My buddy John Betz Jr. is a terrific comedian. Now, you have the opportunity to find this out for yourself. He says:

Hey there. I’m in a comedy contest and I’m sending this out to everyone I know. I performed at the HBO Comedy Festival last week in Las Vegas and the final round is judged by online voting. If you had some time, I’d love some votes and some word-of-mouth to others.

Please go to this website: http://ziddio.com/contest.zd?dispatch=landing&contest=53

Register with Ziddio if you haven’t already and then Vote for John Betz. Vote as often as you can! The rules permit multiple votes, all you have to do is close your browser and open it again. I usually open 7-8 windows at a time, vote on each one, close them all and start again. Also FYI, you don’t actually have to watch the video. The voting is two weeks long. From 10am on Wednesday, Nov. 21st to 11:59pm on Tuesday, December 5th. It’ll be a long two weeks, but worth it if I can win.

Vote relentlessly!

Harry Connick Jr. Trio’s “Lonely Side” just came up on iTunes– for the first time in over two years. It’s funny how the random shuffle will keep tracks from playing for a long time, but it’s always pleasant when you hear a song that you haven’t heard in a long time.

Lofty’s Roach Souffle , which was the one album that Harry Connick Jr. released with his trio, was the soundtrack to Soap, Scents & Seduction, a live, improvised soap opera that I worked on in 1990. Sharon Elder was the guiding force behind the show, which was a ridiculous send-up of the usual tacky soap opera crap, set in a soap factory. I think, for the life of me, I will never forget Helen Hagan saying the line, “Exfoliating scrub? Mr. Johnson, what kind of girl do you think I am?”

Sharon was one of the first people other than Larry Long who believed that I really had a place doing improv. I was a goofy-looking, 15-year-old kid at the time, which I think is all anyone else saw, but Sharon and Larry really bent over backwards to make me feel like I wasn’t wasting my time. She also set me up with a couple of jobs for different things, like taking photos of people in costume at Harnett County’s Project Graduation in 1991.

I’ve tried a number of times over the years to find a jazz trio that sounded anything like that one Connick album. There aren’t a ton of piano-bass-drums albums that I can find, particularly with my unrefined palate for jazz. Pandora didn’t help me much, but that may be due to the fact that I can’t use any of the Lofty’s Roach Souffle songs as a starting point– they’re not listed anywhere, even though a bunch of Connick’s vocal stuff is (not interested).

I did a poetry reading today, my first public reading since I was an undergraduate. It was part of the West End Poetry Weekend, which was arranged by the Carrboro Parks and Recreation Division. I’m grateful to the folks who set it up, particularly Kim Andrews, who did a great deal to make it happen.

Ellen read just before I did, and in case there was any question, Ellen rocks completely. If you have not bought her book yet, you should buy it from Bull City or from Amazon.

After the reading, I sat in football traffic for a little over an hour trying to see the Four-String show. I’ll be working with them tomorrow night, coaching improv for the first time since I walked away from DSI in early 2006. I don’t know what to expect. I’m nervous. I really thought I had shut the door on improv for good. There’s not another team I can think of that could have even coaxed me this far. Part of me hopes that I go and just don’t feel it at all, and we call it quits there. Part of jme hopes it’s a perfect fit. Either way, I’m a little more excited about it than I thought I would be.

What was I thinking going into business? I said repeatedly that as soon as improv began to feel like work, I wouldn’t want to do it any more. And sure enough, I don’t really want to do it any more. I must seriously have a personality defect, because every time I really love doing something, I start thinking that there’s a way to make it bigger than just a hobby, and then it spirals out of control, and I never end up happy about it. Why can’t I be like normal people and be happy to just have a little fun?

This is self-destructive behavior. Bad, bad self-destructive behavior.

I need to breathe.

One thing we improvisers tend to be really good at is shitting in each others’ corn flakes. In the absence of any real worthy drama within our own theaters, we’ll look to war with another theater in our area, and we’ll generally pick the most modest of offenses to set us off. See if any of these claims sound familiar, improviser:

“You worded your ad in such a way that it might be construed as a slam on our program!”
“You began doing a show similar to the show that we have done before!”
“When you opened your new theater, you took away talent from our theater.”

That’s right, they ARE familiar. You heard them in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, North Carolina, Austin, Washington DC, St. Louis, Richmond, Green Bay, Kansas City, and a couple of other places that I’m too lazy to actually research rather than recall.

Why do we do this? Well, within our own theater, if we find ourselves predominantly performing in just one, we talk plenty of shit, but since we’ve bought into a retarded notion that everyone has to be the best of friends in order to improvise on the same stage, despite the fact that it never, ever happens that way. It’s bad form to write in your blog about what a bitch Ronnie Wilson is if you stand a pretty decent chance of being cast on a team with Ronnie Wilson during the next audition.¹ And someone in the theater will be close enough to Ronnie even that if Ronnie doesn’t care (because Ronnie thinks you’re a bitch), that someone feels insulted and hurt, or worse, feels that the mutual distance must be fixed, immediately.

So, because it’s a day-to-day headache to out-and-out despise someone in your own theater for legitimate reasons, it is often much easier to release that frustration in veiled digs and outright message board hostility towards someone else’s project or theater. Ahhh, the message board. How did we fight without you?

So here’s how it goes down. Kelly Poopinski posts something saying, “I really like improv, and I wish the community would get bigger.” This is an honest sentiment from Kelly Poopinski. All of us improvisers agree that we like improv and other people should too. Hey, even Ross White wishes the improv community would grow.

Then Mike Flatulum, who is new to the scene, makes the dire mistake of saying, “Gosh, I wish that the many theaters we have here in our community were working together.” Oh, Mike, don’t you know that seventeen years ago, Joe and Sally were part of the same theater company, and Joe liked Sally but Sally slept with Rick, and Joe harbored resentment against both Sally and Rick that lingers on? And now that Sally is the artistic director of the New Improv Theater Site (NITS), Joe has spread the word around Previous Improv Company of Krazies (PICK) that NITS is pathetic. (Joe has never seen a NITS show, or came to one with his mind made up that it would be bad.) So, Joe posts a veiled reference to the reasons that the two can never collaborate, which boils down to petty personality issues which only really relate to Joe and Sally, and no one else involved.

But because we, as improvisers, are always right, we must immediately enlist the rest of the community around us to come to bat for us. Of course, only one or two people are actually going to post anything offensive or inflammatory– maybe just Joe– but the rest of us have to at least chime in to show our teammates that we were reading the thread and pretending to agree in vague principal that yes, Sally was kind of a dick about things, when in actuality we don’t really care, because we don’t know Sally. Or we saw her show once and we genuinely didn’t care for it. Or maybe we chime in because we’ve been in Joe’s theater for five or six years and we’ve really come to genuinely believe Sally is a dick, because Joe said so and one time she teched a show and blacked it out before we had a chance to say that really funny thing we were going to say.

So we post a few times, usually something innocuous, and then someone who doesn’t know either theater feels compelled to say something about how awful it is that the two theaters are at war. Then, someone in each of the theaters believes they are at war! “If Kevin Polaski says we hate each other, he must really know something about that other theater! They hate us! They talk shit about us whenever they gather! We must hate them back!” is the rallying cry.

But the thing of it is, most people don’t care. It’s not an institutionally held hatred– it’s usually petty and personal, between a few people who have a history that extends well beyond theater and almost always involves sex somewhere along the line. (Maybe just not directly with each other.) Most of the people in each theater don’t know a lot about the other theater, or do, but don’t care because the other theater’s environment just isn’t their cup of tea. It might be geography, it might be established friendships, it might be artistic preference, it might be the cost of classes or the experience of the instructors or the horrible body odor of a member of one company². It might be feelinsg of jealousy or hurt because they were spurned on- or off-stage. Who can say why we choose one artistic endeavor over another? We all have different reasons.

I’m involved at the business end, as a co-owner of a theater currently being dragged through one of these petty spats by good-intentioned people on both sides. And as a business-person, I can safely tell you the following:

• If improv grows in my small market, that is a good thing.
• I see no way in which pettiness and enmity strengthens my goals for my improv theater. So why would I encourage it?
• I may not be at other theaters’ shows or classes on a regular basis, because I’m busy, but that doesn’t mean I think they suck. In fact, in most cases, I’m quite friendly with the members of other companies, having either worked with them on other projects or having performed alongside them for many years.
• I hope you pay no mind to any member of my company who are assholes. I pay very little attention to asshole members of your company³, because I know that they’re not representative of your theater’s ownership. In most cases, I like and respect your theater’s ownership. Your theater’s ownership may have attended my wedding. And I know those assholes are not representative of the many people in your company who are excited about improvisation, yes-and, and community.
• I have seen so many of these spats come and go, I could write a thesis on it for a sociology degree. I could then publish that thesis. And someone would think I was talking shit about their theater in my thesis. And I would still get up in the morning and not worry about it.

So, in short, because I have to go to a theater and perform a show that some people really like and some people really don’t like, here are some parting words.

If you think you’re being a dick, knock it off.

If you think someone else is being a dick, ignore them.

You have better things in life to band against than someone’s improv theater. For Christ’s sake, look at our government and the giant corporations that actually intend to screw you.

If people don’t want to do the same show or class you’re doing, don’t sweat it. There are a lot of factors that go into choosing an experience that works for you, and people aren’t all alike. It’s not an affront.

Let’s stop being rude to each other and focus our attention where it belongs: Having awkward and thoroughly ill-advised sex with the members of our own company, team, or troupe, and then dealing with the fallout from dashed expectations.

Or proposing to have awkward and thoroughly ill-advised sex with the members of our own company, team, or troupe, being rejected, and then dealing with the fallout from dashed expectations.

¹ I’ve also found that it’s retarded to make observations about Ronnie that are neutral, because if Ronnie misconstrues them as negative, you’ll end up with a strained, awkward relationship forever. (Even if you and Ronnie are taking a class in a city you don’t live in. Ronnie could move to your city one day, and end up on your team one day. And you will feel horrible about that awkwardness forever. Seriously. Trust me.)

² You may think I am joking. I am not. I was once in a company with a man who smelled so badly of his own pee that company members left to pursue other interests, and to get fresh air.

³ Someone, somewhere, in an improv company, thinks this statement is directed at them. Get over yourself. Unless you are Larry Howard. Larry Howard, you are an asshole⁴.

⁴ But I love you.

I finished up a Level 1 class last night, which means I don’t currently have anything planned at the DSI Theater. I did a show Friday, hosted my Level 1 Sunday, and taught Monday, and it was that same familiar “weekend of improv” feeling that I’m so used to (albeit interspersed with family madness). I do miss it, and part of me wonders what it will be like to know that for the next little bit, I have absolutely no improv lined up. I have a couple of possibilities to guest here and guest there, which is sort of rending, because part of me would like to dive back into a full-time commitment at the theater and part of me knows that a little time off is going to do wonders for the exhaustion and justs general chronic crud that was Februrary and March. It’s like, the minute I sense that I’m not stretched to my absolute maximum, I start looking for ways to overextend myself. Bad Ross! Bad Ross!

I have, however, committed to directing a one-man show later in the summer and wild horses could not keep me away from that.

Some pix that Lauren took Friday that make me happy:

Watch the hell out for Nikida… she’s going to be wicked good in a couple of months and will contribute mightily to the unstoppable juggernaut that is ComedySportz.

Since it was my stepfather’s 70th birthday, my mom brought cupcakes for everyone in the audience.

I got tongue-tied at the beginning of the second half, and what came out sure sounded like the word “shit.” I tried to barrel on and hope no one noticed, but members of the audience started calling for the brown-bag foul. I was caught. What choice did I have but to bag myself? Embarrassing. Awful. At least I got to end on an absolute low note, right? (Actually, it was a strong show.)

DSI Comedy Theater features the owner of Chicago’s IO Theater presenting monologues and personal anecdotes for the longform improv of DSI’s acclaimed House Team Mister Diplomat as they slap a Dirty South spin on the Armando.

Charna has been teaching people how to improvise for more than 20 years. Her world-famous IO Theaters, located in Chicago and Los Angeles, are meccas for training in the art of improvisation, specifically Harold. They act as a breeding ground for television shows like “Saturday Night Live,” “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” and “MADtv,” regularly supplying New York and Hollywood with writers and performers.

Who knows what you might learn about the modern movement of improvisation, the brilliant mind of Del Close, or the whirlwind world of All-Star comedy?!

Where, When, How Much:
DSI Comedy Theater @ Carr Mill Mall
(Entrance on dock behind Elmo’s Diner)
200 N. Greensboro St., Suite B-11 Carrboro, NC 27510
BOX OFFICE: 919-338-8150
FRIDAY 9:30PM FEBURARY 3, $8

DSI Comedy Theater is blowing it out for the new year with a VERY special show–

Seriously, sometimes performing comedy is the most fulfilling thing in my life (after my marriage, but if you know me at all, you know that is the freaking best thing that ever happened to me). I got to play miniMonsters tonight in CSz, and we giggled with how much we like each other, and then we did some comedy for other people and they seemed to like it too. That’s my tribe.