Comedic Pursuits

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Welcome to another episode of the Comedic Pursuits podcast. I’m your host, Seth Payne.

This is the podcast where I sit down and I talk to other DC comedy brethren and sistren and go over people’s backstories, their histories, how they got into comedy, what they’ve done so far, and where they want to go.  

Today’s episode features Tess Higgins, a member of WIT Harold team Captain PhD.

Highlights from my interview with Tess Higgins

Tess Higgins is also an actress, and she performs in plays and musicals. She trained in England and went to school for theater at William and Mary.

She’s also a playwright. When we recorded this interview, she was writing a script. She’s since completed it and is working to get it produced.

But without further ado, here’s the kickass episode of Tess Higgins. Some of the responses have been edited for clarity, but you can hear the full interview by listening to the podcast.

What’s your performance background?

I did plays in middle school and high school. When I was thinking about applying to colleges, I knew I wanted to do theater. For a while, I wanted to do a BFA program, where you literally do theater every day, all day. I was looking at NYU and Emerson, but my dad pointed out that I could go to an in-state school in Virginia for super cheap. They’re such good schools, and some of them have good musical theater programs. I looked into it a little more, and William and Mary seemed like it had the academic vibe that I wanted. I took a tour and learned more about their theater department and thought it was cool. Then I applied and got in.

The transition to college was weird, though. When you’re in high school you might be able to get a big role in every play, but suddenly there are so many more people. I tried out for three plays in a row the first month of school and got into none of them. That was a huge bummer, but as a freshman, it was not going to happen.

I didn’t do a lot sophomore year either, but that was when I made the decision to do a study abroad acting program in London. It was the best decision I ever made. It was the first time I really felt challenged. It was so hard. It was nine to five every day doing intense theater stuff. You had to be physically and emotionally there every day. But our teachers were so good, and I use everything I learned there.

I came back from study abroad too late to try out for a student production on campus and decided to sit in on crew just so I could see my friends. I remember sitting in on their first run-through and feeling like a huge pretentious loser because everything from London was in my head. I just kept thinking, “This is wrong. Everything is wrong. This is so bad.” My standards were higher and better, which made me a better performer. I came back from this program and got my first lead at school.

Now I do theater professionally. My parents are the coolest because they’re very supportive of me doing arts. I did a show last spring, and my mom saw it five times and brought  all these people every time she came. I have a lot of friends who, when they’ve chosen to be professional theater makers or things like that, their parents will nervously give them a couple years to see if it works out.

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Welcome to another episode of the Comedic Pursuits Podcast. I’m your host, Seth Payne.

I’m so freakin’ excited to present this episode to you guys. I got to sit down with a very dear friend of mine who used to live in DC who now resides in New York City. Her name is Sarah Ann Houghton. She is such a delight. Very sweet, very weird, very funny.

I first came across Sarah performing with her duo, Dream Spooners, with Erin Murray in DC and was hooked. I also got to see her perform on her Harold team in DC and do Character Shows at Dojo. Then she moved off to New York City, and she’s been doing sketch comedy, going through the UCB program, and a bunch of other really fun stuff. We’ll get into her acting background, her clowning background, her writing background—she’s been doing it all.

Highlights from my interview with Sarah Ann Houghton

I got to sit down with Sarah at the York Fringe Festival a few months ago. I had such a blast interviewing her. She has such a crazy comedy history. I hope you guys enjoy it as much as I did.

Some of the following responses have been edited for clarity. You can hear the full interview by listening to the podcast.

What’s your performance background?

I grew up doing community theater starting in elementary school. Later, I did high school musicals, and I got my BA in theater. Comedy really didn’t happen for me until college when we did sketch. Our theater department put on the shows, and it was just an opportunity for people to write and then perform what they wrote.

For that program, I collaborated with friends. I don’t think I was super confident as a writer yet. I wasn’t super confident yet as a comedian. I think I found my voice a little bit in college through a character I liked to do. My friends made me kill her off in a show, though. They were like, “Please don’t ever bring that character back.”

Her name was Karen Fillone, and she was pretty much a character made up of all of my worst qualities, heightened. She has really bad allergies, so she’s a mouth breather. Her pockets are full of stuff, like dirty tissues and loose food. She’s the friend in the group that no one really wants. They keep her around because she’s got a good heart, but she’s also a little too sexual. She’s a pelvis-first kind of mover. She moves with her groin. That’s where she makes a lot of her decisions, whether it’s food or another person she seems to be attracted to.

It’s who I would like to be more. Karen doesn’t second-guess her choices. It’s a very fleshed-out character.

How did you get into comedy?

After college, I went abroad to teach English in South Korea. My plan was to be gone for a year, but I was gone for seven years.

Korea has a pretty strong expat community. There are a lot of people living there from other countries. There’s also a large community there for the US military bases, a lot of journalists, and people who are married to others who live there. So there are a lot of native English speakers.

I connected with those people,

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Welcome to the Comedic Pursuits podcast. I’m your host, Seth Payne.

A lot of the podcast episodes I’ve recorded thus far are timeless, in a way. They’re people’s backstories and advice, so it’s okay if the episodes don’t come out until later because they’re still going to be relevant.

But some of the episodes I’ve recorded do pertain to more current events. Case in point, for today’s episode, I actually got to sit down with the trendsetting, limit-pushing, provocative Sam Bonar, who is currently diving into some really cool political stuff in DC. I figured his story was very timely considering the midterm elections are upon us, and the political climate right now is pretty intense.

I wanted to get this episode out before the beginning of November, so that’s what we’re doing. I hope you guys enjoy it as much as I did because I loved it. Without further ado, the Sam Bonar interview.

Highlights from my interview with Sam Bonar

Sam is an improviser and political activist in DC. Some of the questions and answers from his interview have been edited for clarity, but you can find the full interview by listening to the podcast episode.

What’s your performance background?

I started doing lots of theater in high school, and I was very much an actor-y, theater nerd kind of guy. I was president of the drama club for two years. I had all my fingers in everything, and I was in every play. I was the only one who had done theater for four years in high school.

One of my most notable theater moments from high school was getting the lead in The Music Man. I’d never had a real lead, but in my final year, the final play, I finally got a lead.

Every musical we’d done before had been the junior version, which is the easier version. They’d shorten the songs so they were less complicated. But for that play, we did the full version of The Music Man, which is really hard to do because it’s got all these long monologue songs.

My girlfriend and all of my friend group were involved in it somehow. That was definitely a theater crowning achievement in my life.

How did you get into improv?

I started doing improv at the beginning of college at the University of Chicago. I was tired of the stress of drama and having to go to practice every day. In high school drama, I was in practice four days a week, and it would have been even more than that in college.

The improv group I was in, Occam’s Razor, struggled for a while. We were the lesser group on campus. I’d actually auditioned for the other group, Off-Off Campus. It was more prestigious at the time because they were more involved with the theater department, and they practiced like a theater group. I think they were better my first two years, but my last two years, they stopped being as good. I also think Occam’s Razor found its groove, and I think we got a little harder on the fact that people couldn’t just come to practice whenever they wanted. We focused more on long-form improv. They even started doing some sketch the year after I left.

How did you get into improv in DC?

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Welcome to another episode of the Comedic Pursuits podcast. I’m your host, Seth Payne, and today, we get to experience the amazing energy that is Kaitlin Kemp.

I met Kaitlin in an audition for an improv project about a year ago, and I gotta tell you guys, I was blown away by her commitment to characters. Her dramatic roles and her weird, strange characters that she comes up with are so original and so much fun. I’ve since become good friends with her, and sadly she moved to New York City, so I don’t get to hang out with her as much as I used to. But on a more happy note, she’s in New York City, and she’s killing it.

Highlights from my interview with Kaitlin Kemp

I recorded this interview right before Kaitlin moved. I can give you the update that she’s killing it in the Big Apple, and now you guys get the “from humble beginnings” interview experience today. So without further ado Kaitlin Kemp.

Some of the responses have been edited for clarity. You can hear Kaitlin’s interview in full by listening to the podcast.

How did you get into comedy?

I guess it kind of starts from how I got into theater, which is through my mom. She was a theater teacher. She originally wanted to be an actress, but she didn’t really have the support in the way that I did. She took the teaching route, and she’s phenomenal at it. She was (and still is) a high school theater teacher. But that’s kind of how I got involved because she would put me in shows that she was doing when I was three and four years old, so I kind of grew up in that environment. I guess that’s how I got into performance.

We did improv stuff in high school, but we mostly just did warm-ups and exercises. In college, I was a theater major at Rome University, and I kind of got a taste for improv when I did a devised show called Kill Me Now, which is based on So You Think You Can Dance and dance competition shows. We had to play a dance character and then transition to a judge character, which was our alter ego. There was a lot of improv involved in that.

That was kind of where my memory of improv starts. My mom would probably say we did more than that in high school, but in my memory of things, that show was when I realized I really love this stuff. I felt like I was those characters, and I could live and speak as those characters. That’s where I first, I guess, started becoming interested in comedy and actually pursuing it.

After college, I had an interest in doing improv, and then I went out to California and saw a Groundlings show and all this stuff. That was probably my first introduction to improv on a professional level.

Then I actually took a class, just an afternoon two-hour class at Second City, out there. The teacher was just so welcoming and genuine and not abrasive. She was so encouraging, and I didn’t feel any different than the people who were there taking classes regularly, and I felt very comfortable. So that was kind of the click for me to sign up for some classes back in DC.

How did you discover WIT?

I actually have a family friend who knows Reaves McElveen from WIT. I’ve never met him before in my life. I don’t know why our paths have not crossed, but I still have not met him. To me, he’s just this mythical creature that I’ve never met, but my friend was like, “You have to take classes at the Washington Improv Theater. My friend works there.

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Welcome to another episode of the Comedic Pursuits podcast. I’m your host Seth Payne, sitting down today with the charismatic, energetic, dare I say spunky Macey Schiff.

As a side note, we had to record this episode in my car. So you’re going to hear a very gentle—soothing, one could almost say—car hum underneath. But without further ado, Macy Schiff.

Highlights from my interview with Macey Schiff

I’ve known Macey for quite a while now. She’s always been a predominant figure in WIT’s program. She’s currently on Madeline, which we’ll talk about and touch on later. She’s going on ten years experience with improv, which is crazy.

Some of the following responses have been edited for clarity. But you can hear the full interview by listening to the podcast episode.

What’s your comedy background?

My dad is an actor. I definitely got my theater and comedy blood from him. I danced a little bit when I was in elementary school and middle school, but I ended up quitting that to play soccer. When I started high school, we did fall plays and spring musicals, and I did all of those.

My first introduction to improv was Whose Line Is It Anyway. My dad loved the show, so my whole family would watch it. And we had an improv troupe perform at my bat mitzvah for the first night when everyone came in out of town. I hated it.

The planning of the whole bat mitzvah weekend was a group effort, and we had a lot of friends and family come in from out of town. We were trying to find something to do with everybody on a Friday night, and we thought we could stick them in a room and throw in an improv team in front of them. That’s how we ended up with an improv troupe at my bat mitzvah, just because it was a thing we could all do. It was ridiculous. They were doing short form, and it was the kind of improv troupe in Pittsburgh that would perform at a bat mitzvah party on a Friday night in 2003. I remember, even at 13, thinking, “Hmm. No.” I had very high standards for comedy as a teenager.

When I went to college at the University of Delaware, we had a big activities night on our second or third day on campus, and it was divided up by section. I was meandering my way through the theater section, wanting to sign up for anything but being super intimidated because I was a freshman.

I was writing my name down for something, and then all of a sudden heard, “Hey!” And there was this guy standing next to this table yelling at me. And he said, “You should sign up for this. We’re Riot Act. We’re an improv team.” So I gave into the peer pressure and signed up. I had never done improv before, but I got heckled into auditioning by this guy. His name is Mike McFadden, and of course, now we’re friends because, long story short, I auditioned and got on the team.

There were two improv teams on campus, and mine was the newer one. So when I auditioned as a freshman, I became the first person to be on the team for all four years of college.

At that audition, Mike, the guy who heckled me, invited me and another auditioner to a house party. That my first introduction to improv people and the community in Delaware, and everyone was really, really nice. So I was really excited to find out that I got on a team.  

What was your your college improv team like?

We would do long form and short form, like four or five short form games and then a 30-minute long form at the end,

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Welcome to another episode of the Comedic Pursuits podcast. It’s going to be fun. It’s going to be wacky. So far, season one has been a good time. I’ve been enjoying all of these interviews. I’ve gained a lot of knowledge and all sorts of really cool backstories of people and learned some really cool lessons. It’s great. I love it. I’m gonna keep doing it.

If you enjoy this show: like it, subscribe to it, share it with your friends, write reviews, rate it, all that good stuff.

Today we’re going to listen to an awesome interview with Erik Beringer, a stand-up comedian and improviser from Charlottesville. I was really excited to sit down with him and talk to him about his stand-up experience.

You can check out some highlights from the interview below or listen to the full version by downloading or following the podcast.

Highlights from my interview with Erik Beringer

Erik started doing short-form improv in middle school, eventually moved to DC, and got into all sorts of stand-up craziness. Now he tours and gets paid to do stand-up, which is kickass. He’s moving to LA soon, so catch him in the DC area while you still can.

Some of the interview questions and answers below have been edited for clarity.

What’s your comedy background?

My first intro into anything comedy-related was improv. When I was 14, I took a class at Bent Theater, which was a short-form improv group in Charlottesville. They liked me, so they asked me to audition for their house team. We traveled around a bit and did some shows in Maryland, southern Virginia, Norfolk, and a couple other places.

That was in high school, so I was between the ages of 14 and 18. That was my first time doing comedy a lot. The group started performing at a resort in central Virginia, and that was my first realization that someone could get paid to do comedy.

But the Charlottesville comedy scene sort of fell apart because a lot of the people who were talented and involved enough to put it together moved away and onto the next thing. Bent Theater survived, but pretty much nothing else did. After high school, I came up here and started doing improv at George Mason University, where I went to college.

My first year at Mason, I auditioned for the Mason Improv Association, and I didn’t make it. When the team roster came out, I went and found the other people who didn’t make it, and we started an indie team called Big In Certain Countries. That was with Elijah Sloan, Alex Galloway, and Eric Schlein. We did some shows in DC, and I think we ended up performing more and meeting more people through that than we might have through the college team.

How did you get into stand-up?

I’ve been doing stand-up comedy since I was 16. But actually doing it well and getting shows, it’s been two years. When I was a kid, I asked my parents if, instead of college money, I could have a bus ticket and starter money to go to Second City in Chicago and enroll in their program. They said no.

How did your improv experience inform your stand-up?

I think doing short-form helped a little bit with my stand-up because short-form is definitely a lot about mugging and going for the laugh. People can get as artsy as they want about stand-up,

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Welcome to another episode of the Comedic Pursuits podcast. I’m your host, Seth Payne. This is the show where I sit down with comedians around the D.C. area, and we dish about their career so far and other fun bits of wisdom they might have for you.

My guest this week is DC improviser and stand-up Kara Kinsey.

Highlights from my interview with Kara Kinsey

Some of the interview questions and answers have been edited for clarity, but you can hear the full version in the podcast recording.

Tell us about your comedy background

My family is really funny, so I was surrounded by funny people. I’m the oldest of five daughters, and as a kid, I was much different than I am today. I was way more controlling and dictatorial. I don’t know if I was ever funny, but at Christmas, my dad would set up a video camera to watch us come in to see all the gifts and everything. I would orchestrate it and be like, “We’re doing this.” Sometimes there was a dance routine, sometimes there was a song. I would lead it, and I’d be like, “This. Is. The. Step,” just obnoxious.

In middle school, I did plays, and I remember getting laughs doing that. But I don’t know if I ever did things to get laughs. I think I was getting laughs because I was taking everything I did so seriously. I was more proud of the fact that I never messed up, and I always knew what was going on. I wasn’t like, “Hello, world!”

But I’ve always loved being in front of people. I did a talent show in high school. At my boarding school, we would have some meeting in the morning. But if you auditioned for the talent show, you didn’t have to go to a meeting. So one of my roommates said, “Yeah, I’ll put together something.” She was a Junior Olympic Taekwondo person, so for her routine, she literally just kicked and punched me around while I did fake falls and she flipped me over. And the panel was like, “Well, what’s your act? That can’t be yours. It’s her act.” And I was already on stage, so I just did an impromptu stand-up set, and I was like, “That’s my talent.” That was the first time that I did anything.

At that point, I was listening to a lot of comedy. I don’t know why I didn’t make the jump to, “I want to do it.” But I was listening to a lot of CD’s, even listening to stuff like, “Behind the Scenes with George Carlin,” like him deconstructing jokes. But I wasn’t making the leap.

Then I was asked to do some weird live play of “Howl.” I got to play Jack Kerouac, but I didn’t read anything. I was just Jack Kerouac, walking around. So during the middle of this person giving this dramatic reading of “Howl” and everyone getting hyped, I went upstairs to the second story, and there was a hole. I climbed through the railing and was hanging by my feet upside down. I didn’t do research on who Jack Kerouac was, I just read a Wikipedia page and was like, “Oh, he’s on drugs, and he’s crazy. This makes sense.” That was my whole justification.

So I’m doing that. I’m doing random comedy bits. I’m getting devastated because I keep trying to run for these major leadership positions,

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This is the second episode of the Comedic Pursuits podcast! I’m your host, Seth Payne, as always. The music we play at the beginning of this episode is by Zach Mason, our guest on the show today. Zach is a DC improviser, director, writer, and general comedic performer, a real renaissance man of comedy.

Highlights from my interview with Zach Mason

Zach actually has his very own podcast called Like Yes, which you can find on iTunes, so give that a listen when you’re done here!

Some of the interview questions and answers have been edited for clarity, but you can hear the full version in the podcast recording.

Can you give us some background on your comedy career so far?

I’ve always related to other people by trying to make them laugh. I did a lot of class clown kind of stuff through high school. I also started drawing when I was really young. When I was in my early 20s, I started doing comics. A lot of those were a simple drawing with a joke under it. I got really into that and was doing some longer stories that were less funny. I did that for a bunch of years and was doing comic shows, going to other cities and tabling and selling comics. That kind of worked those joke writing muscles.

About four or five years ago, I was in a pretty dark depression and realized I needed something that was going to get me out of my head and put me around other people. I loved comedy, so I thought I’d see what improv was like.

I’d done some theater stuff in high school and thought it was really fun. I enjoyed that experience and liked being around those people. It was a very creative energy and a very nurturing environment. I wanted to reconnect with that energy a little bit but also be more comedy focused.

The idea of stand-up, at the time, seemed totally scary. Being alone onstage felt very isolating, whereas improv was more building a thing together. So I started looking around different theaters in DC to see which ones offered improv classes.

The main options at the time were DC Improv and WIT. My entire knowledge of their classes came from their respective websites. DC Improv’s website was like, “Do you want to get on Saturday Night Live? Take these classes!” But I was in my 30s, so that didn’t seem accurate to my situation. The tone of WIT’s website was more, “Do you wanna to try improv? Cool. Read these ten books.” And I thought, “Okay, I’m with that. I get that. That is the nerd way, and I will follow it.” So I signed up for classes and went straight through their curriculum.

Along the way, I started a couple indie groups and eventually got cast on a WIT Harold team.

What was your Harold experience on Diviglio like?

I auditioned for Harold once, and I got really lucky. I hate auditions. Even the idea of an audition makes me so stressed out.

I think I was cast because—I’m prone to low self-esteem anyway, so I’m going to attribute it to the fact that WIT was starting two brand new teams, LIZARD GIRL and Diviglio, at the same time. They had 24 slots to fill, so that was a help. It was a very unique situation because most people don’t get in on the first audition.

I loved being on the team. I love everyone on that team.

First, Kristin O’Brien,

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I’m Seth Payne, and this is the very first episode of the Comedic Pursuits podcast!

This was an idea that I came up with a little while ago. I was inspired by great podcasts like UCB’s Long-Form Conversations and Don Fanelli’s The Need to Fail. Both are awesome resources to find out more about comedy, coming up in comedy, trial and error within comedy—and both have been really instrumental in my own comedic pursuits, especially my failures. Anytime I go through a rough point in my comedy career, I listen to these podcasts, and they’re relatable, informative, and inspiring. So I wanted to do something like that in the DC area.

It was also kind of for a selfish reason: there are a lot of amazing performers in the DC scene who I’ve seen perform or who I kind of see in passing, but I don’t know their backstory or the rough times they’ve been through. So I partnered up with the Comedic Pursuits blog (which you can also find on Facebook and Instagram), which talks about different things that are happening in the DC comedy community—improv, sketch, stand-up, all that good stuff.

My first episode is an awesome interview that I did with Donna Steele. Unfortunately, we were kind of strapped for time; this was right before a Level Three: Character class I was taking at WIT that Donna was teaching. I apologize: right when we get into the good stuff at the end is when we had to cut it short. You’ll actually even notice I’m out of breath at the beginning of the episode. So this is one of the shorter episodes we’ll have.

In the upcoming interviews, I’ve realized when we get into the nitty-gritty, it gets really interesting, and I don’t really want to cut the episode off. So these will probably be a little longer from here on out. Bear with me. I’m trying out different formats and different questions for this podcast. It should be a good time.

Highlights from my interview with Donna Steele

You can listen to my full interview with improv performer and instructor Donna Steele by tuning into the podcast. But if you only have time for the highlights, here they are. Some of the questions and answers have been edited for clarity.

How did you get started in comedy?

I’m originally from Richmond, Virginia, and I moved to DC two years ago. I started doing improv in 2011 with The Coalition—they used to be the Richmond Comedy Coalition, and then when they got their space, they became The Coalition—at Gallery5, which is this cool old firehouse in Richmond that was converted it into an art space. If you’re ever in Richmond, you should check it out because it’s awesome. They host burlesque and comedy shows. A bunch of punk bands perform there.

But I actually kind of fell into improv. I didn’t want to do it. My friend, Joey,