In the End There Will Be Cockroaches and Zach Galifianakis, Man-Witch

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Today Slashfilm pointed us to Marshall Fine’s open letter to Zach Galifianakis imploring him not to pull a Chevy Chase now that he’s finally in a successful movie and the subject of a New York Times Magazine profile (“Now don’t blow it by letting some agent or manager try to turn you into a comedy commodity.”).

While we’re the last people who’d like to see him take on a string of bad projects (Seriously. Flavorpill loves the man.), we’d like to argue that Zach has already been there, done that, survived, and used the experience to generate new material for his act. Because his brand of comedy is founded in oddball self-deprecation, crappy projects don’t taint his career in the same way they would someone like Jack Black.

Exhibit A: 2002’s Late World With Zach. Think Between Two Ferns but for a VH-1 audience. While some fans think it was funnier than Conan, the show only lasted a season and hasn’t been released on DVD. Not a good sign.

Exhibit B: Dog Bites Man . Zach played Alan Finger, the show’s director, in this 2006 mockumentary series for Comedy Central. It lasted for all of nine episodes.

Exhibit C: Gigantic. It was unclear whether Zach’s homicidal homeless man was real or just a product of Paul Dano’s imagination. Either way, watching him in this indie flick was one of the stranger experiences we’ve had in a theater.

As Slashfilm points out, Zach is already in a few projects (Bored to Death, Youth in Revolt, Rogue’s Gallery) that are coming to a screen near you in the near future, and it’s way too late to take back G-Force now.

The Hollywood Reporter has the scoop on three projects that the actor is currently mulling over — all from Warners, the studio that released The Hangover. One of them sounds exactly like The Hangover with a lamer protagonist. Another is billed as a “pregnancy comedy.” That brings us to Man-Witch, which reportedly “centers on a man who finds he has supernatural talents and ends up at an all-girls witch school.” This sounds awful, likely pays well (it originally starred Black), and would make for fabulous material for his routine.

It’s a win-win, right?