Comedian Sam Morril Talks Comedy Tour, Knicks’ Title Run & More with Rich

Sam Morril came on to promote tour dates in Lisbon, Athens, Budapest, Zagreb and Vienna, which is not the usual reason a comedian visits this show.

"I just booked stuff I wanted to go to," he said. Rich suggested a name for it. Morril had already gotten there: the Where Have I Not Been Tour.

He is not worried about the language barrier, on the grounds that he is a classic arrogant American who assumes people will figure it out. Also, more practically, if they bought a ticket they already know him.

But the actual subject was the Knicks, and Morril arrived with a confession about what winning did to him.

"It's hard to write jokes when everything is great," he said. The title run cost him roughly ten weeks of comedy. He was bad at it, and he knew why. A lot of comedy comes from irritability, and there is no bit in noticing that God is real and everything is cool.

Then he made a claim he has clearly been waiting to make on the record.

"I feel like I started Knicks in five."

The evidence exists. During the Hawks series, tied 1-1, there is footage of Morril standing behind CJ McCollum's postgame interview holding up five fingers. He thought about a different single finger and decided against it, because he knew where the camera was and wanted the shot to be airable.

"I'm an entertainer," he said, when the show pulled up the clip and found him.

The Knicks promptly lost the next game and went down 2-1, at which point the joke updated itself to Knicks in six.

What followed, in his telling, was the most stressful non-stressful run imaginable. Every game felt like watching Shawshank for the first time, miserable for two hours and then fun for the last three minutes.

The turning point was the closeout game against Atlanta, a blowout that made him ask what had just happened. Then Cleveland, where the Knicks came back in Game 1 and started raining points, 120 here, 130 there, 140 the next night, once Karl-Anthony Towns became the point center.

He and Rich both circled McCollum as the unlikely villain, the man cast in the role New York has watched Trae Young and Reggie Miller play for thirty years. Right up until the switch flipped.

The Cavs' analytics comments still bother him. "Kenny Atkinson is too cool a guy to be doing that," Morril said, with real respect attached. Rich was blunter, calling it the epitome of loser talk.

On Jalen Brunson, the two of them found the same frame. New York was always the team that lost because somebody on the other side raised his level in crunch time. Now the Knicks have one of those guys. Brunson's 45 in a closeout game was the most since Jordan did it to the Jazz.

The photograph that got them both was Brunson handing the Larry O'Brien to Patrick Ewing while keeping the MVP trophy for himself.

"Imagine if Ewing had a guy like Brunson on his team," Morril said. He also loved the shot of Ewing in a Newsies cap, nodding like a proud dad, and the way Brunson carried himself all run, walking out stone-faced like Batman while a much younger, much taller opponent cried at reaching the finals.

The trophy superstition came up too. Brunson refused to be photographed with it, or even be interviewed in front of a backdrop showing it.

"It's psycho stuff," Morril said. "In a good way."

His own history explains the relief. He was 10 or 11 at the Ewing finger roll miss, carried out of the building crying by his father. Which is why Josh Hart's finger roll off the back iron in the OG Anunoby game landed the way it did, on the same basket, with the same inevitability.

"For him to blow it would have crushed us," Morril said, listing Hart in the lineage of Anthony Mason, Charles Oakley and Charlie Ward. Anunoby saved him, and Hart has said as much.

On repeating, Morril did not flinch. The Sixers are tough, with LeBron James and Jaylen Brown added and Paul George gone, plus Tyrese Maxey and VJ Edgecombe. He wonders how Golden State watched all that and did not trade for Brown. He thinks Boston will be right there anyway.

"Why can't the Knicks do it again?" he said. "Why not?"

He also revealed he once did a benefit for Giannis Antetokounmpo, met him afterward, told him he respected the Bucks but was a Knicks fan, and got back a line that ruined a year of his life: you never know where I end up next free agency. Morril talked it up publicly and got destroyed for it.

In hindsight he thinks it would not have fit anyway, two ball-dominant players in Giannis and Brunson, and he prefers how it actually went with Towns.

Rich landed the thesis. The Knicks do not need Giannis, do not need LeBron, do not need any of the names that used to go on the season ticket brochures before free agency.

"You're thinking about the way it's always been, when we were beggars," Rich said. "Now we're choosers."