He Was Dying of Cancer. So He Made a Comedy About It

Lee Einhorn remembers the day he officially met his soulmate. He’d been hired at the prominent ad agency Publicis & Hal Riney in 2003, working out of Boston, and had come to San Francisco to collaborate directly with a team there on a campaign. Lee decided to bring his dog to the office one day.

The pooch then proceeded to take a shit in the elevator on the way up to a meeting. Worse, the other person in the elevator, who witnessed this impromptu canine defecation, was his boss. His name was André Ricciardi. “He thought I was a loser, basically,” Einhorn recalls of that first impression. The two would soon become the sort of friends who felt perfectly fine calling each other “soulmates,” or, say, suggesting that one accompany the other for a dual BFF colonoscopy.

Tony Benna, listening on the same Zoom call, laughs at the story. Then he reaches outside of the frame and places a roughly eight-inch puppet of Ricciardi, the kind perfect for stop-motion animation, in the corner of the shot. He has one of Einhorn as well, he notes, but that one is staying in the box.

The real Lee is here, after all, nestled in a digital square right next to his. André is absent. The doll will be his stand-in.