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Welcome to another episode of the Comedic Pursuits Podcast. I’m your host, Seth Payne, and my guest today is Dan Miller.

You might know him from the indie group Sistine Robot. Or maybe you know him from the Washington Improv Theater house team, Madeline. Or maybe you know him because he’s the director of external relations at WIT. Or because he’s part of FIST champion team, Beverly Crusher.

Highlights from my interview with Dan Miller

Regardless of how you know Dan Miller, I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did. Without further ado, the Dan Miller interview.

Some of the questions and answers have been edited for clarity. To hear Dan’s full responses, listen to his podcast episode.

Let Dan Miller pour you a cup of coffee before you get into this interview

The early years

I’m from Chantilly, Virginia, and I come from a family of introverts. Everybody was constantly reading, and I was the one who was coming up with voices and generally wondering why everybody was so quiet.

I went to William and Mary and studied English. They had an improv group called I.T. (Improvisational Theater) that mainly did short-form. I auditioned, but I didn’t get on. Instead, I ended up spending hours and hours and hours at the student newspaper, The Flat Hat. A lot of my first comedic writing was for that paper.

Tifaux.com

When I graduated in the early 2000s, I had kind of a do-nothing job, so I ran a blog empire. I was writing several articles a day for my site, tifaux.com, just because I had nothing else to do. I wrote about Veronica Mars, Battlestar Galactica, and 30 Rock because those shows were on back then.

I feel like TV writing today is very recap-centric, and this was before that time. I would write my takes on different shows. It’s like the opposite of improv because I spent a lot of time crafting everything and trying to make sure my jokes were properly worded. I still very much appreciate a well-crafted joke, whereas you can’t really plan for that in improv.

But improv is so wonderful because of the community and collaboration aspect. And writing, whether you’re writing for a website or a blog, is a lot of alone time for five minutes of glory. Or in the case of a blog, nonexistent glory, hoping somebody comments to validate you. I can enjoy the process much more with improv and enjoy the product just as much.

Getting into improv

I got laid off from my job in 2009 and was depressed and just needed to get out of the...