'Bush' League: Comedy Central Bullies the President

IT'S OFTEN IMPLIED that President Bush's actions are like that of a schoolyard bully mixed with the hard-headedness of a third-grader.

Donick Cary took that idea and developed it into the hilarious new program "Lil' Bush." The animated series originally debuted as a cell phone show; it will premiere on Comedy Central on June 13 at 10:30 p.m. The half-hour shows have been expanded from their cellular beginnings, featuring two stories with some musical interludes by Lil' Bush's cartoon band.

In the tradition of Comedy Central's previous presidential satire, "That's My Bush!," the show stars George W. Bush, but reverting him into a third-grader who's living at the White House with his presidential family, including his dad, George H.W. Bush, his mom, Bar, and his mentally challenged brother, Lil' Jeb. He attends school with the likes of Lil' Rummy, Lil' Cheney, Lil' Condi and an assortment of other political guest stars.

Cary and rocker Iggy Pop — the voice of Lil' Rummy — discussed "Lil' Bush" in a recent press conference.

» EXPRESS: Donick, you were the original voice of Lil' Rummy. What made you decide to pass the buck to Iggy?
» CARY: Basically Comedy Central did. I did the voice on the cell phones. We were kind of making those as quickly and cheaply as possible so I did a bunch of voices; I've never done that before. But the first note I got from Comedy Central was like, "We loved everything about this, but the voice of Rumsfeld is not so great." I was like, "You guy know that's me, right?" And they were like, "Um, yeah."
So I had to do some recasting and then I was like, "God, who has the right gravity for this guy?" And I happened to be listening to an Iggy Pop album when I was thinking about it. I was like, "You know what? Let's just call Iggy; see if that's something he wanted to do."

» EXPRESS: Iggy, could you describe Lil' Rummy as a character? Is he fun-loving? Is he serious? What kind of guy is he?
» POP: He's the kind of guy that has put a lot of thought and preparation into deciding that he's going to put over. He's a put-over, sell-it-to-you, this-is-the-way -we're-doing-it guy. And he's going to get rattled really easily if anyone disagrees, so he can go from definite to urgent to strident to the edge of hysterical.

» EXPRESS: Can you relate to all of that?
» POP: Yeah, of course. I think we've got a lot in common.
» CARY:We're also playing it like he's a classic school bully with a little bit of psychopath in there and not afraid to take anyone on.

» EXPRESS: Did you have that same kind of freedom at Comedy Central that you had on the cell phone shows?
» CARY: To some extent. I mean, there's a lot more restrictions doing anything on a network. But having said that, Comedy Central is known for doing stuff that's edgy and takes those few risks, and they do a lot of political stuff. So there are things in this that they've gone like, "Wait a minute; that seems a little too edgy." And I can easily point out, "You've done something like that on 'South Park.' You've done something like that on the 'Colbert Report.'" So, it's actually a pretty good home for this.

» EXPRESS: Who writes the bubblegum pop songs?
» CARY: I wrote about 90 percent of those lyrics and I found a great guy — our daughters were in "Mommy and Me Yoga" together. And I went to the party and this guy Chris Phillips, who was the drummer for the Squirrel Nut Zippers, happened to be one of the dads. We started talking and I was like, "Hey could you put together a little punk-pop band and record some songs?" And he did it in a second, and we've gone in and now we've probably recorded about 20 of these silly, fun, crazy songs.

» EXPRESS: What were you thinking of in terms of the influences for the songs? Was it somewhere between The Archies and The Banana Splits?
» CARY: Yeah, yeah something like that. I mean, the songs cover a lot of ground. We're doing, hopefully, a lot of these shows [and] we're trying to make every song have sort of a different feel. It's all the Lil' Bush bands, so it's always the same four "musicians," but it's inspired by The Archies the cartoon Beatles or The Monkees. But we're doing parodies of The Sex Pistols and Guns N' Roses and The Grateful Dead and anything from Kiss to Wham.

» EXPRESS: Iggy, are you going to be providing any music for the show?
» POP: I doubt it. They probably can't afford me, but....
» CARY: That's probably true.
» POP:I'm cheap for voices — for voiceover.

» EXPRESS: What kind of contributions can we expect from some of the guest musicians that you have coming up?
» CARY: I can quickly walk you through. We have a number of people who are doing the show. Dave Grohl and Anthony Kiedis are all playing themselves in an episode that's a Lil' Live Earth concert where our little gang sort of infiltrates the Live Earth show and takes it over to convince everyone that global warming's awesome.

Frank Black from The Pixies is doing voice of Satan in an episode where Lil' Cheney has a heart attack and goes to hell and then bugs Satan so much that Satan has to kick him out of hell.

Jeff Tweedy from Wilco is doing a voice. He's doing the voice of God — or as Lil' Bush calls him, "Goddy" — and tries to help Lil' Bush understand evolution. Henry Rollins did a voice for us where he's playing an Iraq War veteran who gets stuck in Walter Reed and the kids come in and try to fix the place up and annoy him.

And Colin Meloy from The Decemberists is doing a voice where Jeb Bush — who is played fairly dumb in this — he gets hit in the head and becomes smart. His smart voice is going to be by Colin Meloy. And then the weirdest one, we're about 90 percent closed on, is it looks like Boy George is going to do the voice of Tony Blair. He and Lil' George have a special friendship — not gay, exactly, but they do a duet about being buddies....

» EXPRESS: Have you entertained the idea of doing a Lil' Hillary or a Lil' Obama?
» CARY: All of them appear in the show. This all takes place in Washington, in the White House, and the kids go to Beltway Elementary School, where Lil' Hillary, Lil' John Kerry, Lil' Barack, Lil' Al Gore — everybody's there. And they get in rivalries, they fight over stuff, they have school elections and compete for tables in the lunchroom.

» EXPRESS: Is anybody off-limits?
» CARY:I think there's jokes that are off-limits but I don't think there's anyone specifically off-limits.

Illustrations courtesy Comedy Central