Judah Friedlander, known to billions of viewers as Frank Rossitano from 30 Rock, as well as the World Champion of sex, athletics and karate, is heading to Britain next month for three nights of stand-up in London (tickets are available here). We got in touch to find out what precautions people should take before going to see him, and also asked him about ping-pong for some reason.

Hi Judah! Firstly, congratulations on your many ongoing victories.
Thank you. Thanks for showing respect. You’re a good citizen of the Earth. When you’re the World Champion, a lot of people are ill-informed about karate and sports, and they’re just jealous.

So, you’re the World Champion…
Yeah. The World Championships are basically karate deathmatches for charity, because I like to give back. Even when I win a karate deathmatch, the proceeds go to charity. It’s important to help out.

You’re very good at ping-pong. Do you prefer calling it ping-pong or table tennis?
Britain claim they invented ping pong, so it’ll be nice to come to the motherland. I prefer the name ping-pong to table tennis. It’s called ping-pong in many different countries. One of the reasons it sometimes has to be called table tennis is that there’s a company, Parker Brothers or another game company, that owns the copyright to the name ping-pong, which is corporate corruption, which is not cool, so I call it ping-pong. The other thing is, ping-pong is its own sport. It doesn’t have the same rules as tennis. You don’t do overhand serves, there’s no volleying at the net, and to my knowledge there are no grass-court ping-pong tables. It’s a different game. Table tennis makes it sound like a subsidiary of tennis. But it’s a different game with different rules. So that’s why I call it ping-pong. I’ve got some videos coming out soon where I’m playing against a ninja, you should watch those.

You’re playing the Soho Theatre in London on the 4th, 5th and 6th of June. How should people prepare to come and see you?
They should probably work out before the show, and make sure they’re in really good health and shape. All my shows come with free Laughter Insurance – most comics, when you go to their show, they make you sign a form to pay for Laughter Insurance, in case you don’t think the show is funny enough, which I think is unfair on the audience. So everyone gets free Laughter Insurance, and you have to sign a Laughter Waiver, just in case. A few weeks ago in New Jersey I did a show and a woman had had surgery a month before, and her stitches started popping because she was laughing so hard, so paramedics had to turn up during the show. So you might want to get medical clearance. That’s all.

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You’ll all know that handsome chap Paul Walker from the Fast And Furious franchise, but he’s got another car-based flick out this month – Vehicle 19. It’s about a bloke who picks up the wrong rental car and discovers there’s a hostage in the boot. Shits just gets cray from there on in. We had the chance to chat to him about it, as well as other stuff like sharks and stunt driving.

Vehicle 19 is filmed in one car – how does that all work?
It works like this: we’re about a week in and the director looks at me, smiles and scratches his head and goes “Oh fuck, I’m running out of things to do in this car!” (laughs). I think that early on I liked the challenge and I liked where he was coming from – it was familiar to me because obviously I’ve spent a lot of screen time behind the wheel of a car! It played into what we were trying to accomplish, which was something familiar but at the same time it had a fish out of water element – you’ve got an American that’s been thrown into the shit and is scrambling to stay above it. I think that having it all in the confines of this car plays into the claustrophobic feel of the whole thing, the desperate feeling of being trapped with no options, nowhere to go and nowhere to hide. As if filmmaking wasn’t challenging enough! I like the idea of creating just that little bit more – it was the right way to do it – by limiting yourself you’re almost forced to be more creative and resourceful, and I saw that every day.

Did you have to use a specially designed car with the doors ripped off or something?
No, we did try taking the sides off one car but for the most part we ran the vehicle in its entirety, a lot of it was just freewheeling. What made it a lot easier considering the time constraints – we weren’t there for a long time – was that in South Africa they don’t require permitting, so we didn’t have to close off roads and stuff. The majority of the film was spent quite literally with crew members hanging off both sides of the car with multiple cameras, just driving in and out of actual Joburg traffic. To me it was quite liberating because I’m used to the safety net and the due process when I’ve done things in the past, but this time it was just the Wild West – we were shooting from the hip and I found it quite refreshing. In a lot of ways I find the structure of other movies quite suffocating, so the ability to go out there and just play was great.

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It’s only a few weeks until Slam Dunk Festival, where our Front X SinStar Bar will be graced by killer acts including the mighty Caspa. He’s also in the ace main fashion feature in our current issue, on shelves now. With that in mind, we thought we’d dust off this 20 Questions interview we did with him back in FRONT 172.

1. As a youngster, what was your favourite film?
Gotta be The Goonies. I loved Chunk.

2. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever eaten?
I had a Reggae Reggae pasty from a service station on the way to Leeds. I took a bite and threw it out the window. No disrespect to Levi Roots, but it was pretty bad.

3. If you could throw one person off TV into a pen of lions, who would it be?
Alan Titchmarsh. About ten years ago, he was on the Shredded Wheat box, so at breakfast he’d just be looking at me. It’s his face. It really annoys me. That cereal box got punched up and ended in the bin.
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FRONT recently spoke to Kevin Smith about his podcasting empire and telling Hollywood to go suck it. Here’s a tip for if you’re ever talking to Kevin Smith: make no plans for immediately afterwards. This is a man that can TALK, yo. This is a heavily edited version, because there’s not enough server space in the world to hold everything that was said.
(Note: This interview first appeared in FRONT 179, along with Tonight Alive, Descendents, Arabella’s trainer extravaganza and home visits to “Weird Al” Yankovic and Mastodon. It’s a hell of an issue. Buy it here, or in a limited-edition signed version here.)
Illustrations by Bicicleta Sem Freio.

Hi Kevin! So, you’ve got these DVDs, Teabagging In The UK and Teabagging in Ireland…?
If you’ve always thought the idea of watching two middle aged men speak to one another is boring, this will absolutely change your mind. This is riveting conversation about a guy who almost died from drugs talking himself back into the land of the living. It’s funny as fuck and you’ve never heard sex stories like this before.

You’ve somehow built a podcast-based empire through your SModcast network. Was that a plan?
No, I’m just fucking spinning plates like crazy. My friend Scott was asking recently, like “Was there a moment?”. Like a bi-curious teen saying “When did you know you were gay?” to somebody who figured it out and was eating dick already. But there was no formula. It just happened.

Was it something to do with shitty experiences in Hollywood?
When I made Zack And Miri, even though I like that movie, it wasn’t what I got in this business to do. I was doing an imitation of me, or an imitation of someone else who was influenced by me, Judd Apatow. The kid who made Clerks would have made fun of the guy struggling to figure out what to do next. It felt like in order to stay in the game, I was subverting why I got into the game in the first place. I decided I didn’t want to do it any more.

That’s a pretty big decision to make.
I thought instead of serving one master I’d serve a bunch. You make these films, and people who don’t make films tell you you’re doing it wrong. It was tough to put it to the side, because film money is like heroin, man.
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Mick Foley (aka Mankind, aka Dude Love, aka Cactus Jack) has done it all in wrestling. He’s won pretty much every championship, he won the King Of The Deathmatch, he’s broken a load of bones and lived to tell the tale. Well, a lot of tales. And they’re all condensed into his new one man show that’s coming your way soon. Check the tour dates HERE.

Your most famous moment is arguably being thrown off the top of the cell by the Undertaker. How did you psych yourself up for it?
It was my mentor Terry Funk who suggested I start the Hell In A Cell match against the Undertaker on top of the cell, which was actually a joke but after we stopped laughing I thought I could do that. I was essentially terrified. Once I got up on top of the cell and realised what a terrible idea it was I realised I’d made my bed and had to lie in it, so had to get thrown off this structure. Who would have known in 1998 I was getting laughs out of that during my show 15 years later.

Would you say you have no fear?
I did have fear. Courage is conquering your fear so I did have courage, but I was not fearless by any means.

Are there any stunts you wish you hadn’t done?
I thought I was a pretty safe wrestler, I took a pounding but I didn’t take extreme risks all that often. I knew what the consequences of certain moves would be and I knew they would be painful. I tried to avoid things that could compress my spine or result in ligament damage.

How easy was the transition from wrestling to comedy?
The show is based around wrestling stories. You take an event like Hell In A Cell which was positively hideous at the time but you find a way to make the stories surrounding the event funny. It’s challenging but I’ve been doing it a while, so I know what will and won’t work.

We guess it’s a much calmer lifestyle?
It’s a similar lifestyle but without the late night emergency room visits, unless the set goes very very poorly. But it’s the same idea that you go out there with an empty canvas, moreso than wrestling, and you’re solely responsible for people enjoying themselves. There’s a lot of pressure to be good.

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Sightseers is out on Monday and it’s COOLIO. Really very good indeed. So to celebrate, we had a chat with Ben Wheatley (who also directed the ace Kill List) about the film and also the UK film industry in general.

So, Sightseers – how did you get on board?
Well, I had a meeting over at Big Talk, which is the production company that does Edgar Wright’s stuff, and they offered me a script just after I’d finished Down Terrace. I knew what it was because I’d worked with Alice and Steve before and I’d seen the short film version of Sightseers. I read the script and thought it was really funny – I knew I was gonna do Kill List next but I wanted to make something after that that wasn’t really as horrible.

It appears there was a bit of trouble getting the script to the screen in the first place, what were the problems involved in this?
There weren’t too many problems really, it had originally been written as a TV sitcom script but then Edgar Wright saw the short, took it to Big Talk and told them it should be a film. Years and years went by as they developed the script but my involvement was quick – I saw it in 2010, then shot Kill List and then as soon as that came out and got reviewed, they green-lit Sightseers straight away.

What made you decide to direct a film you hadn’t written? Were you worried? Is this something you’ll do more of in the future?
I didn’t write A Field In England (Ben’s next film), Amy [Jump] wrote that, and the one after that I’ve co-written with Amy. I don’t mind so much because I’m involved heavily in the editing where you have an enormous amount of control. There’s a great deal of improv in Sightseers and Amy had rewritten the script so it was quite close to what a normal one of our scripts would look like anyway. The thing is, when I’m writing with Amy, if the stuff she’s writing is better than mine I can’t have an ego about it – you sort of just have to go “Fill your boots, it’s fine! I’ll work on something else!” (laughs) I think on some of the press releases for A Field In England it says it’s a co-written script but it’s not anymore really!

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If you’ve got this month’s issue of FRONT then you’ll have seen our fantastic Collect, Obsess, Explode feature. In it, we interviewed a bunch of interesting people about their mental collections, one of whom was the brilliant @vivaVHS, who owns a hell of a lot of VHS tapes. We loved talking to him so much, that we felt a bit bad that we cut down his interview for the mag, so we’ve got the full uncut version right here!

Why did you start collecting? What attracted you to collecting this stuff?

It basically stems from not wanting to replace an entire media by jumping to another format. I don’t think any other format will last as long as VHS did because there’ll always be something new in five to ten years. Just look at DVD – nobody buys them anymore, it’s all Blu-Ray now, soon they’ll all be obsolete, it’ll all be streaming media. People are losing touch with the physical formats and the act of actually owning something. It’s not like I hate Blu-Ray or DVD, I still buy both – I’ve probably got about 1000 DVDs – it’s just I’d prefer to watch an 80s movie for the first time on VHS and then if I really like it and want to see it again then I’ll buy the Blu-Ray, if it’s available!

When did you start collecting?

I was about 13 when I started collecting tapes purely to watch, for example I bought every John Candy film just because I was a fan. Then at 15 I started my first full time job, so every pay-day I’d go to market stalls and car boot sales to pick up tapes. So I started actively collecting at 15, but I had a number of tapes from before. When I was younger it was any film that I wanted to see, but now that I’m older I only collect ex-rental tapes. Firstly because they were built to last and secondly they’re the original video store releases which is much more appealing to me.

Do your friends and family think you’re weird for collecting all this stuff?

They think I’m a bit of a nutcase to be honest! My wife tolerates it which is appreciated, but every now and again I’ll be like “Do you wanna watch this one?” but she won’t really watch a weird film from the 80s so the chance of sticking on a video nasty is pretty low! My mum and dad think I’m mental too. Before Twitter came along I didn’t harp on about my collection, I didn’t really talk to anyone about it but now it’s opened up a world of VHS fans and followers so I know there are others out there like me!

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A while ago, we put our regular list of queries to the godfather of grime, Wiley. This appeared in FRONT 158, available here. More recently, we also did an awesome fashion shoot with him in issue 175, available here.

1. As a youngster, what was your favourite film?
Back to the Future II. I don’t think flying cars’ll ever happen though – aeroplanes only just get along with each other.

2. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever eaten?
One particular cheeseburger from a service station McDonald’s.

3. If you could throw anyone off TV into a pen of lions, who would you go for?
That’s out of order. Lions is a bit extreme.
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