The story of British comedian John Bishop is a wild one: man and wife seek divorce. Man stumbles into an open mic night having never done comedy before, and discovers a talent he never knew he had. Man continues to work at his comedy, until his nearly-ex-wife unknowingly attends one his gigs. Man and wife start to reconcile, save their marriage, and he goes on to become one of the biggest comedians in the world. It’s the stuff of Hollywood movies – hence, the arrival of Is This Thing On?, a film based on Bishop’s comedy origin story, penned by and starring Will Arnett, and directed by none other than Bradley Cooper.
It’s an unlikely combination – and yet, nothing in Bishop’s comedy career has been likely. Arnett, having heard how Bishop got his start, had been working on adapting the story into a screenplay. And Cooper – whose other directorial efforts A Star Is Born and Maestro also explored characters pursuing artistic expression – proved a perfect fit to direct. “[Bradley] and I happened to be flying back to New York together around Christmas time a couple years ago, and he was on a break in the Maestro shooting schedule. I said, ‘Hey, give this a read’,” Arnett tells Empire. “A week later, he FaceTimes me and he’s sitting at his desk and he’s like, ‘I’d like to direct this, if you’d let me.’ And I was like, ‘If I let you? Of course!’”
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The fictionalised telling casts Arnett as Alex Novak, a character based on the real Bishop. “In the first conversations with Will and Mark, it was like, ‘It shouldn’t be a biopic of us. It should be the essence of the story taken somewhere else’,” Bishop tells Empire. “I love the idea that it was taken to North America. I thought it would open the story up to more people.” Still, the results still feel deeply personal to Bishop. “When me and Melanie watched it in a small screening room for the first time, it was like watching a memory,” he says. From regular life, to the comedy stage, to the big screen – who knows where Josh Bishop’s story goes next?