Scriptnotes Recap: Ep. 733 - Learning Comedy with Ali Barthwell
Yes yes, Ali Barthwell is insanely funny and has talent bursting out of her eyeballs, but the thing I want to celebrate her for the most is how she's built her career.
Living in LA, you always hear stories about the creatives who live in other places. People who somehow live on a sprawling ranch in Idaho and still work constantly.
For the most part, these are people who have an established career and don't need to be seen to be thought about. Sometimes it's people your age who are still building their careers, and you frustratedly wonder to yourself, how? (The answer is usually their family is rich). And that's usually it, because building a career outside of LA and New York is really fucking hard otherwise.
Now, Chicago is still a major metropolitan city. It's a bustling hub of creativity with a tremendous theater scene and probably the best comedy scene in the US. Incredible creative careers have come out of Chicago – all the Second City players who have gone on to comedy greatness, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company gave us John Malkovich, Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts, Gary Sinise, Joan Allen, etcetera etcetera and on and on, and I'm not even including all the musicians. But even still – Chicago was the launching pad. Most of those people didn't stay there, because frustratingly there's only so much work. (The outlier here of course is Joe Swanberg, but for the sake of the argument he's the exception that proves the rule.)
Ali Barthwell, though, lives in Chicago, won five Emmys in Chicago, and is staying in Chicago.
Even more than that, she doesn't have an agent. Why would she? She's generating an incredibly fruitful creative career for herself, that'd just be giving away 10% for no reason. She's clear-eyed about who she is, what she wants, and what fills her creative cup. And by working incredibly hard at all of it, she proves that you really can have it all.
Ali imparted so much wisdom throughout the episode, but as a teacher at Second City and writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, she most importantly knows how to make people funny. She makes it sound simple. Which is probably why she can work from anywhere she wants.
The First Things You Teach: Presence, Honesty and Play
John: Ali, you have a student who shows up to learn comedy. They’re considered funny by somebody. What are the first things you do?
Ali: One of the really first things is you have to turn off that self-judgment because you’re really trying to create as much as possible. You don’t know exactly what’s going to work, what’s not going to work. You’re going to try things on. A lot of teachers will tell you, we’re going to get you to try a bunch of different styles of things. A bunch of different exercises. If it works for you, you can take it and run with it. If it doesn’t work, feel free to drop it or look at it and be like, “Why doesn’t this work for me?”
Then the other part that is really important, especially when I was teaching improv. I would say I require two things: You have to be honest, and you have to be present. Those are really hard things once we get to adulthood. That sense of play, that sense of discovery, the sense of honest reaction to what your scene partner’s giving you or what’s being written on the page. Taking away that judgment, taking away what I think this is going to be, where I think this is going to go. Really, you can return to a state of play.
John: Talk us through what you mean by present. It’s listening. It is not trying to get ahead of the moment, not anticipating too far.
Ali: You don’t want to plan too much. You don’t want to be dictating to your scene partners or to yourself where you think the scene is going to go. Because I always tell people, “I talk to my parents, friends, and they’re like, ‘Oh my God, I could never do that.’” I’m like, “But you did. You were a kid, and you played pretend.” We have to break you out of that adult mindset. You have to break that and be like, “What would a little kid do?” They’re going to see something in front of them. They’re probably going to touch it. They’re probably going to pick it up. They’re probably going to shake it. They might even tear it into two parts and eat one.
I do an exercise where I have two people stand face-to-face, and I have one person send the other an emotion. Then I have the person mirror the emotion back. Then send that same emotion and send the opposite back. Then the third one, send the emotion and send the appropriate response back. It’s teaching you there’s no wrong answer. If it makes sense to you and it was your honest reaction, don’t judge it, just do it.
John: I’ve never taken an improv class. If I do the introspection for why, it’s like, I didn’t want to be bad at it. I was afraid of failing. I’m sure those are some of the first walls you need to break through.
Ali: I would split my class into two groups and be like, “Okay, each group come up with a scene.” They’d go, “Who won? Who won? Who won?” I said, “If you wanted to win, you should have played lacrosse in high school. We are comedy nerds doing make-em-ups at 9 AM on a Saturday. Nobody won.” The beautiful thing about improv is you do it once, and then it’s gone. We can never do that exact same scene again. If you’re embarrassed, it’ll be over, and you’ll never have to do that exact same scene again.
From Improv to Sketch: Making a Choice, Finding a Point of View
John: As you move into sketch, you really are asking, “What am I trying to achieve here?” If things didn’t land, if things didn’t get a laugh, that’s when you can actually start to pick apart why. Talk us through how you’re getting people thinking about sketches and how you’re improving them.
Ali: The first thing in improv that I have to teach you to do is I have to teach you to make a choice. You have to say yes. You have to pick up the rock and look what’s underneath it. The second thing I want you to do is make a choice that will serve you a little better, a choice that will make your life a little easier. If we’re in an office and there’s something on the desk, it’s probably going to make everybody’s lives easier if it’s a paycheck. It’s going to make your life a little harder if it’s a tiny man who can speak German to you.
The transition from improv to sketch is looking at what do I want to see again? What do I want to see more of? What confused me? Then you’re looking to pick out maybe a character, maybe a whole arc, maybe a turn of phrase that we stumbled on, an interesting point of view or a piece of dialogue. What choices do I want to make again?
John: What is the first version of a sketch that you might see as a person teaching this class?
Ali: It’s all kinds of things. Personally, I love to see, “We got together, and she’s going to do this.” I’m like, “Great, don’t tell me anything. Get up there, just start doing it.” I’m going to call time, probably around three and a half, four minutes. Then we’re going to sit down and talk about it. For all of those situations, the next step is: what were you trying to do? What were you trying to say? What do we want to see more of?
My personal thing is point of view and self-expression. I go, “What was your point of view? What were you trying to do?” Then, great, that’s what you want — here’s what we can change to make that louder, clearer. If you know what you want to say, then we can take your idea and put it anywhere. Most of our scenes, we want to be saying something about ourselves, the world, the government, relationships. We want to be saying something.
John: What are the common knobs you find yourself adjusting?
Ali: They always have too much.
John: Everyone always thinks a joke is funnier if you put more words in it. It never is.
Ali: I’ll see sketches from students, and I’ll tell them, “Okay, you have five pages for your sketch. We should know who the people are and where they are by the middle of the first page, the most the bottom of the first page.” If we’re explaining who, what, where beyond that — is this a sketch or is this a short play? I want to get to the thing that you want to do in this sketch.
The thing you want to do in the sketch is not explain who everybody is at this dinner party. The thing you want to get to is that somebody brought their girlfriend who went to the rival college, and now we’re going to all have a freakout. We want to get to the thing that is the most fun. Then let’s give everyone something to do, and make sure that everything we’re doing builds up to the point of view that the student wants to get across.
Listen to the full episode on Scriptnotes or wherever you get your podcasts! The full transcript is available at johnaugust.com
You can also see more of Ali's work in her new book, Reality TV for Snobs!
