The Parks and Recreation cast is full of pros. All of them are comedic geniuses, which means they know how to make people laugh, and they could get each other to break from time to time. To prove that point, Aziz Ansari revealed a story about him and Adam Scott not being able to hold it together during one particular scene of this fantastic sitcom, and I can’t get over why they couldn’t stop laughing.
Aziz Ansari was explaining how he’d try and get his castmates to break with Amy Poehler on her podcast, Good Hang. The Tom actor explained that he would try and get his hilarious Parks and Rec co-stars to laugh, and then he told the story behind the scene he broke the hardest for. Calling it “the hardest scene I’ve ever had to film in my entire acting career,” the Master of None co–creator said:
It’s me and Adam Scott, and we’re having lunch with Joan Callamezzo. Mo Collins, who always is just so funny. We’re at a lunch and she says, ‘I’m going to go powder my nose amongst other things.’ And then she walks away. And then Adam comes to me and goes, and then Ben is supposed to say, ‘Uh, dude, is she going to go powder her vagina?’ And we couldn’t do it.
For context, this all went down during Season 4, Episode 3 – which you can stream with a Peacock subscription – when Tom and Ben took Joan out to lunch to try and woo her into giving Leslie’s book her sticker of approval. After talking about being a woman with “a strong sexual appetite,” Collins’ character excused herself and went to the bathroom after saying she needed to powder her nose, “amongst other things, if you know what I mean.” She got all up in Tom’s space and then crashed into the table as well.
After she’s gone, Ben asked if she meant her vagina in reference to the “other things” before they tried to diffuse this odd situation they’d found themselves in. In the show, they kill the scene and their deadpan reaction is hilarious. However, in real life, they burned a lot of takes because they couldn’t keep it together, as Ansari explained:
This is the only time I think this ever happened on Parks or anything where me and Adam were like ‘Let’s just film the rest of the stuff, and we’ll come back to that. We’ll just come back to that, because we couldn’t do it.’
He went on to say that every time they came back to it, the second the great Parks and Rec guest star would say “amongst other things,” they’d crack up, and you can see the blooper on YouTube, too. Aziz Ansari and Adam Scott really couldn’t keep it together.
Poehler then explained that Collins was “so funny” during the scene and kept stumbling out of the table…amongst other things. Ansari then said that while they were attempting to film this, she would also “add some other thing” that would make them laugh more. When she’d do that, the Good Fortune star would say:
‘You can’t do that. I just stealed myself. And now you just did this other funny thing? That’s not fair.’
I truly can’t stop laughing about this. First of all, the scene itself is hilarious. Ben asking if Joan is going to powder her vagina with a straight face is so funny. However, the fact that Mo Collins kept doing something new and the guys couldn’t get through it ever makes it even better.
Now, the next time I watch this great show on Peacock, I know I’ll be laughing even harder because I know the full story behind how hard it was to film for Aziz Ansari and Adam Scott.
