Comedians Get Nude and Rowdy

With a name like “The Naked Trucker and T-Bones Show,” you might be tempted to pass off Comedy Central’s new program as just another redneck comedy show, following in the steps of “Blue Collar TV.” The duo behind the show, David “Gruber” Allen and David Koechner, say that would be a mistake.

The program features sketch comedy intertwined with onstage banter between Koechner’s “T-Bones” and Gruber’s “Naked Trucker,” whose modesty is only preserved by the acoustic guitar hanging from his neck. “There are a lot of levels to what’s happening all the time on the show,” Koechner said in a conference call last week.

Beneath the show’s red-state surface lies genuine satire and intellectual humor. The pair will often reference literary and academic figures, from Chaucer to Chomsky.

“A lot of the people in the press are missing those elements, calling it a redneck adventure,” said Koechner, who viewers might recognize from his appearances in the film, “Anchorman” and the hit television show, “The Office.” “We’ve hand crafted all of these jokes and trying to play them as true and possible. There are satirical elements to our show that are often overlooked or dismissed.”

Naked Trucker often plays the straight man to T-Bones’s off-kilter antics and back-country twang, though Gruber says there is a lot more to T-Bones than a trailer-trash stereotype. “One word a lot of the Southern writers often used was ‘grotesque,’” Gruber said. “I don’t like to think of our characters as grotesque. They’re obviously human with a full 360 degrees of humanity and emotion.”

The two comics met on the set of “Saturday Night Live” when Koechner was a cast member and Gruber was a guest writer. They shared a love for ensemble comedy like Monty Python and the Marx Brothers, and hit it off. Before Comedy Central signed them for their first season on television, the pair developed the show live at a small club in Los Angeles, where they still regularly perform.

The show features material largely imported from the stage show but cropped to fit within the constraints of television blocking. The improvisational parts of the live show were cut back, though they’ve kept the occasional musical interlude, which they perform with their group, the so-called “Dickaround Gang.”

Though the two aren’t famous yet, they plan a star-studded list of guest appearances. “We decided that if you get one chance to do a television series you should call in all the favors and bring in all your friends any way you can. You can expect a guest star in every episode,” said Koechner.

The pair hinted at a partial guest list, including comic Jim Turner, Andy Richter, Neil Flynn from “Scrubs,” and their old touring buddies, Tenacious D. An early episode features guest Will Ferrell challenging Naked Trucker to a road race, then slicing the front tire of his truck before taking off on foot to the finish line.

But special guests don’t make a show, and for these two comics, it all comes back to the characters they’ve created. “T-Bones is a character who is on a quest for truth,” said Koechner. “One thing I’m trying to bring out through T-Bones is the idea of purely living for every moment, seizing the moment.”