Laugh It Up, continued

Matt Johnson:
“Tweak it, Make it Funnier”

As founder of The Royal We (www.theroyalwe.org), Matt Johnson slips easily into the patriarch role. In one skit he plays a father whose son comes out of the closet, admitting his secret life as … an astronaut. Shocked and disappointed at his boy’s astronaut-uality, Johnson blusters, “You’re setting quite an example for your sister.” The son breaks in, “I know about your secret videos, Pop … Apollo 13, The Right Stuff, Space Cowboys.” As the skit ends with a compassionate, teary-eyed family embrace, Johnson delivers the clincher: “We’re all part-astronaut.”

This scene leads off the second half of a one-hour performance, part of the Lounge in Monster’s Pajamas series at a small theater on West 22nd Street. Whereas “Openly Astronaut” and the remaining bits are all sketch comedy, scripted and rehearsed, the first half of The Royal We’s show is entirely improvised.

With an audience prompting— “Ham-macher Schlemmer”—the group invents a series of skits, each one inspiring the next. Airline passengers become obsessed with Sky Mall magazine … sexy plane terrorists seduce airport employees … ugly terrorists worry about their job security because they’re not sexy … clothier Lane Bryant and MAC cosmetics launch product lines designed for ugly terrorists … and the FBI struggles to combat the newly confident ugly terrorists. The scenes miraculously tie together, congealing into a kind of long-form riff on terrorist profiling. Though they’re not all as hysterical as the rehearsed bits, some of the improvised ideas are comedic gold—perfect material to refine into sketches.

“Improv is like writing that first draft of anything,” Johnson tells me later. “You’re just getting all your thoughts out on the paper. Sometimes it can be very exciting, but then when you go back and read it, it’s like, ugh, that was not so great.”

We’re inside his stylish Brooklyn apartment. Explaining his own code of comedy, Johnson massages his beard, thoughtfully, and gets up to make tea. He paces back and forth, emoting with his hands—almost performing to a one-man audience. “So, say there were these moments of brilliance. Why not do a second draft? Do the same thing again, get it up on its feet, knock it around?”

A craving for this sort of editing process, he tells me, is what drove him to found The Royal We, his four-person improv/sketch comedy group. Ever since his undergraduate years in Mask & Wig, Johnson says he was searching for a way to merge the two mediums. A class with the New York branch of Second City—the renowned sketch-comedy powerhouse that spawned legends like Bill Murray, Mike Myers, and Martin Short—gave Johnson the answer he was looking for.

“Second City’s whole thing is about using the process of improvisation to create sketch comedy.” At the improv stage, he says, “we just roll along, connecting dots, and letting the audience tell us with laughter which dots they were connecting. … After you’ve improvised something that’s great, you go back and play with it a bit, tweak it, make it funnier. Then you present it as a sketch.”

Johnson founded The Royal We last year with a “self-selected” team of classmates from Second City and UCB. (Risa and Johnson’s paths have crossed in the tight-knit world of New York improv groups, but they did not take classes together at UCB.) Though not yet a money-making operation—Johnson is an executive assistant at Deloitte & Touche —the group is regularly playing to packed houses at performing-arts houses like the Irish Rep Theater, Above Kleptomania, and Flipside. While improv still dominates the majority of The Royal We’s performances, the group’s goal is to stockpile enough ideas to launch an all-sketch revue this spring.

“No one else is doing what we’re doing,” says Johnson. “No one else is pushing this mode of improvising and creating sketch comedy … I feel that a lot of the sketch comedy I see is really devoid of the character work and relationships that are so important to our stuff.”

Aside from the obvious genre distinctions—stand-up, long-form improv, sketch/improv—all three comedians have starkly different views on how to be funny. While Karo is businesslike, methodically planning and rehearsing his routines, Risa thrives on being spontaneous and irreverent. In terms of content, Johnson strives for political and social satire in his work; but Karo refuses to engage in current affairs, and instead follows the “write what you know” maxim.

These strongly defined voices are what make each of the performers engaging. Whether it’s Karo’s ruminating Wharton/frat boy observations or Johnson’s paternal socio-political riffs, or Risa’s ad-libbed athletic games, they each speak with the conviction and optimism of people who adore the words yes, and …

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Ted Mann C’00 is a writer living in Philadelphia. Most recently, he worked for The Atlantic Monthly and the Philadelphia City Paper. He has another story on page 17 of this issue.

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