IN THE MAGAZINE

ASSSSCAT'S TEMPORARY, ONE-NIGHT ONLY, FUNNY STORIES - PART 2

The Vice Interview

INTERVIEWED BY VICE STAFF,
PHOTOGRAPHED BY DOUGLAS THOMPSON

JOHN LUTZ

John Lutz is a writer for Saturday Night Live and has a recurring role on 30 Rock. He’s also a performer in Asssscat, and we asked him if he’d talk to us because he was one of the funniest people up there the last time we went.

Vice: We were so impressed by seeing Asssscat doing live improv.

John Lutz: Thanks! Doing Asssscat is the most fun part of my week. As you can tell. People are just having fun up there. It’s great when people come for the first time and see it and it’s a good show… because sometimes it can be stinky.

Yeah? There are off-nights?

Usually not with Asssscat because there are so many fantastic performers in it. So when someone is having an off-night, it doesn’t really show. But I’ve been doing improv for 10 or 11 years now. I’ve gotten a lot of my stinkier shows out of the way. There can be times when there’s just silence. That’s almost just as fun—afterward, when you’re laughing about it.

Do you remember the first time you saw improv?

I do. It was a Second City show called Old Wine, New Bottles. It was the 35th anniversary of Second City in Chicago, I think. We stuck around afterward to see the improv set and it blew me away. It looked like so much fun. Scott Adsit, who’s on 30 Rock with me, was in that show. He was amazing. I was like, “That’s what I want to do.”

What were you doing then? Writing?

I was still in college at the time. I was in Indiana and my buddy was like, “You love comedy. Let’s go to Second City.” I had just recently almost flunked out of college and then changed my major to psychology, so…

So you had your life saved by that.

Yeah. It was about a year later that I moved to Chicago to improvise and learn how to write sketch comedy.

Did you enroll in improv classes at Second City?

I moved to Schomberg because there was supposed to be a Second City there too.

Wait, what’s Schomberg?

It’s a suburb of Chicago. I didn’t want to move to Chicago because I was scared of living in the big city. I’m a real pussy, actually.

But, and I don’t know if it’s just me, isn’t Chicago particularly scary?

It is until you move there, then you’re like, “Why was I so scared? You can take taxis everywhere and you can get drunk and not have to drive home.”

Right. But first you did some time in Schomberg.

Yeah. But the Second City there closed right when I moved in. So I decided to take classes in the city, but it was booked at the time so I went to Improv Olympics instead. That’s where people like Chris Farley, Tina Fey, and Rachel Dratch started. All those people did Improv Olympics and then went to Second City.

Once you started doing the classes, did it click in for you pretty quickly?

No, it was hard, but it was fun. The first time it works onstage, it’s awesome.

Do you remember when that was?

Yeah. The first show that my team, Valhalla, did was a really good show. I think it was because we were all pumped with adrenaline and didn’t know what we were doing. We just attacked it. It was an amazing rush. And then the show after that was a complete tanker. It’s a roller-coaster ride of emotions! But once you have a little taste of it, even if you stink at it and it just works a little bit, it’s like you’re addicted to it and you need to find it again.

It seems like it can be sort of like chasing a high, or like that perfect moment. Do you tend to go high-status or low-status characters?

I switch it up a lot, but I really tend to like playing low status.

Will you define “low status” for me?

Sure. It’s like, if you look at the Three Stooges, Moe would be the high-status dude and Curly would be the low-status guy. As low status, you set yourself up to get abused or yelled at or get tripped.



You did a great thing when I saw you with Asssscat recently, where you were playing this dancing high school janitor thing. You were doing soft-shoe while miming holding a broom. I guess that was a low-status character?

[laughs] That’s a total low-status character. That was fun because as I was dancing across the stage, Peter Guinn tripped me—not like a real trip, but enough to make me fall and hit the floor. My favorite characters are the ones who think they’re cool and then something bad happens because they’re acting cool, and it immediately takes them down a peg.

Did you ever meet Del Close?

Yeah, I took classes with him.

Can you tell me something about him?

He was awesome. He always said, “Why wouldn’t you want to say yes to things?” He was a big “yes, and” dude. So onstage it’s like, if you’re getting ready to go to an event, why not be excited to go? A lot of times when you’re a new improviser, you’re like, “I don’t want to go to that. No, no, no.” He would always say, “Why wouldn’t you want to go to that thing? Why wouldn’t you want to go to, say, the reception for that wedding? If you say no to it, then nothing happens.”

That whole idea of “yes, and” seems to be essential to good improv.

It is. Another thing I remember about him was once we were doing an improv, and this one girl was doing a bingo caller. She would say, like, “Z-24… Z-24.” And of course, it’s just B-I-N-G-O. So he stopped it immediately and was like, “Alright, if you’re gonna play a game, know the rules of that game.” He was big on being confident about it. Why be a bumbling doctor? Be a doctor that’s superconfident.

That would lead to more possibilities.

Right. You’re going to mess up eventually because you’re not a doctor.

And that’s when it can get really funny. Who is your favorite improv performer?

Stephnie Weir. She was on the main stage of Second City when I was still taking classes. She was on MADtv for five years, I believe. She does a show right now with her husband, Bob Dassie. It’s called WeirDass. She’s an amazing improviser and character actress. She always commits 100 percent. She’s hilarious.

How is the New York improv scene different from the Chicago scene?

I’ve noticed that things in Chicago play a little slower. That was a hard transition for me to make. The scenes accelerate faster here in New York. Two people will start a scene and before you know it, somebody will tag one of them out and take it to a different location. It gets faster and faster and faster. In Chicago, you would have a four-minute scene with just two people, or one scene for 45 minutes. It’s a different style in terms of the patience it takes. You can go two minutes without laughs, but then you’ll hit something and get really hard laughs. In New York, it’s a rapid-fire, not-gonna-let-you-breathe sort of pace. But it’s all the same principles—even though it took me like two years to feel comfortable doing their style of improv. I’d stand on the back line like, “What? Oh… I have an idea—oops. They did it. There it goes.”

Do you think you access the same part of your brain when you’re writing as you do when you’re performing?

When it’s really going well writing-wise, it feels like the same thing. It pretty much is improvising, because I talk out loud when I write. Whenever I write with somebody, it’s very much like we’re improvising a scene together, and then we write it down if we think it’s funny. When it’s not going well is when I’m not improvising and I’m thinking too hard.

It seems to me like the hardest thing about learning improv would be accepting the fact that it’s OK to say stupid shit and make mistakes.

Making mistakes is the best thing you can do. When I teach, I say that you need to make a bunch of mistakes in improv to get good at it. And also, sometimes the mistakes you make turn out to be the funniest things.


TO BE CONTINUED
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