With their film Reno 911!: Miami opening in theaters this Friday, Washoe County Sheriff Department members Lieutenant Jim Dangle and Deputy Travis Junior (the alter-egos played by Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, respectively) sat down with North By Northwestern’s Patrick St. Michel and Loyola Chicago’s The Phoenix’s John Lohrstorfer to talk about Miami, college and mustaches.

Patrick: First off, I just wanted to know which did you guys prefer: Reno or Miami?

Listen to Dangle and Junior discuss which city is better.

Junior: That’s a dumb question.

Dangle: Here’s the thing, everyone down in Miami is into nudity and rollerblading, and so am I, you know. The only person we got who rollerskates in any sort of nudity in Reno is Terry.

Junior: Not easy on the eyes.

Dangle: I’ve seen him. It’s just wonderful to be in a different place where everybody is on recreational drugs, as opposed to hard, addictive things like meth, which is not a recreational drug. People on the party drugs, something called a “dance drug,” they’re not that dangerous. They basically want to rub your belly, say how much they love you, and hug…

Junior: Feel your pain.

Dangle: And talk about what a great night this is, and how the air feels real good.

Junior: That’s alright for law enforcement, that’s not a bad problem to tackle, whereas crystal meth…

Dangle: Impossible to tackle. They’ll tackle you.

John: So in Reno you have quite a large crystal meth problem?

Dangle: Oh my goodness gracious yes. Have you been? You can’t even get any cold medicine in Reno anymore. You have to go way, way out to Tahoe or something like that to get cold medicine without a prescription.

Junior: There’s a lot of crystal meth, and our crystal meth users are very big. We have a morbid obesity problem in Washoe County that’s getting near 60 percent.

Dangle: Something like that.

Junior: So meth is doing a lot of damage.

John: What advice would you have for college students regarding recreational drugs or alcohol use?

Listen to Dangle and Junior offer college advice.

Dangle: Here’s the thing- if you don’t have a car, do whatever you want. Drugs don’t kill people. Cars kill people. Cars being driven by people on drugs kill people. But if you are walking, go for it man. Check out The Doors’ Perception, learn about yourself.

Junior: Glade don’t fool anybody. I’ll give you that. Glade don’t fool anybody. What I don’t get is the theory that you put towels underneath the door when smoke rises. That doesn’t make any sense. That’s retarded.

Dangle: Put towels overneath the door. Or do what you used to do, put a wet towel in a Pringles can.

Junior: Yeah, Pringles can. You poke a little hole in the bottom for the air to escape, fill it with tissue paper and spray Glade on that outside, so your dorm room doesn’t smell like Glade.

Dangle: Then you blow into that. But obviously, kids should stay off of meth. Maybe I misspoke when I said drugs never killed anybody. That’s probably not department policy. But as long as you aren’t driving, you know.

Junior: Very difficult to be really, really stoned and have a pedestrian collision that leads to serious injury.

Dangle: If you do, wow, call Guiness Book.

Junior: Yeah, get it on YouTube.

Dangle: If somehow you’ve taken so much marijuana or shrooms that you ran into a tree or another person, get it on YouTube. You’ll win a prize, probably. More power to you.

Junior: And if you know someone who did that, party with that guy.

Dangle: If you can run that fast on marijuana at all, I’d be shocked.

John: What about the myth that chewing activated charcoal tabs will cover up alcohol consumption?

Junior: The other thing is, if you are acting drunk, it’s a pretty dead giveaway. We’re not gonna smell your breath. We’re not your mom. Cops aren’t your mom. We got equipment to do that.

Dangle: If you’re drunk, I’m gonna take you in, you’re coming with me if you’re operating a motor vehicle. If you’re chewing fucking charcoal, I’m taking you straight to the fucking mental asylum, and they’re not gonna let you go for a while. If I come up and you’re like that, thing, that rock monster chewing on charcoal, holy bejesus, I might start shooting. I think this fucker’s nuts! I don’t want anything to do with this guy. I’m not gonna ask him anything, and I sure ain’t given him a Breathalyzer. You’re gonna catch some lead poisoning off of me.

Junior: I’m gonna get out of this DUI by waving a gun around, that doesn’t really make any sense.

Dangle: Maybe if I shoved a bunch of feathers up my ass it’ll distract from the fact I’m drunk. Don’t call more attention to your self with your behavior, call less attention to your self. Maybe if I rolled in turds I won’t smell like booze. That’s true, but now you just smell like turds. Do the math people. Do the math.

John: What sparked your interest in law enforcement? What got you into the field to begin with?

Listen to Dangle and Junior talk about their careers.

Junior: I think if I were interested in law enforcement, I would be much better at it.

Dangle: I think that goes for most of us. When you are interested in something, you want to learn about and you get better at it. Like my interest in musical theater.

Junior: You gotten better at it?

Dangle: No, but I’m interested in it. Nothing sparked our interest in law enforcement. Law enforcement is what they call, you know how you have a backup plan, or a safety net. We’re in our fallback career right now. This is not…if I could be selling real estate, I would do it.

Junior: If you talk to people who work at a Taco Bell, they don’t talk about Taco Bell all night. They aren’t that interested in Taco Bell. They just work there.

Dangle: Yeah, any interesting Gorditas today? No, they were all exactly the same.

Junior: Boy, I went home after Taco Bell and I thought about it all night. I bored my wife talking about Taco Bell.

Dangle: Tomorrow I’m going to make some really interesting Gorditas that stand out from the other…no, fuck it. No, who’s interested?

Junior: But we get guns.

Patrick: This question is directed toward Lieutenant Dangle. Why don’t you think more departments have adopted your uniform-style?

Dangle: Because they’re living in the Bronze Age. They feel like it would be better to fight crime with cannons and crossbows and pouring molten lead down on the villagers with their ancient techniques and their spears and their maces. I am a product of the 20th century, I’m the next coming century of law enforcement. And I understand that I am…I’m a weapon. My whole self’s a weapon. Everything. I’ve studied….not Feng Shui. The other one.

Junior: You rented that Tony Jaa movie one time. Is that what you are thinking of?

Dangle: Yeah. Ong Bak: Thai Warrior. Anyway, my whole bodies a weapon, like Tony Jaa. Do you see Tony Jaa wearing a lot of clothes? No. Because he’s gotta be able to kick, and pounce and use extreme prejudice, and sometime I have to use extreme prejudice with my legs.

John: Are there any unique personal complications that can come of your uniform?

Dangle: Oh goodness gracious, yes. Medically, I’ve done permanent damage to myself.

Junior: What was your sperm count?

Dangle: Last time it was three.

Junior: They wouldn’t take him at the sperm bank.

Dangle: But that doesn’t matter to me, because A) I’m a confirmed bachelor and B) I’m married to my work. So there’s that, and there is chafing, wind burn, chapping, waffle butt, I get a lot. You get that when you sit on any Pier One Imports sort of chair with webbing, I get waffle cheeks sometimes.

Junior: You stick to the car seat quite a bit.

Dangle: That’s why I spray Pam on my legs. So I started spraying Pam on my legs so I could get out of the car faster, you start rassing me about it but it worked really good. It did turn out that it caused a slight fly problem. I looked like Pig-Pen with flies around the back of my thighs because I had sprayed them with Pam. That’s why I’m trying to find an unscented sort of Pam for next summer. Does that answer your question? My body is a weapon, it has to be able to move at all times. If I could go pants-less, I would.

John: This is directed towards Deputy Junior. What’s it like to be inside a whale?

Listen to Junior discuss being inside a whale.

Junior: About what you think. I would imagine that being halfway pulled out of a Caesarean section is probably very similar, except the smell is a lot worse, it smells like a whore house at low tide.

Dangle: And you’re middle-aged.

Junior: I’m not as flexible as I was during that Caesarean section. Yeah, it ain’t like Pinocchio, it ain’t delightful inside a whale with songs and little crickets on rafts with banjos. It’s an unpleasant, horrible experience. Every night I wake up and feel like I’m inside that whale.

Patrick: What do you think the greatest threat to America today is?

Junior: Honestly, the youth.

Dangle: The youth. Some people would say the Taliban, we would say no, the youth.

Junior: Quit jackin’ off each other on MySpace.

Dangle: You go onto the MySpace, you trade yourselves like sex slaves on the MySpace by day and night. The only skills you work on, that I know of, are shooting in the Grand Theft Auto and whacking each other with pipes and chains. So what we are creating are an army of cyber, chain-whacking robots trading each other as pleasure slaves to eachother.

Junior: They are really good at that stuff in their heads, but all they really do is sit there and type. It’s an underachieving group of whacked out, ultra-violent….

Dangle: It’s like A Clockwork Orange. They actually went out and raped people!

Junior: They stoled cars!

Dangle: They got the hat, and they’d go to the milk bar and they’d steal it and then they would go crack some skulls.

Junior: They obviously dry-clean their clothes from one night to the next. They fight other gangs. They just didn’t sit and pretend. They did stuff.

Dangle: What happened to The Warriors? They would actually go fight people in the subway!

Junior: But they fought, like, pantomimes.

Dangle: Yeah, they did fight a bunch of mimes and baseball guys.

John: Do you think this decline in America’s youth could be related to the overall decline in mustaches among young people?

Dangle: A mustache is a privilege. It is not a right. You don’t have the right to have a mustache. You just don’t. I know the Constitution might say otherwise, but fuck the Constitution, and you can quote me on that. A mustache is a privilege.

Junior: Yeah, it’s a club, you aren’t invited to.

Dangle: You are not invited into it. It’s for us. It’s for a certain branch of Navy guys…

Junior: Oh, you aren’t talking about law enforcement, are you?

Dangle: No, no I am.

Junior: I thought you were talking about the other guys with mustaches.

Dangle: Yeah, it’s OK for the leather community too. But it’s a club, and you aren’t welcome. You have to earn it. It’s like the Spidey Suit. Comes great responsibility.

John: What would be the process for someone to earn a mustache?

Dangle: It’s a long road. It’s like a walk-about, where you find out who you really are. It starts by picking what kind of mustache you want. Because there are a lot of different ones.

Junior: And it’s a hard decision, but you have many weeks to make that decision, as you are growing in your mustache, which takes some pressure off.

Dangle: At a certain point, the mustache tells you what it wants to be, and then you have become fully realized. And you got a ‘stache.

Patrick: So what’s next for Reno’s Sheriff Department? What’s on the horizon?

Dangle: California is literally on the horizon. What is next for us?

Junior: The girls are really excited because we are getting a new tampon machine. That’s kinda all the talk.

Dangle: That’s very exciting. We’re trying to learn Miranda Rights in Chinese for the coming millennium. So, we’re making a real effort to learn Miranda Rights in Chinese. We don’t shoot at autistics anymore.

John: Any thoughts on higher education in America and the direction that it is traveling?

Junior: I didn’t go to Junior College.

Dangle: We are mostly high school graduates. So, I’m not really sure what college is for. What college seems to be for is a place to go to finger each other and learn about…read a couple really obscure books that will never come up again in your life and math so complicated that it has no practical application.

Junior: Stephen Hawking doesn’t even use it.

Dangle: The only practical thing you are learning in college is fingering, unless you are taking Spanish or typing. So, I’d focus on those.

Junior: Just focus on basic rudimentary skills. Learn how to fix a muffler.

Dangle: You would be so much better off. You don’t need to read about Descartes. Learn how to change your oil. That’s going to come up a lot more.

Junior: Never under any job interview will they ask you to list any of the philosophers. Do you know what they ask? Typing. Can you type? How fast?

Dangle: Habla usted Español? Can you change oil? These will come up every day.

Listen to an exclusive clip of Dangle and Junior discussing adrenaline boners.

Exclusive clip of Dangle and Junior talking about autistic bugs.