Will Ferrell Didn't Know He Wrote Elf, and Other Things Harland Williams Told Him

Harland Williams spent the first two minutes of this episode too excited to do his own intro. That energy never really comes down. By the time Will Ferrell arrives, Williams has already revealed that Cher gave him butt fat in a syringe, that he broke his wrist punching a mountain goat, and that there is a stain on his studio ceiling that is, regrettably, still there. Ferrell, to his credit, settles in like a man who has survived wilder rooms. He has not. Nobody has.

The two go back to the late nineties, when they shot Superstar together in Toronto and crashed a Second City improv show in the most adversarial way possible. Williams, by his own proud admission, spent the entire set blocking every offer his castmates made. ‘There’s a boat,’ someone would say. Williams would go, ‘Fuck off.’ The green room afterward was, per Ferrell, a ‘real showdown.’ The kind of anger that improv people carry for years. Williams is still delighted about it.

The MILF That Became Elf

The cleanest bit in the episode is Williams’s extended, completely straight-faced insistence that he wrote Elf, that it was originally designed for Betty White under the title MILF, and that Carol Burnett came close to taking the role before asking for a hundred and two million dollars. Ferrell plays it exactly right: confused, then slowly buying in, then genuinely moved that the universe guided the role toward him after God ‘killed Betty White.’ The joke works because Williams never blinks.

had literally no idea that it would be like one of the top thousandth movie

That line, delivered with the specific confidence of a man who genuinely cannot locate a bigger number, is the funniest moment of the hour. Ferrell knows what he’s doing. The delivery is too precise. But it still lands because he commits.

The Rheinblatts of the Murder Hotel

Williams’s other major production is a fake ancestry reveal in which he brings two audience plants into the studio as Ferrell’s alleged birth parents, Burt and Edith Rheinblatt. Edith traded baby Will for a Rottweiler puppy. Burt works at a murder hotel and previously did something unspecified for Cirque du Soleil. Neither seems particularly haunted by the transaction. Ferrell processes this in real time with a sincerity that is either very good acting or genuine bewilderment at what podcast he has walked into.

She implied she was with a biker gang

The bit runs long, which is honestly fine, because Ferrell keeps finding new notes inside it. His observation that Burt and Edith ‘didn’t seem that excited to make a connection’ with him, that the whole transaction felt ‘very transactional,’ is the kind of hurt-comedy that doesn’t come from improv training. It comes from someone genuinely unsettled and deciding to stay in the scene anyway.

Norm, Vegas, and Thirty Grand on Michigan

The episode’s most unguarded stretch is Ferrell talking about Norm Macdonald. He doesn’t perform the grief. He’s just specific: Norm and Ferrell were both recluses who found each other at SNL, both gravitating toward the empty office on Sundays to watch football nobody else cared about. Ferrell threw out a casual comment about Michigan playing well in the mud. Norm bet thirty thousand dollars on it. Michigan lost.

You lost me 30 grand. I’m like, what? I go, what do you mean? He’s like, I bet on Michigan to win in the second half. I’m like, what are you talking about? You said they were good in the mud.

He also tells the story of Norm playing Burt Reynolds on Celebrity Jeopardy, grabbing Ferrell in the hallway after the sketch, and asking in genuine distress whether Ferrell was actually mad at him. The yelling had been rehearsed. Norm thought it was real. Ferrell’s read on it is simply: ‘You’re a good actor.’ Which is the kindest possible thing to say about a man who apparently could not always locate the line between a bit and a confrontation. Neither, for that matter, can Harland Williams. This is probably why they got along.

The episode ends with Ferrell doing a cappella cowbell while Williams screams threats at him as Bruce Dickinson, and then with both men rubbing gourds on their faces in what Williams calls restorative. Ferrell accepts a countertop microwave as a parting gift and leaves, emotionally, as a Rheinblatt. A good podcast? Williams rates it less than 1% milk. He’s being modest.