There are many forms of fuck at Bob Odenkirk's disposal: the anguished, slow-motion version he emits while watching bad comedy ("It's just a fffuckin' mess!"), the whispered yet still damnably loud variant he uses when remembering one of his own terrible sketches ("The first draft of that Amish thing was a fuckin' absurdity!"), and a high-pitched, roof-scratching, all-purpose edition that he applies to pretty much every other situation ("I met a 70-year-old woman who wants to take sketch-comedy classes! FOCKin-A!"). It's a word he brandishes frequently, even in the best of moods.

On this midsummer afternoon, Odenkirk is delivering his fucks in a windowless room in Hollywood, surrounded by the members of the Birthday Boys, a seven-man Los Angeles comedy troupe whose new, Odenkirk-produced TV series debuts on IFC in October. They're ostensibly gathered to eat lunch and discuss production logistics, but, as is so often the case when hanging around Odenkirk, the session has quickly turned into a lengthy and learned dissertation on comedy, with him riffing on everything from Saturday Night Live to Monty Python to a noisy, unwatchable '70s oddity called The Goodies ("Just fffuckin' cacophony!" he yells, watching a clip on his laptop).

Odenkirk is best known as the character actor who plays the efficiently sleazy strip-mall lawyer Saul Goodman on Breaking Bad—a character so well embodied, he's getting his very own spinoff, Better Call Saul. But, as it happens, Odenkirk is also a comedy cleric of the highest order. He's been writing sketches for more than 25 years now, and without him a certain strain of modern humor—a kind of sketch comedy that's rigorously silly, intelligently designed, and more than a little self-aware—likely wouldn't exist, largely due to one show. In the mid-'90s Odenkirk teamed with David Cross (who would later go on to play Arrested Development's never-nudist Tobias Fünke) to create Mr. Show With Bob and David, a wisely profane, daringly intricate half-hour series that ran on HBO from 1995 to 1998.

Mr. Show wasn't a hit when it aired, but over the years the series accrued the kind of brainiac-maniac following usually reserved for gloomy-puss novelists or obscure Chapel Hill rock bands. It also predated and informed the quick-hit viral clips that are now regularly devoured on sites like Funny or Die and Channel 101. You didn't just want to quote the best Mr. Show bits; you wanted to immediately pop in a DVD (or perhaps a VHS tape) and show them to your friends, partly so they could share in the fun and partly because you knew that if they didn't laugh, you probably shouldn't be friends with them in the first place.

In that way, Mr. Show managed to perfect YouTube-ready sketch comedy before YouTube was ever invented. And its approach has since been adopted by a generation of comedy writers and performers who smudge the lines between online and traditional media, who in fact may no longer recognize a difference.

Over the years, many of these comics have sought out Odenkirk as a sort of sketch-sherpa, a master collaborator with the ability to elevate the absurd. Among them were Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! and Derek Waters from Drunk History. In fact, if these acolytes hadn't pursued Odenkirk so ardently in the mid-'00s—when his career was plateauing and his self-confidence was a bit slack—he might not be where he is today. They urged him to help them create their own shows and gave Odenkirk a chance to further explore the web, where the kind of comedy he'd helped perfect in the '90s was quickly becoming the norm.

Odenkirk's latest cohorts are the Birthday Boys. In addition to writing, directing, and costarring in several sketches, Odenkirk also plays the role of gruffly enthusiastic sage, providing cautionary advice, pep talks, and his almost religious beliefs about what separates bad, lazy comedy from gags that resonate with a savvy viewer. "A sketch needs to be about recognizable human behavior, not just gobbledygook silliness," he tells them during lunch. "You want the kind of person who should like you to be able to find a way in."

Of course, now the Birthday Boys' show isn't the only series on Odenkirk's mind. There's also Better Call Saul, envisioned as a prequel for the character, which stands to make the 51-year-old Odenkirk a true star. There's no release date yet—a pilot hasn't even been shot—but the Saul show will demand a lot from Odenkirk. It's all a bit weird; even he's not exactly sure how he got to a point where he's a full-time comedy mentor with a major TV series. Looking back, though, one thing's for sure: It involved a fair amount of gobbledygook silliness and a whole lot of recognizable human behavior.

The Ever-Expanding Odenverse

It's never been easier to become a comedy icon. All you need to do is 1) be really, really funny, 2) go on a zillion podcasts a week, and 3) work with Bob Odenkirk. Over the past two decades, Odenkirk's TV, film, and web projects have often served as the public's introduction to comedians who would go on to major success. A look at his sprawling sphere of influence. —B.R.

The Birthday Boys: Robyn Von Swank/IFC; Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Tom Goes to the Mayor: Courtesy of Adult Swim; Helberg, Van Artsdalen, Mitchell, Ferguson: Chris Ragazzo/IFC; TVs: Alamy; Odenkirk and Cross in Mr. Show: Photofest; remaining: Getty Images (8)

In both manner and appearance, Odenkirk couldn't be more different from his tackily garbed Breaking Bad character. Out of costume, Saul's crabgrass comb-over is tamed into a gracefully thin-topped style, and his garish peacock suits have been replaced by a dark-blue T-shirt, light khakis, and laceless Converse All Stars. He has a sort of genial intensity—he calls everyone "buddy" and seems to genuinely mean it.

Odenkirk grew up in Naperville, Illinois, in a family of seven kids. He and his brother Bill, who's now a writer for The Simpsons, were constantly coming up with comedic bits, which they'd videotape in their basement and stage in the house. His father, who Odenkirk says was out of the picture by the time he was 12, was a Korean War vet and business-form designer, a heavy drinker who was quick with a joke. "He was really funny," Odenkirk says. "It's a shame he didn't try to write comedy. I think maybe he would've been a happier guy if he'd come to Hollywood."

Eventually Odenkirk made his way to Chicago and studied at the famed Second City, where he met writer Robert Smigel, who later brought Odenkirk to New York and Saturday Night Live. "It was really, really hard for me," he says of his four-year SNL stint. "I probably was intimidated, but it was transmuted into an 'I don't give a fuck' attitude." (At one point, future senator Al Franken threw a football at his head, though Odenkirk says it didn't hit too hard.)

Odenkirk went on to win an Emmy for SNL, churning out several memorable sketches and characters—including Matt Foley, the flop-sweating motivational speaker he'd created for Chris Farley back at Second City—before departing in 1991. He moved to LA, where he embarked on a strange streak of little-watched, later-

worshipped comedy shows: He wrote for Get a Life, played a soulless, tactless Hollywood agent on The Larry Sanders Show, and cowrote and costarred in The Ben Stiller Show. This is where he met a young, equally headstrong stand-up comic and writer named David Cross. The two didn't get along at first, but after riffing in the kitchen at a mutual friend's party, they soon began writing bits for the stage at an LA club. In 1995 they persuaded HBO to give them their own series.

There's no such thing as a typical Mr. Show sketch; this is a series that included segments on a mom-and-pop porn store, a metal-loving burn victim, and an East Coast-West Coast ventriloquism war. But there's probably no better example of the show's commitment to pointed, protracted silliness than "The Story of Everest," a bit that first aired on November 16, 1998. "It's a masterpiece," Portlandia's Fred Armisen says. "I would even put it in my top-five favorite sketches from anything, including Monty Python and Saturday Night Live."

Ursula Coyote/AMC | Samsung

The scene begins with a jazz-age mountaineer returning home in triumph, ready to regale his mother and father with his tale of ascending the world's highest peak. But before he can begin he flails backward, scattering two giant shelves full of delicately arranged thimbles. Once the thimbles are painstakingly returned to their places, the explorer again begins to tell the story—only to fall and scatter the thimbles once more, and then again and again. After more than a half-dozen accidents, the explorer goes to a theater to watch a film that's been made about his "story of Everest"—which, to his dismay, focuses solely on his spectacular tumbles—and then falls yet again, into the street in front of the theater, where his hands are run over by a car.

Like all Mr. Show bits, "Everest" is devoid of mugging guest stars or convoluted attempts to launch a catchphrase. Nor are there any time-stamping '90s references. Instead of mocking pop culture, Mr. Show took aim at the powers that shape it: TV news, advertising, even organized religion.

The show helped introduce a slew of ascendant talent—including Jack Black, Patton Oswalt, and Sarah Silverman—but much of the behind-the-scenes work fell to Odenkirk and Cross. Putting episodes together for four years was a grueling task, partially because of Odenkirk's opinionated and demanding attitudes about comedy. He would drill into every potential sketch idea, even bad ones that never aired, for hours on end, looking to find something usable. "But we'd also talk about sketches that wound up being some of the favorites," says Scott Aukerman, the Comedy Bang! Bang! host who wrote and starred on Mr. Show for three seasons. "The process Bob taught me—and that I still use today—was to sit there and figure it out."

Everyone worked long hours on Mr. Show, especially Cross and Odenkirk, who admits he had a "short fuse" for its entire four-year run. As Odenkirk himself puts it, he was "kind of a dick," often antagonizing or ignoring others in the room. "It wasn't because I was a huge asshole," he says. "It was because I felt like you get your ass kicked in the world for everything you do, and I thought, 'Just trust me and listen to me. This is the only fuckin' thing I can do.'"

Saul Goodman struck us as a guy who could flow very easily through the corporate world and, under the surface, didn't really belong there.

Mr. Show would earn a pair of Emmy nominations for writing, but ratings were low. By the fourth season-when HBO moved it to Mondays at midnight, a slot more suited for, say, Lady Chatterly's Boink Gazebo than a sketch-comedy series—Odenkirk and Cross knew it was over.

Not long after the show ended, Cross was at a George Carlin performance in New York, where, he says, an HBO exec gleefully introduced himself as "the guy who ruined your life" by moving Mr. Show to its doomed slot. "I was really angry at how cavalier he was," Cross says. "But I also thought, 'Man, you are fucking lucky I'm not Bob Odenkirk. He'd throw you over this fucking railing.'"

In an editing room at the Birthday Boys' production offices, Odenkirk and several group members are fine-tuning a turd. They've crowded into this tiny space to watch a rough cut of a sketch Odenkirk directed, one that spoofs cruddy, low-budget '70s kids' movies. During postproduction, someone noticed that a donkey used in the sketch had taken a perfectly timed on-camera bathroom break. It's not the kind of comedy Odenkirk or the Birthday Boys usually indulge in, but even he can't resist the occasional vérité poop joke. The only debate is how it should sound.

"The shit-hitting is too wet for me," one of the Boys says. The editor cues up another, more subdued take.

"Is this better?" he asks. "I took the squish away."

"Yeah, that's good," Odenkirk says quietly, leaning back in his chair with mock solemnity, as everyone laughs in agreement.

After Mr. Show ended, Odenkirk kept busy. He created a sketch-show pilot for Fox called Next!, with Armisen (helping Armisen land a role on SNL) and a then barely-known Zach Galifianakis, and directed a likably chatty feature film called Melvin Goes to Dinner.

In the mid-'00s, Odenkirk was given the chance to direct his own big-studio comedies. But the fatigue of fighting and bickering had worn him down. He decided not to push his crew, or himself, as hard as he might have in the past. "I thought, 'There's got to be a way to do this without being such a jackass,'" Odenkirk says. The resulting films—Let's Go to Prison (2006) and The Brothers Solomon (2007)—were panned by critics and ignored by all but the most devout Mr. Show fans. "I should've made more of an effort, and that shows in the movies," he says.

Around the time Odenkirk's moviemaking career stalled, Mr. Show's posthumous reputation was growing, thanks in part to the arrival of YouTube. The show's 30 episodes were chopped up into easily embeddable, on-demand segments, and because Cross and Odenkirk had strived to minimize time-stamped, obsolescence-ensuring references, the sketches felt current. Soon Mr. Show was gaining the kind of audience it had never been able to find on HBO.

At the same time, the web was starting to foster a new generation of comedians and sketch performers, many of whom had been strongly influenced by Mr. Show. Groups like Human Giant—and later, the Birthday Boys—had absorbed Cross and Odenkirk's belief that a good sketch wasn't a bunch of mugging impressionists and forced catchphrases; it was a small idea or simple truth that could be escalated into something grandly absurd. One sketch, for example, was about a government plan to blow up the moon; it features fake newscasts, musical numbers from a rabble-rousing, lunar-hating country-western singer, and, of course, a lunar explosion. Somehow it holds together. "Mr. Show comes up in the Portlandia offices all the time," Armisen says. "We'll say, 'Well, they did something like this, so therefore it can work.'"

One second-wave Mr. Show acolyte was Drunk History creator Waters. "Everything you watch now you can trace back to Mr. Show," he says. "And every idea I've ever had, or ever heard, makes you say, 'It's kind of like that one Mr. Show sketch ...'" In the mid-'00s, Waters managed to get Odenkirk's phone number and started leaving Mr. Show—related messages on his answering machine. They eventually met, and Odenkirk wound up directing Waters and The Big Bang Theory's Simon Helberg in a sweetly awkward web series, Derek & Simon.

Soon other Mr. Show disciples tracked down Odenkirk: Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, a pair of Philadelphia videodrones with a taste for the abstract, sent Odenkirk DVDs featuring their early work; Odenkirk brought the pair to Adult Swim, resulting in the freakish and unsettling late-night series Tom Goes to the Mayor and Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! And Odenkirk was approached by online comedy impresarios to make short web videos—sometimes just by himself, sometimes for outlets like CollegeHumor and the TBS-backed SuperDeluxe.com (now also part of Adult Swim). As with the best Mr. Show bits, they were goofy yet skillfully executed, and a few of them would become viral hits. Among those were 2008's faux found-footage doc "The Truth About Lincoln," which focuses on people who believe Lincoln is still alive and lurking in the woods like a presidential Sasquatch, and 2009's "Craigslist Penis Photographer," about a guy who has perfected the art of taking poorly shot penis photos for the site's Casual Encounters section. Another larky clip that same year, a faux blooper called "Bird Poops in Reporter's Mouth," got 5 million views. "It was great to feel confident again, you know?" Odenkirk says now.

In the course of all this shepherding and mentoring, Odenkirk was slowly rethinking how he approached his own work. The easygoing persona he'd adopted for his movie-directing attempts hadn't made the films any better, but at the same time, the yelly tactics he'd employed during his Mr. Show years weren't going to endear him to the younger comics who'd sought him out. "That cocky attitude does not allow other people in," Odenkirk says. "They're not going to participate with you, and you're not going to get the best out of them and learn something from them. Your world gets smaller. The walls close in." Somehow he found a balance. By the time he started working with the Birthday Boys, he could be both authoritative and accessible. "With Bob, you never feel the shutdown," notes Birthday Boys member Dave Ferguson. "You keep talking till you find the intersection. And sometimes there's a lot of fuck in those talks."

In 2009, Odenkirk got a call from his agent asking whether he'd be interested in a part on a series whose creator was a huge Mr. Show fan. "It was so damn funny," Breaking Bad's Vince Gilligan says. "I watched every episode of it. I still have episodes on my iPod, which I watch on the plane." When it came time to cast the show's ethically flexible, unfailingly inventive lawyer, Gilligan and the character's creator, Peter Gould, thought of Odenkirk. "On Mr. Show, Bob was always the guy wearing the suit, yet he was crack-up funny," Gilligan says. "Saul Goodman struck us as a guy who could flow very easily through a corporate world and, under the surface, didn't really belong there."

The Saul role came along not long after Odenkirk had been reenergized by his online sketch work, just as he was figuring out "the mix I'm trying to have in my life," he says. When he read the script, he says, he thought, "This is new to me. I'm a little unsure of it, but I'm going to fuckin' work hard on it."

The strategy went well enough to make the character of Saul Goodman hugely popular, prompting Better Call Saul—arguably the first spinoff of the new golden era of TV dramas. Doing the show is a big opportunity for Odenkirk—as he says, it could put his kids through college—but it will also force him to rein in and maybe even abandon his efforts with comedy upstarts like the Birthday Boys. At one point, while we're driving through downtown LA, I ask him how much longer he can keep up his comedy-mentor duties. "I think I'm kind of done with that," he says. "I don't know if I'm just saying that. Maybe that won't turn out to be the case ... but I gotta stop helping people. I really should take my limited time left and dig in a little bit and try to get a little better at what I do." And, for awhile at least, what he does will be Saul Goodman.

Still, it's hard to imagine him not having some sort of role, directly or indirectly, in the next incarnation of comedy, no matter what shape it takes. Odenkirk may not be as difficult as he once was, but many of the forces that helped shape Mr. Show—a bewildered frustration with the world—are innate and unshakable in him, as they are in all comedians.

On our drive, I ask him to elaborate on a statement he made years before—namely, that all comedians are angry at the world in some way. "You're not going to believe this," he said, reaching into his backseat. "I have a quote I read just the other day that characterizes that. It made me so happy. I think it's still as true today as when the guy wrote it."

He pulls out The King of Comedy, the autobiography of Keystone Studios founder and silent-era comedy kingpin Mack Sennett, and begins to read a line about comedians: "They whaled the daylights out of pretension," Odenkirk reads. "They reduced convention, dogma, stuffed shirts, and authority to nonsense, and then blossomed into pandemonium." He closes the book and smiles. "That's cool, right?"

FOCKin-A.