You can follow this podcast on:

Google Play | iHeartRadio | iTunes | SoundCloud | Spotify | Stitcher

Welcome to another episode of the Comedic Pursuits podcast. I’m your host, Seth Payne. Before we get into today’s episode, I just want to say thank you for listening.

This has been such a fun project. We’ve had a ton of talented, funny people on already, and we’ve got so many more episodes recorded. This train’s just going to keep on chugging along. I hope you guys are enjoying the ride.

For today’s episode, I sat down with Erick Acuña. You may have seen him around town. He’s at every show ever. He’s also on eight or nine teams. He’s obsessed with comedy and is really funny.

Highlights from my interview with Erick Acuña

Erick is from Lima, Peru and was first introduced to comedy there. We’ll talk about his training in Peru and the US and how he dealt with English a second language during his improv classes.

He’s started a bunch of fun teams and programs, including directing WIT special project Heavy Rotation. He’s been a performer with Improv Actually and WIT Harold team Captain PhD. When we recorded this episode, he was working on a one man sketch show, Acuña Acuna. He’s since performed it at Dojo Comedy and in New York.

Without further ado, let’s dive right into the Erica Acuña interview. Some of the answers and responses have been edited for clarity. But you can hear Erick’s full take on improv by listening to the podcast episode.

How did you get into comedy and performance?

In high school, I loved theater, but I think my first introduction to comedy was watching American sitcoms. That’s also how I started learning English. Seinfeld was one of my all-time favorite shows.

Humor and comedy is different in Latin America than in the States. In Peru in particular, especially in the 1990s, comedy was very rude and very raw. Just insulting someone was considered funny. So watching the subtlety of Seinfeld and certain jokes was so different from anything that I’d watched before. Back in the ’90s in Peru, we were also in the middle of an armed conflict. There weren’t that many comedy shows, so pretty much anything that I watched was from the States.

But watching American comedy shows was just a hobby for me. I wanted to be a musician. I play guitar and drums, and I had a punk rock band when I was in school. Back then, thought, there wasn’t really a possibility to be a musician or a comedian or an actor or do creative stuff. You needed a legit job and a legit career, so I went to law school.

At first I hated it. I had this internship, and I had to wear a suit. I couldn’t imagine wearing a suit and going to court for the rest of my life. I just needed an outlet. A friend of mine told me they’d started taking classes at an improv comedy theater that had just opened in the city. I’d never heard of improv at that point, but my friend persuaded me to take classes at this theater called Que Tal. The founder was an Argentinian actor and comedian. He’d moved to Peru because he realized that there wasn’t any improv scene at all there, so he founded a theater and did clown and improv.

I started taking classes and enrolled in the program at the theater in 2009. I was still in law school, and I would take improv classes every Friday night from 7pm to 10pm.