Five Questions for Judah Friedlander

Last night we found 30 Rock’s Judah Friedlander standing alone amid the Tribeca festivities at the Museum of Modern Art and thought it might be the perfect opportunity to inquire about those self-designed trucker hats he sports on the show.

So you design your own hats for 30 Rock.

Yeah, I’ve been making my own hats for years. I’ve been doing stand-up for 19 years and my hats have always said world champion in some language.

World Champion?

That’s my stand-up persona: The greatest athlete in the world and the biggest sex symbol in the world. That’s not who I am on 30 Rock, though—the world champion would never be a writer on a TV show. That’s too nerdy. I’m too busy banging chicks and breaking more records. I don’t even know how to read and write, I’m an athlete.

So what about the hats you make for the show?

For 30 Rock I thought it would be funny to have in-jokes on the hats because whenever I watch a movie I like to watch it again and find things you didn’t see the first time. I try to make the hats fit within the scene. Some of them I write way beforehand, some of them are last minute, some are flat-out jokes, some are in-jokes. Within an episode, if it spans one day, I make one hat; if it spans five days, I’ll make five hats for that episode.

Do you have a favorite?

I like the one I made for the show that says Half Centaur, which would imply that I am half-centaur. So let’s say that my dad is half-human and half-horse and my mom is all human, and then if you look at me I just look like a regular human because the horse gene was recessive on me. See, it’s like I look like a regular human, but I’m actually half-centaur and I could have a kid one day that is part-horse. Another one of my favorites is the Bahamas Trapezoid. Have you ever heard of the Bermuda Triangle? Right, so an even more dangerous and mysterious place than the Bermuda Triangle is the Bahamas Trapezoid. But it’s not a real place, I just made it up.

Do you get paid extra for designing your own wardrobe?

I own the hats, I make the hats, and I come up with the sayings. I don’t get paid extra for the hats. I just figure they're mine and I happen to be wearing them on the show.