Jeremy Bradley-  You started out your comedy career at an early age.

Hal Sparks-  Yeah, 15.  I mean, if you don't count doing Steve Martin's Wild and Crazy Guy at the Thanksgiving dinner table in front of my grandparents. 

JB-  Why did you get started in comedy?  Were you always just wacky and goofy?

Hal- Yeah.  My mom and my aunt Susan always encouraged my humour from a really young age and I used to go see movies with the two of them and I would sit in the front row and they would sit in the middle or in the back.  And I grew up in Kentucky so I could hear them laughing at places the rest of the audience didn't get - and I didn't get because I was too young.  I would sit there and (think), "Obviously something is going on here.  This is funny.  This is good.  I just have to figure out how."  And so I kind of became a student of comedy because of that.  I wanted to know what my mom and aunt Susan were laughing at.  So I just kind of started absorbing it.  My dad had a bunch of old comedy records hidden in the back of his record collection.  I just had a veracious appetite for it after a while.  I really attribute almost anything… I think people can do anything.  I think we all have natural talents for almost anything, it's just about what wakes it up.  If you're on a farm every day getting eggs every morning you're going to kind of have a natural ability to do it after a while.  And I think comedy was the same for me.  I just started listening and imitating and memorizing it and then it became just a part of who I was.  It's a great way to date and meet friends.  That's probably why.

JB-  Who would you say is your idol or who you looked up to?

Hal-  I don't really have any.  I sort of have this hodgepodge fusion of a bunch of different people I liked for different reasons.  But I never really had any hero worship my entire life.  A friend of mine joked that if you took Bruce Lee, and the guys in KISS and Steve Martin and squeeze them into one person, that would be me.  And it's kind of true.  There are traits and elements of all those people that I…absorbed the best I could.  As far as people worth emulating and really appreciating, I think George Carlin, the most important comic working and living today because he truly is doing standup for the art of doing standup.  There are few people like that anymore… at least by choice.  Some people, they're hardcore standups and they will be standups their whole life.  They kind of wish in the back of their minds they could do a sitcom.  And I don't think he lives that way.  He just does his thing and that's his art and it's really impressive.

JB-  I can definitely see a resemblance between the look of Bruce Lee, KISS and you - very similar.

Hal-  (laughing)  Yeah!  Yeah actually.  Especially all the tongue pictures that people find online.

JB-  Maybe I haven't looked that hard, but I'll take a look…

Hal-  Yeah.

JB-  Those are from the Queer As Folk days, hey?

Hal-  Those date back from a long way… (laughing)  Actually, Michael, my character on Queer As Folk doesn't have a long tongue.  That's a little important note!

JB-  (The program) Talk Soup (on the E! network) was the first time I had seen you and seeing you on that show and in interviews and everything, it seemed to suit your personality because you could just be wacky and zany with Jerry Springer clips and stuff like that.

Hal-  Yeah.

JB- Did you have a hand in writing that kind of stuff?

Hal-  As the show progressed and as I was on there longer I wrote more and more.  By the end of my tenure there I was pretty much improvising most things which didn't rub the writers very well.  But when I went up for the job I was doing standup seven nights a week at that point.  And the idea of doing a semi-live show, a live to tape show, for a lot of people is really intimidating, I guess.  But since I had been doing standup so much the idea of coming up with, what is the equivalent of 12 minutes of new material every day, didn't seem hard at all.  You just get up and do it… that's your job.  Let's go be funny.  It's great.  And yeah, so it very much suited what I could do.  I come from an improv background too.  You just get to a certain point that you've just got to trust what you're doing and why you're there.

JB-  Improv is kind of picking up now in popularity with shows like Whose Line is it Anyway?  Where it's all made up on the spot…

Hal-  Yeah, totally. 

JB- What's one of the craziest things you ever came up with on the spot that really went over well?

Hal-  I think making out with Rainbow Brite on the I Love the 80s series.  Or we did a nude episode on Talk Soup.  I went to (legendary) Pink's Hot Dogs (stand) in nothing but a g-string and asked for a bun.  That was pretty funny.  I got in line at Pink's Hot Dogs on Melrose and asked for a hotdog bun.

JB- I think that probably could have worked on Queer As Folk as well. 

Hal-  Yeah.  Although Michael would never be in public in the nude. 

JB-  You've played everyone from Regis to the Croc Hunter… lots of different characters…

Hal-  Right.

JB-  Which was the most fun?  Or which was the most challenging?

Hal-  So far as comedy characters I think James Lipton was hard when I did him on Talk Soup because he's so subtle and quiet and you have to work really hard to convey the creepy, pervy undertones that he has going on.  (laughs)  You just have to trust people will see it.  The hardest impersonation I ever had to drum up was Harrison Ford because you don't really realize he has any real personality quirks and elements you can use until you really look at him.  And then you go, "Oh shit, yeah there is something there."  It takes a lot of work to get him up.  And then once you see it you're like, "Oh yeah, he is like that."  The Tom Green one was probably the most fun.  I did a spoof of Tom Green.  We did a spoof on Talk Soup that he had a younger brother named Ron Green who was even more off the deep end.  One of his stunts was me roller-skating through an old folks home hitting people with a bat.  And that was a bunch of fun. 

JB-  "Why are you old?" I think was one of the lines.

Hal-  Yes, exactly!  That was Tom Green's style.  He was just kind of, "I'm acting a fool, I'm acting a fool."  Yeah, we got it dude.  Everyone's uncomfortable… congratulations!  What do we have for you? (laughing)