Best known for baking a cookie that looked like an iPhone, eating it in front of a police officer and being briefly detained for it, Randy Liedtke has the market cornered on Internet pranks and tweeting photos of himself at the Los Angeles Police Station. Liedtke moved to LA after graduating from Redmond High School in 2002 and developed a comedic style that merges social media and traditional stand-up. He has made a name for himself by appearing on this year's season of "Last Comic Standing" and pranking the world with fake cooperate brand accounts—last winter, Liedtke duped fellow comedian Kyle Kinane with a hoax Pace Picante Salsa Twitter account in an exchange that snowballed from Liedtke favoring insulting tweets about the salsa company (Pace Picante-brand salsa officially endorses @MrsRenfros salsa as the tastiest super market salsa ever!) to the firing of fake employees on behalf of Pace. He has appeared on "Adam Devine's House Party" on Comedy Central and hosts the immature and goofy podcast "The Bone Zone."
Liedtke will appear on "Late Night with Seth Meyers" for a standup set on Thursday Sept. 18. Other guests that evening include Julianna Margulies and Viggo Mortensen. The Source spoke with Lidtke prior to his appearance for an update on his comedic success.
On the Pace Picante Twitter ordeal and the fallout...
"Messing around on Twitter is really fun because it's such a new medium that it catches people off guard when you mess with them. The first person to get a prank phone call was probably like, 'Why did you do that, it doesn't make any sense.' But now if something is slightly weird on a phone call your first instinct is to assume its a prank.
As far as the Pace Picante thing goes, I noticed a lot of companies had fairly unpopular twitter accounts so I decided to create a few accounts for real companies that didn't have one yet and confuse people. Twitter was designed for people, not for companies or brands, and a few companies figured out how to use it to their advantage so now all companies think they need to use it. It's easy for a company on Twitter to mess up because there isn't a rule book on how to do it, so when I acted like Pace Picante on Twitter and started doing crazy stuff, people believed it.
There was no real fall out from it, I thought I might get sued but I didn't. The prank was on the masses instead of one person.
On how social media and comedy interact...
Well, I've been doing stand-up in LA for about six years and I was making good strides with that, but once I got some attention from doing something that was not typical and strange—like the Twitter stuff—I started getting more work. It's an interesting business because sometimes there isn't a correct way to go about things. More and more people are starting to tap into this type of comedy, Nathan Fielder, who has a show on Comedy Central called "Nathan For You," is a good example.
On going viral...
If you really try to go viral it will bum you out cause you will fail a lot. I just try to do stuff that makes me laugh, things that go viral have to have mass appeal and just have to be right time right place on the Internet. There are all sorts of viral marketing campaigns that fail miserably. I'll post a couple things in a day and have high hopes for one of them and then the other one will get more attention; it's strange.
On what's next...
I'm performing stand-up on Seth Meyers. I'm real excited about it. I have done stand-up on TV before, but this will be my first late night talk show. It seems special to me for some reason. I can't wait for it, my girlfriend and parents are all coming to New York with me for the taping. It's gonna be wild.
