comedian and musician is discussing his new album, 100 Sound Effects – a 101-track record composed entirely of, well, noises, ranging from “Wine Glass Breaking in Sink” to “Tentative Sawing”. I ask, off the bat, why he decided to make it – often a pretty rote interview question, but here, one for which I am desperate to know the answer. “I thought, ‘There are music recordings, and comedy recordings… but what happened to the library version of a record?’” Armisen responds. “Something to access, to use as a tool. An album that’s for utilitarian purposes.”

Comedians including Mary Lynn Rajskub, Tim Heidecker, and Riki Lindhome (who’s also Armisen’s wife) feature fleetingly on the album, and some of the tracks are undoubtedly funny. (Other selections include “Sparsely Attended Show Encore with Someone Shouting ‘Where’s Jim?’”, “Haunted House Piano”, and “Important Film – Italian Woman Yelling Through a Doorway in a Small Italian Town”.) But this is no straightforward comedy album. “I hope the reaction is like, ‘Oh, that’s accurate,’” says Armisen, earnestly. “‘This is an accurate representation of what camping sounds like. This is an accurate representation of what tuning a guitar sounds like.’ And then if it’s taken as a joke, then great.
But really, it’s more like, maybe 10 years from now, if there’s a production that needs, say, the sound of a washer-dryer from 2025, they don’t have to go digging through all kinds of stuff to find it.”

Each answer seems only to raise more questions. A “utilitarian” sound library is all well and good, but why is Fred Armisen, one of the stars of Netflix’s smash hit Wednesday, the person who’s spent a year of his life recording it? Even the fact that he’s now doing interviews for it feels, I remark, rather funny. “‘Funny’ is probably a good word for it,” Armisen replies. “But everything I’ve done in my work and career – Portlandia, [Armisen’s recent HBO series Los Espookys], any of those shows – I had no idea what the reaction was going to be. I pretty much bank on that question mark.”

He’s got a point. In some ways, an inexplicably functional sound-effect album is in fact perfectly in keeping with Armisen’s sensibility – an offbeat comic individualism that defies conventional pigeonholing. For all his excursions into the cultural mainstream, Armisen has never settled down there; he has spent two decades slipping around the American film and TV comedy scene unwrangled, like a greased pig. Jerry Seinfeld once compared Armisen to an “exotic bird”, and I’ve got to admit – it’s an apt description. There’s a certain avian strangeness to Armisen’s demeanour, in the characters he plays and even over video call today; he is friendly and infectiously upbeat, but ever watchful.

Armisen was a child of immigrants – a Venezuelan mother, who worked as a schoolteacher, and a German-Korean father, who worked for tech giant IBM. Growing up principally in New York, he was an obsessive fan of punk music, specifically British bands, such as The Clash or The Damned. (“England really dictated my childhood – and then my adulthood,” he says.) From 1988 to 1996, Armisen was a drummer in the punk band Trenchmouth, and he still performs sporadically to this day.

“There are some things that I miss about being in a band, and some things I don’t,” Armisen says. “I don’t miss that every decision on where to eat is a group decision. Now it seems like nothing, but in the moment, it feels like torture. And that extends into ‘What venue should we play?’ ‘What’s the set going to be?’ All these things.”

“But,” he adds, “I miss the campaign feeling of it. The tours, the venues. And to play drums that frantically for 40 minutes, really loud… I really miss that. It took away a lot of my hearing, but, oh my God, the feeling of sweating. We played loud. And I haven’t felt this since.”

Armisen’s eclectic early screen work – particularly the 1998 short Guide to Music and South by Southwest, in which he interviewed musicians while playing different characters – rapidly earned him a reputation in the comedy world. So in 2002 he was cast in SNL, becoming a regular cast member in 2004. The US variety series has a reputation for being something of a showbiz pressure-cooker – you hear tales of back-stage vomiting, nerve-shredding performance anxiety, or various gripes with longtime showrunner Lorne Michaels. Armisen, on the other hand, revelled in it. During his time on the show, he proved a versatile impressionist, mimicking everyone from Barack Obama to Queen Elizabeth (memorably reimagined as a crude-mouthed cockney).

If there’s one thing that people misunderstand about SNL, says Armisen, it’s that “every cast member has a different experience. For the most part, it’s a joyous experience – the moments you’re on, and the cameras are on… It’s a very heightened existence.”

Armisen seems resolutely optimistic, when we’re talking about the state of the modern comedy scene (he cites Tim Robinson, Matt Berry, and Nathan Fielder as standouts), television production in the streaming era (“In a way, it’s easier now… when I first started, you would have to hope people watched live, now they can just find it all”), or indeed the fraught landscape of modern America. “I try to focus on the positive aspects whenever I can, even if the news can seem frustrating or confusing,” he says, on this last note. “My parents are immigrants. They were welcomed into this country. When I go on tour here, I get to travel all over and meet people, and talking to them gives me a sense of hope and optimism. There is amazing music and art everywhere I go.”

He embarks, unprompted, on a tangent about his deep affection for England. To Brits, Armisen is seemingly most recognisable for his handful of guest appearances on the Andy Samberg-fronted cop sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine. “I guess it’s big over here,” he says. “Everyone keeps mentioning it. Every time it happens, I tell Andy right away. I joke with him that for all the work I’ve done, it’s those quick little 30-second appearances that have paid my way for England.”

Stateside, he is now mostly approached about Netflix’s hit Addams Family adaptation Wednesday, in which he plays the unsettling but endearing Uncle Fester. The runaway success of that show (by some metrics, Netflix’s second-biggest TV series ever) caught him by surprise. “I don’t know how numbers work, how business works,” he says. “But just walking around in real life, so many more people would mention Wednesday to me. And it was a really nice surprise, especially for something so spooky and weird – I see it as sort of countercultural, and odd… for that to be such a hit is the best feeling.”

Armisen’s future includes a Fester spin-off series and a live tour; he remains, as ever, dauntingly in-demand. When I ask him what he wants to do next, he throws a predictably Armisenian curveball. “I want to do something in a foreign language – a language I don’t really speak that well,” he says. “Something like a Finnish TV show – where I have a small role, really embedded, not a stunt, and way later, you’re like, ‘Oh, my God, was that him?’”

It’s a peculiar answer, but also, I suppose, business as usual. As we wrap up, I ask one last question: what sound effect would Armisen choose to sum up his own life?

Ever the practised percussionist, he doesn’t miss a beat. “A Timbale,” he replies. “It’s a sort of Latin American drum. Tito Puente plays it. It has this melodic, high-pitched sound – it always feels like it’s in harmony with everything, but there’s a sense of humour to it. It’s something kind of goofy.” Cue sound effect: “Interviewer Nodding in Agreement”.

‘100 Sound Effects’ by Fred Armisen is released on 26 September, by Drag City