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Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Comedic Pursuits podcast. I’m your host, Seth Payne.

This week I got to sit down with someone who I have found to be a very funny, very talented, very bright and nice person. I’m talking, of course, about Kate Symes.

Highlights from my interview with Kate Symes

Kate has been doing improv for a little over eight years now, so we have a lot to cover in this episode. She’s from the West Coast and has gone on a bunch of different adventures.

She’s taught at Washington Improv Theater, was on Commonwealth, King Bee, Going to the Movies Alone, Press Play, Telenovela, and many other teams. She’s currently on the indie team To Be Frank and is directing The Fourth Estate, which is a brand new WIT show about the media.

Without further ado, Kate Symes.

Some of the following answers and questions have been edited and shortened for clarity. You can hear Kate’s responses in full by listening to the podcast episode.

The early years

I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and am the oldest of four kids, so I think my early comedic influences were my siblings. We weren’t allowed to watch a lot of television growing up. My parents were kind of hippies. They grew out of it as I got older, but they were pretty hardcore hippies when I was young, so television was not a thing. I was encouraged to go play with my siblings in the backyard. We would come up with skits and plays and entertain each other. My dad is super into music, so we listened to a lot of music. We’d play records and put on dance routines. Those were comedic—not on purpose, but accidentally.

Jury’s out on whether this is recreation of one of Kate Symes’s childhood comedic dance routines

I think the earliest thing I saw on film or television that I liked and recognized as comedy was Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I love that movie, and I love the style of it. We bought it on VHS, and it was the only movie we owned for five years, so we watched it a lot. I don’t know why, for my parents, that was the acceptable movie to own. But that was it.

I did gymnastics growing up, and I also played the violin. So I did things where I performed, and I was used to being on stage or in front of people doing a thing. So I got comfortable with that early and often. But music and gymnastics tapered off in high school. Then I just started going to keg parties. That was my biggest contribution to society for the last three years of high school.