“The classic joke about nothing.”

That’s how Broken Lizard comedy group member and “Super Troopers 2” writer and actor Paul Soter explains the running “meow” joke from the films. Now an all time classic, the “meow” bit is one of the standout moments from the 2001 film, and we’re happy to reveal its essence lives on in the sequel “Super Troopers 2.”

“We were crashing, five of us, in one room at the TravelLodge on Pico,” Soter explained outside of the “Super Troopers 2”  premiere. The comedy troupe was staying in cramped quarters while looking to “drum up business” before the original “Super Troopers” was made. “You just sit around, crammed in one room, getting all cagey and weird…it was the classic, sort of like, joke about nothing…What if some wizard turned your tongue into a cat’s tongue? And the only discernible difference in your life would be that instead of saying ‘now’ you’d say ‘meow.'”

In an earlier Google Talk, the film’s director Jay Chandrasekhar confirmed the motel’s location as the joke’s birthplace and added that it was his “bad ear” that helped create the joke. “I heard somebody say ‘something now’ and I said, ‘Did you say meow?'” Chandrasekhar revealed at the talk. “The next hour we riffed on sentences with meow replacing now.” Thankfully someone (allegedly Soter) scribbled “now = meow” on a napkin that night and brought it back up in the writer’s room. But the bit’s final form hadn’t coalesced yet…

According to Chandrasekhar, he was originally cast as the mewing cop. But the joke wouldn’t land. “We read it without a Southern accent and it wasn’t that funny,” the director said. “It didn’t land. I could buy a white Southerner in Vermont…But an Indian guy with a Southern accent in Vermont, I just don’t buy it.” So he put Soter in the role, and the rest is “Super Troopers” history.

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