Video Killed The Improv Star - PW Humor Issue
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| Worldwide Pants: Getting sketchy with the locals. |
Video Killed the Improv Star
Secret Pants are using the Internet to find success and maybe even a TV show. 
by Jeffrey Barg
In a city of roughly 945 improv comedy troupes, no other groups are doing quite the same thing as Secret Pants. They’ve opted to forgo improv in favor of actually writing material, shooting elaborate video shorts and blending the two in live-action shows, podcasts and Internet videos regularly beamed across the planet. (“We’re big in Italy,” says Secret Pant Brian Kelly.)
PW sat down with four of the group’s 10 members to get the skinny on the funny.
This is going to be Q&A, so the more funny you can put into it, the better.
Brian Kelly: “Okay, I won’t talk about my dead mom.”
Bryce Remsburg: “You think he’s kidding.”
Samantha Russell: “Please don’t print that—his mom will be very mad. It was two Easters ago—he ruined the entire family event.”
BK: “We made a joke about ‘my dead mom … ’”
SR: “ … on the Internet.”
BK: “Yeah. Oops.”
BR: “We got one of our sketches on TV, and it was the one sketch Sam’s mom could not see.”
SR: “I ended up sitting in my room hoping she wouldn’t flip through the channels and see me getting hit in the face with yogurt.”
Hit in the face with yogurt?
SR: “It’s for our one sketch, a sort of porno that never quite happens. The one scene is a semi-money shot, but it’s yogurt, and I get hit in the face with it. My mom’s a little conservative, and I can hear her saying, ‘Everyone’s gonna think I’m a bad mother.’”
So how’d the group get started?
Brian Craig: “It was a bunch of us sitting around a table talking about what movies we loved, and we kept noticing each one of them had people who originally came from a comedy troupe—Wet Hot American Summer, Brain Candy, any Bill Murray movie—so we decided we should start a comedy troupe. And we did. And now we’re being interviewed by you.”
Which do you like better—video sketches or live shows?
SR: “You basically need both. You need to put your name out there and show you can be funny live. But there are other things you can do with video, and you can reach more people with that.”
BK: “At our live shows we’ll typically open up with, ‘Oh no, something’s gone wrong. Let’s do improv.’ But we make fun of it, and we always end up being on a show with another improv group, and they think we’re mocking them.”
SR: “Well, in a way we are. We’re mocking them a little bit.”
What did you think of the SNL digital short “Lazy Sunday”?
BR: “We thought it was phenomenal as an Internet phenomenon. We thought it might open a door. When something like that happens, one of my aunts will be like, ‘You like comedy. Have you heard of this show Saturday Night Live? Is that what you do?’”
SR: “I’m somewhat unwilling to tell people I’m in a sketch comedy troupe, because they always say, ‘You know, that would be funny—put that in a sketch!’ My dentist did it. He was cleaning my teeth, and it squeaked, and he’s like, ‘That should be a sketch!’”
BR: “This always shuts people up: ‘If we took your idea, it’d be a copyright issue.’”
BK: “Those SNL guys did something really fast, and then everybody was waiting to see what would happen next, and it didn’t pan out. But then they got ‘Dick in a Box.’ I’m happy to see ‘Dick in a Box’ doing very well, because they’re funny people. It’s a lot of pressure, though. To hit a home run right off the bat is always scary.”
And now there’s the “My Box in a Box” spin-off.
SR: “I haven’t seen it, but apparently it’s a big moneymaker for this girl. Somebody wrote it, and then they got this girl off of Craigslist to put a dick box in her crotch.”
BR: “You don’t need Craigslist for that!”
SR: “And apparently they’re making money off of that.”
BC: “I think that’s awful.”
SR: “But it’s the No. 1 story on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown!”
What are you working on next?
BR: “Trying to get into Philadelphia Weekly.”
BK: “Yeah. Really trying.”
Congrats!
BK: “I think we’ve finally figured out how to do a TV pilot.”
BC: “We kept forgetting what step one was, and we realized: Write it.”
What’s the pilot going to be?
BK: “It’s not gonna be a traditional sitcom—it’s gonna be a hybrid of sorts. Straight sketch shows besides SNL don’t do very well anymore. I think a lot of networks could use some young blood. How are these networks succeeding playing reruns of, you know … ”
BR: “ … MASH.”
BC: “I love MASH.”
BR: “Brian loves MASH. I’m sorry.”
BC: “We all have somewhat discerning tastes in television, so we’re trying to write a show we’d watch.”
BK: “We also have lots of guilty pleasures. I like the movie Jingle All the Way with Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
BR: “I love Kelly Clarkson.”
SR: “One of my favorite movies is Showgirls.”
BC: “I don’t watch shitty movies.”
