Jameela Jamil and ‘Impractical Jokers’ Stars Preview Their “Forking Ridiculous” Game Show, ‘The Misery Index’

What’s worse, getting trapped in an elevator or walking in on your grandparents doing the deed? There are a lot of variables to consider. Are you claustrophobic? Did you grow up in a family of over-sharers? And are both of these preferable to contracting “super- gonorrhoea” or confusing a loved one’s ashes with another powdery substance? These are the kinds of questions that contestants on TBS’ new game show The Misery Index try to answer for host Jameela Jamil with the help of the Tenderloins.

An uncomfortable twist on a comfortable format, The Misery Index brings the popular card game Sh*t Happens to life by tasking hopeful contestants with assigning a numerical value to some of the most painful experiences you can think of (and plenty that are beyond your wildest nightmares). The titular Misery Index was compiled by a team of therapists who ranked those horrible incidents on a scale of 1-100. The contestants try to correctly guess just how mortifying these experiences were with insight from the Tenderloins, who are masters of mortification thanks to their TruTV show Impractical Jokers. Although as Jamil told reporters during a set visit to The Misery Index, the Jokers might be biased.

“Whenever it’s anything penile, I have to rein them in from becoming too dramatic with their answers,” said Jamil, who gave an example of one such penile tale of misery. “One man had been in the shower and sat in one of those IKEA shower seats that have those little holes in the bottom, and his bollock had fallen through one of the holes—which is fine, it happens to the best of us. But the heat of the shower made the bollock swell, and then he could not get up and out of the stool.”

Other miserable incidents include a doctor amputating the wrong leg, getting a tapeworm stuck in your brain, and having a spider nest in your ear. “Whenever there’s an animal or an organism in you, I’m going north of 70,” said Joe Gatto, one of the four comedians tasked with guiding the contestants to victory.

And then there was one rare and unfortunate side effect of getting breast implants. “They put them in incorrectly and started to make noise. So any time she would move, her breasts would flatulate,” recalled James Murray. “That was funny! It was funny.”

Not even the most sacred of days is immune to misery. “A woman on her wedding day, her husband—they just got married two minutes earlier—he got super drunk, started a fight with her friends, and ruined the wedding,” said Brian Quinn. “[He] started screaming he wants a divorce—!”

If it’s hard to hear some of these stories, particularly that ear-spider one, know that the Jokers are right there with you. “I also naturally have a weak composition,” said Sal Vulcano. “So, I actually, you guys have made me throw up just by saying many things.”

The reason these stories are so painful (and funny) is because they’re 100% real—as are the reactions. “Our reactions are pure,” added Murray. “We’re seeing it for the first time, we’re reacting purely, and we are giving you permission to laugh at it too, at the craziness of life.”

The Misery Index is a perfect match for the Tenderloins, who have been suffering for comedy for almost 8 years on the series Impractical Jokers. Their embarrassing TV history is incorporated into the series by way of clips, wherein one of the guys becomes an “In-House Expert” on a particular miserable experience. But just because they lived through a certain event doesn’t mean they know how it’ll score on the index.

“The worst is when you become the in-house expert because the last clip is about you from Impractical Jokers, and then people look at you and go, ‘Oh, what was that?’ and they think you should know the magic number,” explained Gatto. “And you’re like, ‘I don’t know what people think. I know what I thought!'”

Considering their painful pedigree, it makes sense for the Jokers to participate in The Misery Index. But what about Jameela Jamil, the actress who plays the super upper-crust socialite Tahani on NBC’s The Good Place? How did she get involved?

“I just kind of got the call out of the blue and they were like, ‘Do you want to host the show? We think you would be great for it,'” said Jamil, who said she immediately did her research and became a huge fan of their work. She couldn’t wait to jump in, but she had no idea how the pairing would turn out. “We didn’t have a chance to really meet until day one, and it was just instant chemistry. We went out for lunch and maybe within about five minutes we were all making jokes, and we have a similar sense of humor, we have a similar stance on the world—which is very helpful in a show like this, where we feel a similar way about things—and also there was a kind of instant understanding that we were able to take the piss out of each other, which I think is really important on this show, that you feel like we all are on an equal playing field.”

The guys felt that same camaraderie. “We’ve been working together, the four of us, for so long and so tight, and to have her come in and, I mean, ‘click in’ isn’t even the word,” said Quinn. “I honestly believe that as a host of the show, as a cast member, as we’re developing into a pretty solid friendship here, I don’t think there would have been anybody better for the show than her. I mean that from the bottom of my heart.”

And, as Murray pointed out, the international pairing actually made a lot of sense considering where all the Misery Index entries come from. “It’s been almost legitimately 50-50, Florida and United Kingdom.”

There’s even a similarity between The Misery Index’s point system and the elaborate one used to total an individual’s morality in Jamil’s other show, The Good Place. “Everything about morals and points, I’m just drowning in morals and points,” joked Jamil.

“The game is forking ridiculous,” Vulcano interjected.

As the show’s host, Jamil literally stands apart from the guys. That distance, Jamil said, actually helps inform her role as the show’s impartial “authoritarian.” “I don’t get too chummy with everyone, and I think that’s kind of my role as the Mistress of Misery, which is my name on the show,” said Jamil.

“I just wanted to let you know, I called you the Mistress of Misery before I ever even knew you,” joked Vulcano.

While Jamil was immediately comfortable in the host role (after all, she worked in the UK as a TV host before The Good Place), the Tenderloins endured a bit of a learning curve while interacting with contestants as teammates on a traditional-ish game show.

“You’re not even rooting against your other team, you’re rooting for everyone to win,” said Gatto. “Even though you want your person to win money, you want everybody to win money, so it’s just kind of like a weird dynamic up there.”

“You can’t really learn the game because the scores sometimes just don’t jive with your own biases in your own head,” said Quinn. “And that’s when you really let people down.”

Vulcano has even had to resist offering to pull out prize money from his own pocket for the losing contestants. Recalling one instance where he wanted to pay for a contestant to go on their dream trip to Dubai, he said, “I was like, ‘Let me not say that out loud,’ but I was partially pretty serious. Actually, that’s what I felt, you know what I mean? But I was like, ‘I don’t know the rules here, so let me just not say that.'”

One thing’s for certain, though: the Jokers and Jamil would make for excellent contestants on The Misery Index, just judging by their own personal stories of misery.

“I live on the 56th floor, so I’m on an express bank of elevators, you know, which goes express to 40 and then local above that,” said Murray. “I’m coming down the elevator, it reaches like 45, 44, 43, so I’m like, ‘Alright, it’s going express to the lobby, I’m fine, I’m in the elevator alone.’ So, I farted, and it was the worst passing of gas in my entire life. And sure enough, the elevator slows down at 41. I was like, ‘Oh my God,’ right? The doors open, the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life, who I had never seen in the building before, walks in. I panic and walk out, and she walks in. As the doors close I hear her say, ‘Oh my God!’ I was so embarrassed, I wait like ten or fifteen seconds, I turn around, I hit the elevator button, I didn’t wait long enough and the doors open back up, and she’s staring at me with a look of disgust on her face. She looks at me, and I said, ‘I’m on the wrong floor,’ and the doors close again. And I left her to die.”

Topping that, Vulcano said he was literally hit by a car when he was four years old. “I was playing frisbee with my dad in the parking lot. There was a guy walking down the street that [my dad] knew, so he went up to the gate to talk to his friend and I went to get the frisbee. It was a 100% empty parking lot besides the two of us and the Coca-Cola frisbee. And then a station wagon pulled in from the opposite side. I saw it coming, and it was going to where the frisbee was, and I was walking to the frisbee and I was like, ‘There’s no way the station wagon doesn’t see me.’ And so I went to get the frisbee, I bent down and looked up, the car was right in front of me, and then I woke up in the hospital after that.”

It’s hard to top a story of getting run over by a car, but Jamil certainly tried with her “date from Hell” story. “I had a date with a guy, so I was like, ‘Oh, something sexy’s gonna happen!’ And he turns up and he walks into my house, and he just suddenly drops to the ground and has a fit on the way down. I’d never seen someone have a seizure before, and so I have to call 911, because as he’s gone down, he’s broken his fall with his face, so he loses all of his teeth. He splits his chin all the way open and is knocked out, completely.”

“So I call the ambulance, and the ambulance turns up with the fire brigade. Everyone pours into my house—I barely know this person, I’d been living in America at this point for maybe ten days, so this is just the worst possible welcoming ever. They resuscitate him, he’s got no teeth, but he’s able to communicate, and they’re like, ‘Have you taken any drugs?’ and he was like, ‘Well, I’ve only had a bit of cocaine, but I take that every day anyway,’ so I was like, ‘Oh, red flag, red flag!’ And they were like, ‘Have you taken any other drugs?’ and he was like, ‘No, I haven’t had anything else,’ so they start putting the blanket over him to take him out, and as they were going past his penis, it stands to attention, which lets everyone in the room know somebody’s taken some viagra with his cocaine. So now he’s having to be carried out of my house, he has to admit that to me, he goes ‘I may have taken some Viagra.’ Worst. Date. Ever.”

The host and panelists of The Misery Index hope that the show will get people thinking about their own miserable moments, and that maybe this ranking system will work its way into everyday conversation. “I imagine it being used out in everyday life, where people are like, ‘Oh, that’s a 70!'” said Jamil. “I’m already doing that, I’ve only been shooting this for two weeks, and I’m already giving everything points and numbers.”

The Misery Index premieres on TBS on Tuesday, October 22 at 10 p.m. ET/PT.

Where to watch The Misery Index