We’ve had a soft spot for Jamie Kennedy ever since his performance as mega film geek Randy Meeks in Wes Craven’s Scream. And we’ve also spent a lot of time watching his short-lived but very funny hidden-camera show, The Jamie Kennedy Experiment (which for our money was much more daring and inventive than that lame-ass Punk’d. For example…).

At the tail end of South by Southwest this year, we got a chance to chat with Jamie about his new breakdance comedy Kickin’ It Old Skool, his forthcoming documentary Heckler, and what it’s like to be a standup comedian in a post-Kramer world.

How did [Kickin’ It Old Skool] get started? I’ve heard that it originally started as an idea for a music video.

Not really. Well, Harvey [Glazer] is a music video director. His most famous one is probably that Shaggy video, Mr. Lover. I really liked that video, and I knew he was shooting a video in Vancouver, and I met him and he was like, “yeah, come in and shoot this movie”. He’s a big breakdance enthusiast, and rap enthusiast, and he liked the script.

You were a teenager in the 80s, right? So I imagine this movie is pretty close to home for you.

Yeah. I just love the 80s. If it were up to me, we’d never leave that era. Everything from wrestling to MTV. You know—Nina Blackwood, Van Halen, Vans sneakers, BMX, Run DMC, Cabbage Patch Kids…

Were you actually into breakdancing when you were that age?

I loved it. I wasn’t really a breakdancer, but I wore parachute pants and mesh shirts and stuff. And I might do the worm every once in a while.

Yeah, everybody could do the worm. It’s a pretty standard move.

I particularly loved ‘82 to ‘87. From right around when Fat Boys came out to when Less Than Zero came out. That was the pivotal period of the 80s for me.

How much of your own experience is in the movie? Did you have a lot of input as far as the script and the story?

We wrote the script with some guys I hired. They came up with a lot of great ideas and I put my notes in, but they were really smart, and they loved the 80s too. But there are some jokes in there about how things have changed since then—like my character goes to watch some MTV and an episode of Laguna Beach comes on, and I’m like, “mom, the TV’s broken! MTV doesn’t play videos any more! It’s just a bunch of girls crying”. Because when I was a kid, videos were all MTV played.

It’s sort of crazy that things have changed so much. To me, the 80s don’t seem like that long ago. In the big picture, 20 years isn’t that huge a chunk of time.

Yeah, the 80s really isn’t all that long ago. And if you go to other countries like Australia, they’re really living in the 80s right now, as far as their style and their music. Bands like the Killers and the Bravery are really brining back an 80s sound. If you put on “Smile Like You Mean It” and you put on an Echo and the Bunnymen track, it’s pretty similar. And the fashion is coming back too—if you go to the East Village right now, everybody’s wearing skinny ties and Hush Puppies. The 80s are among us.

I’m not sure that as a culture we’ll feel a nostalgia for the 90s the way we feel for the 80s. Or for that matter, the 50s, 60s and 70s.

What did we even have in the 90s? In the beginning we had paisley shirts. Then fade haircuts? Rockabilly sideburns? It’s tough to define what the 90s were. Maybe it was the first sort of corporate invasion—McDonald’s and Burger King used to be the only big chains, but now everywhere you go there’s a mini-mall with a Starbucks, a Blockbuster, a Subway. Everything’s so compartmentalized. Even Von Dutch, which lasted like a minute, had outlets everywhere. It’s like, “get your hip here, get your food here, get your music here”. There are no hole-in-the-wall type places any more.

When you were making Kickin’ It Old School, did you go back and look at any of those 80s dance-fight movies? Like Breakin’?

Yeah, I watched everything. Wild Style, Beat Street, Breakin’, Breakin’ 2 (which doesn’t hold up, by the way), You Got Served. I also watched this documentary called The Freshest Kids, which I liked a lot. I watched those just for the dancing. Then I watched movies like Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Sixteen Candles…a bunch of those movies, just to get that feeling again.

You know what dance-fight movie doesn’t get enough credit? Girls Just Want To Have Fun.

I never saw that.

It’s really 80s cheese. But it’s awesome. It’s a classic dance-fight story. Sarah Jessica Parker is in it.

Really? I haven’t seen it. I’d like to see it though.

Are you much of a dancer now? Did you do a lot of your own dancing in this movie?

We took classes for nine weeks, popping and locking with Ozone from Breakin’. He was our choreographer. We did a little bit if popping and stuff, but the breaking was all really hardcore stuff, so they’d shoot [close-ups of] me doing moves with my hands [and then shoot the dancers for the rest].

How’d you round up so many 80s personalities to be in the movie?

We just kind of went after them. We knew we had to have some cameos in the movie, so we just did it—we approached Emmanuel Lewis, we approached David Hasselhoff and Erik Estrada, and they all said they’d do it. They were all so cool.

Did they understand that it was an affectionate thing? I sort of thought that Emmanuel Lewis was especially sensitive about his Webster days.

Well, they just wanted to know what it was. And I just explained, “It’s everything that I love from the 80s”. We tried to get Mr. T, but he wanted too much money.

Let’s talk about your standup, because you’re doing a standup tour in the coming weeks, and you’ve got a movie coming out called Heckler, that’s about standup comedy...

Yeah. We’re almost done it. It’s going to be screening at the Tribeca Film Festival for its world premiere.

Is it harder to do standup comedy now? It seems like post-Kramer, the climate for live comedy has changed. It seems like you’d have to be a lot more careful about what you do and say onstage.

Nah. That was just one night that people kind of went crazy with, but that kind of stuff has been happening forever. Kramer just made us realize that everything that used to stay in the club doesn’t stay in the club any more. He obviously went to a dark place, and I don’t know if he meant it or not—he’s an intense dude. With standup, you should just be able to free-flow, and obviously he free-flowed the wrong way. And now there are cameraphones and Youtube and everything, so people put that stuff up [on the internet] and it becomes a sensation.

Are you personally more careful now about what you say onstage?

I wouldn’t say so. There are certain things that would never come into my vocabulary anyway, and that’s one of them. It’s just not my thing. And I don’t even think that [Michael Richards] is a racist, I think he just tried to hurt people that he felt were hurting him—he felt that those guys were attacking him, so he could attack back.

But yeah, there was something on Youtube of me the other day from Spring Break where I was just talking to somebody waiting for our next setup. Someone was filming me and I didn’t even know it. Cameras are everywhere, and people can take things out of context. The problem is that people can take half your sentence. I can say, “I hate fatty foods”, and someone can just use the, “I hate fatty” part, and all of a sudden it looks like I hate fat people.

As a standup, that’s my job, so I’m aware of that stuff. Especially there; I play the [Laugh] Factory all the time and I know that anything can end up on Youtube.

Do you enjoy doing standup compared to making movies?

Yeah. I like the feedback of it. But it’s hard because sometimes I just don’t want to be funny, I just wanna be whatever I am at the time. Sometimes I wanna laugh, sometimes I wanna cry or be weirded out. That’s the only thing I don’t like about standup is that it’s expected that you be funny. Sometime I just wanna say what I’m thinking, but I can’t because it has to make people laugh.

Do you enjoy confrontation though? A lot of the stuff on the Jamie Kennedy Experiment had you in some pretty confrontational situations.

I’m good at uncomfortable situations. I have no problem with that. And I’m not bad at confrontation. But if it gets physical, then I’m not good at it. I’m not a fighter or anything. But mentally, yeah, I’ll stand with anybody. I don’t get wigged out. But if somebody wants to punch me, I’m not good with that.

Sure. Nobody likes getting punched. Have you made any enemies doing gag humor or doing standup?

Yeah, you get people mad. One time I was doing this standup spot in Toronto, and it was a late show, and I started doing jokes about Canada. I was saying something like, “you guys are so easy to please. You put a puck on some ice and everybody goes wild”. And then I made some jokes about their beef being bad. Canadians are pretty laid back people, but there are certain buttons you can push. So they were all laughing, but one Jamaican guy got really patriotic and was like, “fuck you man. If you don’t like it get the fuck out of Canada.” So I said something like, “easy Pepper Johnson”—you know, the linebacker from the Giants? And he started yelling, “fuck you… go back to America” and all this.

He was with this white girl, so I said something like, “sir, are you her boyfriend, or are you her pimp?” And he kept coming after me, and I kept going after him. And it got to the point where they were gonna throw him out, but I told them not to. And I tried to shake his hand, but he wouldn’t shake mine. So he just sat there, hating me.

And that’s when I started to do Heckler. Because people don’t know what goes on in the clubs. There’s a difference between what Michael Richards did—he just went to a really base place, and said something shocking instead of something creative. If a heckler’s beating you, just let him beat you, you know?

But that’s the weird thing about comedy is that it rides this fine line. Part of the goal is to push boundaries and get a response, but people don’t want you pushing things too far. They want you to offend everyone but them.

Well, yeah. You can say things and people will be laughing, but if you go over “the line”, people are like, “hey, whoa!” And for me, it’s like, come on… it’s a fucking joke. Relax. Or you say things that make people sad.

Like I used to tell this joke about my mom—my mom used to keep money in her bra. If I wanted a dollar, she’d pull it from the left side, and she called it the “first national”. If I wanted a five, she’d pull it from the right side, and she called it the “second national”. And if I wanted a ten, she’d say, “hang on, let me open the vault”. People would go “oh my god!” when I told that joke. And I’m like, “yeah… my mom actually used to pull ten dollar bills out of her fucking vagina. You’re so stupid!” People are such apes... such lemmings.

I love people, but… the biggest thing with people is making it interactive. Like last night at [SXSW], rappers would say a line, and people would repeat it. Then they’d feel like they’re part of something, even though they don’t even know what they’re saying. And if you’re a comedian, you can do that too—you can empower people to say shit. That’s what’s so brilliant about Borat: he has the whole crowd saying something, and then they eventually realize that they’re saying some really awful shit.

A lot of the stuff you’ve done has links to hip-hop. You’ve got a new rap album out, Malibu’s Most Wanted was kind of about hip-hop, this new movie has a real hip-hop connection… is there something inherently hilarious about hip-hop?

Well, I think most good rappers are really funny. Eminem is funny. Redman is really funny. Method Man is funny. There’s an aspect of comedy in being a good MC. He’s like a comedian who just happens to spit a different way.

Malibu’s [Most Wanted] was really a joke about white people who think they’re hard and from the hood. They’ve never left their nice suburban surroundings, but they talk like, “yeah, what up, foo?” Growing up in Philly, I’d see Asian kids and Spanish kids and Black kids, and it seemed like the thing that unified them was rap music. All these kids form different backgrounds all trying to emulate this one way of talking or dressing. Hip Hop isn’t funny, but the way people perceive it is funny.

I love fun rap. I like the hardcore stuff too though, because it makes you feel cool.

Sorry—I’m off topic. We should get back to talking about the movie.

Basically, the movie is about my love of the 80s. And it’s about how we’re supposed to be progressing and simplifying things, but instead things are much more complicated now.

You’re pretty on top of all the internet stuff though. Do you have to be technology literate to be an entertainer these days?

Oh yeah. I’m all over that. I’m in Madonna’s top friends on MySpace. I don’t know how I got there, but I am.