He was shirtless with purple sweat pants, a necklace celebrating Minnesota swinging from his neck and his hair mussed up from the power nap he just took on his prison-style bed.
"Wassup, dude."
It's the kind of slacker greeting one expects from the Minneapolis native, who got his start doing open mike at Acme Comedy Co and has, apparently, slouched his way into the mainstream, first as a flamboyant stooge on Reno 911 and numerous Adam Sandler movies, and now in his own series, Nick Swardson's Pretend Time, a censor-teasing sketch show on Comedy Central in which the star leads a sexual-harassment seminar for the staff at a donkey sex show, pelts an obese man's naked bottom with oranges and munches coca leaves in the jungles.
But Swardson didn't just belch his way to the top.
Running your own show isn't child's play, which Swardson proved after slipping on a Vikings sweatshirt and Vikings slippers and heading to the set, where everyone - costume designers, producers, make-up artists, actors - wanted a piece of his time.
"It's a lot harder than I thought it was going to be," said Swardson, who recently turned 34. "I'm probably in 98% of the sketches and each one requires a different voice, a different moustache. It's intense."
Critics probably won't have a lot of sympathy for a guy who called his last stand-up special Seriously, Who Farted?.
He and his mentor, Sandler, specialise in scatalogical, silly humour that's not likely to lauded by the Peabody Awards committee. But Swardson, an astute student of comedians such as Charlie Chaplin and Woody Allen, dares anyone to think his approach is ridiculously easy.
"There are people that will slough off my comedy as stupid, sophomoric and idiotic, but I'm not an idiot," he said. "There's really a method to the madness. You just can't have a cat that has diarrhoea.
"There has to be a joke there. You know, people called Don't Mess With the Zohan the dumbest movie ever made, but Sandler made a Middle Eastern comedy that's insane.
"That's amazing," he said.
Swardson, who appeared in Zohan as well as I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry and Bedtime Stories, has also been a Sandler favourite behind the scenes, guiding him through writing, editing and producing.
"I honestly don't think it was calculated," Swardson said. "I think it just evolved from Sandler thinking, 'Oh, this guy is funny', to me rewriting Grandma's Boy and then co-writing The Benchwarmers. He's just thrown everything at me, but in increments."
Their next two collaborations are major steps in their relationship.
This month, Swardson will play the leading man for the first time. The film, Born to Be a Star, about the Midwestern son of two porn performers, was co-written by Sandler and Swardson. The two are currently shooting a romantic comedy with Al Pacino.
• Nick Swardson's Pretend Time screens on Saturdays at 10am and Sundays at 9.30pm on Comedy Central.