Zach Galifianakis' curiosity about gardening is infectious

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.It’s odd to see Zach Galifianakis being sweet.A uniquely gifted comedian with significant acting range — from The Hangover movies to the Baskets TV series — Galifianakis has, in recent years, become known for the insulting and underprepared interviewer persona he puts on for his YouTube series Between Two Ferns. On it he asked Barack Obama how it felt to be the last black President (“Seriously?” Obama responded) and told Brad Pitt, “You play a lot of people that are Nazi hunters, which is weird to me.” “Why do you say that?”, Pitt asked.

“Because you look like Hitler’s dream,” said Galifianakis.It’s a shtick we’ve seen before — and Galifianakis owes a larger debt to Martin Short’s offensively ignorant interviewer Jiminy Glick than, say, Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G — but there’s something about the bearded Greek comic that makes it forever unclear how sincere he is and how much of it is a gag. Maybe this guy really does think Jon Hamm’s middle name is “Honeybaked”?All this changes on Netflix’s This Is A Gardening Show, where Galifianakis spars with children about root vegetables, giggling good-naturedly with them, and then learns from farmers and agriculturalists about grafting tomatoes or foraging for mushrooms.

The actor is clearly interested in farming himself, and comes to the subject with his trademark unpreparedness, but, while wide-eyed, he’s also enthusiastically hungry to learn. This curiosity is extremely infectious.Galifianakis speaks in an offhandedly absurd way, coming up with lines that are beautiful, describing the tomato, for instance, as “a gateway drug to the garden” but also, quite simply, as “pre-ketchup.” He brings both goofiness and earnestness to the enterprise, but