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Welcome to another episode of the Comedic Pursuits podcast. I’m your host, Seth Payne, and this week you guys are in for yet another treat. I was able to sit down and get an exclusive interview with the educational director of Washington Improv Theater, Jonathan Murphy.
Highlights from my interview with Jonathan Murphy
Jonathan Murphy is a past FIST winner as part of the team Beverly Crusher and has had a crazy journey in comedy. He’s gone from the East Coast to the West Coast, up and down the West Coast, and back again. He did some awesome stuff in DC, moved out and started his own improv theater in Providence, Rhode Island, moved back, and is now the force behind all of the educational stuff going on at WIT. He’s a really funny dude who loves improv.
Without further ado, Jonathan Murphy. Some of the following questions and responses have been edited for clarity. To hear our full conversation, listen to the podcast episode.
How did you get into comedy?
When I was doing theater in middle school and high school, we did a lot of comedy. I was super into theater and was a huge theater nerd. I got into theater when I was 12 years old and started doing it pretty seriously.
It’s funny considering how much comedy I was consuming and doing in a theatrical sense, I still didn’t have great interpersonal comedy timing or even a sense of comedy in a more refined way. That part took a while, and I don’t know why. I did a lot of comedic plays and really took the timing seriously. I went through a lot of breaking it down to figure out what the best way to deliver lines was for the biggest laugh or impact.
I ended up going to Reed College in Portland, Oregon, because I wanted to leave home. I grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia, which is a very beautiful city that I wanted to leave as quickly as possible.
I didn’t really find my people until I got to the West Coast. I think a lot of people go through that. I was a very specific kind of person, and I wanted to create a bit of a new identity for myself. I think part of that was moving as far away as possible. I dyed my hair bright red before going to college and was looking for this other experience.
I acted in a David Ives one-act play in the fall of my freshman year at Reed, so I was involved with theater early on. But then that thing kicked in where I wanted to be different. After that, I took a huge step back from theater. I was super into partying and doing drugs and just being a college kid and rebelling.
What did you do after stepping away from theater?
I was going to school originally for biochemistry, which I liked. But it quickly became clear that it wasn’t as much of a passion for me as it was for some of my friends and other people in the program. I was a terrible student and wasn’t taking it seriously enough. I was coasting on being a good student in high school. It was very challenging for me. I needed to take it a lot more seriously, and I was not at all. I totally burned myself out and basically flunked out of college.
I got super depressed. I was sleeping 12 hours a day and barely functioning. I was a total wreck my second semester of sophomore year. I think part of that depression was that I was looking for an outlet. There were tons of things I was doing creatively during that time, but I just didn’t have much.
I love science. I love biochemistry. I loved lab. I was fairly good at doing that kind of stuff. But I quickly realized the long-term scale around creativity in the sciences was a bit much for me. In the sciences, you’re pretty much going to do the same thing and base your whole career off of building incrementally on people’s previous work. You’re not really be able to be super creative unless you’re a superstar or work harder than anybody else. Seeing people work around me, I felt like I would need to kill myself in terms of my work ethic to get to a point where I could even taste some creativity.
So I flunked out, went to LA, and lived there for a while. I started taking community college classes to get credits back up and go into the UC system. I lived walking distance from UCB LA and was going to see comedy there. But I didn’t even realize you could be a normal person and take classes. I was so naive.
From LA, I actually ended up going back to Reed because the computer lab opened. I majored in studio art, got back with my friends, and lived with them. It was amazing. I felt like it was what I should be doing. I was doing computer-based art, more theoretical stuff. I just happened to use the computer. I was good with computers, so that was the main thing I was working on.
While I was back at Reed, I got involved with the improv group there. That was my first intro to improv. I met a bunch of people who were super funny. That being said, I wasn’t great at it. We were playing lots of games, and it was a little bit of an excuse to have drunk people throw beer cans at you. It was not good improv, and we kind of knew it.
I learned more in the first two hours of my first improv class at WIT than I learned in the entirety of my improv experience in college. No one had ever talked about improv in a more formal way. It was a lot of people that wanted attention, and it was all self-coaching, which was a disaster.
How did you get into improv in DC?
I moved to DC in 2008 or 2009, and I saw a poster for improv, so I thought I should check it out. I ended up going to see a random WIT show, and it was amazing. It destroyed me, it was so funny. I realized I could kind of get back into acting via improv.
Part of it was that I really didn’t like DC when I first moved here. I started seeing more shows because I wanted to start seeing improv if I was actually going to do it. I kept on trying to take classes, but I could never make the schedule work. There were always too many conflicts, and I could never commit to a class for eight weeks. I was the kind of person who wanted to make sure I was there for all eight weeks if I was going to take improv seriously. Now, I’d just tell myself to take the class.
This was all happening for almost a year before I took a class. During that year, I was miserable in DC. I didn’t really have a friend circle. I missed the West Coast. I felt like everyone here was mean or too uptight. It was driving me crazy. All my time was being spent in Georgetown, which I really didn’t like.
My girlfriend at the time was doing a master’s program at Georgetown, and I’d moved here because of that. But I got to the point where I thought I was either going to move to New York and have a long distance relationship or manage what it would mean for us if I moved.
Then I heard RZA on NPR. He’d just released a book all about how if you don’t like what’s going on in your life in terms of your situation, that’s a little bit on you. You need to take ownership because you can be in control of how you see your life and see the world. No one’s forcing you to see things in a certain way. Things aren’t happening to you to the extent that people like to say, at least from his perspective.
I realized I was being kind of a shithead. I was putting everything on DC, thinking it wasn’t good enough and that people here weren’t cool. That really inspired me to block out time to take an improv class. I took level one at WIT, and the first week was completely life-changing. I realized improv was what I wanted to do.
I found all these people that all of a sudden became my friends. I realized it was what I’d been missing. I was going to the theater and hanging out. Even just working and volunteering at WIT, I managed to meet all these curious, funny, interesting, creative people. I felt like I’d just peeled back this layer that I hadn’t known was there. It opened up the city for me. I burned through classes because I just couldn’t get enough.
I ended up doing improv five to six times a week for either a rehearsal or a show. I was up until 1 a.m. most nights hanging out. Every Harold night, I was there hanging out after the shows. I was just trying to learn as much as possible.
I don’t know if that’s necessarily a beneficial way to get into improv. I’m sure it probably depends on some personality types. For me, part of it was that a lot of my friend circle was doing it like that. There was a little bit of this culture around being on all these teams and hanging out a lot.
I think you have to go through a phase where improv becomes a little bit obsessive if you want to get better quickly. If your goal is to get as good as possible, as quickly as possible, and to get onto high-performing teams, I think having that experience where you push past your limits and see what’s possible makes you a different performer.
You become way less precious with your scenes and your improv. You’re doing so many shows that you don’t have time to stop and wonder if a scene didn’t go well. It doesn’t really matter because you’re going to do another show that night or tomorrow.
As someone who’s very judgmental of myself, I needed to have a situation where I wasn’t allowed to have time to stop and think about how bad my improv was. If I had one show a month, I’d spend the entire month picking myself apart and trying to fix things.
But some people don’t have that issue. They are much better about controlling their energy and creativity, and they extend themselves in smaller doses, and those doses are gorgeous and beautiful and hilarious.
When did you join Sistine Robot?
Some friends I’d met in my classes got together and formed Sistine Robot. We all just marched through the curriculum. We were rehearsing at least once a month together as a group. We started booking indie shows.
We were self-coaching throughout classes and even a little bit later. At some point, we realized we should get a coach, so we tried a few out. We were so inexperienced and had no idea what we were doing. It’s funny to think back on just how bad we were at so many things, to the point where we would have coaches come in for one or two sessions, and they kept breaking up with us.
We finally got very lucky and worked with the most amazing and patient coach, Steph Anderson. She’s in Chicago now, but she was the one that was willing to work with us and get us in shape. That really kicked us into gear. It was nice just having someone who really added some more discipline to what we were trying to do and help us a little bit.
A lot of the people in Sistine Robot think in comedic terms in a way that’s almost effortless. I found myself in classes at one point feeling really shitty. I had to cut off trying to compete with that and just do what I could do. I decided to try to bring more acting skills to the group, commit very hard to characters, and bring a lot of reactions and emotions to their comedic ideas.
That balance ended up working—obviously, we’re still a group. We’re one of the oldest troupes. But I think it’s because there was this nice willingness of people to do what they did well, and it balanced out.
What was your improv experience in Providence like?
I moved to Providence, Rhode Island, around 2011. Right when I was getting involved in the scene in DC, my wife at the time went to Providence to get her PhD. So I went there, too, and met a bunch of amazingly talented improvisers and comedians.
If anyone has an opportunity, and they feel like DC is too expensive want to move somewhere cheaper, they can get the best education for the money in terms of a crash course in comedy and improv. Providence is a hidden gem. There’s so much talent there, which shocked me.
But there was nothing in terms of training when I got to Providence. There were a bunch of short-form teams. Improv Jones, which was a team I ended up auditioning for, was the only main long-form team in Providence. But it was still this collection of some of the funniest, most talented comedians I’ve ever worked with.
At some point, I asked where the other improv teams and the school were because I wanted to help and get involved. This person I’d met, Melissa Bowler, told me there wasn’t one. She was trying to get something started, but she was the only one. So I said we should start a school.
We got very lucky. All these things started to fall into place. We got access to a very cheap space. I had an IT background and was able to build websites. We got the ball rolling with a great level one class that we co-taught. Melissa took me on and took money out of her paycheck to pay me as a TA. I was able to observe her—she’s a very good teacher—and learn a lot.
We managed to time our level two class so we could do the class at this new school we’d created. Our success was all Google—we quickly rose to the number one search result. Then payments started coming in, and it began to grow from there. We had weekly shows and started growing the community. At the time, there were maybe 10 long-form improvisers, and within a year we had basically doubled that to the first graduating class.
The theater was called Providence Improv Guild (PIG). All the iconography is pig-themed. PIG kind of took over within a year. We had all these different teams. People in Newport were traveling to come do shows with us. People started moving into Providence because they realized they could take improv a lot more seriously, and if they got a job in the area, we could all work together more.
For three years, my life was improv. I was working a full-time job, running a theater, teaching all the classes, and building the curriculum. I did all that work just because I was in love with improv and wanted to share it and build a community.
All of a sudden, I had a resume that fit the education director job at WIT. I applied for the job and was hired within two weeks. Within two weeks of that, I was back in DC. So within a month, my life had completely changed.
How has your experience as WIT’s education director been?
This is a goddamn dream job. It’s truly unbelievable. It was life-altering, life-changing. I was looking for career in the arts. I was thinking 20 years down the road after working in IT, I’d be able to shift out of some of that stuff. So to be able to do this now is amazing. The community is great, and we’ve grown so much. I love teaching the classes.
But I got a little weird the year I came back because I wasn’t performing very much. I was jumping into mashups, which wasn’t as satisfying. I didn’t have a team, and I got really anxious and was feeling very isolated. I wasn’t performing at all, and I missed it. I was also missing Providence, where I was performing twice a week.
I talked to Mark about auditioning for a Harold team because I needed to perform. I ended up getting on Madeline. The whole experience of being on Madeline from the time it was a Harold team and shifting to an ensemble was amazing. There was so much love and trust on the team. It was such a magical time.
I’ve since stepped down from Madeline. Some of it was a little bit of burnout. I was teaching and coaching a lot and finding myself unable to bring 100 percent of myself. I wasn’t able to commit the way I wanted to commit.
I also realized I really wanted a director experience. That’s hard for a lot of teams to get because there’s a difference between a coach and a director. I think a coach is usually there to help a team who is on its own, crafting its own voice. The team is still going to be there if the coach leaves.
I realized that, creatively, I was craving someone telling me to do something like this, this way, because they’re in the director’s chair, as opposed to trying to generate a lot of that energy of where to point my energy or negotiate that with a team, which is harder. I want to be told in more explicit terms what someone’s looking for.
How did you form FIST X champion team Beverly Crusher?
I love clowning, and WIT brought someone in from Baltimore to do a clowning workshop. I met Lura there.
There’s this very specific exercise you do in clowning where you try to be neutral and just look at someone and make heavy eye contact. Whenever Lura and I made eye contact, we would giggle like kids. It was uncontrollable. The teacher noticed and told us we should think about doing something together. If we couldn’t avoid making eye contact in that way without laughing, there was some kind of chemistry there.
Flash forward six months later, and Dan Miller, my improv soulmate, asked me if I wanted to do FIST. I suggested Lura Barber as our third person because I knew we were going to have chemistry with each other.
Our rehearsals were terrible. We tried to do some complex structure, which, of course, was my fault. We were out of sync and being very safe and polite. Before the first show, we decided to scrap what we’d been doing and go on and have a blast.
That first show was electric for us, and it was the polar opposite of what we’d done in rehearsals. We realized that’s what we should be doing. From that point on, we never did scenes to warm up. We just messed around and antagonized the shit out of each other. Our warm-ups are just us being ruthless and gross and weird. And all that weirdness comes on stage with us.
We still perform, and we consider ourselves the biggest jerks of FIST winners. We always say hi and address each other as winners publicly. We do the last year’s winner’s format for Palooza every year, which is such a terrible thing to do. But it’s purely for our enjoyment. It’s essentially a very long bit.
What’s been your biggest aha moment within comedy?
I’ve had lots of different epiphanies, but I think the most recent one for me has been about the commitment to a high level of performance in terms of energy.
I don’t care necessarily if it’s funny or if it’s the best improv, I want to see a goddamn show. I think that’s why I really love clowning. There’s this higher level of energy and commitment and force coming off the stage and hitting the audience. I think the most memorable shows are rarely good because of how clever someone was.
I think the things that really stick in my gut and my bones are when I see someone committing to a point where I’m feeling unable to do anything but watch what’s going on. I don’t think you have to commit to a character. I think you just have to commit to a true performance, where you want something to happen in a very real way. Someone could even play themselves at a level where they’re oozing energy, and you’ll feel it in the room.
I think that’s where, to me, it’s not boring. There are no distractions. I don’t care if the scene is messy, I don’t care if the character’s messy. I just want to see that commitment to a performance exude out of every pore on someone’s body.
I think a great example of what I’m talking about is Kate McKinnon. There’s a level of energy and commitment to her performance that is beyond that of so many people who go on stage or are in a movie with her. She’s stealing the show because you can’t help but be drawn into this thing she’s doing.
What’s been your biggest failure within comedy, and how did you overcome it?
My biggest failure was that I was not playing women characters at a respectful level a lot of times. This was probably more in Providence, so I kind of forgive myself for a phase of learning where I was just bad at improv, period.
We brought Jill Bernard to an improv fest as a special guest and headliner one year. So she was in the audience, and I was in a scene where we were going to play frat and sorority characters. I remember doing this terrible, stereotypical woman character. As it was happening, I just felt like dogshit. It was bad, and to do it in front of an amazing performer like Jill Bernard just made me feel more terrible.
In that moment, I was trying to do an improv scene, but I was totally losing it because I was thinking back to other times. That, to me, was the biggest failure. I just felt awful. It was more of a realization of how bad I’d been with some of that stuff. I made it a point to start practicing just being myself, who just happens to be a woman. The gender doesn’t really necessarily matter.
Occasionally, you get called in to play certain characters. But at that moment, I got offstage and told myself I’d never do that again. If I’m being called on to play something a little more stereotypical in a very specific character, I try and personally bring as much heart into the feeling behind it.
Every character should be played with a higher degree of authenticity and reality and respect. To work on that, I got some feedback and talked to my friends about it to make sure I was focusing on that, and I think it’s worked. I haven’t nailed that 100 percent, but it’s more about playing people with more respect and realizing you don’t need to reinforce bullshit things. And it’s also your responsibility as an improviser.
Where can we find you online?
Beverly Crusher is still performing. I’m on Power Lunch. I’m on Badlands. You can follow me on Twitter, but I don’t tweet anything. Honestly, don’t bother following me because nothing’s going to happen.
Thanks for tuning in!
Join us for our next episode where we talk to Wonder Whale improviser Geoff Corey.
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