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Welcome to another episode of the Comedic Pursuits podcast. I’m your host, Seth Payne.
This is episode 13, and 13 is my favorite number. Coincidentally, this is one of my favorite episodes. I got to sit down with Geoff Corey, a super hilarious, delightful human being known for his goofy-ass characters and scenes. We have a lot of laughs this episode, and I think this is actually the most I’ve laughed in any episode so far.
Highlights from my interview with Geoff Corey
Geoff has a great way of breaking down the things he’s done in the past and the things he’s learned. He’s a fantastic storyteller. He was on Not Great with Kids and Wonder Whale. He’s currently on Nox! and Runaway Train. It’s an awesome episode, and I hope you thoroughly enjoy it.
Without further ado, Geoff Cory.
Some of the questions and answers have been edited for clarity. To hear Geoff’s full responses, listen to his podcast episode.
What’s your comedy background?
Growing up, I was very influenced by my brothers, who are older than me. I was the youngest of three boys. I basically did everything they did with music, film, comedy, shows, movies, anything. I would say the people we idolized were Jim Carrey and Chris Farley. We watched their movies over and over again.
I think that checks out because I’m super physical. I make faces and large, explosive additions to scenes. I think people don’t expect it from me if they don’t know me because I present as a little guy and a thoughtful person. But when a scene starts, I’m just like, “Oh, this scene needs a crazy uncle who only wears underwear.”
I went to college and studied politics as SUNY Albany in upstate New York. I was friends with everyone in the improv club, but I didn’t do improv. The group on campus was called Sketchy Characters. My roommate was in it, and I went to their shows. I liked everybody in the group. I hung out with them and went on their bonding trips even though I wasn’t in the club.
From meeting them, I told myself if I ever found myself in a new city where I didn’t know anybody, I would seek out the improv community because I knew I liked those kinds of people. But then I never did improv until I got to DC.
How did you get into improv in DC?
I came to DC with a boyfriend of five years who was also an honorary member of Sketchy Characters who never did improv. We broke up about a year into living in DC, which was very life-changing because we’d been together through college. Of course, in those situations, you lose a bunch of friends, and you don’t really know what to do with your nights and weekends anymore. So I did a little partying and some crazy things, then I signed up for an improv class.
In September 2014, I went to Improv For All workshop facilitated by Kate Symes and Dan Brown. The workshops were every Friday around the corner from my house because I lived in Columbia Heights at the time. So I went over to Centronía and did the workshop and loved it. But after I took the workshop, they told us all the classes were filled up unless we wanted to take Kate’s class in Takoma Park.
So I signed up for that class, even though I literally lived around the corner from where the rest of the classes were. I had to take the Red Line after work all the way out to Takoma Park and take level one there with Alan Prunier. I loved every second of it.
Level three was probably my favorite, and it was the first class where I got excited about my classmates. We all bonded. I think a lot of people follow their class from level one up. For me, level three was when I found myself in a new grouping of people that was really great. We then followed each other up through the rest of the levels. Then literally a week or two after level five ended, I auditioned for Harold and was accepted. I went to Not Great With Kids.
What was your experience on Not Great With Kids like?
We were best friends. Some of the people on Not Great With Kids had already been in the Harold program, so I felt like a newbie coming to the scene, but we all bonded almost immediately. Zach Chase, from Love Onion, was our coach. He was a great first coach who got us really comfortable with each other. He left after just one cycle, but nobody from the cast left. Joe Dawson, also from Love Onion, became our next coach and coached us for a year and a half.
Not Great With Kids was a Harold team at WIT for a year and a half with zero cast changes. It was really crazy. At our finale show, Jeff Bollen came out and gave a speech at the end thanking everyone for coming and mentioned that it was a bittersweet moment and that we’d been the exact same cast for a year and a half. You could hear people in the audience saying, “What?” Because that doesn’t happen, especially now.
I think the chemistry of the groups and the creation of the groups is just part of the development of the Harold program. It’s gotten really big. There are a lot more people auditioning, and it’s a much harder decision. I don’t envy Mark.
I think 70 people auditioned last time for 15 spots. He has to not only pick the people who he thinks are going to do well, but also find chemistry. There’s someone who could be on a team and seem like they’re not doing that well, but if they were on the right team, they would be doing well.
It’s really an impossible decision to make. I’ve been incredibly lucky. Both the teams I was on were very well-bonded, very supportive, and I still firmly believe that part of that was that we went out together after every rehearsal. Ryan Brookshire took the lead with Not Great With Kids and said, “After rehearsals we go out,” and everyone kind of followed.
When I got onto Wonder Whale, I was the senior member of the team because I had been on Harold the longest. After the very first rehearsal, I was like, “Alright, rehearsal’s over. Now we all go to Lou’s. That’s how it works.”
I say that about Not Great With Kids, too. During Not Great With Kids’ final show, I walked out and made a pull about wanting to do things the way girls do them, or maybe it was the way boys do them. Whatever statement I made was a bold, out there, ridiculous statement. I grabbed a stool and put it down, and I stated it loud and proud. And I turned and nobody was on stage with me.
So I said it again in a different way, and I swear I saw, out of the corner of my eye, Lauren Woody look at everyone else on Not Great With Kids to say, “No, don’t. Don’t go out. No one go out.”
So I looked at the audience and went into a monologue and sat down. People talk about this scene as being one of their favorite scenes they’ve ever seen me do, but it wasn’t me. What happened was, everybody else on the team then sat down in the audience and started pretending to eat popcorn and whispering to each other. And they turned it into this scene where they were all there to see their friend’s one-man show, and it wasn’t going very well.
I’ve had people talk to me and say it was such a cool scene I did. But it wasn’t cool until they all sat down and supported this idea that I was there by myself. Someone decided I was out on the stage by myself for a reason, decided I was doing a one-person show, and decided everyone should sit down and watch it. That was all Not Great With Kids’ chemistry.
What was your experience with Wonder Whale like?
The transition between Harold teams is very dramatic. I’m glad I’m not in the Harold program to deal with the drama. The last two or three weeks of the Harold program, everyone starts talking about who’s going to get moved where or which team is going to get disbanded or who’s going to get cut.
At the end of the day, I don’t think anyone really knows. We always joke about starting a rumor amongst ourselves to see how long it takes to get back to us because the rumors just fly. Whenever the cast list comes out, there are some surprises, but generally, most of the teams basically stay the same. A few people get moved around. Maybe a team gets disbanded, but you kind of knew they were going to get disbanded.
You get an email from Mark with a week or two left in the Harold program where he says WIT wants to move you to this team, coached by this person, practicing on this night. He doesn’t tell you who else is on the team, he just asks if you’re in or not. And you’re obviously in, because why would you leave?
When I got that email, all I knew was that I was on a new team, practicing the same night, with Dan Miller as the coach. I love Dan Miller. He’s such a smart improviser. I thought it was great to have a coach with such knowledge. But I was getting nervous because I didn’t know who else was on the team. When I started seeing who else was on Wonder Whale, though, I was so relieved because we had some great people.
My last several shows with Wonder Whale were some of the best improv I’ve ever been part of. It was so, so on point. Everyone was on the same page or just jumping to support or jumping in with a new or supportive idea, and the back line was laughing hysterically at all times.
We weren’t sure what was going to happen with the team around the time I left because there were four open slots. So half the team was gone, and our coach, Matt Mansfield, left, too. But I think the last five or six Wonder Whale shows were talk-of-the-town status.
What has your experience on Nox! been like?
Nox! is awesome. They’re the senior ensemble team at WIT now. Most of the team members have been on the team from the beginning.
Half the people on Nox! have never been on a Harold team. They were on Nox! as an indie team, applied to be an ensemble team, and got accepted. We actually had a brief discussion about doing a Harold as our format. It’s basically reserved for improvisers in training, so you never really see a Harold done by really experienced improvisers. We thought it might be cool to provide that.
Can you talk about some of your past Improvapalooza shows?
I did so many Improvapalooza shows this past year that I got in trouble for it. I think I was in 24 shows. Every year, I apply to be in all these shows, and half of them don’t get accepted. So I feel like that’s always a safe strategy, but that wasn’t the case this year. I would say yes to teams planning shows whose idea I liked or thought was innovative,. Apparently, the committee thought they were innovative, too, because they didn’t reject the idea. So then it was this whole running joke that I was in every single show.
Every year, Sam Schiffrin and I do a Palooza show called Awkward Sex in the Dark during the late-night shows. It’s one of my favorite shows that I do.
We’re always scheduled for 1:30am, so it’s usually really late. We have two microphones, and the lights go down, and we’re just a couple having sex in the dark. We do the noises, and we just make it really awkward. Someone’s always like, “Oh, I’ve got a cramp in my foot? Do you want to keep going?” Stuff like that.
I came up with that show when we were in level five together. And I was so happy that Sam agreed to do it. I didn’t think she would, but we did it two years in a row. Then this year, Sam couldn’t do late-night shows, so we decided to submit it for the middle of the day and call it G-rated Sex in the Dark.
It was same exact show, but one of the things about the show that people always laugh at is that we talk like a couple having sex. We say terms and refer to body parts and use the vulgar terms for them. But when we did the G-rated show, we had to talk about sex while avoiding those types of words. We weren’t even going to say “boobies.” Instead we would say “chest mountains,” or something like that.
So we did the whole show saying all these terms in a totally new way. Sam would say something like, “Do you want to come into my cavern?” As soon as the lights went off and one of us said one of those made-up terms, someone in the audience goes, “Oh my god, this is worse.”
What has been your biggest aha moment within comedy?
You don’t need to have an idea of what you’re about to do. In fact, having a fully thought out idea makes it harder. I think I’m pretty good at naming everything at the top of scenes, but then it doesn’t go anywhere. I’ve given my scene partner such restriction, and they don’t want to go outside of what my idea is. I think the biggest moment for me is when I realized you should really just react to what’s happening.
You might have an idea and your character, but you really just need to look into your partner’s eyes and wait for them to say something. Then you say something back, and they respond. And before you know it, you discover what’s funny about the scene. I’ve done too many scenes where I’ve come up with the game before starting the scene. But the scene comes up with the game for you.
What’s been your biggest failure within comedy, and how did you overcome it?
With improv, I have failed so many times, I don’t know if I can come up with a one moment in particular. What’s great about improv is, if it fails, the whole group wasn’t pulling it off.
But when shows aren’t going well, I still, to this day, become an unsupportive team member. It’s something I’m trying to work on.
If the scene is going awry, the best people jump in and lean into that. Jess Lee is one of the most supportive players on the scene. Ryan Brookshire is the same way. They will go out and support the scene, no matter what. And I am just really bad at that. I’ve been in several shows that are going awry, and I shut down. I think just backing off is a big failure of mine.
I think the other thing I fail at over and over again is that the audience reaction needs to be there, or I get into that shutdown mode. If I don’t have a big audience, it’s really difficult for me to do improv. If the scene isn’t getting laughs, I assume it’s not going well, and I start throwing bombs. I just add new crazy things, and none of them will get laughs.
I’m trying to think about what the fundamentals of the scene are and not caring about how the audience is reacting to it. If we have a relationship and there’s a game that’s developing, we need to lean into it. My teammates are going to build off of it. That’s how you ignore the audience.
In terms of when something is not going well, I try to think of why it isn’t going well on the backline. When I think something’s not going well, I try to do walk-ons or tag-outs. I’m still pretty bad at tag-outs, frankly. I’m much better at walking on, naming a detail, and walking back off.
Where can people find you performing?
Nox! performs on the weekends. I’m also on Runaway Train and Power Lunch.
Thanks for tuning in!
Join us next week for our episode with Comedic Pursuits founder Kelsie Anderson. And don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast and give us a rating!
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