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Welcome to another episode of the Comedic Pursuits podcast. We’ve got another stellar episode lined up for you today.
This week, I got to sit down with the delightfully versatile Adam Koussari-Amin, who used to play with WIT Harold team Richie before they were retired.
Highlights from my interview with Adam Koussari-Amin
I talked with Adam about his background in comedy, how he got started with improv in DC, his indie team Ugh, his experience with Drag Brunch, and some other exciting topics.
Without further ado, Adam Koussari-Amin. Some answers and responses have been edited for clarity. To hear Adam’s full answers, listen to the podcast episode.
How did you get into comedy?
Growing up, I think I was always kind of a goofy person, but I was a lot more insecure about both myself and my talents. It’s so weird to me because, thinking about what I’d go back and tell my five-year-old self, I’d say, “Just be fucking gay all the time,” and also, “Join theater.” Because if it didn’t really go anywhere, fine. But I’d be playing a lot less catch-up than I am now.
I was a smart kid in high school, but I was one of those smart kids that had no fucking idea what they wanted to do. I mostly just sat around and played video games, then was like, “Now what?” So I took my sister’s college list and applied to bunch of those places. Luckily, I got into the University of Virginia.
Originally, I applied to be in the engineering school because, at the time, I thought I would be a software developer. But when I got there, I realized it wasn’t actually what I wanted to do. It sounded cool, and I liked video games and developing, but my brain wasn’t really structured for that. So I switched to economics because it sounded like I degree I could probably use for whatever. Then I ended up applying to the commerce school because it was what all my smarter friends were doing. I just looked at what all the intelligent people were doing and tried to keep up with them.
My senior year, I’d come out over the summer, and I was like, “Well, I’m gonna be gay. I’m gonna do all this fucking crazy shit.” I wanted to explore and do all this stuff. I went to go see my friend in this hip hop dance crew called Mahogany, and I decided to join. But that, again, was the limit of my creative pursuits because I always stunted myself.
I always felt like I wasn’t good enough or shouldn’t do something or didn’t have the time. I think people get crippled by their own sense of quality because you’re your own harshest critic. Rather than just continuing to produce and iterate, you hold yourself back. Sketch is something that’s very difficult for me to get into, for example, because I won’t want to do it until I feel like I have something, but I won’t have something unless I keep doing it.
What was your introduction to improv in DC like?
I was trying to think of when I actually started doing improv, and I realized I’ve always managed to find a “professional” or “academic” way to do some sort of artistic pursuit. I was in a gifted school program called GATE in the New York area—I grew up in Rockland County, New York—and in this advanced program, we always found reasons to write comic books for things we had to do. I also remember making an original video for a history class, which was very stupid and very goofy. So I’ve always had an ongoing vision of how I can make academic and professional pursuits as creative as possible.
I first started doing improv, which is probably my main form of comedy, when I worked for a consulting firm in 2007. I got the organization to approve training and development funding for some comedy classes. Originally, I was supposed to do a sketch writing course at DC Improv. I’d pitched the idea that it would make me a better writer, but they said no. This was before Second City had all their material about sketch and improv and how it can impact professionals.
But that got the ball moving, and they gave us some funding. I decided I wanted to be a better public speaker. I even got them to pay for a voiceover course because I said it would make my phone presence better. Then I took an improv class for that reason, as well. I think too often, people don’t see how they can connect a lot of their creative interests with what they do on an ongoing basis.
I’m a senior manager of talent strategy and operations. I try to develop programs for my company around what engages talent and what keeps them there. We’re focusing on the employee experience. When that’s your day job, you tend to stifle a lot of conceptual ideas because you’re weighing budget, planning, and this and that and the other thing. When you bring an idea to your team or your boss, it has to have some semblance of structure to it whereas, in more artistic pursuits, it’s more about the act of getting people to help develop an idea because it’s more of a concept than a solution.
I think too often, people think in their business minds. Creative design gets you out of that mold of having to make everything perfect. You can bring that into your professional career, but when you’re a professional trying to get into something creative, it’s very difficult to get out of that mindset.
My company paid for me to do the intro course at DC Improv in 2009 or 2010. There, I met one of my really good friends, Stacy Hayashi, who lives in New York now and was a huge fan of improv. That class was a really interesting roster of people. This was when improv didn’t have a big community feel in DC. The group was a retired Navy vet, some guy who lived in Virginia who taught taekwondo, an older guy who was just trying to see new things, and some younger people who wanted to try comedy.
It honestly felt like a comedy movie. If there was a movie about someone who decided to take improv because they went through a breakup—one of those soulful movies where everyone learns something—it could have been cast with this group. It was the kind of characters you’d see in Dodgeball or Bad News Bears, just all these personalities. The improv was awful, but it was such a funny mix of people. It was delightful in the sense of realizing all these people exist just like I do in real life.
Shawn Westfall, who now owns Unified Scene, was our teacher for that class. He taught the class almost like you’d teach an advanced class. He told us what to do, but these people barely had any passion to get on stage in the first place. It was so peculiar. He would have been the “duck, dodge, dive” guy in Dodgeball.
After that class, I took a break. I was thinking about taking another class, but I wasn’t sure of the technical competency or how the class would progress next. Then a year later, I ran into Stacy at a concert in Baltimore. She told me she’d just finished WIT’s full curriculum and was about to go through it again if I wanted to join.
I went through WIT’s program, and we created Prettier Than You out of those classes. No one knows where the name came from. It was around for a while, and it’s a nice legacy story. I was in it for two years.
A lot of the people in the group were classmates who had to decide if they were really into improv or if they were riding the social wave. When push came to shove, Stacy—who was one level above me in terms of passion and connection with the form—had a “come to Jesus” moment with everybody and basically said, “If you want in, stay in and go to practices. If you don’t, that’s totally okay. We just have to make a decision so we can figure out what to do.”
Pretty much everybody left, so we rebooted the team. That’s when, Murphy McHugh really took over. We wanted more of an artistic director and wanted to think about how we were presenting ourselves.
At some point, I was actually kicked off the team—in a very good way. I was kind of the captain of the team, but I was juggling another indie team called Neighbors, a Harold team, and the all-gay indie team I’m still on, Ugh, and juggling became very difficult. We went out to dinner before a show, and they asked if I was still good to keep playing. My reaction was basically, “I’m really glad you brought this up, and I’m sorry you had to fire me, but I should leave.” I have a hard time separating from things that were great and exciting in the past, and they were spot on.
What was your experience with WIT’s Harold program?
I tried out for Harold once and didn’t get it. Like every fucking idiot, I thought since I’d finished my levels, I was ready. At the time, it wasn’t even that competitive. When I didn’t get it, I thought, “Well, fuck this shit.”
That’s actually why I doubled down on Prettier Than You. We were getting shows and having fun. It was the full experience to me. At the time, I didn’t know that many people in the Harold program, nor did I go that often. So I kind of thought, “Whatever. I get good stage time, and I do it on my own time.”
When I decided to audition for Harold again, it went really well. All I was focused on was making the audition fun and having a good time versus trying to prove that I was good at X, Y, or Z. My attitude was that all I could do is what I do best. I had a really good time, and I felt good about the audition. Then I got on Richie.
Looking back on those experiences, I think the best thing to do for anything you go into is to do what you consider good work. Then it really doesn’t matter. Putting on my HR hat, it’s the same thing as job interviews: people get too wired about getting the offer. But if you leave the interview knowing that you put your best foot forward and had a conversation, even if you realized you’re not qualified for it, you can do the best you can and be willing to note that you don’t have those skills. Then you can realize it’s not a fit, it’s not that you’re good or bad.
You just have to relax, enjoy the moment, and take it for what it is. And don’t show up hungover.
What was being on Richie like?
Richie was a brand new Harold team when I joined. Two Harold teams had been dissolved, and they’d created newer teams and spread people around from the old ones. There were eight of us, and Richie Pepio missed the first practice. That’s why the team name is Richie. We were around for two or three years.
What was really cool about Richie was that our original coach, Rich Nyman, taught us to have more of an ensemble kind of feel before we really learned to do Harold well. Katie Ozog always compares it to being ravenous wolves that learned, later on, how to act like dogs. Rich really wanted to blow up the Harold structure to be more artistic, so that really fed into a lot of our energies.
I loved everyone on the team. We’d go out for tacos beforehand and go out for drinks afterwards. It was a super, super awesome time.
By the time Richie got to its third cycle, we started wondering if we could be an ensemble. The answer was, “Probably not right now,” because there were a bunch of ensembles at the time. But it felt like, to us, based on who we were receiving in terms of talent, we were getting really high-quality people in our program, and I learned so much. Everyone got along super well. It was just an incredible experience all around.
At the tail end of our fifth cycle, we had a “come to Jesus” moment. I think the biggest conflict for us was all the shifts in people that come with Harold teams. I can see why Harolds don’t automatically shift to ensembles because if you lose the people—again with my HR hat—you lose the company. So when we had a few folks leave Richie to join other teams and lost Rich, who was a driving force, I think everyone kind of wondered what we would do.
There were some changes that happened that were good, overall. But at some point, it just didn’t feel great. Some of our longtime team members were cast on ensembles. At the time, I thought the best way for me to support the organization was to take a weekly break from improv and remain on the board at WIT. I felt like I could keep doing great stuff with them and stay connected. I’d already found my friends, and to me, improv was all about making the connections I had. I had my guys in Ugh. I was friends with a lot people on ensemble teams. So I kind of thought, “What else do I need?”
So that’s where I left Richie. Richie continued to do many amazing things, and I loved going to their final Harold night performance. There are so many great opportunities to meet high-quality people and high-quality improvisers. I’ve been very blessed to not remain on the edges just doing my own indie thing. But that comes with really getting involved.
How did Ugh start?
Dan Millikin sent an email to a group of us to begin with just to say that he liked how we performed and wanted to create an all-gay troupe. He knew a few of the people he’d asked to join, and I knew of them, but we weren’t necessarily close before the start of the group.
Ugh is the pre-eminent improv thing I’m really on top of now, but we’ve been around for quite some time. We joke all the time that Ugh isn’t really an improv troupe, it’s a lifestyle brand. And by that, we just mean we get drunk on the weekends. We just happen to be funny enough to be able to do improv easily. But it’s also because we all have our own pursuits.
Dan Milliken is in iMusical and was coaching. Denny and Ryan were on Commonwealth and Harold teams. Darnell’s been in Love Onion and a variety of other projects. Bryce is now on Lizard Girl. And then I, at time, was on Richie. So it was sort of like Ocean’s 11, where we said, “We’ve got a job to do,” so we’d get together and do that. We rarely have shows, but when we do, they’re impactful enough that we feel good about promoting and getting people in the door.
Where did the idea for drag brunch come from?
If you’re on the WIT board, you have to fundraise. I decided my fundraiser could be a Housewives of Improv drag brunch, which is just Ugh in drag being fake housewives. It’s a great concept, and the crowd loves it. It’s just wacky enough that it works.
We did it every year at Improvapalooza, and when we started, our makeup was terrible. We got hand-me-downs from our improv girlfriends. But it was a blast. When it came to fundraising, I thought it was a great opportunity.
We did the first drag brunch fundraiser sometime in March 2017, and now there’s an annual fundraiser called Grig’in’ w/ the Gurls. That’s our themed one where we’re the housewives. People who come know our characters, and it’s super fun. Now we’ve done fundraisers and are doing more for organizations other than WIT.
What are some of your takeaways about DC improv after being in the scene for a while?
To me, the best improv comes from teams you really believe in. You don’t have to be best friends with them, but you really have to get along with them. I’d rather go grab a drink with somebody ahead of time than do warm-ups because you’ve got to get into your teammates’ minds. If you’re just showing up to go through the motions, you’re not really going to care. All the teams I’ve been part of were most on fire when everyone went out after or got together before because you wanted to be on stage with these people.
Also, improv should be fun all the time. If you’re not having fun, you’re the asshole. I think that’s a really good golden rule to have. The minute you start thinking you’re a better player than somebody else is the minute you’re probably not going to have fun and the minute you’re going to be the problem.
One of the things I always say about DC is that the biggest selling point we have, as far as being a destination for improv, is that community aspect. And I think we do a lot better for ourselves now that we’re slowly gaining back really innovative and artistic design.
We’re doing a lot of mixed concepts, which I love. There’s a lot of cool stuff we’re playing with that mixes and blurs regular theater with improv, and I think that’s where we do our best work. DC’s full of very thoughtful people who see improv as a window into additional activities and fun rather than a high-end artistic experience. Improv isn’t the only thing these performers are going to do or focus on, so we have a diverse set of creative talents. We should focus on how we can make that creativity as interesting as possible while just letting people have a good time and growing fun, creative ideas.
I’m so proud of all of the work that Shawn Westfall, Murphy McHugh, Mark Chalfant, and every indie artist out there has done. I think we’re at a really great zeitgeist for DC improv, where it’s up to the players to figure out how to play. If you can’t get on a Harold team, you can still go do improv. You’ve got to figure out how passionate you are and what works for you and go bite into it.
What was your biggest aha moment within comedy?
I think I go back to “If you’re not having fun, you’re the asshole.” I think when it comes to comedy, you do yourself a disservice to judge others unless you’re surrounded by a bunch of assholes making racist or xenophobic or misogynistic jokes. If you’re in a room of people trying to be fun and funny and you’re not allowing yourself to help others grow, then you’ve already kind of fucked yourself.
There were certain times on certain teams with certain activities where I would get frustrated when people weren’t getting it. But that’s just chump change. It’s not necessarily a peer’s place to say that. Noting each other isn’t necessarily going to do anything for your team. But there are creative discussions you can have in terms of what worked and what didn’t.
I think of how a lot of companies are looking toward 360 reviews, and I wonder if comedy could benefit from more of that. I’m not talking about self-policing but more open discussion and acceptance of feedback about how to grow and how not to. When you’re onstage together is probably not the best time to be bringing up those issues, but I think getting feedback—as long as it’s constructive and thoughtful—is totally valid.
I think it’s also about looking at how to analyze people and realizing you have a lot of weaknesses, too, and figuring out how to circumvent those, work around them, and build into them. I think that’s part of why Richie worked so well because we had a clear understanding of how every player did their thing. And I think sometimes that would structure us to do the same thing every show, but it’s why we had great shows. We were systematically executing a lot of very fun stuff because we saw exactly how it would play out.
What’s been your biggest failure within comedy and how did you overcome it?
I think it was not getting on Harold the first time. I guess I can combine that with my aha moment where I had a really good self-realization of, “You’re not that fucking good. Shut up.” I was very upset at the time because there were people who did get on, and I was judging their quality of work.
It was a failure two times over because it was also a failure of me to be bigger as a person and just say, “Great. Just keep working on it. Focus on your shit. Don’t give a shit about anybody else.”
There’s no real “boys’ club” of DC improv. Maybe there is in other places, but usually a lot of the decision-making process within the universe of DC improv comes from quality, not from social interactions or community. I think part of that balancing act with quality and community is that, too often, people equate that showing up means you get quality, and that doesn’t always play out.
I think it’s always a good recognition for anybody that if something doesn’t work out for you, either have this idea that you want to put out your best work product and call it a day—which I think is something we all aspire to be better at—or go do your own thing. Prettier Than You came about and stuck around because I didn’t get on Harold, and it worked out great.
There are so many other opportunities that just because you didn’t get through one door, there are a million other doors you can keep running through. You can be involved and come back to that first door when you feel really ready and confident enough to do a good job at it. That applies to almost everything. You can use it with your career or your dating life or whatever.
It goes back to the idea that you can only control how you feel. You can’t control the world around you, and you can’t control the decisions other people make. You have to ensure that you are always walking away from a situation knowing that you only have control of yourself and that you did what you thought you could do to get a result you wanted. Whether you got it or not, you know that you at least hit that effort level to maximize that attempt. If it doesn’t play out, it’s not always your fault. There’s always the chance that something won’t play out, and you have to be willing to accept those consequences.
Where can we see you in action?
My DJ collaborative, CTRL, is at Trade once a month. I’m still involved with WIT, and you should donate to them because they’re a great organization making differences in people’s lives. Ugh might have shows coming up. Listen to my podcasts, Short Story Long and Homo Superior.
Thanks for tuning in!
Join us next week for our interview with WIT education directory Jonathan Murphy.
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