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| [Article re-printed from artshub.com.au] American comedy and performance coach Steve Kaplan has worked with and coached the best - including the writers from Sex and the City, Seinfeld, Ugly Betty, Friends and Will & Grace, as well as the industry's top stars including Jack Black, Nathan Lane and Nia Vardalos. This month he is bringing his world famous Comedy Intensive workshops to Australia for the first time. Arts Hub had a chat with Steve just prior to his arrival to find out more about his workshops and what it means to be funny for a living. You're coming to Australia to run some workshops with performers, comedians and writers. How do you teach comedy and can you tell us a little about the workshops? The seminar evolved out of an improv class I was teaching. I was running a theatre at the time with the focus on comedy, so I started inventing improv games to experiment with comedy: what was it, how did it work, why did it work and why does it stop working? That led to a forty week master class in comedy that I taught to a selected group of performer/writers that were connected to the theatre: the Comedy Corps (Oliver Platt came out of the Comedy Corps, as did Tracy Poust (Will & Grace), Howard Morris (Home Improvement, According to Jim) and others. When I moved to LA, given the... reduced, shall we say, attention span of the inhabitants, the 40 weeks were reduced to a single weekend. Since some of the participants were unaware of some of the classic comedy references, I started showing clips from films and TV shows as part of the weekend. The seminar that I do now, geared mostly to writers but also attended by directors, actors, and producers, retains a lot of that flavour and fun. There's a lot of exercises and activities as well as a healthy dollop of comedy clips to go along with the lecture part of the weekend. What is your background and training? I was the kind of kid who would get picked on and beat up after school. Because of that, I learned to do two things really well—run fast and make people laugh. Most kids couldn’t catch me; those who could, I tried to disarm with self-deprecating humor. I still got beat up, but I also grew to love comedy. After studying theatre at university, I started out as a (fairly mediocre) actor. But I was young and judgmental and thought I knew it all. After watching a show, I would always point out the mistakes the director and playwright made. Finally, someone told me, "If you think you know so much, why don't you direct something yourself?" I found out that directing was something I was good at, and it was a lot more fun telling people what to do than being told what to do by someone else. A friend approached me and asked if I would like to start a theatre, so we started Manhattan Punch Line, a theater devoted completely to comedy, which ran for 13 years. Over that time, I directed, developed and/or produced hundreds of plays, readings, sketches, improv shows and stand-up evenings (I even still acted in a few of them). I began to wonder why something that was incredibly funny on a Thursday night got no laughs on a Saturday. That's when I started seriously exploring the art and the science, some would even call it the physics of comedy. How do you think that comedy is different in the US to say the UK or Australia? I think there's a portion of American comedy which happily assumes that most of their audience has never read a book, or is ever likely to. However, the best comedians and writers do challenge their audiences and refuse to talk down to them. But as one comic once told me, "You can never go wrong with a dick joke." America's a big place, and there are all sorts of comedy going on. You have raunchy SNL - style humor alongside sharp, subversive political and social satire - sometimes in the same episode of The Simpsons or South Park. There's lots of broad comedy going on in the UK as well, but they also have a long history of supporting edgier, more groundbreaking work, something our cable networks are starting to emulate. |
What are some of the changes to comedy you have seen develop over the last ten years? |