TooFab spoke to the comedian after he was unmasked on Wednesday’s show, where he dished on his experience as the Dust Bunny, and the relatable reason he decided to take the gig.
For Andy Richter, stepping onto The Masked Singer was a challenge he wanted to face head on.
While the comedian is no stranger to stages and studios, singing outside of his car or shower meant taking things a step outside of his comfort zone, something he told TooFab he was ready to do.
“Just to get out of the house, make some money, get on TV,” Richter joked when asked why he said yes to competing on the show. “No, I mean, well certainly it’s a nice paycheck — this is what I do for a living. I am on TV for a living. So it was work, but also I’m nervous about singing in front of people. I don’t have any musical training. I can’t read music. I don’t know music. I’m a, you know, sitting in traffic singer. That’s the only kind of singer I am.”
“So it was a way to kind of challenge myself and do something uncomfortable,” he continued. “And it was uncomfortable. I was nervous about it because to go on TV and just chat and be funny and tell stories or react to things — that I could do all day. I don’t get nervous about that because I’ve done so much of that. But singing, that makes me nervous. So it was kind of a way to challenge myself to do something that I wouldn’t normally say yes to.”
As for how he feels about his performance overall, while Richter admitted he was disappointed about getting booted off the show so early on, he said he did “karaoke fine.”
“It was okay. I’m not a huge fan of me. I think I did fine, and I am disappointed that I didn’t get through, but i mean, but the other singers were really good singers,” Richter shared. “They were like — I would not be surprised if we get to the end and I find out, ‘Well, G–damn it they’re all singers,’ you know, they’re not– it’s not just like, ‘Oh, it’s a hockey player.’ It’s like, no, these are singers, you know? Because they were really good. And I was not expecting that.”
“I think I did fine. I did karaoke fine,” he added.
As for if the famous TV sidekick — who appeared alongside Conan O’Brien across multiple networks and shows during his late-night run — was able to sniff out the competition, he said not at all.
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“While you’re doing it, too, you’re in a silo. You don’t even see the other people. And it’s not as if there’s a feed of the show going on. If you’re walking from one place to the other, you’re either in the costume or you’re wearing a mask, basically, that obscures your identity. And you might catch a glimpse on a monitor of somebody else rehearsing, but I didn’t, I didn’t have any clue, any clue whatsoever,” Richter admitted. “And it’s beyond, like one of the people was like really tall, and I was like, maybe a basketball player, you know, but I don’t know. It might not be, it might just be a really tall person that’s good at singing.”
As far as that Dust Bunny mask, while it looked heavy, Richter said it was more hot than anything, adding that his movement was constricted, making some of the choreographed moves the TMS crew wanted him to do nearly impossible.
“It’s not so heavy, and it all sort of rested on a helmet. There’s no straps or anything. I’m wearing furry overalls, you know, with suspenders. It wasn’t too heavy, but it’s very hot,” Richter explained. “There’s nowhere for your own body heat to escape and you’re in like, foam rubber, so you really are kind of trapped in there. And the visibility is terrible. You have like, two little peepholes to look out of.”
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He continued, “There was choreography and there was some things that they wanted me to do. I’m like, I can’t do that. Like, I can’t do, like, hand gestures. I’m like, my hands were like from just above, you know, like just above the wrist was all I could really get out. And there’s not a lot I can do.”
When asked who he told about his performance, Richter said outside of his friends and family, — and Conan, of course — he kept things pretty tight-lipped.
“I think I did mention it to him,” Richter shared. “You’re not supposed to tell anybody, but of course, like, my wife knew and my kids knew and I think like I told my sister. On the night of the show, I did tell my siblings and my mom: ‘Watch The Masked Singer tonight,’ and they probably figured out it’s because I’m on it, because if I don’t tell them when I’m on things, they get mad at me. But I didn’t really tell too many people.”
“I kind of kept it under my hat because that’s the deal, you sort of make this deal with them, and it is kind of fun to keep it a secret,” he teased.
Richter also stumped the judge’s panel, as well as fellow comedians Joel McHale and Nikki Glaser, who joined joined the madness for Wednesday’s “Sports Night.”
“Ken Jeong I know pretty well, Jenny McCarthy I’ve met. I mean, she was on the Conan show back in like the early nineties, and used to come on pretty frequently, and I think that she’s guessed me for other people. So I kind of thought that the two of them might [guess me],” Richter shared.
“I did feel like once I started — ’cause my voice is, people can tell me by my voice when you know, if I’m in a store or something, nobody notices me, and when I start talking, they’re like, ‘Wait a minute, I know that voice,'” he continued. And there were people online, just regular people commenting on the show who were like, ‘The second he started singing, I knew it was Andy Richter.’ So I think if I’d lasted another episode, they would have probably figured it out.”
Richter added of seeing the judges’ shocked reaction to his unmasking, “I don’t know how that math works in their brains about who they think it is or who they think it isn’t, and that’s a fun part of the show, but it does not have anything to do with the actual results, it’s purely the votes. so they could all guess you and it wouldn’t really change anything.”
Now that Richter has faced his fears, Richter said he’d be up for giving something like this a go, again — though he’s not confident Broadway will come calling anytime soon.
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“It would depend. I mean, like if there was a project — there’s been a couple of times where they’ve approached me to do something, you know, like a Broadway-ish kind of show. And if something like that happened, I would certainly entertain it. But I would need a lot of help to make sure that I could do it,” he shared.
“I don’t think I’ll ever get a job, you know, in Guys and Dolls really singing, but I think that if it was like a comedy kind of singing, I think I could pull that off.”
The Masked Singer continues with Group B next Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET on Fox.
