If I was going to start an improv group, Heffernan had to be part of it—the dude just oozed funny. The problem was that, aside from playing Captain Hook in his fifth-grade play, Kevin wasn’t an actor and didn’t aspire to be one.
When Queen picked up the phone, we bullshat awhile before I got to the point. “Hey, how would you feel about starting an improv group? You know, like I did in Chicago?”
Silence. Then: “What?”
“It’s for the Kinetic Theater. I was thinking we could gather up some funny people and put on a show.”
“Put on a show?” He couldn’t have sounded any snider. “Yeah, I don’t think I’m gonna be ‘puttin’ on any show.’” That’s all it took for my own insecurity to flame up. My gut was screaming loudly: Don’t do this!
So I said, “Yeah, you’re right. Fuck it. See you back at school, big man.” He was right. Why would we do this? What if it didn’t work? Why expose ourselves to failure? Relieved, I called Glatzer and for the second time said it just wasn’t gonna happen.
That fall, I was back at school and all was good in the world. I had my two night classes, and I was basically drinking, smoking, and playing poker the rest of the time. Then I got a phone call. It was fuckin’ Glatzer calling from London, trying one more time. I tried to stall. “Hey, buddy! How’s jolly old?”
He wasn’t having it. “Look, I’m not taking no for an answer. You have to do an improv show for me. You just have to.”
I exhaled. My response would radically change the course of my life: “Okay, fine. Fuck it.”
After I hung up, I went down the hall and walked into Kevin’s room. We didn’t knock. Kevin looked up. “What up, home girl?”
“We’re doin’ the improv show. It’s a done deal.”
“What do you mean?” He looked as angry as he did confused.
“I told Glatzer we’re doin’ it, so we’re doin’ it. Done deal.”
Here’s the thing. Heffernan and I both thought we were funny, but the fact that I had actually gone to Chicago and performed onstage was intriguing to him, because, like me, he loved SNL and Monty Python and all of the John Landis movies. And now I was going to start an improv group at Colgate with or without him. So as much as he really didn’t want to do it, because he would be exposed and it would be a hassle, he also didn’t want to be left behind. He exhaled.
“Fine. Fuck it. Whatever.”
HOW TO MAKE A COMEDY GROUP
Since the three other one-acts were holding auditions, I decided we’d do the same. Let’s see who’s out there. We made signs: “Auditions for comedy group! Come one, come all!” and we put them up around school. Though this had stirred some interest from the theater community, the true comic giants at Colgate weren’t actors at all. I needed them. Pulling a page from The Magnificent Seven, I made a list of the funniest people on campus and paid each one a visit. Here was my pitch:
“Hey, you’re really funny, and I know you’re not an actor, but I’m starting a comedy group and I need you to join.” After they got over the surprise and confusion about what I was proposing, most of them were flattered enough to come to the audition. Most. This guy Riley turned me down flat. “No! Fuck no. I’m not an actor!”
I countered, “Most of the people I’m talking to aren’t. That’s what’ll make this cool.”
He shook his head. “Seriously? You want me to go up onstage and perform . . . comedy, for the first time in my fucking life, in front of all of our cynical friends? Yeah, right.”
As I left Riley’s apartment, my original fear started creeping back up. What if we did suck? We were starting something new. This wasn’t Harvard, where they had the long history with the legendary Lampoon. This was Colgate—a place full of cynical, funny people who did three things really well: drink cheap beer, smoke bad grass, and crack great jokes. If we weren’t funny, it was going to be humiliating. I buried that thought and drove over to meet the next funniest person on my list.
The audition included a series of improv games. Borrowing from the Improv Olympic, I had the auditioners play pencils in a case, with the twist being that one of them was used to cheat on a test. The audition was effective, but more than that, it was nice to finally sit on the other side.
STEVE LEMME
Steve was a year younger than me. He was a junior in our fraternity and was always good to stay up late, drinking, smoking, and trading insults. He was also one of the great storytellers at Colgate, and when he found out I was interested in show business, he regaled me with the tale of his one acting experience.
Steve grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and went to Dalton, a ritzy private school. Steve was a faculty kid there—his mother taught French. On his way home from school one day, he stopped to watch some African American kids break-dance on the street corner, and he was spellbound. When he asked the two teens if they would teach him how to break-dance, he became their protégé. One day, while the three guys were roboting on a corner, a casting director approached, saying she was looking for break-dancers for a Colombian jeans commercial. Excited, the guys immediately started popping and locking, trying to out-peacock one another. By Steve’s own admission, he was the worst of the three, but she hired him anyway, saying his look would play best in Colombia. (His white look.) Heartbroken by the injustice of show business, Steve’s dance teachers cut off his lessons.
In the commercial, Steve and another white break-dancer are wearing Bobby Brooks jeans while freestyling on a street corner. Soon, two hot female cops walk up to arrest them (I assume break-dancing is illegal in Colombia). As they’re about to be cuffed, Steve and his pal pull some sick dance moves, which charms the cops. Before you know it, the cops and the break-dancers are walking off, hand in hand, for a fun date. Without any irony, I’ll admit that Steve Lemme is a good break-dancer.
On the Saturday morning of our auditions, Steve and his girlfriend, Kathy, were tailgating before a football game. Steve had always told Kathy that he wanted to be an actor when he graduated, which she found odd, since he had never auditioned for a play at Colgate. Kathy told Steve about our auditions and said if he wanted to be an actor, he should show up. Steve said that he had already had a few beers and he wasn’t in the right mind-set. Kathy called him a chickenshit, so an annoyed Steve Lemme downed his beer and trudged off to our audition.
The junior class (Lemme’s) and senior class (Kevin’s and mine) had a silly rivalry going over who was cooler and who could party more. Ah, the good old days. Lemme and five of his classmates lived in a downtown apartment above a place called the Eagle Mall. This led to us nicknaming their apartments “the Ego Mall.” The joke was that Lemme and his vain, pretty-boy friends preferred to spend their time looking in the mirror and masturbating, rather than drinking. (I think that’s still true of Steve today.)
As much as we made fun of each other, Lemme had a special place in my heart, because on my twenty-first birthday, someone joked that I should walk through our packed, four-hundred-person party in my birthday suit. I was vaguely considering it, and then my girlfriend, Denise, egged me on. So it was now happening. It was at this critical point that Lemme stepped up. He knew I needed a wingman more than anything else in the world, so he offered to join me in my birthday suit walkabout. The two of us marched through the party, buck naked, which meant that I owed the little dude a favor.
So when Lemme walked into the audition, I wanted him to succeed. But could he act? Because, favor or not, if he couldn’t, this wasn’t going to happen. Luckily Lemme nailed his audition. There was one problem, though. Queen didn’t like him. When I suggested to Heffernan that we cast Lemme, he shook his head. “Nah. No way. He’s a thief.” I had a feeling he would say that.
When Steve was a freshman, rushing our fraternity, he . . . well, he stole Kevin’s jacket. According to Heffernan: It was the dead of winter, and we had an after-hours party at our house. A lot of people left their jac
kets on the benches in the foyer, near the front door, including Kevin Heffernan. The morning after the party, Kevin went looking for his jacket, but it was gone. Stolen! A week later, a bunch of freshmen who were rushing our fraternity came down to the house for dinner. After dinner, Heffernan wandered through the foyer, where he miraculously found his missing jacket. When he rifled through the pockets, he found the college ID of none other than Steve Lemme. When Kevin confronted freshman Lemme about the stolen jacket, Lemme denied it. So Heffernan pulled out Lemme’s college ID and said, “Then why the hell is your ID in my pocket?”
Not missing a beat, Lemme said, “Ahh! That’s where it is! Whoever stole your jacket must have also stolen my college ID!”
Lemme tells the story a little differently: It was a snowy, freezing February night. After the party, when it was time to go back to his dorm, Lemme checked the benches for his jacket, but it was gone. (This wasn’t uncommon. There were a lot of drunks around and the weather was brutal, so jackets disappeared and reappeared all the time.) Faced with the prospect of walking a mile up Cardiac Hill, back to his dorm, in heavy winter weather, Lemme just grabbed a jacket off the bench and headed off into the night.
When he woke up the next day, Steve noticed a jacket balled up in the corner of his room. But since he had been hammered, he had no recollection of where the jacket had come from. And now it was the only jacket he had, so he started wearing Heffernan’s ridiculously oversized jacket around campus, including when he went back down to Beta for dinner that next week. When Heffernan confronted him, Lemme admits he lied. And when Heffernan produced Lemme’s college ID, Steve knew he was fucked and he was likely not going to get into our fraternity now.
He was almost right. Heffernan did tell the story of the stolen jacket at our fraternity bid meeting as evidence of why Lemme shouldn’t be allowed into the house. After Heff spoke, I stood up and vouched for Lemme, because he really was a funny guy, and jackets did disappear all the time. Lucky for him, I prevailed and he got in.
But back in the audition room, Heffernan was a dog with a bone. “Fuck that guy.”
I smiled. “Let the jacket go. Lemme is funny.”
Eventually, Heffernan gave in, but not before firing one last sneering shot. “I guess we do need someone to play the scumbag roles.”
CHARRED GOOSEBEAK
Rounding out the cast were a number of really funny people, including Alison Clapp, Ursula Hanson, John Cooke, and three freshmen, Ted Griffin, Zach Chapman, and Francis Johnson.
With the improv group assembled, I set out to teach them all the Harold, the long-form improv style I had learned in Chicago. Unfortunately, I was unqualified, so it was the blind leading the blind. While I understood the basic rules of improv, when people asked questions about why we should do one thing over another, I didn’t have the answers. Our rehearsals went poorly. We were all funny people, but this improv thing was shaking our collective confidence, which, in turn, was making people question the whole venture. Should we quit now before we embarrass ourselves in front of the whole school?
So I decided to shift gears. We had signed up for this because we loved SNL and Monty Python; we loved sketch. So at the next rehearsal, I told everyone about my struggles on the improv stage in Chicago. I told them that we were going to abandon improv and perform a sketch show instead. Though the relief was palpable, we did have one problem: We didn’t know how to write sketches.
Aside from English and history papers, the only writing I had done was my ten-minute stand-up set. Now we had to write an eighty-minute sketch show. I told everyone to carry around notebooks to jot down ideas for sketches and jokes. At our writing meetings, we pitched ideas, which we would riff on like a jazz band figuring out a song. Sometimes we’d smoke joints and the riffs would get nutty. Ideas would get stretched, bent, and turned inside out. We were learning how to write sketches, and it was feeling right. I remember bringing in ideas I thought were funny and then watching them bloom into something far funnier once the group got ahold of them. The group mind was funnier than the individual mind. Yes, there were individuals who were funnier, more prolific writers, but everyone was contributing. The idea of being a team was important, so I told everyone that we needed to share credit. If someone asked who wrote a joke, the response should be, “We all did.”
To take this idea further, I held off on casting until all of the sketches were written. This way, the funniest writers couldn’t write all of the best parts for themselves, because writing a sketch didn’t necessarily mean you were going to be in the sketch. These rules continue in Broken Lizard today. If you ask us who wrote the “meow” joke, you’ll hear, “We all did,” and that’s true. And our film roles are not cast until at least draft fifteen, which ensures that everyone keeps writing jokes for all of the different characters, because they don’t know which one they’re going to play.
We organized the structure of the show to be sort of a hybrid between SNL and Python. Some sketches would be stand-alone, like in SNL, while others would have second and third parts like Python: “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”
The sketches included a healthy mix of political humor, historical humor, Colgate humor, and just plain bizarre humor. We did a sketch where Plato is a freshman wrestling recruit at Athens University, but he’s failing his Basic Thought class. So the school hires a hotshot senior philosophy major, Socrates, to tutor him. The two go to a party, where Socrates teaches Plato the meaning of life by teaching him how to hit on girls. Two of the girls Plato meets are Medusa and Anorexia.
We did a political sketch where we played a group of Republican superheroes called Team America. We basically burst into places where liberals were doing typically liberal things and berated them for not being American enough. I played Captain Nationalism, Zach Chapman played Kid Liberty, and Fran Johnson played Fanny Freedom. No relation to the great South Park film.
Borrowing from SNL, we decided to make video shorts, which would play in between our sketches. My directorial debut was a sitcom parody called My Wacky Grandma. In it, we played a family with a nutty grandmother who plays pranks on us. In the sketch, we’re all hanging out on the couch, when Grandma gets up and walks off screen. Then we hear the sound of Grandma falling down the stairs. After a worried beat, we hear her yell, “Just kidding!” Then we all fake laugh, and freeze.
I set up the camera on a tripod and pointed it at the couch. Then I pressed record and slid into my place on the couch. “Action!” After shooting the wide shot five times, I wasn’t sure what else to do, so I said, “I guess we got it.”
My first time in the edit room was thrilling. I thought it was unbelievably cool to see how videos were cut together. The student editor and I watched the raw footage for My Wacky Grandma, and he laughed. “This is funny.” I smiled proudly. Then he said, “Where’s the coverage?”
“Coverage? What’s that?” I asked.
“You know, the close-ups?”
When I told him I hadn’t shot any close-ups, he looked nervous. “But we can’t just show the wide shot.”
“Um, why not?” I asked. “Can’t we just show the best take?”
The editor played our “best take” and I immediately saw the problem. Everything is going along great, until Fran forgets her line. We sit in silence for a moment and then I nudge her, after which Fran says, “Oh,” and then says her scripted line.
The editor said we had two choices. “You can either go back and shoot a close-up, so I can cut out you nudging Fran, or you can just play it as is.” We didn’t have time for a reshoot, so we played the take as is. The crowd laughed, as though maybe we had intended it, but it was personally embarrassing, and the pain burned grooves into my future filmmaker brain. I hated myself for missing the close-up and I never made that mistake again. Not that mistake. I made plenty of others, and each time I got into the edit room and realized what I’d done wrong, whether it was a missed shot
or slow pacing, I cursed out the fucking director (me) for his mistake. But next time, I’d be sure not to make the same mistake. I didn’t go to film school, where I would have been exposed to shot lists, pacing, and blocking. I learned filmmaking through experience—I learned through pain.
We shot two other videos, both of which were directed by a freshman from Los Angeles named Ted Griffin. Ted was an aspiring filmmaker who knew about shot selection and editing, and his work showed it. Ted directed a great parody of the Brian De Palma film The Untouchables, which poked fun at Colgate’s Greek system. When Ted graduated, he moved back to LA and become a successful screenwriter, writing such major studio films as Ocean’s Eleven, Matchstick Men, and Tower Heist. If you want to see Ted, he plays the owner of Rick Johnson’s Pizzeria in our first film, Puddle Cruiser.
As the show approached, I realized we needed a poster, so I went to see my artist friend Chris Chaudruc, who owed me a favor. Chris and I had gone to high school together at Lake Forest Academy, and we had a complicated history. Our junior year, Chris asked me if he could drive my car the short ride from the gym to my dorm. He was sixteen and had no license, but since it was the middle of the day and the drive was only a third of a mile, I figured it’d be okay. The road was windy and lined with trees, and the speed limit was ten miles per hour.
I put my seat belt on as a joke. Ha-ha-ha, why did we need seat belts if we were just driving to my dorm? He laughed and put his on too. Then he put the car in reverse and floored it.
I laughed. “Slow down.”
He put the car in drive and floored it. The wheels spun in the gravel.
I laughed. “Seriously, slow down.”
He kept the gas floored. We screeched around a tree-lined corner. “Slow down!” He kept it floored, screeching around another tree-lined bend. And there it was—dead center to the windshield and coming fast: a mature, fat oak tree that . . . Wham! I blacked out for a brief second and woke up covered in tempered glass. Chris had driven straight into a tree at forty-five miles an hour.
Mustache Shenanigans Page 7
