Elevator Pitches

Several Undercooked Ideas For The Price (Free) of One

Rather than bore you with a longish essay on a topic I have not had time to think through properly, here is a short list of topics I considered writing about, presented in summary.

Elevator Pitches For Better Essays

The New Silliness In Improv in Los Angeles: Two mighty oaks of improv (iO, Second City) are gone, and even UCB is diminished (though seemingly thriving). Clown classes and shows seem ascendent. Improv seems like old news. Or so you’d think. Instead, there’s a new generation of people who waited all pandemic to become part of the scene. Over the last year, they’ve created improv shows (and podcasts, and teams, and schools) on their own, and everyone seems less beholden to the old rules. The Harold is on the way out, wilder freeform inspired by Comedy Bang Bang has taken hold. The scene is smaller, but younger and more inspired. Plaid is out, meta is in.

I No Longer Speculate On The Past Crimes Of Strangers: When I walk to the Los Feliz Starbucks in the morning, I used to routinely wonder about the strangers I’d see: I wonder what the worst crime they’ve ever committed is? But that started to bore me and instead I asked myself Who is this person still in love with, even though the person is long gone? Especially fun to wonder if the person seems over 70.

Will The Guitar Ever Come Back To Pop Music? All pop music is made by computers. Doesn’t anyone want to shred? Where are The New Strokes? Or was music never meant to have guitars? Maybe the success of The Beatles tricked everyone into using guitars for 50 years longer than nature intended.

If Netflix Figures Out The 90 Minute Movie, I Will Forgive A Lot. Strike notwithstanding, if Netflix can crack the code on making decent 90 minute movies I will stay subscribed.

Sticky Phrases for Dumb Ideas: A good motto makes a dumb idea seem okay. Strangely the phrase I want to go after most is “a stitch in time saves nine.” I disagree with that phrase in particular and the phenomenon of sticky phrases in general.

Fake Niceness Is Still Nice. Thoughts about 10 years in Los Angeles.

Big Grande Is Great: I laughed so much at Big Grande’s set at Dhruv Singh’s Hot Summer Improv Spectacular in July. Ryan Rosenberg in particular was on fire, but everyone was great. Because Casey Feigh’s Holy Shit Improv Festival (which was also terrific) was going on, there wasn’t much audience for this show, and I feel like I got to see a hidden kingdom of great improv. Fun. This should be part of “New Silliness in Improv” but I almost wrote about it all on its own.

Plugs, Fresh

Hi(nes)! I’mPROV to Meet You! - This is a podcast I do where I teach improv to characters from the Comedy Bang Bang world. It’s behind the comedybangbangworld.com paywall but dare I say it’s really funny. This episode’s guests: Payim Banifaz, Hannah Pilkes and Seth Morris.

District Improv Festival - Jim Woods and I will be performing and teaching at the District Improv Festival Sep 8-10 in Washington DC.

Das Improv Festival - Jim Woods, Sarah Claspell and I will be performing and teaching at this improv festival September 28-30 (ish?) in Berlin.

Plugs, Ongoing

Screw It We’re Just Gonna Talk About Comics - My brother Kevin and I continue our weekly comic book podcast. We’re currently examining the stellar run of Catwoman comics from the early 2000s written by Ed Brubaker.

Clubhouse Fridays - My improv school The World’s Greatest Improv School does shows every Friday 7pm at The Clubhouse in Los Angeles. Two great student teams, then the teachers do a set.

Hey that’s it! I need to figure out how to word the headers and footers on this thing, so look forward to that part of this newsletter getting BETTER.

Good bye, good bye, good bye.

-Will