“There’s Nothing But Happiness In My Soul” — The Chuck Armstrong Interview
Chuck Armstrong and I share a love for comedy, and while I am no longer funny, Chuck continues to be, as one half of the group Charles.
We chatted via email. It wasn’t funny enough. So then we had a quarantine Zoom session. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
RRD: Let’s not bury the lede. You contracted the novel coronavirus. What have you learned about yourself, or what powers have you gained, since having COVID-19?
Honestly, just that I’m extremely lucky to have gotten a fairly mild case and to have gotten it early enough to be tested. It was scary to get that sick, but something of a relief to have had it sooner rather than later, and I’m extremely lucky that I didn’t need to be hospitalized. That, and that Val Kilmer absolutely deserved an Oscar for his performance in Tombstone.
[Editor’s note: Chuck provided a more earnest answer than I was hoping for.]
You currently are an adult man who still does comedy and theater. Growing up, did you know you wanted to be a performer (or writer)? When did you know you were funny?
I did not explicitly know I wanted to be a performer, no. My best subjects in school were always math and science, so I kind of assumed I’d do something technical, even as a kid.
However, from a young age I took my comedy very seriously. Sketch comedy, specifically, was always appealing to me because of the genre’s ability to explore many concepts from many different angles in such a concise format.
There was a show in Seattle called Almost Live!, which was a locally-produced, local-focused sketch comedy show. (It’s actually where Joel McHale and Bill Nye the Science Guy got their starts.) It preempted Saturday Night Live, pushing SNL back 30 minutes every Saturday night. All the jokes were about local issues: Seattle politics, sports, arts and culture, etc.
I was obsessed with it as a kid, I think partly because I really felt like I was in on the jokes. SNL of course was great at that time (this would have been the Mike Myers, era), but something about the local focus of Almost Live! resonated with me so profoundly.
It made me understand that comedy was something that could be done without the trappings of a massive international production machine. Seattle in the early ’90s also had something of a DIY/punk/anti-corporate ethos pervading its art and music scenes generally, and my older sister was really into the Seattle music scene at the time, so I’m sure a bit of that seeped in. My friends and I started goofing around with a video camera at some point, and I honestly don’t think I’ve ever stopped making sketch comedy since then.
When you were in college, you did the Chappie, right? What were the comedy gigs in high school / college that helped you grow?
Indeed I did. The Chappie was amazing, but I came to it a bit later. As a freshman, I was intimidated by the quality of the magazine, especially the volumes from the late ’90s into the early aughts, and so didn’t really think I could hang as a writer.
As I mentioned above, pretty much all of my comedy experience was on the performative side; there’s a writing element to that obviously, but it’s very different to write a script and film it or put it on a stage than it is to just put the written word out there as a humor piece, and some of the work that was in those Chappie volumes, especially pieces from folks like Chris Onstad, Jacob Young, Chris Crane, Owen Ellickson, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, just blew me away.
You have a writing partner, also named Charles (right?) with whom you have a comedy group called Charles? What’s your creative relationship like?
That is correct on both fronts, though in the context of Charles the group, he is Charlie and I am Chuck. This works out because that’s also what most of our friends already call us, respectively. We met at Stanford working on the Chappie, Charlie was head writer and then editor our last two years at Stanford.
We were roommates after that and Charles was born a few years later when we were both up in Seattle and got involved in the comedy scene up there. In the early days, the creative relationship was this never-ending free-flowing discussion.
We had a big whiteboard on the wall and we would write ideas down as we hung out and chatted about things in normal conversation. The Seattle comedy scene at the time was unbelievably supportive, and gigs were popping up everywhere, so we could conceive, pitch, write, and perform an idea in less than a week. That never-ending dialogue and refinement was always the bedrock of our act. Ideas already had four or five levels of revision before anyone even sat down to write a first draft on a script.
Things are obviously different now, Charlie lives in LA and I’m in NY. He’s married and a dad, so we don’t have the endless free-flowing-roommate-conversations anymore, but we still talk regularly and work on videos and scripts.
Let’s talk about some recent projects. I would love to talk about America’s Next Top Cult. Explain it to me.
Yes, so America’s Next Top Cult is a show.
It’s a monthly show that I do at Caveat with my co-producer James Hamilton, who’s a very good stand-up comedian here in New York and also a writer for Vice News. The original concept was “Shark Tank for Cults” where we would get comedians to come on and just pitch insane cults. As we developed the idea, we realized that there was a little bit more to mine here, so it ended up being something more akin to American Idol for cults.
What we do is, every month, we have a panel of three experts, which includes one actual expert, so somebody who is a theologist or a practitioner of an interesting… I shouldn’t say interesting necessarily, but of a maybe perhaps esoteric spiritual practice. We’ve had, for example, the staff astrologer from Cosmopolitan Magazine, we’ve had a performance artist who did an installation about the Church of the Now where energy drinks were venerated as a spiritual, [chuckle] like a spiritual communion.
And then we also have two comedians, in addition on the panel, usually folks who have had some exposure or affiliation with a cult-like or some religiosity, but all it is, these are just comedians that we think are good. And then we have a panel of judges, and then three comedians will come out over the course of the evening, and each of them will present a new cult that they have come up with. And they then get feedback from the panel in front of the audience. At the end of the night, the audience votes on which cult they would most like to join. And then we crown America’s Next Top Cult at the end of the night.
That sounds exciting. In your experience — because I’ve definitely talked to people in comedy who have spent time in cults or cult-like environments in their childhood — What percentage of comedians do you think, and you don’t have to quantify it, but do you feel like you know a lot of comedians who have been in cults?
I mean, not cults proper, but you do get a lot of folks who have had either particularly religious upbringings, or even with some folks who have been in the military will compare it to a cult.
The regimented lifestyle will be similar to what you would imagine would be dictated upon you in a cult. So no, I don’t think that there have been a significant number of comedians that have been in actual cults, but enough folks usually have come from some background where a strict religious or regimented, or prescribed structure that we would consider cult-like was a part of their life.
How would you connect that to your idyllic childhood that you described to me? You said, “Okay, my childhood was really great, Seattle,” whatever, but I think it’s funnier if you come from a cult, right?
It would be much funnier if I came from a cult. That would also just give… I mean, man, what a great one-man show I’d have, just out of the box with no work. If I’d been raised in a cult, my God, think about that, I’d crush.
Do you think comedy has been more work for you because your parents are nice?
[laughter]
Yeah. I’m not disturbed in a way that I think a lot of comedians are, that are able to find narrative success by mining their own personal experiences. If I were to do a one-man show about where I grew up, it’d be like The Andy Griffith Show. But with more grunge music.
Don't you think that would be disturbing to a lot of people right now... If The Andy Griffith Show is just a one-man show, wouldn't that freak a lot of New York stages out?
That's a great question...
Whistling and skipping down the street, and putting people in jail.
I mean...
That was his whole thing, right?
I don't know. I'm thinking about it now. A one-man show that's just doing episodes of The Andy Griffith Show, as one man, now, I don't know how that would read. I think that would mostly be baffling. People would try to think if... They'd be like, "Here comes the commentary. Here comes the big... "
It doesn’t fit todays’s politics and the culture. Wouldn't it be just insane? This person who was a particularly happy jailer of other people? That's what his job was and he had a dog and he would whistle... Those are the things I know about him.
We all know that he whistled, just 'cause that song... I felt like that song was the sort of... I imagine that was the soundtrack in his brain the whole time.
Isn't that a crazy thought? That he just whistled in his brain the whole time?
It is pretty crazy. If you're trying to get me to say that a good textual reading of The Andy Griffith Show was that Andy Griffith was a character who was grappling with some kind of psychosis... I'll say it, you can just come out and ask me to say it. We can go off the record for that part and then I'll come back and say that... That's what you're trying to lead me to, but I don't...
You know how interviews work is you can't just say we'll go off the record and then say the thing, and then you're off the record. It's not... I'm not a journalist...
No, that is how it works, right? I go off the record and then you can't now say anything until we agree on the record again, or you...
No, but you go, "Are we off the record?" And I either say, "Yes," or, "No."
Oh, I see. No, I think if I go "off the record," then we're off, right?
Not when I'm recording.
So what was your question? Would an Andy Griffith Show, would...
Well, the question was about your childhood. I'm not interested in The Andy Griffith Show.
It seemed like you were pretty interested in The Andy Griffith Show, as a one-man show.
I'm only interested in it as the only proxy you have about talking about your childhood. You grew up in Seattle?
Correct.
Green River Killer, grunge, Chris Cornell killed himself.
Yes.
Singles soundtrack. No championships from 1977 to … I don't think even now, the Sonics left. And you have no problems?
Sorry, what was the question?
Your childhood.
In this insane Twin Peaks land, where they choose to make the remaking of The Killing, which is a Danish serial killer movie with Joel Kinnaman, there are orcas off... You were talking earlier, when you said off the record, about the fact that in Seattle, you can be in nature.
And one of the things I understand is you can have your oysters at the place on Pier 40, and you get on a ferry, and then if you take the wrong ferry, you're swimming with orcas... None of this introduces any terror into your young childhood life that informs your adult comedy. You are like, "It was fine. I love my parents, they're really nice and I appreciate them. They are just charming people and there's nothing but happiness in my soul."
I mean, to a certain extent... I mean, you are putting words in my mouth "There's nothing but happiness in my soul." I can say that I was extremely lucky in how I was raised. Yeah, I had what you would consider a traditional nuclear family. My parents were wonderful, were involved in my life, were around, all of that. Yes, all of that is true in that regard.
How traditional was your nuclear family? Was there a half a kid?
No, I had two sisters, and my mom and dad are still married. So I had a mom and dad, and two older sisters.
So three kids, but not two-and-a-half kids?
Correct, not two-and-a-half... Unless you count me. Oh! I'm sorry...
That was great. That was terrific.
It was just a burn, I burned myself, I guess.
Can we talk about the hardship of being a comedian with no problems?
That's kind of what I was getting at earlier when I was saying like, "Oh man, have I had some real problems."
Let's talk about the struggle. You were a person who is contented and happy, and loves your parents, and feel good. How hard is it compared to those other people who saw dolphin penises when they were young?
Great example. Very specific and very vivid, thank you. I think that, not to eject too hard from the wonderful world of this question, but I think that you're kind of getting a difference in where I would typically see something around sketch comedy versus stand-up specifically. Stand-up comedians tend to have a reputation for being fairly wounded. I couldn't hear you because your bandwidth is low and you turned your video back on. I did not hear what you said…
I said stand-ups have a reputation for being funny. But then you said, wounded.
Yeah, I don't know that stand-ups broadly have a reputation for being funny.
Some of them do.
If anything, my comedy tends to be a little bit less experiential and a little bit less... Maybe I'll say a little bit more conceptual, situational, things that aren't derived from personal... Or based on literature, or culture, or things that already exist in the zeitgeist that aren't based on my own personal experience.
I don't draw a ton other than what you are incapable of setting aside, I don't draw a ton from my own personal experience, in terms of any of the writing or performing that I do.
How do you draw up concepts? Where do concepts come from?
That's... [laughs] Where do concepts come from? They just exist. They just already exist. How do you have an idea? Describe an idea, is essentially what you're saying, right?
I think they're great questions, I think you should answer both of those questions. How do you have an idea?
I'm not going to... I'm not gonna answer the question of how do you get an idea? You just have it, that's it.
It's a very unsatisfying answer to me and to my audience.
[laughs]
I'm sorry. I don't know what to tell you. You just have it. I wish I could give you some tips on how to have an idea, but I can't.
Can you at least describe the experience of having an idea for the people who don't have the idea in the same way that you do? What happens?
Okay, but I think we're getting into some... We're getting into a level of understanding human... To have to describe things to an alien species.
So, I'm really glad you asked. Essentially, you have a feeling of an image in your brain, of a thing that you think would be relatable or well-received by other human beings, and that is an idea.
Okay, but what is the... Describe the feeling or image. Describe what that's like. Like you see a picture? An image is a picture.
Man, [laughs] you're asking me to describe what an idea... You're asking me to describe what a thought. Sometimes it's a picture, sometimes it's a situation, like a conceptual situation. "If this teacher were a pirate... " I don't... You're like...
Well, what do you see in your brain? You said an image. What does this teacher as a pirate look like to you?
I think you can figure out what a teacher as a pirate looks like.
Are you seeing a teacher in a pirate suit?
We all know what a...
Like it's up there on a boat and you see a teacher that you know?
This is not an idea I had until right now.
But it’s in your brain, right now?
Right now, yeah, I am seeing a teacher of mine. I am seeing specifically my AP US Government teacher... History? Yeah, AP US Government teacher dressed as a pirate in my brain right now.
That's wild. I've visualized a lot of ideas of my life and I have never visualized any of my high school teachers.
I mean, in this case, you sort of forced me to describe what I was visualizing when I thought something entirely off the cuff.
But I didn't make that idea come into your head, of a teacher as a pirate...
You're right. You didn't force that idea into my head. That is correct. That was an original idea that I had right now during this conversation.
I just asked you to describe it.
Well, I know. And I did.
And you did and I appreciate it. I actually feel like I understand your process a bit better than I did before.
I'm very skeptical that that's true, but thank you. I'm glad if that's the case.
Well, look, here's the thing. You had a great childhood, but also have pictures in your brain coming up of your teacher in a pirate costume. Someone else can connect the dots. It's not my job, but...
That's a good point. Did you know that some people don't visualize ideas or visualize their memories? That there are apparently people who only remember, essentially, some sort of equivalent of a verbal description of them? That they don't actually see the images of things from their pasts in their head?
I don't believe you can know what other people do unless you ask them, which is why I do this. But I do know that people smell faces and also fart colors, so...
I think that's synesthesia, but no, there's like a documented condition where there are people who cannot...
I don't think farting colors is synesthesia. I think you're confusing things.
You're smelling colors, right? Like presumably a fart, you could smell. So if somebody farted and you smelled red, that seems like...
Smelling colors might be synesthesia, but farting colors is a different talent entirely.
But isn't that the same if you are the recipient? Now we're getting into observer-observed questions. I'm really glad that we've really gotten into the fundamental issues on this... [chuckle]
Correct. If I fart red and you smell blue, what is reality? Correct.
All right, so [laughter] did you have a question about my childhood? I think I answered it, I'm sure I answered it.
What’s life like as a touring comedian? Are there any crazy tour stories? Most of your friends are probably at home with kids…
Man, all right, so let me tell you actually, not to be too self-indulgent, but let me tell you one of my favorite stories from something that happened on tour. It combines a few elements of the tour, of being on tour. And then I can answer specific questions later if you'd like.
But this would have been in 2012-ish, and from having toured pretty extensively for the four to five years before that, my writing partner, Charlie Stockman and I, were pretty well-known, just in the Pacific Northwest sketch scene generally.
We became very good friends with a good number of Canadian performers, specifically, these two guys, Devin and Tom that still teach and have a comedy theater up in Vancouver, British Columbia. They were from an improv and sketch group called Hip.Bang!
They were really fantastic, and we kept bumping into them on tour and we became very good friends. Ultimately, we organized a tour together, but they had us up to Vancouver for a festival that they were producing, and there were comedians from mostly all over Western Canada, but also from Portland and Seattle.
We had this show that was like a mash-up, which was basically at the end of this festival. We had all done little sets during this festival, and then at the end of the festival, the big grand finale was a mash-up show. So it was like a two-hour show of interwoven sketches from all of these different sketch comedy groups.
And the grand finale was this big ensemble piece, which was just comedians literally acting out a specific scene, verbatim, from the movie Speed. And when you see it at the stage, it's verbatim, it's taken directly from the script. It's a good bit.
And I had seen these guys do it before, and inevitably needs a bus full of people, there's extras. So we have one rehearsal before we do this, and basically we find out like, "Okay, so you're doing these sketches here and we need you to be an extra on this, so you don't have any lines," etcetera. So we do the whole show, it's great, we get to the very last sketch of the night, which is this, doing Speed verbatim. So everybody from the show that had performed that evening was on stage. And...
Can I ask you a question?
Yeah, of course.
So all the comedians are in the festival are on stage, basically?
That were involved in sketch and improv.
Who's in the audience then?
[Silence.]
People that attended the comedy festival. People that were interested in seeing comedy.
It was a pretty well-attended show, we were at a... I can't remember the name of the venue, but we performed there a couple of times in Vancouver. It's a long performance space and sports bar. But it was well-attended.
Were there no sports happening?
Sorry?
Were there no sports happening then? No hockey?
You just wanted to really needle comedy audiences, like really stick it to them.
It’s not part of the interview, they were just factual questions.
Okay, all right.
Well it was, believe it or not, it was a well-attended festival, and we got a well-attended crowd.
And also to be fair, a lot of it was drawing from the fans of some sort of comedic institutions in Vancouver. There's this group called The Sunday Service, that has done a Sunday night improv show for almost a decade, maybe even more than a decade at this point, that is fantastic. Some of the best improv I've ever seen, and also they're just absolutely beloved in Vancouver.
So they were on the bill, so whatever, the audience was huge. It was a well-attended show.
We're doing the scene and the power goes out entirely, just blackout in this venue. And it took us a minute to figure out what had happened, obviously.
Did they cut the power? Did the lights go down? Everything is off, everything in... There's not a light on. And our eyes adjust after a couple of minutes, and we didn't really know what to do. We're all standing on the stage. There's no lights or anything, and then somebody on stage says, "I think we should keep doing the scene. Does anybody have any light?"
And people in the audience turned on the flashlights on their phone. And also, there was a prop spotlight from an earlier sketch that somebody found backstage, so we kind of stopped and everybody got every single light source possible and pointed it directly at the stage as we finished the scene. It turned out, there had been a fire on that block in Vancouver and had knocked out all the power. But we finished the scene, it went really well, and then after that, it felt like we... It was very much a show-must-go-on situation, but it was wonderful to feel the audience all standing up, and saying, "No, we want you to keep doing this." And the lights turned on from phones, people's phone light turns on, and then the power never came back, but it was great.
And then after that, inevitably, I think we ended up going back to a party somewhere for performers, and some of the people who were in the audience came, and it was quite a, I don't know what the right adjective is, it was a wonderful experience. This is the sort of thing where, I don't know, it felt like we made a very real connection, not just with the audience in this case, but also with performers with whom we don't normally have to share the stage or collaborate. We all realized... Everybody was sort of on the same page, on the same team. It's one of my favorite stories from touring.
I think it's an awesome story, and I will say that, as a performer, I don't actually think I've have ever had a performing experience like that on stage as a comedian.
But I've experienced something not dissimilar to that singing karaoke. I'm not a good karaoke singer, and I mean this in all sincerity. There's this little bar call Baby Grand that we used to go to in the Lower East Side.
I know both Baby Grands very well. I live in New York, Ritik.
So the original Baby Grand owners were friends of mine. I had this experience, where I'm a bad singer and literally, I'm so bad that they introduce me as singing in the style of Ritik. Because I would sing the songs not in the style of the performer, but in my own vocal flair.
I was singing “Like A Prayer” by Madonna and in the original Lower East Side Baby Grand, 20 people, fully packed, entirety of 20 people, a cold winter night, singing it, and in the gospel section, four women came out of the little nook and started singing, and it was this shared experience.
Literally, people who were there talk about it to this day. And I feel like there's this thing about, people maybe experience it in an audience setting, but as a performer, which you're describing, this experience of a moment that's completely shared by everybody. It happens every so often, and it's crazy and it's weird, and it's almost like, it has this either religious or ecstatic quality to it where you're like... It's almost like you transcend your normalness.
Yeah, it's like a sociological transcendence. If you can read into that as being spiritual, I think that a lot of spiritual experiences probably are similar to that. But that makes sense, because you're essentially, you are... Inevitably, you have some role as a performer or audience member in a performance space and then when that line is blurred in a way that elevates the performance, it feels as though everyone is able to share it, everyone had something to do with that happening. Everyone that came out of the audience and supported you at Baby Grand was a part of that success, in the same way that everybody that had a cellphone app on...
It's the weirdest thing, there's fire and the lights go out and people have their lighters, and it's not just like you did a good show. It's just something weird happened.
Well, but we did a good show.
No, but in addition to doing a good show.
Yes. So number one, we did a great show. We did such a good show that the audience was like, "You're not stopping", despite all the power being out. And then the audience took it upon themselves to take the necessary steps to ensure that the show must go on.
I love it.
So, that's a story from touring.
Where was the weirdest place you slept on tour?
A great question. It's usually a couch or a fold out bed, or a futon.
Weirdest place you've slept is a couch?
I'm trying to think, but on tour, inevitably most of the places you go on tour, you're treated pretty well...
You know in Japan, they sleep on futons all the time.
I think that... Yeah, I can't give a good answer. There's nothing like so weird. No, I do have an answer to this question. I do have an answer to this question.
I slept on a piece of high density foam that was just put down on a hard linoleum floor.
You were performing at NASA?
No, I wish. I was in Toronto and...
Canadian NASA?
No, I wish. We were performing in the Toronto Fringe Festival and I actually did this by design because there was a... We had a futon, a very big futon, and Charlie and I are a little bit... We're both bigger, we're larger men, we're not...
Charlie... He doesn't seem that large, is he large?
No, but I'm 6'1" and I think Charlie is probably at least 5'10". It's not like a...
Like a Hollywood 5'10"?
[chuckle]
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. But we had a bill in Toronto and rather than try to both squeeze onto the futon, which was a very nice futon that was provided very generously by our host, I took a piece of foam, a high-density foam, and laid it out on a linoleum floor and slept on that. But even that wasn't that weird, it was basically a mattress, which was fine.
Well, it sounds relaxing.
Yeah, it was fine.
Let's go to the last line of questioning. You, uniquely as a performer that I know, have worked in New York, LA, Seattle, and apparently across Canada.
I've toured across Canada. I have not been a member, a participant in the scenes there, but yes.
But you're not as ignorant to them as I am.
Correct. Unless you're gonna start speaking that weird Quebec French now.
Oh, actually, I do know a bit, I know "tabernacle!" I know a bit about that.
Moving on, let’s compare the scenes: New York, LA, Seattle, Canada. Goods and bads, highs and lows, roses and thorns. You are an upcoming comedian, you're going somewhere. Where do you go? What matters?
I'm an upcoming comedian?
From Seattle. And you're like, "Hey where do I go?" You're you from 10 years ago.
So let me start with the States then talk about Canada 'cause I think it's a little of a different beast.
Seattle, I actually would say that the comedy scene was quite similar to what I experienced in San Francisco, which was very supportive, in retrospect, quite small but also very good. They're both, Seattle and San Francisco, I think actually have a lot in common generally, but they're both coastal metropoli, with a quite literate and educated population, and I think, it tends to be one that's artistically-minded.
You see this also in places like Chicago; Austin would be another one, Portland also. And what you do is you have a small scene, and what you essentially have is a bifurcation between people who are there to perform or people that are looking to make a career out of these things.
Speaking to Seattle specifically, it's almost impossible. There's a few people that have been able to do it, but it's almost impossible, I believe, to have a full-time professional career as a comedian or a comedy writer in Seattle, especially with the homogenization of media in the last few decades. There's no local television produced, local publication, you couldn't even be like a humor columnist for the local, one of the local dailies 'cause they're becoming fewer and fewer.
But isn’t the specificity, that regionalism, isn’t there tons of value in that? I think most of the great comedy actually comes from that specificity of observation.
I agree, but I also think that there's an unfortunate vacuum of, I guess what I'll call polish. I certainly don't wanna use the word "talent" but polish and professionalism where if people are leaving their local scenes as soon as they get to some level of capability and going to Los Angeles or New York, I'm guilty of this, then... So much just being around people who are necessarily the best in the industry...
Just level up.
Right? You're pulling the town away from the Portlands, the Milwaukees, the Austins, these places where there's incredible talent, but that pulls people off to pursue it as a career. That is a loss for those cities presumably because you could have developed an artistic direction in a genre that is endemic to wherever those artists happen to hail from, but instead, you pull the talent off in the interest of careerism.
We had this... I remember, one of the more baffling things that has ever happened to me on tour was, Charlie and I were performing in Portland, and Portland, very close to Seattle, we were living in Seattle at the time. And we had a sketch so... Potentially, this Kim Jong-Il was still alive and was still the supreme leader of North Korea. Kim Jong-Il was still alive, we had a show in Portland and one of the sketches in our show, we go to this theater and we realize that there are some... This was like an all-ages comedy theater, we didn't know that when we arrived. But we were on the 10 o'clock bill, and we had a sketch that had some blue material in it that was quite crass, had some swearing. And we realized we hadn't worked that out with whoever booked us.
Oh excuse me, no, it was the owner of the theater. We hadn't worked it out with her, Stacy Halal, when we came to Portland. So, while we were doing our tech and we had seen the shows earlier on that evening, we realized that there were, I would say kids as young as 14 attending some of these shows, some of the earlier shows of the night.
So we pulled a couple people aside from the theater and we were like, "Hey, just wanted to check in. We have some sketches in our show that are pretty blue, pretty rated R, very profane. Is this a venue where, will there be people in the audience that would find that offensive?" We asked this question to a bunch of people. No fewer than three people responded by saying, "Oh no, like the dirtier the better. In fact... " Excuse me, they said, "The more offensive the better. In fact, there's a local group that does a bit where they sing a love song to Kim Jong-Il."
Now, I saw the bit that was the love song to Kim Jong-Il, and it was very funny, but I don't understand how it was offensive. It was like a pretty straightforward piece of musical comedy.
It was funny, it was very good. There was a guy in love with Kim Jong-Il, but three people in Portland equated offending people, broadly, with jokes about bad sex and saying dirty words with a love song about Kim Jong-Il. [laughter] So I was like, "What is happening in Portland that these things are synonymous?"
So we did our very, very dirty sketch and it played fine. It didn't play as well as the love song to Kim Jong-Il, didn't play as well as it has at other locations, but no, we kept it because enough people assured us that an audience that loves a love song to Kim Jong-Il is gonna love our dirty sketch about a guy trying to sell speakers out of the back of his trunk.
Well Portland is an entire town that, I love it, 'cause all the bars have strippers. It's a lovely place.
That's my understanding as well. I mostly was in the comedy clubs, but that's what I've heard.
Let’s talk about baseball. You love baseball. Why?
I find incalculable nuance in baseball. There’s so much happening on every pitch, so much to think through and dissect, it’s in many ways not unlike a physical world manifestation of a chess game. Beyond that, far better writers than I have written far more words about what makes baseball so great; I tend to agree with most of them.
If an alien from outerspace showed up, and you had to share a few videos/moments/clips/stories/whatever to explain to him what comedy was, what would they be?
Steve Martin’s stand up from the ’70s, Dana Carvey’s stand up from the ’90s, Madeline Kahn’s performance in Clue, Monty Python’s “Argument Clinic”, The State’s “Mind Match”, Mr. Show’s “The Story of Everest”.
If this same alien, or a different alien, wanted to see videos/moments/clips/stories/whatever to understand why people like baseball, what would you share?
Baseball’s a slower game, so clips wouldn’t really tell the whole story any more than a couple pages from Moby-Dick would demonstrate what makes it a great novel. But, if we want to reduce things to sets of games, I’d go with the 1988 As/Dodgers World Series, the 1991 Braves/Twins World Series, the 1995 Mariners/Yankess Division Series, and the 2004 Red Sox/Yankees Championship Series.
[Editor’s note: While I would introduce aliens to soccer, I think the aspect of grown men of different shapes and sizes hugging is a good introduction to a positive vision of humanity.]
[Second editor’s note: A hug is like a boomerang. You get it back right away.]
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