|
Home
About Jester
Sketch & Solo Performances
Improv Performances
Film & TV
The Jester Interviews
Jester's Blog
Book reviews
Favorite links
Facebook
|
|
 J:
Two questions: How does improv inform sketch comedy or writing sketches?
How has what you know about improv changed since performing with Chicago
City Limits and as you’ve continued as a teacher?
CK: To some extent improv and sketch are almost the same thing. Improv
is sketch written instantaneously. The differences may be obvious. In
improv, you contract with the audience that you’re writing the sketch
right now in front of you, while in a written sketch show your
understanding with the audience is that you sat at home or worked in a
rehearsal studio and spent a great deal of time to come up with the
perfect execution of a comedy premise. What improv loses is the
perfection -- like being able to rewrite a joke a little better, or cut
out an extraneous 30 seconds, or if it was only a grapefruit instead of
an orange it would have been that much funnier. With sketch you can do
that. With improv the audience will enjoy being part of the process
more, and enjoy watching the writers at work on multiple levels because
the writers are writing it and performing it at the same time. In
sketch, the writers have already written it and you’re seeing it after.
In improv you’re seeing it both before, now and after. There’s an
original thought. I’ve never said that before. Some of the things you’ve
heard today are things I’ve been repeating for too long.
J: And you’ve honed them to perfectly execute them.
CK: Which leads into your other question about what’s changed since I
started in improv. A lot has changed. For starters, when I started
taking classes at CCL, even though I’m sure there were other groups,
there were pretty much only two groups of note in New York: CCL and
First Amendment. There were things going on in different cities -- L.A.
and of course Chicago, and other cities.
After taking classes at CCL for awhile some of us formed our own group
called the New York Improv Squad. Of course, people have always formed
their own groups and groups have branched off, but that was not a common
thing back then. Now with places like The PIT, Upright Citizens Brigade
and the Magnet Theater, it’s unimaginable that someone would be
impressed that someone branched off and started their own group, because
that’s what everyone does -- forms Harold teams, gets coaches, starts
working and does shows. Those places are flourishing communities of
students doing their own shows. At CCL, we were in class for a long time
just waiting for someone to leave so we could audition or get into the
touring company or the main company.
I’m thrilled with how huge the improv community is in New York now.
There’s so much going on. Another huge change is I remember a time when
improv was going on and there were some successful people from Chicago in improv going onto Saturday Night Live and the movie world, and as
writers into other areas of the performing arts. But in the mid-80s even
the early 90s, to a lot of the industry, if it wasn’t ‘What’s improv?’
it was ‘I don’t get it.’ -- I don’t mean audiences, but the casting
directors and agents. They wanted actors who had gone to prestigious
acting schools like Julliard, Carnegie Mellon and NYU. Now pretty much
any casting director or agent worth their salt wants improvisers, people
who can think on their feet. So many more movies are done that way,
where someone gives them a scenario and they go with it. There was a
time when almost everyone was terrified of improv and wanted their
script. Now there’s so many more improvisers and people who are facile
with it, and so many more people in the business recognize that
well-trained improvisers will do such a better job in a sketch group, a
series or a sitcom. They will be more comfortable essentially
‘yes-and’ing a script or director or scenario and going with it.
I’m often really proud when I see improvisers that I know in movies or
TV shows. I sometimes imagine that I see underpinnings of their improv
skills in their work. I know why they’re so funny or they made that
character choice -- because they’re trained in improv, and that’s what
makes them so good. It’s like feeling like you’re part of the Shaolin
Temple and ‘That is why your skills are so strong, grasshopper, you have
been trained well.’
What’s interesting about the improv community feeding the Web -- or even
a general societal trend, is that improv is empowering people by saying
comedy is not something that only immensely gifted comedy performers can
do. Intelligent people with a good sense of drama can do a comedy scene.
That won’t make someone a star performer or a brilliant improviser, it
just means that they can improvise. Often people say they could never
improvise. I say if you didn’t have a script for our conversation, you
still had a conversation with me. People often put improv in this very
separate category and don’t realize they’re always improvising.
Now it feels very improvisational to me even if it’s written sketches on
YouTube. Everyone is trying to create. There’s something interesting
about that. I once heard Dick Gregory say -- ironically this was a show
he was doing -- ‘You don’t need to come to a show. Let your friends make
you laugh. Why do you segment everything into going to see professionals
do it?’ But there are many examples of that in the culture. You can go
see a professional sing or you can go to karaoke. Sometimes there’s a
great pleasure in doing something yourself.
The skills that a good improviser learns will enable someone to do a
better sketch on YouTube in formal terms. I’m not sure that knowing the
rules of improv is necessary when someone just gets on the Web and
lip-syncs a song like a lunatic, and it’s funny hearing it, but I can
still break that down in comedy rules, that what’s funny about that is
the guy’s commitment to it, he’s committing 100 percent to singing the
song and he’s playing it at a 10 level. It’s his passion for it, that
he’s so into it, that’s one of the things that makes it funny.
J: How has being a father changed your comedy and performance?
CK: For starters, when my son was born, one of my friends said to me
sardonically, ‘Carl, I hope you’re not going to become one of those
comedians who now that you have a kid, only does material about their
kid.’ I said, ‘Please, no.’ And in my head I thought, ‘I’m going to be
cutting edge.’ Sure enough, I have a 13-month old now and I’m thinking
about writing songs connected to raising an infant and raising a
toddler, and I think ‘Oh no, it’s happening!’ No matter what, it
happens. Other than that I don’t think it’s really changed my comedy.
It’s changed my ability to explore the world in one way, but of course
I’m exploring something very different.
I’ve been creating more characters lately because I’ve been doing
written monologues, and really enjoy creating characters for that show
and that format. It’s interesting that it took me this long to write
characters because I was always a huge fan of Eric Bogosian and was in
the original Talk Radio at the Public Theater, although I joined the
cast mid-run just as
Eric was leaving the show and being replaced by Larry Pine. But in improv my characters were always just in the situation. I didn’t have a
lot of pre-prepared characters, although after a certain amount of time
of performing, there would probably be one I would do again -- but
rarely. It was a point of pride for me to try to repeat as little as
possible. I didn’t like having set characters. I probably had
archetypes.
J: How did you move from improv to doing characters?
CK: I’ve always enjoyed doing every aspect of comedy. It was just
sometimes where life took me. I did improv for 11 years straight with
CCL’s main company. After such a long amount of improvising with only a
limited number of those shows being videotaped, I felt frustrated by the
impermanence of it. As much as I adored that when I went to work every
night, I had no idea what the show was going to be, the flip side is not
having anything permanent. Out of that I thought I wanted to start
writing more. I happened on a works-in-progress group called Initial
Stages and started writing solo pieces for that, then got involved in
the Manhattan Monologue Slam. Those were character monologues. In
Initial Stages, I was often doing personal pieces and monologues, which
were a hybrid of stand-up, but not exactly that because I wasn’t going
for punch lines, but for concepts.
If I were to go back and do everything all over, the perfect balance for
me would always be doing ensemble work in improv and simultaneously
doing solo work. Sometimes solo work is lonely and I like the
companionship of having an ensemble with other people to work with and
the inspiration of other people to work with. But sometimes having other
people to work with means you don’t get to be the final arbiter of what
goes. You don’t get to control it enough, and that’s why I like the solo
stuff, because that’s exclusively mine. So I love having both and doing
both if I can.
|
|
|
|
|
