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Welcome to another episode of the Comedic Pursuits Podcast. I’m your host, Seth Payne.
I’m so freakin’ excited to present this episode to you guys. I got to sit down with a very dear friend of mine who used to live in DC who now resides in New York City. Her name is Sarah Ann Houghton. She is such a delight. Very sweet, very weird, very funny.
I first came across Sarah performing with her duo, Dream Spooners, with Erin Murray in DC and was hooked. I also got to see her perform on her Harold team in DC and do Character Shows at Dojo. Then she moved off to New York City, and she’s been doing sketch comedy, going through the UCB program, and a bunch of other really fun stuff. We’ll get into her acting background, her clowning background, her writing background—she’s been doing it all.
Highlights from my interview with Sarah Ann Houghton
I got to sit down with Sarah at the York Fringe Festival a few months ago. I had such a blast interviewing her. She has such a crazy comedy history. I hope you guys enjoy it as much as I did.
Some of the following responses have been edited for clarity. You can hear the full interview by listening to the podcast.
What’s your performance background?
I grew up doing community theater starting in elementary school. Later, I did high school musicals, and I got my BA in theater. Comedy really didn’t happen for me until college when we did sketch. Our theater department put on the shows, and it was just an opportunity for people to write and then perform what they wrote.
For that program, I collaborated with friends. I don’t think I was super confident as a writer yet. I wasn’t super confident yet as a comedian. I think I found my voice a little bit in college through a character I liked to do. My friends made me kill her off in a show, though. They were like, “Please don’t ever bring that character back.”
Her name was Karen Fillone, and she was pretty much a character made up of all of my worst qualities, heightened. She has really bad allergies, so she’s a mouth breather. Her pockets are full of stuff, like dirty tissues and loose food. She’s the friend in the group that no one really wants. They keep her around because she’s got a good heart, but she’s also a little too sexual. She’s a pelvis-first kind of mover. She moves with her groin. That’s where she makes a lot of her decisions, whether it’s food or another person she seems to be attracted to.
It’s who I would like to be more. Karen doesn’t second-guess her choices. It’s a very fleshed-out character.
How did you get into comedy?
After college, I went abroad to teach English in South Korea. My plan was to be gone for a year, but I was gone for seven years.
Korea has a pretty strong expat community. There are a lot of people living there from other countries. There’s also a large community there for the US military bases, a lot of journalists, and people who are married to others who live there. So there are a lot of native English speakers.
I connected with those people, and we put on performances that other locals would want to go out and see in English. There was a need for that, so I was able to do some performance stuff with people from a lot of other countries.
I spent a little over two years in Korea and did some serious theater stuff, a little bit of comedy, and a little bit of sketch. But it’s different when you’re always a guest moonlighting versus having a team or an ensemble that you’re seriously committed to and regularly writing and performing with. For me, it always felt like, “Here’s a thing happening, a project going on. Come do this.” So I wasn’t quite feeling like, “Oh, I’m getting better at something.” It was more like, “I like doing this stuff.” But there were a lot of creative outlets and a lot of opportunities.
I spent a lot of time traveling in between some of my work contracts, so I spent a summer in the Philippines and then backpacked for a while in Malaysia, Singapore, and the Southeast Asia area. I visited a lot of my friends that I made in those places in Australia and South Africa. Then I worked in China for a while, which was also great. I lived outside Shanghai, in a city called Wuxi, where I taught writing to some business students.
From there, I went to Warsaw, Poland, and that’s where I found long-form improvisation. I was in Poland for three years doing a mix of stuff. I was doing some acting, some stand-up, and a little bit of improv here and there.
What was doing improv in Poland like?
In Poland, there’s a great community of improvisers. There are improvisors all over Poland, in a couple different cities. Around Europe, there’s this network of improvisors that all are really supportive of each other. They go to each other’s festivals, travel to each other’s cities and offer workshops, and really learn from each other. It’s beautiful and wonderful. They’ll use English for their workshops because they don’t necessarily speak each other’s languages. It’s just a whole other level of bravery when it comes to improv.
There were some Polish comedy clubs where they would teach their own classes and have their own shows, and they were all in Polish. I couldn’t necessarily participate because my language skills are not there. I would go, I would enjoy, I would watch. There would be stand-up in English sometimes, and sometimes there would be English jams. They had classes, too. They would have visiting instructors come. There were a lot of mixer shows, mash-up shows, a lot of montage stuff.
My first taste of Harold was an intensive taught by Lindsay Hailey, who came over from iO in Chicago. That was really life-changing for me. It was four days long, and it was like theater camp. We did Harolds at the end of the week and had a full house of people come and watch. It was intimidating but wonderful.
I knew at that point, coming back to DC in 2015, I needed to do a full curriculum and start over and really learn the basics because I felt like I was missing a lot. I literally was on WIT’s website as I was in the airport. I wasn’t even moved in, and I emailed Jonathan Murphy saying, “Hey. I want to come and take a class.”
I started in level two because I wanted to learn improv as fast as possible. And I did. I went straight through WIT’s curriculum. Fast forward three years, and I moved to New York City because my long-term goal was to study at UCB. I went into level one at UCB, and it was the best thing ever. It made me feel like, “Oh, gosh. Why would anyone ever skip level one? This is the best!”
How did Dream Spooners get started?
Erin Murray and I have an improv duo together called Dream Spooners. We met each other in level two at WIT, and we’ve been together ever since. Erin’s a magical, wonderful person. She’s one of those people who’s naturally funny.
What I love about Erin is that she’s an ASL interpreter, so she’s naturally a very expressive person. That’s something that’s not easy to turn off at the end of the day. We should all be expressive, but Erin just wears her emotions on her face. It’s a delight to watch someone like that on stage.
We applied to compete in FIST, but at the time, we were a trio. We were not at all confident enough to go up there as a two-person show. It was a strength in numbers kind of thing. Our third was this guy from one of our classes who was into performing.
But the day of the show, this guy said, “I’m not going on stage with you guys,” because of romantic drama. It was respectful and amicable. He’s a nice guy, and there are no hard feelings. Improv is a very vulnerable thing, and you don’t want to go on stage with someone who you felt rejected by because now you have to be in front of an audience with them. And props to people who can put that aside. I’m still very open to him playing with us, but I get it.
Whoever was hosting the tournament was like, “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry you guys lost your third person. If you want someone to step in, we’ll make an allowance.” And Erin and I looked at each other, and we were just like, “We got this. We’re going out there, and we’re doing this.” And Dream Spooners was born that night.
How did you get into clowning and commedia dell’arte?
During Harold, I took a class in clowning. It was an intensive with Dody DiSanto in DC.
Clowning is just beautiful. It opens your soul. There’s just a level of vulnerability that I think we lose sometimes in improv because we’re just hungry for the laughs and games and the storyline or the patterns. In clowning, it’s not about that. It’s really about finding your voice and discovering a lot about who you are. But it’s also about who the audience sees you as and how to be a mirror for them, how to hold attention in a way that you feel like you’re enough. Like me standing here looking at you and doing nothing is enough. I am interesting enough.
Think about it as a performer, losing those inhibitions onstage or just being self-aware enough of what other people are seeing in you and how to harness that for performance. It’s a lot of digging for how to access your emotions more easily, so it was a lot of help on the acting side, as well.
I think there’s a lot more to be said about commitment and drilling down and really leaving your whole self out there on the stage that an audience wants to see. That’s when there’s magic happening onstage.
Later, I also got to study commedia dell’arte in New York with Chris Bayes, who is on the Yale School of Drama faculty, and that was a wonderful experience, as well. A lot of that is improvisation with masks and stock characters.
Sometimes you gotta hear those hard truths, and every time I walked out on stage, Chris Bayes would just say, “Oh, here she comes. Here comes a housewife with a cocktail for her husband.” It seems weird, but his job is a very sarcastic kind of job. He was asking, “Are you aware of how you present yourself to a room of people?”
I’ve had that said to me before in level five at WIT. I was tending to play high status characters that were a little condescending. I think that was totally, at that time, coming from a place of fear and wanting to control what was happening.
So sending love out there to all those improv teachers and coaches who help their students take a closer look at themselves. So much of improv has to be about being loving and giving and supportive and open and agreeable. But so much of it, you have to be selfish. You have to know who you are, what you believe, what’s going on, what you want, and think about yourself first. Put your own oxygen mask on before you put someone else’s oxygen mask on.
How did you get into sketch in New York?
Right around the time I was finishing the UCB improv curriculum is when I auditioned for the sketch house team at The Pit as a writer and performer. I saw the house team’s second season was starting and that they were taking applications. I kind of threw it on the back burner because it was a writer-performer position, and I didn’t know if I was talented enough.
I was also taking sketch classes at UCB because I wanted to get better at it and feel more confident. That was very helpful, just the idea of working hard on something that’s not improv, and then bringing it to a room of people and letting it fail.
For auditions, they read the pieces you submitted in your writers packet and your resume, then called you in for an audition, as well, so it’s a package deal. From that, the directors put together a list of who they wanted to call back. Then the next morning was callbacks.
For callbacks, you had five minutes to go up on stage solo and do pretty much whatever you wanted. You needed to showcase your skills. If you’re a writer, you have a voice, and you also want to show your stage presence, so some people did stand-up. Some people who were musically inclined sang a bit in combination with something else. And some people did character bits.
I did a character piece, but it was very rooted in my journey with clown and improvisation. It was not very verbal. It was more physical and silent. I think it stood out. My director said it was very brave. I got big laughs, but he was like, “If that failed, that would have bombed so bad. That was a big risk you took.” I don’t think I would have been able to find that comfort zone of being silent without my clowning experience.
The experience of being on this sketch team, Like Butter, has been really great. I could not have asked for a better experience. It’s a group of 10 or 11 of us, and everyone on the team is very talented and just great people. I also give a lot of credit to our director, who cast each of us very thoughtfully. We each have very unique brands. We each come from a pretty different walk of life, whether it’s where we grew up or our day jobs or our comedic style or our interests or even just how we look on stage.
It’s different, and I think it’s refreshing, not only to be part of the team but maybe even to watch. It’s been really great just to be in a room full of talented people who can give me feedback every week, which is not always easy to find and put together.
What’s been your biggest aha moment in comedy?
There were so many of them, and some of them I mentioned with clowning, with having feedback from teachers about what it is they’re seeing from me that I can improve. Maybe the most recent moment was getting some specific notes. When you’re in 401 at UCB, you get specific notes that are personalized to you. Coaches and teachers try to do that along the way, but it’s part of your graduation “gift.”
My note was my teacher just saying to me, “You’re weird.” But what he meant was, “Don’t stifle that. Let that out. Embrace it. Embrace how weird you are.” A lot of what he meant by that was: you play it, we see it, but there’s so much more, there’s so much more weird crap in you that you can let out.
I also felt like a lot of what he was saying to me was me not letting myself have fun. It was me thinking too much and wanting to do it right. And I’ve heard that in clowning classes, too. Gabriel Levy would say to me, “Get it right, Sarah. Make sure you get it right,” but in a teasing way because that’s usually what is happening, me trying to do it right when that’s not what comedy is.
Comedy is failure. It’s beautiful failure on stage for us to laugh at.
What are your biggest failures that you’ve had within comedy, and how did you overcome them?
I guess failure can be loosely applied to a period of time where I was in a negative headspace. I was very hard on myself and very critical of not just myself but the show and how everything happened and all of the choices that were made and all the missed opportunities.
This was a while back, but it took so much energy and was unnecessary. It’s hard to put into practice a lot of what we learned in improv. When you care so much about it, you want it to be great. And you forget that you’re playing make-believe onstage.
Even though that was part of my path and education and learning and growing, I think if I was still holding on to that—which I think sometimes I do because it’s part of my personality, to be a little controlling and planning—I feel like I’m failing at improv. Although that’s still a funny thing to say out loud. You can’t really fail at improv. But I strive to not be that way.
The work we do every day as people is just to work harder to be more positive and to be nicer and kinder to ourselves and to others and be grateful for what we have. That’s all very hippy-dippy, lovey-dovey stuff, but I need to remind myself of these things.
I felt a big difference going through the improv curriculum at WIT and then doing it again, starting from one at UCB. I felt like I had a newly added calmness, where I could see people who were newer to improv were a little more frantic.
But then I thought, “This is just fun. We do something in this room, and then we leave it there. We do something on that stage, and then we leave it there. And whatever happens happens, and it happened. Maybe it’ll be better next time. Maybe it won’t. But we went up there, and we made some art together. And it’s never going to happen again that way.”
I think I’m a better person for having improv in my life. But aren’t we all? I think improvisors are great people. That’s all I need to know. Put that on your dating app.
Where can we find you on social media?
You can find Like Butter as a hashtag or on The Pit’s website. You can find me on Instagram and Twitter. I’ve recently started tweeting because I love being part of the network of comedy writers in New York City, and it makes me feel like I know them.
Dream Spooners is on Facebook and Instagram. We will come to your festivals.
Thanks for tuning in!
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