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J: Do you see any problem with putting forth the most offensive lines you could think of?
HZ: No. I feel like you see a thousand groups that pull their punches. We’re going to go there. We’ll go there every time. Every single time you see the door open to the world of the weird, we want to be there. We want to live in that room. The thing about our stuff is that because we have so many groups and ranges with the voices that are in there -- we do parody, we shock, we’re also very silly and very surreal. Sometimes we like to be really abstract. It’s all about being completely unpredictable. I love it when an audience sees the sketch and thinks it’s going to go in one direction -- like it’s set in a doctor’s office and they think it will be a doctor sketch, that it’s a set relationship and then it gets turned on its ass.

That creates a sense of excitement when you know and the audience has no idea what’s coming next -- that great tension and surprise. When something truly shocking or truly surprising comes out at the end of it. We have a sketch called “Boardroom” -- I won’t tell the end because I don’t want to spoil it, but it’s crazy. I want to take people by surprise. We performed it recently in our Sketch Fair. We want to write the thing that makes us laugh, and what makes us laugh is … I don’t want to be pretentious and say it’s the things that people are afraid to say or afraid to do, but I don’t want to do anything half-assed. I feel like it engenders respect for the audience. I don’t want to think that you can’t handle what we’re about to do. We’re all grown-ups.

J: What shows or projects are you working on?
HZ: We’re in the middle of a lot of things right now. We have more shows this month in Brooklyn. It’s becoming a new scene in Williamsburg. We will probably organize another festival. We’ve been tossing this back and forth with groups like Rue Brutalia [reviewed July 13, 2007], that the new wave of comedy is here, and we’re going to present it with these gigantic shows.

We’re working on a webisode series right now, called “The Apartment,” about four different apartments in an apartment building and the storylines will cut between each apartment, but we insinuate that the apartment is built on top of an Indian burial ground, so it’s going to be a little bit surreal. We’re eyeballs-deep in it right now so I have no idea what it’s going to look like. I feel like we’ve been putting a lot together -- we’ve been writing it for the past three months, but we’re basically now figuring out how to put all the pieces together. I think it’s going to be great, I hope. It’s really horrifying. We’re fascinated with the idea of what’s really horrifying and transforming it into what’s really funny, finding that limit of someone in hysteria. It’s a weird, vague concept. It’s about taking that weird road and going way past that point. A lot of our material comes from dreams and nightmares.

J: Are you a big fan of horror movies?
HZ: I just find it fascinating. There’s something there that’s really human. Especially that feeling of fear. It almost goes back to primal man -- where primal man sits in the dark, they don’t know who they are and they’re afraid of the wilderness. They’re sitting with their tribe and begin to tell stories to each other to make each other laugh, feeding off that fear. I guess it goes back to that feeling where it’s such a release to really laugh at the things that you’re afraid of. There are so many things to be afraid of right now. I guess it’s no different than any other generation. Life is just scary. But it’s just fun to blow it up on our own terms, to get to the deepest part of your fear and be aware of it. It’s almost as if it’s cathartic to exploit that and know I’m not the only person afraid of getting shot in the head on line at McDonald’s -- just random fear.

We’re all pretty gigantic fans of horror movies but also a lot of really intense material. My favorite movie is probably a tie between “Ghostbusters” and “The Deer Hunter.” We find intense situations to be really funny. A lot of our sketches are about sociopaths. There are very few normal characters in any one of our sketches, because we’re living in a world where these characters have no morals or scruples. It makes the stakes so much higher. Everyone can be laughing, but you don’t know when one guy will just get angry and then change the whole situation -- now this guy’s angry and he’s unpredictable and for some reason we find it really hilarious.

We’re three episodes into filming “The Apartment.” I think we’ll get to about five or six before we start figuring out how to put them out there. We’re trying to get them to be between five and 10 minutes long for Internet’s sake, but if we did everything we wanted, they would each be 20 minutes long, but we don’t know what to do with them yet. I hope it’s good. When you spend enough time with something, where it’s just you and the object you’re working on, and you have no idea anymore. We talk about that a lot, how we’re so into it sometimes that we’re really afraid it won’t bridge the gap to people who see it. We’ll all be laughing and a bunch of people will just find it really warped and think, ‘these guys have issues.’ But I feel like our issues are not that different.

J: A lot of comedy comes from that element of surprise.
HZ: It’s one of the basic tenets of what we believe. Basically it’s just that I’m bored with reality and the limitations of my universe. We talk about it all the time. In our sketches … there have to be intrinsic rules, things that exist within reality but it’s just important to know that anything could happen in a scene. It could go anywhere. We try and bridge a gap between writing “sketch”-y sketches, which we feel is just anachronism humor, like “Zombie Barber” -- ‘Oh, what happened? The zombie’s a barber.’ We try to see if we can get situations like that and take them to zany.

J: But you might start with a conventional sketch?
HZ: I don’t think it’s about breaking every rule. I feel there are people who are too much about being revolutionary. I think the rules are incredibly important, like the game, conflict and resolution, in sketches, but sometimes they’re just really boring. If my mind can go someplace else, why should I deny it?

J: You might need the start of it, so it’s not just out of nowhere, but then you don’t have to stick to it.
HZ: You don’t have to stick to what you set up. I guess I just want to live in a cartoon. I get in so many problems where I create sketches where suddenly we need a panda -- in order to do this sketch, we’re going to need a live panda. We sit down, and it’s a good idea, but we throw it out because it’s just so ludicrous and we don’t live in a cartoon world. We’d love to do cartoons but that’s really hard to get together and we don’t have any money. But I just love the idea of breaking away from reality. Reality is like this all the time. You can’t get away from it. I don’t want to watch sketches that are caught in reality because I live in it, and it’s horrible. It’s also fun, the idea, if these characters in sketches live in a random world -- insinuating that there’s no god in this world and it’s just random information, and they just have to deal with it, and it’s just a bunch of frightened people. It’s like a combination of the manipulators and the manipulated. … But we’re not personally nihilistic. It’s just … the façade of being nihilistic, but it also makes someone completely unpredictable. It’s just the whole idea of ‘This guy doesn’t believe in anything, he doesn’t hold anything sacred and he can do whatever crosses his mind.’

J: In putting together shows, do you choose things because they fit together?
HZ: We sometimes do that. A lot of it comes down to the venue. If the venue is more of a theater, we can do a more epic piece that has actual set pieces or do a bar or do things that are very presentational. We have 300 sketches archived and about 50 sketches that are in the working repertory of sketches of Murderfist. We do about eight shows a month. We’ve been doing between five to eight shows a month for the past six or seven months. We never do the same show because it’s hard enough to get people to come out and see us, if you have 20 people who come see your shows all the time, you want those people to be entertained. I don’t understand sketch shows that do the same exact sketch show for months. That’s probably part of our problem though. A lot of our problems are completely of our own creation.

J: The rationale of doing the same show may be to build an audience for themselves, though, and through word of mouth, get different people to come to see the same thing.
HZ: We’re constantly trying to impress. It’s really strange. We don’t have a guaranteed audience. Every single audience we have, we have to impress to show them what we do. So we have to keep it fresh.

  

   

     

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