Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Podcast (heavy-flo-podcast): Play in new window | Download
You can follow this podcast on:
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn
DC sketch writer and performer Elizabeth Kemp, of Bad Medicine, talks about owning self-defense weapons, what she wants sketch comedy to look like in the future, and her favorite Midwestern grocery chain.
Elizabeth Kemp on Heavy Flo with Puss and Kooch
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. To hear everything Elizabeth has to say, listen to her podcast episode.
Getting started in comedy
I finished grad school in Iowa and then immediately took a job with Mayor Bloomberg’s office in New York.
I’d never been to New York in my life. I just packed a suitcase and got on a plane. It was the financial crisis, and that was the only place that would hire me. When they were interviewing me on the phone, they were like, “You’re from Iowa? That’s weird. We’ve never had that before. Let’s just see how this goes.” So I ended up taking a job out there.
Did you do comedy while you were in New York?
I did not. I did comedy stuff in undergrad and then was so busy in grad school that I didn’t have time to do anything. I don’t think I went to a single comedy show when I was in New York because I was working all the time. It wasn’t until I’d been in DC for about a year that I started getting back into it.
I went to a couple stand-up shows and remembered how much I liked comedy. I’d also started picking up work over time from contacts who needed help punching things up for speeches, fundraisers, campaign events, that kind of thing. I was kind of trading that work for beer money or however one gets by and forges a creative outlet in DC. Then I ended up taking a sketch class from Murphy McHugh.
Was taking this sketch class your first step into comedy in DC?
Yeah, and it was there where I met a couple of the people who ultimately started Bad Medicine with me: Julian Morgan, and a woman named Maura. Then we found Isaiah Headen at one of the very early Sketch Jam events in a basement bar and recruited him. I basically badgered him on Facebook Messenger and tracked him down through mutual friends.
Then we all gathered at a bar on U Street. We had a massive plate of tater tots, and that’s how Bad Medicine was born.
Bad Medicine and sketch comedy in DC
I’m one of Bad Medicine’s head directors and a performer-writer. I also help with production stuff sometimes.
How did you come up with the name?
We were pitching various names, and Bad Medicine was one I pitched.
I don’t know if it’s the Midwestern roots, but I use comedy to deal with a lot of stuff and get through it. Comedy makes people feel better, and you’re never going to leave a situation worse off after having had a good laugh and a good time. So Bad Medicine’s deal is that we do dark humor, but laughter is good medicine.
So when you formed the group, what was the sketch situation in DC?
It was non-existent. There were a couple loosely-formed groups. This was before Murphy had space at Dojo. There was no Unified Scene Theater at that point.
I think we did our first show in that gallery space over on 8th Street SE, The Fridge. We all wore matching outfits. We looked like a catering team or something.
What is the internal structure of Bad Medicine? There are quite a few people in the group, so how do you orchestrate that?
I think we’re around 15 people altogether. At this point, we’re as much a sketch group as we are a comedy collective. We recognize that there’s actually great strength in having the ability to rotate people in and out depending on whether people move or have family obligations and aren’t able to do shows. Having a cast we can push, pull, or rotate depending on availability helps a lot.
We currently have a structure where the founding members and a few other people we’ve added over time sit on a management committee of sorts. We have quarterly meetings where we prioritize, manage festival submissions, respond to any inquiries, and do social media management. We assign roles for the ongoing maintenance of the group. And we have a group of people who just write or who just want to perform or who help with video production.
It’s a really nice system, actually. There’s always room to try something else. If you came on as a writer but you decide you want to perform in a show, we have the flexibility to let you try that.
I’ve taken four or five months off before, and I’m confident that I can come back when I have more time for it again. It won’t have completely fallen apart because one of us had a bunch of other stuff to do.
Is Bad Medicine affiliated with a particular theater?
We did shows at Unified Scene Theater for about a year and a half, almost two years.
It was great to have that consistency because we could actually start to write shows to that space. There were some real spatial and tech limitations there. Initially, they were interpreted as hindrances or problems. But we actually started writing to the space.
But we don’t have a home right now. There are pros and cons to that. We have to find somewhere new to do shows in DC, certainly. But we also have a really strong presence at a lot of festivals. So even if we just end up being a festival team for the next few months until we get something figured out in DC, that’s fine with me.
When you are traveling, are there certain sketches that land better in certain places? Do you ever consider that?
I wasn’t able to go to one of the shows we did in Canada, but we have a sketch about cable company customer service. We didn’t realize it’s just not that much of an issue with whatever the cable provider was in Montreal. So I guess there were golf claps, and it kind of bombed.
A lot of times, we fight the expectation that because we’re a DC sketch comedy group, we’re going to do lots of political comedy. That’s actually one of our rules—especially with this particular administration—that political comedy is not evergreen. We can’t take a sketch that we did two years ago that was incredibly successful and take it out on the road.
You have to calibrate that a little bit. But it’s mostly fighting the expectation that we’re going to do really politically-oriented comedy. And then when we don’t, occasionally we’ll get comments after a show like, “Oh, I thought you guys were just going to bash Trump the whole time.” We don’t need to do that for him. We could never keep pace.
If it was five years ago, maybe we could do a little bit more of that. But by the time someone would write a sketch and we would be able to take it live, we would never be able to execute on that in any kind of timely way.
Where do you see sketch evolving? What’s the future of sketch?
DC is growing a little. What we’re trying to do is go out and see more types of shows. We interact with tons of different comedians, sketch writers in particular.
Most people’s baseline for sketch is Saturday Night Live. So seeing how differently sketch shows can be structured and what the different kinds of approaches are is interesting.
I want to get to the point where you’re getting more into almost a theater experience, as opposed to just a comedy show. It becomes a much more cohesive 30-minute to an hour-long production. It is a whole comprehensive show that has some thread or narrative. You’re not necessarily using the same characters throughout, but maybe there’s a world that is created or a theme or detail or some kind of thread that weaves everything together. The production value goes up.
I think sketch is going to have to evolve beyond, “Here is a two-minute sketch about two people who have a disagreement about something. And then here is a blackout sketch, and here’s this longer-form thing where two or three weird things happen.” It’s not just DC that does this. A lot of sketch comedy is still very much in this zone of “Sketch. Blackout. Sketch. Blackout. Sketch. Blackout.”
To see the teams that really push that structure and do something different, to see the real creative energy that goes into putting some of those things together, is a great learning experience.
We have a lot of people who are just starting out in DC. And unfortunately, because of the nature of a lot of jobs here, a lot of people leave. And they leave at right about the time when they would start looking to some of those other things, and would evolve into graduate-level comedy stuff. Then they usually go to LA or New York.
For DC in particular, it seems like people are starting to stick around longer. Certainly Bad Medicine plans on sticking around and hopefully getting to a point where we are evolving, at least in what we’re doing.
One of the mandates I had on our last show was doing more with lights and sound and making it feel like more than just sitting in an audience, watching three or four people talk on stage. I want it to be an immersive kind of thing with more audience interaction. It’s going to feel like an actual show of sorts. We’re definitely getting there.
Going to the festivals has been a huge part of pushing those boundaries we didn’t even realize we had set for ourselves. I certainly hope that will carry on. I think once people start to stay in DC, that will happen more. But so many good people just keep leaving. It’s kind of a bummer.
The tale of the two machetes
I was dating a guy who was an Army Ranger. One day, we went back to his house, and he was really excited because there was this box that had arrived for him. He opened it up, and it was this massive SOG machete.
It’s a very high quality machete, by the way. I recommend it. They’re small knives. You have to sharpen them regularly. They’re great for camping and hiking. That’s my endorsement if you’re in the machete market.
But I was immediately terrified because I’d only been on five or six dates with this guy, and he was really excited about this machete. And he made the point, because he could see that I was a little stressed out in that moment, to say, “I’m getting one for my cousin, but I also needed a new one because I don’t want to use a gun as a form of home defense.”
I’m just thinking, which date do you show your date that you have a machete? What is that number?
Well, for him it was date five or six. I don’t normally talk about it a lot. I don’t think it’s something you lead off with unless you’re in a relationship with or dating someone who’s very into the outdoors. Then it’s just going to come up because you need a blade for kindling or clearing campsites.
So when did you get a machete?
The first machete was actually a gift from him because we had this whole conversation about it. His justification was that, because he lives in an apartment building, if he would ever need to use a weapon of some kind, he didn’t want to use a gun or firearm because that can penetrate walls. He could risk harming someone in another unit or causing damage that he hadn’t intended to cause.
This was coming from someone who was an Army Ranger, trained in self-defense. So I thought that seemed legit. At that point, I wasn’t particularly fazed by it. But I guess because we were talking about it for 20 minutes, he thought he should get me one. And then the next time I saw him, he was just like, “Here is a machete.” So that’s how I ended up with the first machete.
The first time I really came to appreciate the value of it was when I was living in a townhouse. We had a grill on the back deck, and we’d decided to have people over for Thanksgiving. I decided to spatchcock the turkey and then cook it on the grill. But I got distracted because I was drinking a lot and left it to light on fire outside.
It started catching the branches of the tree over the grill, because of course we had, in a drunken stupor, moved the grill too close to the tree. So I used the machete to very quickly saw off the branch that was on fire and throw it into the driveway and save the turkey. So nothing burned to the ground. It actually turned out to be a really great turkey. And I got to use that machete for the first time. And I was like, “This is a really great thing.”
Then when I moved, I couldn’t find which box the machete was in. But I was like, “This thing has proven itself as a really valuable thing to have around the house. So I’m going to get another one.” Because at that point, I had taken it on several camping excursions. So I bought a second one. And then I found the first one in one of the unpacked boxes in my storage unit. And now I’m just like, “Hey, worst case scenario, I now have an auxiliary machete.”
Thanks for getting wet with Puss and Kooch
Tune in next week for an interview with improviser Darnell Eaton!
You can follow this podcast on:
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn
