Teeing Up With Jon Daly on Golf and Comedy

Adult Swim has a reputation for airing high-quality one-off specials that give wonderful comedic talent an opportunity to shine. Jon Daly’s Adult Swim Golf Special is certainly one of the weirdest specials that they’ve ever put into production, considering it goes after a very specific niche.

There are professional golfers named John Daly and Adam Scott. There are also two comedians named Jon Daly and Adam Scott. In the special, the comedians go down rabbit hole with this coincidence as Daly and Scott portray their golf counterparts in a match. 

Jon Daly is an exceptional comedian in his own right and been apart of some brilliant productions through the years. I got to talk with him about the genesis of Adult Swim’s latest special as well as what he’d like to tackle next! 

DEN OF GEEK: There’s been a lot of mileage on Twitter with you and Adam Scott having the same names as two professional golfers. You made that JonDalyIsJohnDaly.com website as well. This sconcept has clearly been with you for a while. When did you decide to finally do something bigger with that premise?

JON DALY: I did this movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, with Adam and on set we would just—I had made the “Jon Daly is John Daly” website and Adam Scott the golfer, I think it was just before he had won the Masters. He was definitely on a roll though. He was winning tournaments and he was just coming out of the Champions. Now, Adam Scott’s Twitter was turning up the wrong web search because Adam Scott the actor was more famous than him. But to some extent Adam Scott’s search results were getting messed up by Adam Scott the actor. I wanted to do the next kind of “Identity Project” with Jon Daly and so I pitched it to Adam on the set, he said “Yeah,” and two and a half years later we made it!

Adult Swim has had a very interesting history with these one-off specials. Adam Scott himself had a lot of success with his Greatest Event in Television History series. How did your experience with this one come about? Were they just giving you a special and you wanted to pursue this, or was it always this golf beast?

Right, this was this idea from the start.

Interesting!

It was all kind of in the JonDalyisJohnDaly.com vein. It was just this thing. I’ve been playing John Daly live and tried getting involved with the audience and becoming very obnoxious. I wanted to do the next part of this and so it all just kind of came together. Adam Scott was real and I was real and it was just this crazy opportunity. So yeah, it was just the right place and the right time, basically. 

Do you in reality actually give a fuck about golf? Do you play it at all or is it all just banking off of that joke? 

I do give a fuck about golf!

That’s good! 

I would say that I’m terrible at the game but I’ve always been obsessed with the aesthetic of televised golf. I play golf maybe once a year with my dad and my brother. My dad has always been an extremely golf-centric man. He could play professionally, Adam Scott and I not so much. But when it comes down to it, I didn’t play golf as a kid. I played hockey and liked team sports. But I have recently been getting a little more into golf, but I’m so terrible that it’s hard to have fun.

You go all out here with little touches to further the reality that this special is from 1966, like the classic Arby’s sponsorship right from the start and the grainy film stock. Were these touches of authenticity important to you?

Absolutely! Yeah, we wanted to recreate—as I was kind of watching televised golf to prepare for this special—there’s this show, The Wonderful World of Golf, from the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s. I started watching that show and getting very into the aesthetic and that kind of slowness, the film grain, the way that it looked all blown out and technicolor-y. I just got really into that whole aesthetic. We wanted to make it right on the mark. 

There’s so much accuracy in the special that will likely going right over people’s heads. I really hope Adult Swim repeatedly airs this thing during Saturday afternoons, really making it feel like you’ve just stumbled upon a match of golf on TV. 

That’s my great hope, too! And I think golfers—real golfers—are going to get the special in a way that other people aren’t, but I hope that everybody loves it.

You must be thinking more about future specials for the network. Any vague ideas or past characters like Sappity Tappity that you’d like to explore here?

Yeah, I’ve thought about doing a Sappity Tappity special, definitely. I’d love to continue this line of golf specials!

You nail the fundamentals down so well. Why not continue doing more of these sports things? 

Yeah! I would love to do a golf special every year and nobody knows when it’s going to take place in history, or who’s going to be involved, but it’ll continue to get more surreal. I think one a year would be great! But I’d also love to do a Sappity Tappity special as well, or just some sketch special of some sort would be really awesome, too!

Jon Daly’s Adult Swim Golf Special airs this Friday, April 8^th, at 11:30pm on Adult Swim