The Coming

Birthday Boys/Convoy Interview: Part X

2009-07-01T20:00:46Z

We sat down with the improv group Convoy and sketch group The Birthday Boys and had them talk about influences, origins, and sketch vs. improv. We broke that massive interview down into weekly chunks. The following is the final chunk of that series.

ALEX F/CONVOY: I have one last question for you guys…how do you guys deal with a guy that wears shoes like that? (re: MIKE M ’s white sneakers) I would quit! TIM/BDB They are the main source of tension for us. ALEX F/CONVOY: This is going to be written up in text, for The Coming? Then I just want to state Todd has been farting this entire time. It’s been unbearable in this corner because Todd Fasen of Convoy has been farting. Mike H/BDB: I don’t think it’s been that bad! TODD/CONVOY: Thank you. ALEX B/CONVOY: The sound has been throwing me off.

Convoy has a weekly show Thursdays at 11p, The Birthday Boys do a show the first Wednesday of every month at 8p. For more info on these groups check out http://www.myspace.com/birthdayboyscomedy and http://www.myspace.com/convoyimprov.

-Joanna Calo

Birthday Boys/Convoy Interview: Part IX

2009-06-24T20:00:07Z

What other local comedy groups do you like? TIM/BDB: Kiss From Daddy, Neil Campbell and Paul Rust. TODD/CONVOY: Brett Gelman and Jon Daly are pretty fucking hysterical ALEX F/CONVOY: Being around there, be it friendship commitment, or you legitimately want to, you see a lot of stuff. And I’d say half of it is interesting, or good. I haven’t seen their new show but I liked the Apple sisters when they came through before. ALEX B/CONVOY: Donna and Danielle (Let’s Get Awkward) JEFF/BDB: Jennie Pierson and Amanda Sitko were great in our monthly shows, their show Best Friends was awesome and we've become great pals with them. We love Heather Campbell and Charlyne Yi. We fell hard for The Apple Sisters when we did Sketchfest NYC and they just moved to LA, lucky for us! DAVE/BDB: Good Neighbors are good. ALEX B/CONVOY: What’s that? DAVE/BDB: They’re a really funny group of USC guys with a big web video presence. ALEX B/CONVOY: Oh they hosted Harold night a few weeks ago. ALEX B/CONVOY: Tom McMillan and those guys, right? DAVE/BDB: Yeah. Actually, can you stop the video real quick? (Aside) Not sure if they’re from USC, probably. TODD/CONVOY: Tom McMillan is just a guy that went to USC. I don’t think he’s in Good Neighbor. Oh, George Lucas must be in Good Neighbor, cause he goes to USC. ALEX B/CONVOY: If George Lucas is in it, their videos should be great. Actually, their old videos are great, their new videos are terrible ALEX F/CONVOY: Too much CGI. What about- MIKE M/BDB: They Re-, oh. Oh, sorry. Were you going to say something? MIKE M/BDB: No, go on. I was going to make a bad joke. LAUGHTER ALEX B/CONVOY: Hang on hang on I want to hear the bad joke. MIKE M/BDB: I was going to say “they re-release their old videos with new footage.” All: Ahhhhh ALEX B/CONVOY: I’d say that was a mediocre joke. Mike H/BDB: I’d say it was bad. ALEX B/CONVOY: It was an apt observation of how crappy the re-release of star wars was. ALEX F/CONVOY: This is kind of a generic question, but I think it’s interesting…if you had to say who your influences are, and especially if we remove Monty Python, kids in the hall, the state…what would you say? (Birthday Boys react, oh shit) (Simultaneously:) DAVE/BDB: My mom. TODD/CONVOY: My mom (They high-five) ALEX F/CONVOY: It doesn’t even have to be comedic, but who would you say has influenced you? CHRIS/BDB: Did we remove Mr. Show? ALEX F/CONVOY: No. (Birthday Boys react, YES!!!) TODD/CONVOY: Without repeating! MH I’m a Simpsons fan, through and through. That’s my biggest influence I think. It shaped how I look at comedy and how I even talk. Matt My formative years were Simpsons … DAVE/BDB: You guys have common interests, one of the things we come back to is like Americana, or the feeling of the 50 s or 40s or doo wop music, stuff like that. Not that that’s a comedic influence, but it’s such a great genuine place to come from, I consider that informative on our comedy. ALEX B/CONVOY: Like The Saturday Evening Post? DAVE/BDB: Yeah TODD/CONVOY: Like the “white after labor day” sketch that you guys do. DAVE/BDB: Norman Rockwell. ALEX F/CONVOY: The only thing I ever quote, and I do this when I coach or teach…did you guys read Born Standing Up (Steve Martin’s autobiography)? DAVE/BDB: Yeah. ALEX F/CONVOY: If you haven’t, it’s so great, one of the best books I’ve read in a while, it’s so interesting to see how he came up and he has this little anecdote where he's on the tonight show they do this weird little esoteric bit and Carson turns to him at the commercial and says “you’ll use everything you ever knew”. And I read that and I was like YES. Everything. Like every little piece of every comment anyone’s ever made like using that, how everything influences…and like watching that white after labor day sketch, there are several different specific things I could point to as touchstones in that sketch that I knew as…it’s platoon, it’s back to the future, it’s this and it’s that, and it’s this and it’s that. And it felt like one whole sketch, not just like “oh, you guys like references?” DAVE/BDB: It’s the emotion and the sentimentality… CHRIS/BDB: Thank you for saying “use” and not steal. TODD/CONVOY: Because it informs (the) sketch rather than it being about those references. Matt/BDB: I also heard a writer quote which was “everything you know should be in everything you write”. Everyone is impressed. ALEX F/CONVOY: Did you hear it from yourself? Matt/BDB: I read it in my diary. TODD/CONVOY: Also his screenplay is like a thousand pages… Matt No, it’s 20 pages and I’m worried about my education! ALEX B/CONVOY: Have you ever seen the pop culture and philosophy book series? There’s one that’s The Simpsons and philosophy, it’s like philosophy lessons using examples from The Simpsons, like isn’t Flanders MORE moral than Reverend Lovejoy? TIM/BDB The Doh of The Simpsons? ALEX B/CONVOY: It’s The Doh of Homer. There’s an article in there about Lisa and American anti-intellectualism and they get into the fact that The Simpsons was, at one point, a very intellectual show… MIKE M/BDB: HEY. I work there. ALEX B/CONVOY: Shhhh shhhh. But now it’s just utter, utter garbage. But the book made the point that The Simpsons was able to, in a way a lot of shows aren’t, make references where the joke wasn’t dependent on the reference but if you got the reference it enhanced the joke. And I think that things like the labor day sketch, since we were just talking about that, if you’ve seen Platoon it makes the end funnier. But if you haven’t seen platoon, that sketch is still funny. ALEX F/CONVOY: Same as Hot Fuzz or Shawn of the Dead. If you take out the comedy from either they function as a lethal weapon movie and a zombie movie. And there just happens to be these amazing jokes as well. That appeals so much, there are multiple things you can find funny, but all you need is one level… ALEX B/CONVOY: You can laugh at the joke, and feel superior to the guy sitting next to you for getting the reference. But at the very bottom you just get to laugh at the joke, no matter what. MIKE M/BDB: I think our idols are the smart guys who can balance those things…Robert Smigel , Bob Odenkirk, Conan O’Brien, I think all those guys do such a good job of making things silly and fun but also putting in smart references that you don’t necessarily have to know. Matt And then later when you come to learn who was behind it, like George Meyer at The Simpsons, people who were very influential to this group of writers. I also credit sitcoms, cause I used to watch so many sitcoms, you learn formula from that. Like from Home Improvement…there’s a formula to that. TIM/BDB Well you learn transitions from that! You pull a hammer across the screen, and that’s how you do a transition! Matt/BDB: And you learn that Norm MacDonald was a staff writer at Roseanne, he probably shaped a lot of that. Learning like who was actually involved… DAVE/BDB: And in a completely superficial sense I also love just like great entertainers… like the Marx Brothers, things like that. Guys that just occupied an entire screen… TODD/CONVOY: Like Charlie Chaplin…

-Joanna Calo

Birthday Boys/Convoy Interview: Part VIII

2009-06-17T20:00:46Z

ALEX F/CONVOY: (So) you guys make a lot of videos, and I’ve never seen a video of yours I didn’t really really like. So is that, like, sort of what you want to do? Videos? If someone was like, alright, pals, it’s video or stage, what would you do? CHRIS/BDB: I think there’s, I don’t want to say a rift, but some of us are like, like myself, really like the videos, but some of us like the stage. It balances out. DAVE/BDB: There’s a general eagerness to create, Just like you guys said, coming up with the idea, getting it to script form, and getting to portray it ourselves…whether that’s a web medium, TV…pitching feature idea, whatever, that is to me, and I think the group as a whole, really enticing. But what’s interesting is that while you’ve come at it from this improv/performance standpoint, a lot of us were screenwriting majors, saw ourselves as writers in a room or editors…and like coming to UCB, performing around town has broken that shell. So like now we want it all. ALEX F/CONVOY: Todd and I were history majors, and Alex was a physics major…there’s a part of you that, until just recently, there’s an element like: okay, this is “fun”, very little thought went into, like “how can we turn this into a thing?” And the more I interact with people, (I realize), I just want to make stuff. Like if you guys were still in Ithaca, where there’s little to no chance of making it in the TV business…the people who would be doing that no matter what the circumstances, that’s the best. And I feel like if you guys were in the Antarctic you’d still be doing this. And that totally differentiates between that and “I’m at the showcase, and I hope someone sees us” DAVE/BDB: And I don’t think we’d exist as a group of 7 if there we didn’t feel that way. Because it is the most fun way for us to create comedy, pitching to a group of people. It might not be the best way to advance a group, but it’s THE most fun way for us to create comedy. TODD/CONVOY: When we even started, when I came back to LA after college, I didn’t want to act, I wanted to be in the music industry, but for me I always like performing, convoy was just started to have fun. The two of them they had a sketch site, Police Cat. ALEX B/CONVOY: Which had ulterior motives, and because of those motives failed! We tried to put that show up at UCB, we got a Spank slot before they had Spank slots. Seth Morris was like, ah, I think you two can do better and turned us away! But it was probably for the best because we ended up working on other stuff. TODD/CONVOY: And that led to Thirty/30, too. ALEX B/CONVOY: And I want to be very clear, Seth Morris was very kind, and right. I don’t’ want to portray him as some kind of comedy Nazi. TIM/BDB That was Police Cat? ALEX B/CONVOY: Yeah. And we still have so many bumper stickers, if you guys want any.

-Joanna Calo

Heather Fink in LA!

2009-06-16T15:50:30Z

The wonderful and talented Heather Fink got into LA yesterday. Your best bets to catch her are at UCB's ~~Comedy Death Ray tonight at 630~~ (already sold out!), or immediately before ASSCAT this Sunday at 6pm. She does have a full show line-up so be sure not to miss her while she's here. This stand-up gig is better than that f-cking restaurant job. As a side note, our incredibly talented friend Rory Scovel is also in CDR tonight, so if you already have advance tickets, we're jealous. If you want to stay up to date on the latest shows in LA, become a fan of LA Comedy on Facebook.

Birthday Boys/Convoy Interview: Part VII

2009-06-10T20:00:58Z

That sort of relates to a question I had. Being a comedian, you’re really a performer. Do you want to be actors? And related to that- while you guys are sort of in different places of this as your career, what do you hope will happen in the future? JEFF/BDB: I was going to ask if you were actors or if you wanted to be in college. ALEX B/CONVOY: When I was in college I first wanted to be a professor until… ALEX F/CONVOY: No, first you wanted to be ghostbusters. ALEX B/CONVOY: This is true. But Vassar has a thing where you can make your own major. And I tried really hard to major in paraphysical research. As it related to ghosts and unexplained shit. I sat down with my pre-major advisor, like before classes started. Like the first week of my freshman orientation he asked me what I wanted to major in and I said “I want to major in paraphysical research, you know like telekinesis and spiritual apparitions”. And there was a long awkard pause and then he looks up and says “there is not a single class at this college that can help you do that”. So I ended up majoring in physics. But I wanted to be a professor for a long time and it wasn’t until like halfway through my junior year that it became clear that I would get sick of writing papers. ALEX F/CONVOY: A friend of ours sort of convinced us to give it a shot- and we drove out here in the same car, after graduation, cross country… ALEX F/CONVOY: Speaking for myself, I think I have too much of a controlling instinct to just want to be an actor in someone else’ s sitcom, I don’t think that would be satisfying for me. The whole creation thing, making something that sounds like what I like and is what I like, which is why in this show – we shot a pilot over the summer that was OUR thing, we did work on it with a few people – it was interesting to a. find out A. how that works and B. that was so amazing to do because it was like this is going to be our thing! DAVE/BDB: And in case people don’t know, we’re not talking about a web show, this was a Comedy Central pilot. ALEX B/CONVOY: Yeah so the parts of that that were the most fun to do were the parts that we had total control over versus the stuff that comedy central made us do, like their notes and stuff. You guys had talked to them for a while, right? Alex F/Convoy: ter your showcase show. DAVE/BDB: It’s still in the infant stages but yeah. It’s cool because they seem to embrace new voices, writer/performer voices. And that’s great. So we’ve both done shows at the comedy central stage, which I think they try use as a venue to help build relationships with performers but also to advocate for their own things and get executives to shows. MIKE M/BDB: How has that opened up doors for you, the pilot? ALEX F/CONVOY: The whole last year (has been different), because we worked on the pilot with Tom Lennon and Ben Garant (from The State, Viva Variety, Reno 911!, etc.). TIM/BDB How did that happen? ALEX F/CONVOY: The writers strike left those two gentleman with very little to do so they started coming to comedy shows, like Cagematch… ALEX B/CONVOY: The writers strike is the greatest thing that ever happened to us. I’m very sorry for all the catering guys that were unemployed, but it was great for us. ALEX F/CONVOY: Those guys have been just crazy supportive and awesome and we owe a lot to them. Especially for us as people who watched The State, and Viva Variety… ALEX B/CONVOY: It’s been some sort of weird perverted childhood dream. I remember when Tom first came to a Convoy show, he came backstage and it was like, holy shit Tom Lennon’s here! TODD/CONVOY: At first it was like “who is this guy who’s coming back stage?!” ALEX F/CONVOY: Who is this dude? ALEX B/CONVOY: Who’s this dude with the frosted hair and the weird moustache? TODD/CONVOY: And then he left and I was like, (hushed) was that Tom Lennon!? And we actually hadn’t done a great show that night and he came back and thought it was a good show. ALEX B/CONVOY: We owe the whole Comedy Central thing to those guys, those two guys saw our show and saw some potential in us, and talked us up to their manager and their execs over at cc and so we’ve been lucky to have basically comedic sugar daddies to hold our hands and guide us through the dangerous waters…. And who we’ve become friends with! TODD/CONVOY: The whole thing was very weird. Ben and Tom started coming to our shows late summer last year, but then all of a sudden: January Comedy Central saw our show and wanted to meet with us, and then we had a meeting at the end of February, we came up with the idea for the show like ten days before we had to pitch them. To have no ideas, then all of a sudden come up with an idea and then ten days later have them say “we want you to make a pilot!”…and then the writing process obviously took a lot longer but it was all really fast. It was like, whuuu, I’ll quit my job now!

-Joanna Calo

Birthday Boys/Convoy Interview: Part VI

2009-06-03T20:00:10Z

MIKE M/BDB: That smart comedy brings up a big question for you guys. You guys have very smart improv. Definitely the smartest I’ve seen at the theatre. Is that something you guys recognize, like something you should play off of? DAVE/BDB: Do you see it as part of your identity? ALEX F/CONVOY: It has sort of become that. We never set out to do that. It came from college and just from the shit we find interesting. When you do this stuff, you do what you find interesting and fun and to us, doing these scenes Alex B/Convoy: out philosophers and scientists tend to make us- TODD/CONVOY: But it’s also not as smart as everyone thinks because it’s like, “I’m Socrates but I’m pooping. “ ALEX B/CONVOY: Also a lot of it is, and I’m sure this is the same for sketch, you tend to write a sketch based on something you read that day. And I can’t speak for the other two racists in the group, but I tend to come to the theatre just Alex F/Convoy: ter reading 14 articles from Scientific American. Having watched 4 hours of David Attenborough’s Life of Birds! JEFF/BDB: But you guys can rely on each other to have the same pool of knowledge to draw from. You guys have a like Trey Parker grasp on genre conventions. ALEX F/CONVOY: Part of it is that we know each other so well and we have a lot of shared experiences. And we’ve also been performing together for 8 years, there is the element of when one of us doesn’t pick it up, you tend to trust that it’s going to be ok. MIKE M/BDB: If you see a big dumb guy walking into the theatre (do you worry he won’t get it?) ALEX F/CONVOY: I think that any audience in the world, if things are going the way they should, there are way more of them then there are of you. And they will collectively be smarter than you. Altogether they know more than the people on stage, always… they’re always smarter than you, and (so) I throw out that “what if they don’t know” thing. Because, as you guys know, A. once two or three people start laughing, the whole audience goes. And B. that’s what people remember, they don’t want just that broad side shooting for whatever they hit. And then it’s this sort of thing where they go “Oh there was something in the show, I was the ONLY one that liked it!” ALEX B/CONVOY: My favorite jokes are the ones where we hear ONE GUY laugh. It will be a reference to a specific comic book – TODD/CONVOY: Even if we like reference some obscure politically treaty that only one guy knows and laughs at … Hopefully it’s in the context of a scene that’s funny if you don’t know it, hopefully we’re not just referencing the XYZ affair and other obscure political facts. Maybe that’s fun for us but the audience isn’t going to laugh at that. So you have to root it in something that’s funny and then filter those things in. ALEX B/CONVOY: I have very frequently made the mistake thinking that the audience is on board for my arcane knowledge of weird metaphysics. “Let’s go down this road!” and then been greeted with a silent room and tumbleweeds. ALEX F/CONVOY: The nice thing is that when we improvise, and when that happens, the response to the going too far will always kill. Like if something’s dropped and they don’t know or if I don’t know, the response to it, if it’s honest, that works. ALEX B/CONVOY: Like the Electrolux thing. The first line of our show I said “I’m worried about the Electrolux” and Todd just goes “what is the Electrolux?”. DAVE/BDB: You just call it out. And there’s another thing there… so many of us, from our group comes from a writing background. You guys have enough stage presence and training where you can go back to your performance techniques. You can pick some of the details out, creating more and more of a world, give people more cues, and I think that s where that improv world really opens you guys up and you can benefit from that. (To the birthday boys) Do you want to further answer the “what do you want to be when you grow up” question? DAVE/BDB: Here’s a very general take…I think all of us want to produce comedy. So writing performing acting AND editing. And that’s where articulation gets complicated, because as long as we feel like we’re creating a joke—whether it’s because you make a cut at the right moment in a video, or you know you pitch a great line in a script or you just found a funny way to interpret something stage…like, we’ll take that. For me, I’m totally just happy following the path that’s laid out, following whatever’s working. TODD/CONVOY: Would you guys say you function as a collective too? Like where some people are more about finding comedy by writing, some are more finding it by writing…someone writes, someone edits and makes it funnier… CHRIS/BDB: We’re kind of like a factory. A lot of nights I’ll be down editing the video, two guys will be writing something, two guys will be making props, were just kind of doling out tasks DAVE/BDB: We should explain…we have a fabric green screen that just stays up in the living room. A lot of the time we don’t take down the lights, a lot of the time the tripod doesn’t even come down, props stay on the couch. We do run our house like a shitty studio. ALEX B/CONVOY: We ran into a problem with Police Cat because we’d been living at the same apartment, for four years at this point, and we’d always be shooting skits in the apartment and we’d have to be like: alright, what corner of what room have we not seen yet? How can we angle this so it doesn’t look like the same shitty apartment everything else was shot in? DAVE/BDB: Don’t go back and watch our videos after reading this… MH …It’s all the same corner.

-Joanna Calo

Birthday Boys/Convoy Interview: Part V

2009-05-27T20:00:16Z

ALEX F/CONVOY: We’re huge prudes. If we go dirty or blue one of us will bitch at the other one. I like that so much though. I think that’s why I like both of you guys, actually. There was a little dick, recently (in one of your sketches)… MIKE M/BDB: I need a little dick sketch every now and then. Like every 7 sketches. ALEX F/CONVOY: I think part of it comes from when you see shows like Asssscat, these shows that they’ve been doing for a long time that are very very funny and absolutely earn their Nazi joke and their dick joke or their rape joke. But then students will see that and then they do their shows and right out the gate they go: Hey! That Nazi just raped me!” ALEX B/CONVOY: Oh my god, what was his name? TODD/CONVOY: It’s also such an easy way to get a laugh. I mean you’ll get a laugh, but it’s not interesting. Especially for us, we do shows so often that it’s more interesting to try to not be blue and do things that are funny and interesting ALEX B/CONVOY: But because of that we’ve had to have conversations like: ok, guys, we’ve brought up Bladerunner in 5 of the last shows. We can’t do Bladerunner jokes for the next 6 months. TODD/CONVOY: We put moratoriums on things. We put them on homeless people, ALEX B/CONVOY: Homeless people had a moratorium… TODD/CONVOY: Robots… ALEX B/CONVOY: Robots had a moratorium… TODD/CONVOY: I think Jewish things had a moratorium... ALEX F/CONVOY: God had a moratorium… CHRIS/BDB: I’m the only Birthday Boy that loves the movie Bladerunner, so I’m joining your group. ALEX B/CONVOY: (To the group) how can you guys not like Bladerunner! Mike H/BDB: We’ve never discussed Bladerunner! I don’t know what he’s talking about. Turn that camera off! TODD/CONVOY: I actually don’t really like Bladerunner that much. I don’t know if you guys know this. You guys were talking about having a really captive audience at Vassar, but I feel like you have that now, too. You always have a really supportive audience. I saw (Alex Berg’s) “Me Myself and I 95” character, and it seemed like Alex and Todd were basically daring him to come up with songs and scenes from that (made-up one-man) show. I’m wondering if that’s how you’ve always been, out there to take risks, or if knowing you have a supportive audience helps you? ALEX F/CONVOY: I think it might seem like we have this built in audience, but you don’t. The second you start doing shitty shows, it goes away. ALEX B/CONVOY: Which we’ve noticed first hand. We’ve gone through streaks of not being able to get more than 80 reservations. ALEX F/CONVOY: You have to keep them there, and you have to do stuff that will make people want to come. At UCB because the way the classes are with the students, and maybe this is true with your guys’ sketch show, there are some people that go all the time, but there’s also a high turnover. When people stop taking classes they’ll drift away. So you have to do stuff to make them stay – and one way you can do that, I think, is to make it fun on stage. Like pimping him out on stage with the “I -95” stuff, or like you guys, I think fun is a great way to describe your shows. Like that keeps people coming. ALEX B/CONVOY: Can I pay a very sincere compliment to the Birthday Boys? I think there’s a lot of sketch in LA and at the theatre in general that has the same sense of fun but forgets about the audience. It’s like “I’m silly! I’m doing something on stage that’s silly!” but it’s more of like an inside joke for the group. But what you guys do that’s great and it’s why I enjoy your shows, is that you have that same sense of fun and play but you never forget you’re doing it not just for you but for an audience. I’ll site your 3-D skit as something that just like makes me jealous that I’m not on stage doing it with you guys, but it’s also still VERY fun to watch. It’s so clearly fun to do! (ALEX B starts to imitate the way they move on stage, happily) ALEX F/CONVOY: And also like your guys’ show is the only sketch show I regularly hear about after the fact. And yes, I’m saying, I haven’t been to your last two shows. (All the Birthday Boys slump sadly) ALEX F/CONVOY: Like the skit with the duck? ALEX B/CONVOY: I heard the duck was a big to-do. (THE BIRTHDAY BOYS DID A SKETCH CALLED “PECKING ORDER” IN WHICH THEY PLAY AN ARMY PLATOON TALKING ALEX B/CONVOY: OUT THEIR TOUGH SCARY SEARGANT. FINALLY THE SEARGANT COMES ONTO THE STAGE, AND IT’S A REAL, LIVE DUCK WHO WANDERS AROUND STAGE AND PECKS AT THINGS.) Whose idea was the duck? JEFF/BDB: That was one of those things, like “wouldn’t that be so retarded if we…” and then it actually became a real thing. Mike H/BDB: We were thinking because, like Hotdoggin was running it’s course and we were thinking it would be funny to go up to the artistic director and say “so our next show is about us in the military, and our sergeant’s a duck.” And that’s all we would tell them, like a half an hour of that! And then it got whittled down to a sketch. TIM/BDB I think we even just had the title first. Pecking Order! What we need is a good sketch to go along with that title. ALEX B/CONVOY: But isn’t pecking order something that specifically has to do with chickens? JEFF/BDB: Yes. ALEX F/CONVOY: That’s why you don’t put your titles on your sketches, it’s just an internal thing. TIM/BDB Except for that one, we did. LAUGHTER. Matt/BDB: We have a big fancy old school title card on stage for that one. JEFF/BDB: That was such a stunt, though, because we were doing these monthly shows and it was like “what can we do to get people to talk about us”. TIM/BDB: For our last joint sketch with Kiss From Daddy, when we were writing it we all got pretty far down the road with a sketch that involved a small pig. Until Nick Wiger was like “that’s not a good precedence to set, having two farm animals in two shows.” MIKE M/BDB: But a small pig would be so funny though. Like a tiny one? TODD/CONVOY: I’d like to announce that the newest member of Convoy will be a parakeet. MIKE M/BDB: I think that we keep the audience in mind because we were so terrified of the audience to begin with. When we first started out we wanted to please the audience and I think that’s something that’s stuck in our heads. I’m still nervous the audience will be like “get off the stage! Now we hate you guys forever!” ALEX F/CONVOY: It’s tough line to walk, too. (That line of) I want to make the audience happy but you don’t want to go so far as to do that: “Britney spears is crazy!” thing. You guys walk the line so perfectly… ALEX B/CONVOY: Like your guys’ skit about how your acting coach is in the crowd and you’re all just playing more and more to him until the whole scene is out in the audience… you crawl over people in the audience to get to him. Like that’s- I’ve seen so much fucking sketch in my life, on TV, and in college, and since moving out here, and trying to do it, sketch I’ve been in, but I’d never seen THAT. That was something that was really fun and silly but also really for the audience, something new. So pat yourselves on the back. Matt/BDB: We’ve weirded people out with that sketch. We’ve had a whole audience scared of us out there. MIKE M/BDB: We’ve been scared about, once we go out there, freaking the audience out climbing over them. Also I smell terrible in that dress. TODD/CONVOY: The other thing I admire about you guys too is, there are lots of shows you’ll see around here where they’ll be kind of lazy about it. Like maybe there will be lots of good ideas but their under-rehearsed or they just don’t take the care to do it. ALEX B/CONVOY: Or like the endings are non-sequiturs. TODD/CONVOY: You can tell you guys have worked hard on the writing but also the rehearsing and the acting and getting the beats and figuring out what’s funny and what’s going to work. You don’t go to your shows and think “those guys put that together last night”, it’s like no they’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about that! And that’s such an admirable thing that makes the show great. ALEX B/CONVOY: like you guys clearly came up with that pecking order pun weeks before you got that duck!

-Joanna Calo

Birthday Boys/Convoy Interview: Part IV

2009-05-20T20:00:07Z

TODD/CONVOY: You guys all went to college together? Matt They all went to Ithaca (college) I went to UT. TODD/CONVOY: So then did all you guys, except you, do sketch together there? Or just start doing it here? MH No, we all knew each other in one capacity or another. Like Tim and Dave were working on a college show together, and I just knew Mitch, I knew those other guys through film class. And then we all decided to move out here together. So whose idea was it to actually start a group? MIKE M/BDB: It was me. Laughter DAVE/BDB: No I mean 4 of the guys were already living together and messing around with short videos and stuff, MIKE M/BDB: And we took Improv 101 together. DAVE/BDB: The UCB class, that’s where we met Matt. MIKE M/BDB: And that’s kind of where it started. I think all of us were interested in comedy, and through the class we started going to shows, I started going to Comedy Death Ray. It’s funny that you brought that up, that was the first show I started going to a lot, and then we took improv together, and that’s how it happened. Matt/BDB: That’s how I met all of them. I didn’t know them before that. Todd/CONVOY: Lucky you! Matt It was like all of them and me and only a few other people in that improv class, and we just really clicked. TIM/BDB Those other people didn’t cut it. DAVE/BDB: You guys all met at Vassar, right? Where you in the same living situation? ALEX B/CONVOY: We were all in the same improv group. TODD/CONVOY: Me and Berg got into the group my sophomore year, his freshman year. Fernie got in the year after. TIM/BDB: Is that an ongoing college group? ALEX F/CONVOY: Yeah. It’s been going, like, for a WHILE. It was called “Improv” and no one ever bothered to name it. TODD/CONVOY: I think the rumor was that Noah Baumbach started it, wasn’t that it? ALEX B/CONVOY: I heard Lisa Kudrow started it, so… TODD/CONVOY: Some celebrity alum at Vassar started our improv group. CHRIS/BDB: That’s two more celebrities than ever went to Ithaca. MH Ricky Lake went to Ithaca! CHRIS/BDB: Oh yeah yeah. JEFF/BDB: How was your improv at school different from UCB here or iO (West), process-wise? ALEX F/CONVOY: It was a short form group and there were 8 of us and I think a lot of what we do now in long form came from there because we tried to take away what made short form intolerable. We’d make it so that even if you took away the fact that we were doing it FILM NOIR!! It would still be interesting or funny, that was the goal. And I think that informed what we do now a lot. And doing it there, in Poughkeepsie, New York – once you leave the campus there’s nothing for miles- so people would come to the shows, and it was easy, and they’d be drunk. It was awesome. ALEX B/CONVOY: Yeah we’d have a captive audience of like 200 for each show. DAVE/BDB: Wow, really? ALEX F/CONVOY: Yeah, there’s nothing to do in Poughkeepsie New York. Maybe in 1908 it was awesome, but now it’s a fucking shit hole. ALEX B/CONVOY: My freshman year when I joined the group, the year before that all the comedy groups had gotten together to perform and had horrendously offended the campus to such a point that they’d all lost their funding. Every single comedy group. TODD/CONVOY: One of the groups was actually derecognized by the Vassar student groups association, and the other two groups, including Vassar Improv - cause all three comedy groups do a show together called “Menage a Ha”… ALEX B/CONVOY: I don’t know if you guys have heard of “puns” before, that’s a good one. TODD/CONVOY: So Vassar Improv had their funding frozen, which, as an improv group you know we REALLY needed that funding. ALEX B/CONVOY: But the weird thing was that there was this climate of: if we say something too offensive, we will get shut down by one of the 10 thousand special interest groups on campus. Like the Phillipino students’ association will take offense to our Imelda Marcos joke, and we’ll lose all our funding. But that sort of forced us to, and this has sort of lasted through the Convoy days. There’s a lot of tendency in the theatre to go blue, but we tend not to- ALEX F/CONVOY: We’re huge prudes. If we go dirty or blue one of us will bitch at the other one.

-Joanna Calo

Birthday Boys/Convoy Interview: Part III

2009-05-13T20:00:46Z

TODD/CONVOY: So when you guys write, how does it work? Do you all write together? Are the sketches fully formed or Do you all pitch ideas and then say: “I like Dave’s idea, I’ll go write that”. TIM/BDB Sometimes that happens but usually you know we all have jobs where we sit in front of computers all the time so we have a huge amount of emails everyday, where someone writes a sketch idea and then- Mitch sighs unhappily JEFF/BDB: What’s the matter, Mitch? MIKE M/BDB: It’s a lot of emails everyday. ALEX B/CONVOY: Can I ask you a nerdy 21st century networking question? JEFF/BDB: Yes, please. ALEX F/CONVOY: Do you use shared Google documents? ALL BDB: Noo! ALEX F/CONVOY: You should! ALEX B/CONVOY: You should use shared Google docs, it makes it so much easier. TODD/CONVOY: It doesn’t do Final Draft formatting or anything, but… JEFF/BDB: We DO use shared Google calendars, do you do that? ALEX F/CONVOY: I refuse to do that, that’s too much. TODD/CONVOY: We can take care of our own dates, thank you very much. MIKE M/BDB: I refuse to switch from AOL mail DF: True story. And for the listeners, (to Mitch) can we give your cell phone out to the world wide web? Because I guarantee no matter what day throughout history you’re reading this interview, you call Mitch and he A. won’t answer and B. his voice mail box will be full. CHRIS/BDB: Can’t leave a message. MIKE M/BDB: 617 695 ----

-Joanna Calo

Birthday Boys/Convoy Interview: Part II

2009-05-06T20:00:33Z

Dave/BDB: Now when you rehearse improv, do you use a coach? Alex F/Convoy: With Convoy we’ve never had a coach, we’ve been doing it really since 2004. We started it over at Improv Olympic just as something to do and we were broke and never brought anyone else in and since then as we discovered what our show is and what our form is (something) we know so clearly what the show is to bring someone in there’s such a learning curve to show them what we do. Alex B/Convoy: It’s very clear to us like when we fuck up like how we fucked up. (pause). It sounds so arrogant like “we don’t need a coach”, I’m sure we would benefit from a coach. LAUGHTER Alex F/Convoy: We’ve been together for 8 years…I think with most improv groups it’s like you’re on a Harold team, they throw you together, and you can’t be like, hey guy I’ve know for a month, “what was that? Don’t do that”, but with us, we have no shame or problem being critical. Todd/Convoy: With us we can be critical and we can take it and we can listen to each other and it’s not an ego thing to say: you should be doing this (instead). Alex B/Convoy: For instance, when we hosted Harold night I inadvertently made a Fatty Arbuckle reference- Alex F/Convoy: You can’t inadvertently make a Fatty Arbuckle reference! You reference Fatty Arbuckle. At some point your brain said “let’s bring up Fatty Arbuckle”. Alex B/Convoy: Now hold on. I brought up Fatty Arbuckle because he’s a comedian, but I forgot that he was also a coke bottle rapist. And so there was a discussion afterwards of that. But at this point the legend is so much bigger than the man. I mean, his nickname is Fatty Arbuckle. Todd/Convoy: How about you guys. Do you like, like I know you guys have brought in Drew (DIFONZO MARKS) and Neil (CAMPBELL) & Paul (RUST) directing your shows, but what about the writing, do you show it to a director to get their opinion, or Is it just you? Mike H/BDB: It’s just us. It’s usually too late in the game, like we’ll have a show coming up so quickly we don’t really have time to show it to a director in script form until right before the show. Jeff/BDB: They’ll read it and block for us. Mike/BDB: Yeah they’ll block for us or maybe show us some different angles on a joke. Mike M/BDB: Which can totally turn around the sketch! Tim/BDB: We should say that our first show, Hotdoggin’ (WHICH FIRST PREVIEWED IN 2007), was completely directed by Neil and Paul. Jeff/BDB: And they made cuts… Tim/BDB: They had already seen 15 sketches of ours at Shabby, and we had to pick 6. Dave/BDB: And Amanda Sitko’s been helping us out, recently, in the same capacity as Neil and Paul. You’ll get, in a half hour session, 10-15 ideas that can turn a sketch around. So it’s much better to bring someone into the process at that point instead of earlier when we’re not even committed to an idea. So, we have 7 voices as it is, you can imagine that would be tough, but then once you have that editorial voice, it can be great. Alex B/Convoy: So do you guys workshop stuff? You’ve mentioned Shabby (Not To Shabby is a space in the UCB calendar where anyone can go and perform) and I’ve seen you at Shabby… Do you go there with stuff you already like? Or do you go there with stuff like “Matt came up with this idea and we think it might be half retarded but let’s see what an audience thinks”? Tim/BDB: We’ve only recently started doing that now that we have to churn a lot of stuff out. I think that for our first 6 months in existence we were the lame guys at Shabby that brought SO MANY props, and it was over-rehearsed and had tech cues. Not Too Shabby WAS our performance. And then just recently now that we needed a new half hour every month we were like uhhh that’s a little too much. Mike M/BDB: Also about 20 hours of our week is dedicated to prop collection. Matt/BDB: Yeah nothing’s worse than doing a show with a bunch of shit, like at Shabby, and then it goes horribly and then having to carry it all sadly out of the theatre. LAUGHTER Tim/BDB: We’ve done that so many times. Very sadly carrying a huge prop. Todd/Convoy: I thought this giant head would kill! Alex F/Convoy: We did a show a little while ago, last year, the sci-fi mashup. Our sketch idea was Krypton meets the deathstar. And we were like ok that sounds great but now we need a Krypton and a deathstar! So we made these giant things and I remember trying to walk from the theatre to my car past the bars. And I was like ok, I’m just going to stand here, and you can all shoot your comments to me about the death star at once. Dave/BDB: And it’s one thing if it was some shitty hole in the wall, but it’s La Poubelle. Alex F/Convoy: The comments were only like “Hey, nice deathstar”. So I was like “Yes, thank you”. Alex B/Convoy: I’ve seen that “deathstar”, and kudos to the La Poubelle crowd for instantly recognizing it as the deathstar. Alex F/Convoy: It’s just a line and a circle, that’s all it is. Dave/BDB: So when you guys meet, you said weekly, is it at a practice space? Alex F/Convoy: Our apartment (His and Alex Berg’s). Dave/BDB: So you live separately? Todd/Convoy: I live separately and Fernie and Berg live together. Chris/BDB: It’s convenient for us because 5 of us live together in the same house. Alex F/Convoy: Raise your hand if you live there! Chris, Dave, Jeff, Tim, and Mike H. raise their hands. Alex F/Convoy: I want to say a thanks to you guys – before you came along no one, with the two Alex’s in the group, could figure out our names. But now that you’re here, it’s all about how no one knows your names. (TIM/BDB) That was the whole concept behind our group. We were like Convoy has had too much complication with their names! ALEX F/CONVOY: Whenever anyone meets the group they’re just trying to figure out which one’s Fernie, which one’s Berg, which one’s not an Alex, and if it’s a middle aged dude they WILL make a joke. TWO ALEX’S! Like every fucking time. ALEX B/CONVOY: The best was that we introduced ourselves to this woman, once, and I think it was the lady that wanted us to do the zombie thing downtown? So she was like “what are your names?” and we said “Alex” and “Alex” and she goes: “Oh, are you guys brothers?” LAUGHTER ALEX F/CONVOY: And there was like a beat of silence where we were like, “oh, she’s funny?” but NOPE. ALEX B/CONVOY: No, she just doesn’t understand how families work. (TIM/BDB) So you guys aren't brothers.

-Joanna Calo