Carpet. Desk. Lamp. Those are the iconic three items Steve Carell’s perpetually awkward weatherman, Brick Tamland, declares his love for in one of Anchorman’s funniest scenes, much to the confusion of his Channel 4 News Team. (Just wait until he kills a guy with a trident.) There’s a solid chance in the years since that you’ve had to endure a line-by-line reading of that lamp-y vignette from a friend or random bystander, but as Carell revealed during a recent 92nd Street Y talk, filming it was all-the-more hilarious because it was completely improvised. “I would stand in front of the camera and say these non-sequiturs,” he explained about embodying the character. “Adam [McKay] was like, ‘We should have more lines for you, but we don’t have any on the page.’ He literally said ‘Just say something,’ and hence came ‘I ate a big red candle’ and ‘I love lamp.’ The ‘I love lamp’ thing was just me at the end of a scene staring at a lamp and I said ‘I love lamp’ and Will [Ferrell] picked up on it and said, ‘You’re just saying things you’re looking at.’”
Or, as Carell now fondly reminisces: “And we got paid to do it.” He definitely loves lamp, and money!!!!!
