April Fools' Comedy Day: June Diane Raphael

This April Fools’ Day we decided our readers deserved a good laugh. But since a website can neither get collectively engaged nor pregnant we realized we needed some help. So we interviewed five comedians with upcoming project. Get to know them as they answer our April Questionnaire. Then check out more of their comedy online.

Get to know June Diane Raphael

June plays Jess’ gynecologist on New Girl (look forward to her returning this season). She killed it on Burning Love as bachelorette Julie Gristlewhite (season 3 premieres April 12 on Yahoo! Screen). You can check out How Did This Get Made? a podcast where she, along with Jason Mantzoukas and her husband Paul Scheer, playfully talks about terrible/misunderstood movies. Plus, she just finished filming the ABC pilot Pulling with Jenny Slate and Kristen Schaal.

(Spoiler Alert for Burning Love) Do you think Julie has found true love with Mark Orlando?: I mean I sort of feel like they’re perfectly matched. One of my favorite moments is when Mark Orlando is crying during the proposal to me and I’m sort of crying too. It’s just like these two dumb-dumbs crying at each other. They’re so perfectly dumb for each other. I think after they’ve gotten a taste of celebrity from their reality star status that they’re sort of perfectly suited for each other. So yeah I think Julie got her fanty-tale ending.

On filming those touchy-feely scenes with Blaze (Ryan Hansen): This is one of those things too where Ken Marino directed it and his wife Erica Oyama wrote the show and we shot season 2 and season 3 at the same time. So we were shooting, like, I don’t even know how many pages a day. It basically amounted to, someone came up with it, doing two feature films in 24 days, just in terms of page length. So that was a really quick shooting schedule. So I think one of the nice things for me is I never really had time to be embarrassed or nervous, just simply because there wasn’t time. I think if I had sat down and like really thought about ”Oh I have to like go sexually harass this guy who is not giving me anything back. How do I do this?” I would have probably not done it. So I think for me it helped that I didn’t have any time to think about it.

Have you seen Twilight Breaking Dawn Part 2 yet? I have not seen it yet, but I will be seeing it, don’t you worry. The sad thing about me and this podcast is how much I actually enjoy seeing these movies and how I would probably have seen them anyway. I genuinely enjoy the Twilight series. There’s a lot of movies we watch where like I’ve seen them already and [I’m] having to watch them for a second time happily.

April Questionnaire:

The last week of April is National Karaoke Week, what’s your go to karaoke song? It’s a strange one. I love Les Mis so much, like since I was younger I saw it when I was like you know 10, and I’ve seen it almost 18 times. But I always really loved the male parts of the songs. I really love like all the male solos and ”The Confrontation” and all of Javert and Jean Valjean’s stuff. I never sang ”On My Own.” I never wanted to sing ”I Dreamed a Dream.” And so my go to karaoke song is ”Stars” from Les Mis, which is Javert’s song. And it’s super strange and every time it comes on people are really weirded out but that’s what I do.

April Showers bring May Flowers, what’s the worst thing someone could do that you would forgive if they gave you flowers? Oh my god, I feel like pretty much anything. I gotta say I would forgive anything because to me the, and I’ve always thought this in my head, the sign of success — like I have no attachment to like cars or houses or anything, like in terms of like ”If I had all the money in the world I’d do this and I’d go on crazy vacations.” — to me the real sign of like ”Girl, you’ve made it!” is having fresh flowers in your home at all times. It doesn’t get any better than that. So you could pretty much do anything to me and if you sent my flowers I’d be happy as a clam.

April is National Poetry Month, have you ever written a poem to a love one? No, but I remember when I went to NYU and I was at Tisch and [as theater students] we were introduced to like e.e. cummings and Pablo Neruda. Everybody was buying poetry books and we were all reading poetry together. So one Christmas I had no money and so I went home and just like wrote a poem, I mean I didn’t write them, but I just handed out poems as Christmas presents. Like here’s a Pablo Neruda poem that really made me think of you. And I remember my sisters who were older were like ”Are you f–king kidding me?” I was like, ”Now I’ve looked through a lot of books and these are the poems I’ve chosen for all of you.”

Sarah Michelle Gellar’s and Uma Thurman’s birthdays are both in April, who would win in a fight Buffy or the Bride from Kill Bill? I feel like Buffy. I’m not even a huge Buffy fan but Paul [Scheer] is and so like his office is pretty much like a shrine to Buffy. So I just have seen so much of her. I just know how much he adores her and adores that show and how much the show meant to him. So that’s why my answer was Buffy because I feel like it would be sacrilege to do it otherwise. She’s a badass.

Follow June Diane Raphael on Twitter