Peter Gwinn 11/15/06 Part 1
Peter Gwinn is the founder of the musical improv group Baby Wants Candy. After over a decade of improvising and teaching in Chicago, he moved to New York in 2005, where he played with The Stepfathers and Arsenal at the UCB Theater. Peter has taught at the Improv Olympic and UCB Theaters. He is currently a writer for the Colbert Report in New York.
JF: Where were you born?
PG: Evanston, Illinois.
JF: What were some early influences on your sense of humor?
PG: My Dad when we did car trips, we had to visit his parents in Wyoming, so we had these two day car trips, and my Dad was really into old time radio, so I grew up listening to Jack Benny, Ozzy and Harriet radio shows from the fifties and forties.
JF: Do you think those old time radio shows influenced your sense of humor as an adult?
PG: Absolutely. I still think you could do one of those shows now, not on radio. They were all basically Jack Benny and a bunch of crazy characters come to visit. But more than anything I learned timing from those things. Jack Benny's timing is unbelieveable. I wasn't learning subject, but I was learning the basic techniques without even knowing it.
JF: When did you know that you wanted to be a performer? Was it something that you felt as a kid or did you grow into it?
PG: Well, I always liked doing campfire skits in Cub Scouts, that was probably the earliest. I was always doing it. I did theater in Junior High, High School and College. In college, I was taking all these courses in different areas, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and nothing interested me as much as theater.
JF: Right, and did you know it would be improv comedy at that time?
PG: No, I was a big director and actor in college. I was also in the improv group, but my main thing was doing scripted stuff. I was on the chair of the student committee that scheduled and funded directed-student plays.
I kind of blame Charna for getting me into improv, because I had taken level 1 at Improv Olympic after my Freshman year of college, then I went back to college and after I graduated she was like 'you have to come back. You have to come back and take classes with Del.' And once you get into that place, it's hard to get out. And I found that it was a lot easier to show up on the theater and get up and go on stage without having to learn lines rent costumes, build sets. So it was really laziness more than anything.
JF: So how did you manage to stay in touch with Charna Halpern, if you only took one class there?
PG: Well, back when I did level 1 I think there were two level 1 classes at the time. It just wasn't very big. There weren't more than five classes going on all together, and I think there was something like eight teams. So it was really small, and I guess I was a teacher's pet in my level 1 class a little bit. Besser was one of the other ones. I would talk to her, go see shows if I was home for Christmas.
JF: What was your experience like with your college troupe? Was it short-form? Did you wind up directing it?
PG: It was short-form. Senior year I directed it. It was a lot of fun. We had a lot of fun doing short-form. It was a group where we were always looking for challenges. You know the game 'Play Book,' where one person is reading from a script and the other person is improvising off that. That's an old game we got good at real quick, so we wanted to see what else we could use in that. So during exam week we would use somebody's text book, or we'd use the classified ads or something, which wasn't that difficult really, but it shook things up. The only time I ever got any resistance from anybody in the group is when I tried to teach them long-form.
JF: Why were they resistant to that?
PG: I don't know. I really don't know. I thought it was the coolest thing, because I had seen Harolds in Chicago. I think it was just too big a paradigm shift. If you're really good at short-form, long-form is kind of scary. If I talk for a long time in gibberish, then you translate it as something short, that's a laugh garaunteed. You don't have that kind of stuff in long-form. They've since converted to long-form, I've been told.
JF: What were some of the things that short-form helped you with or taught you for later on in your career? And were there any things that your short-form made it more difficult for you to adjust to?
PG: I think there is sort of a pressure to be funny in short-form, so you sort of learn to play a little harder. Even more generally, I learned how to go get a laugh from an audience. Instead of doing something and being like 'I hope you laugh if you think it's funny,' to a place where I was like 'guess what? This is funny and you're going to laugh at what I do.' And that came from short-form.
What held me back was, when I got to Del's class finally, I had to unlearn a bunch of stuff, particularly doing wacky characters. Because wacky characters killed in my college group, and Del hated wacky characters.
JF: Do you remember a particularly brutal note or something?
PG: Yeah, because I knew he hated big characters, but I didn't understand why, because I thought they were funny. I thought why don't I just ask him, but I was afraid to ask him questions, so one day I decided to myself I'm going to go up and play a big, hilarious character like I played in college and we'll see what he says to me. So, I went up and was like 'Hello! Nanny nanny!' Hilarious voice. Hilarious physical characterization. Let me tell you: drop dead funny. Del stops the scene [laughs] and goes 'well, I don't think we need to see anymore of that.'
JF: Oh wow.
PG: 'Let's get two more.' And it he didn't explain it. It was humiliating. Because I knew he wouldn't like it, I was hoping he'd tell me why, but he didn't.
JF: Interesting. How did you theater experience help you later on? It almost seems like that kind of theater experience might be in conflict with short-form, going for that laugh as opposed to acting something out or whatever.
PG: Well, to a certain extent that's like saying you can't be a good singer and a good tennis player. They're their own sets of skills that I don't think are in conflict. In my freshman year of college I was in a play where it was just a two-person play, and we somehow lost our lines. We went way off the rails, and just got off book. We had no idea what had happened or how we'd got there. And out of necessity we just looked at each other and started improvising, in character. We added like 5 minutes to the show and we could see our director freaking out in the back of the theater. We just decided 'well, we're lost. Let's take our time. Stay in the moment, and work our way back.' And we did. It was a really empowering moment, because it showed how well improv and stage stuff can go together.
Beyond that, I think those two really go hand-in-hand, because improv is all about being in the moment. As an actor if you have the ability to be that present, so you're not just thinking about where you need to step and what you need to say, but you're actually working off of the other actors, that makes you a better actor. Simultaneously, as an improviser, if you are a good actor and can summon up honest emotion in your scenes, your scenes are going to be way better than if you're just doing the funny character voices I was doing.
When you put those two together, it transcends both of them, especially with improv. A lot of people can say funny things, but not a lot of people can get an honest emotional response out of an audience and engage an audience while improvising.
JF: Who were some influences on you while you were taking classes at IO? And did you take classes at Second City as well?
PG: I did not take classes at Second City. I only did Improv Olympic. People told me that you don't really have to. I think I had a chip on my shoulder, that I wanted to get hired for Second City without taking Second City classes. I don't know why I had that chip on my shoulder, but I think I did.
The House Teams at the time were Blue Velveeta, which had Kevin Dorff and Susan Messing on it. Another team was Boquet of Flesh which had Brian Stack, Noah Gregoropoulos. Andy Ritcher was on a team back then. Those were the people that I super-looked up to.
My senior year of college I did an off-campus studies program in Chicago for the Arts program. You needed to do an internship as part of the program. We got a call that they need someone to do lights for an improv show. They offered it to me because I had done that. So I was like 'alright, I guess.' I was like 'doing lights for an improv show. Who are these hacks?' They were like 'they have a performance this Monday. You can go watch them and see if it's something you want to do.' So I go to see the show, which was called Jazz Freddy. The lights go up and every improviser I've ever idolized in my life is on stage. It's was Dorff, Pete Gardener, Dave Koechner, Jim Carane, Chris Reed. It was the early 90's all-star team. So I was like 'yeah, I'll do your lights.' Those were the people I was sort of emulating at the time. They were so good. Watching them was like a free class every show.
JF: When did you start performing on teams at IO?
PG: My first team, and this shows how small IO was at the time, I was put on a team after week four of level 1. It was me, Matt Besser, Rick Romain, and I forget the other people. That lasted two shows, then was broken up. Then I was put on another team that lasted two shows, then got broken up, then I went back to school. When I came back in the summer after I graduated, that's when I got put on a team called Faulty Wiring.
JF: So what was improvising with Matt Besser like back in those days? Could you tell that certain people had a lot of talent?
PG: Yeah, Besser was definitely a class stand out. He was very funny. He was a stand-up primarily. At that time he still kind of had the anti-establishment attitude. He had a beard that was not on his chin. It was under his chin. It was just a little strip. I still see him do this, when he's thinking he'll tug on the bottom of his chin, and that's him pulling on that beard that hasn't been there for however long.
JF: What was your experience like on Faulty Wiring?
PG: It was a blast. It was a very good team. It was a good ensemble, which kind of taught me the value of ensemble. Charna will some times put her eight favorite people on a team, and the team sucks, because they're all the kind of performer. So, we had a really good mix of initiators, support players, and character players.
The best thing I learned from the Faulty Wiring experience was we had a guy on the team name Stuart Sidel, who was a Psychology Professor at DePaul, and he used to drive me crazy. He initiated a game one time 'what if Piaget's seven stages of man had dinner together.' It was like 'what the fuck are you doing? Nobody knows what that is but you.' When this guy came out on stage, it was like 'oh boy, what's going to happen now.' Then I took a month off from the team to travel. When I came back, Stuart had gotten comfortable on the team and was suddenly like the funniest guy on the team. It was amazing. I was still my young, hotshot, come out of college self, so I was pretty judgemental, even though you're not supposed to be. That was such a great lesson that everybody's a good improviser. If you treat them as awesome, they will become awesome.
JF: Who were the people on Faulty Wiring with you?
PG: There was Stuart Sidel, David Malley, Oliver Wortel, Greg Lindsey, Lisa Trask, Al Samuels. In our first wave, we had someone named Kara McNamara, Rob Reese, and Paul Vallaincourt. Paul, Kara, and Rob left to pursue other interests. We replaced them with Craig Cackowski, Rich Talarico, and Lawrence Peters.
JF: When did Baby Wants Candy form?
PG: That was after Faulty Wiring broke up. I was sort of kicking around and Charna offered me the chance to put together an experimental team, which basically meant I could pick some players and be a team together. The idea that I wanted to do was to do by the book Harolds, really stick to that format and see what you could do. So, I picked a bunch of the underrated people, I thought, on sort of the midrange teams, because they didn't really have many stand out, superstar teams. So I picked them. That was the first incarnation of Baby Wants Candy.
JF: That's a huge amount of responsibility that Charna gave you, that you could just go in and pick people from preexisting teams.
PG: Yeah, I cannot hide the fact that I was kind of a Charna's favorite, as embarrassing as that may be. If she trusts you and you're good, she will give you opportunities like this, and she still does it with people today.
JF: Where were you born?
PG: Evanston, Illinois.
JF: What were some early influences on your sense of humor?
PG: My Dad when we did car trips, we had to visit his parents in Wyoming, so we had these two day car trips, and my Dad was really into old time radio, so I grew up listening to Jack Benny, Ozzy and Harriet radio shows from the fifties and forties.
JF: Do you think those old time radio shows influenced your sense of humor as an adult?
PG: Absolutely. I still think you could do one of those shows now, not on radio. They were all basically Jack Benny and a bunch of crazy characters come to visit. But more than anything I learned timing from those things. Jack Benny's timing is unbelieveable. I wasn't learning subject, but I was learning the basic techniques without even knowing it.
JF: When did you know that you wanted to be a performer? Was it something that you felt as a kid or did you grow into it?
PG: Well, I always liked doing campfire skits in Cub Scouts, that was probably the earliest. I was always doing it. I did theater in Junior High, High School and College. In college, I was taking all these courses in different areas, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and nothing interested me as much as theater.
JF: Right, and did you know it would be improv comedy at that time?
PG: No, I was a big director and actor in college. I was also in the improv group, but my main thing was doing scripted stuff. I was on the chair of the student committee that scheduled and funded directed-student plays.
I kind of blame Charna for getting me into improv, because I had taken level 1 at Improv Olympic after my Freshman year of college, then I went back to college and after I graduated she was like 'you have to come back. You have to come back and take classes with Del.' And once you get into that place, it's hard to get out. And I found that it was a lot easier to show up on the theater and get up and go on stage without having to learn lines rent costumes, build sets. So it was really laziness more than anything.
JF: So how did you manage to stay in touch with Charna Halpern, if you only took one class there?
PG: Well, back when I did level 1 I think there were two level 1 classes at the time. It just wasn't very big. There weren't more than five classes going on all together, and I think there was something like eight teams. So it was really small, and I guess I was a teacher's pet in my level 1 class a little bit. Besser was one of the other ones. I would talk to her, go see shows if I was home for Christmas.
JF: What was your experience like with your college troupe? Was it short-form? Did you wind up directing it?
PG: It was short-form. Senior year I directed it. It was a lot of fun. We had a lot of fun doing short-form. It was a group where we were always looking for challenges. You know the game 'Play Book,' where one person is reading from a script and the other person is improvising off that. That's an old game we got good at real quick, so we wanted to see what else we could use in that. So during exam week we would use somebody's text book, or we'd use the classified ads or something, which wasn't that difficult really, but it shook things up. The only time I ever got any resistance from anybody in the group is when I tried to teach them long-form.
JF: Why were they resistant to that?
PG: I don't know. I really don't know. I thought it was the coolest thing, because I had seen Harolds in Chicago. I think it was just too big a paradigm shift. If you're really good at short-form, long-form is kind of scary. If I talk for a long time in gibberish, then you translate it as something short, that's a laugh garaunteed. You don't have that kind of stuff in long-form. They've since converted to long-form, I've been told.
JF: What were some of the things that short-form helped you with or taught you for later on in your career? And were there any things that your short-form made it more difficult for you to adjust to?
PG: I think there is sort of a pressure to be funny in short-form, so you sort of learn to play a little harder. Even more generally, I learned how to go get a laugh from an audience. Instead of doing something and being like 'I hope you laugh if you think it's funny,' to a place where I was like 'guess what? This is funny and you're going to laugh at what I do.' And that came from short-form.
What held me back was, when I got to Del's class finally, I had to unlearn a bunch of stuff, particularly doing wacky characters. Because wacky characters killed in my college group, and Del hated wacky characters.
JF: Do you remember a particularly brutal note or something?
PG: Yeah, because I knew he hated big characters, but I didn't understand why, because I thought they were funny. I thought why don't I just ask him, but I was afraid to ask him questions, so one day I decided to myself I'm going to go up and play a big, hilarious character like I played in college and we'll see what he says to me. So, I went up and was like 'Hello! Nanny nanny!' Hilarious voice. Hilarious physical characterization. Let me tell you: drop dead funny. Del stops the scene [laughs] and goes 'well, I don't think we need to see anymore of that.'
JF: Oh wow.
PG: 'Let's get two more.' And it he didn't explain it. It was humiliating. Because I knew he wouldn't like it, I was hoping he'd tell me why, but he didn't.
JF: Interesting. How did you theater experience help you later on? It almost seems like that kind of theater experience might be in conflict with short-form, going for that laugh as opposed to acting something out or whatever.
PG: Well, to a certain extent that's like saying you can't be a good singer and a good tennis player. They're their own sets of skills that I don't think are in conflict. In my freshman year of college I was in a play where it was just a two-person play, and we somehow lost our lines. We went way off the rails, and just got off book. We had no idea what had happened or how we'd got there. And out of necessity we just looked at each other and started improvising, in character. We added like 5 minutes to the show and we could see our director freaking out in the back of the theater. We just decided 'well, we're lost. Let's take our time. Stay in the moment, and work our way back.' And we did. It was a really empowering moment, because it showed how well improv and stage stuff can go together.
Beyond that, I think those two really go hand-in-hand, because improv is all about being in the moment. As an actor if you have the ability to be that present, so you're not just thinking about where you need to step and what you need to say, but you're actually working off of the other actors, that makes you a better actor. Simultaneously, as an improviser, if you are a good actor and can summon up honest emotion in your scenes, your scenes are going to be way better than if you're just doing the funny character voices I was doing.
When you put those two together, it transcends both of them, especially with improv. A lot of people can say funny things, but not a lot of people can get an honest emotional response out of an audience and engage an audience while improvising.
JF: Who were some influences on you while you were taking classes at IO? And did you take classes at Second City as well?
PG: I did not take classes at Second City. I only did Improv Olympic. People told me that you don't really have to. I think I had a chip on my shoulder, that I wanted to get hired for Second City without taking Second City classes. I don't know why I had that chip on my shoulder, but I think I did.
The House Teams at the time were Blue Velveeta, which had Kevin Dorff and Susan Messing on it. Another team was Boquet of Flesh which had Brian Stack, Noah Gregoropoulos. Andy Ritcher was on a team back then. Those were the people that I super-looked up to.
My senior year of college I did an off-campus studies program in Chicago for the Arts program. You needed to do an internship as part of the program. We got a call that they need someone to do lights for an improv show. They offered it to me because I had done that. So I was like 'alright, I guess.' I was like 'doing lights for an improv show. Who are these hacks?' They were like 'they have a performance this Monday. You can go watch them and see if it's something you want to do.' So I go to see the show, which was called Jazz Freddy. The lights go up and every improviser I've ever idolized in my life is on stage. It's was Dorff, Pete Gardener, Dave Koechner, Jim Carane, Chris Reed. It was the early 90's all-star team. So I was like 'yeah, I'll do your lights.' Those were the people I was sort of emulating at the time. They were so good. Watching them was like a free class every show.
JF: When did you start performing on teams at IO?
PG: My first team, and this shows how small IO was at the time, I was put on a team after week four of level 1. It was me, Matt Besser, Rick Romain, and I forget the other people. That lasted two shows, then was broken up. Then I was put on another team that lasted two shows, then got broken up, then I went back to school. When I came back in the summer after I graduated, that's when I got put on a team called Faulty Wiring.
JF: So what was improvising with Matt Besser like back in those days? Could you tell that certain people had a lot of talent?
PG: Yeah, Besser was definitely a class stand out. He was very funny. He was a stand-up primarily. At that time he still kind of had the anti-establishment attitude. He had a beard that was not on his chin. It was under his chin. It was just a little strip. I still see him do this, when he's thinking he'll tug on the bottom of his chin, and that's him pulling on that beard that hasn't been there for however long.
JF: What was your experience like on Faulty Wiring?
PG: It was a blast. It was a very good team. It was a good ensemble, which kind of taught me the value of ensemble. Charna will some times put her eight favorite people on a team, and the team sucks, because they're all the kind of performer. So, we had a really good mix of initiators, support players, and character players.
The best thing I learned from the Faulty Wiring experience was we had a guy on the team name Stuart Sidel, who was a Psychology Professor at DePaul, and he used to drive me crazy. He initiated a game one time 'what if Piaget's seven stages of man had dinner together.' It was like 'what the fuck are you doing? Nobody knows what that is but you.' When this guy came out on stage, it was like 'oh boy, what's going to happen now.' Then I took a month off from the team to travel. When I came back, Stuart had gotten comfortable on the team and was suddenly like the funniest guy on the team. It was amazing. I was still my young, hotshot, come out of college self, so I was pretty judgemental, even though you're not supposed to be. That was such a great lesson that everybody's a good improviser. If you treat them as awesome, they will become awesome.
JF: Who were the people on Faulty Wiring with you?
PG: There was Stuart Sidel, David Malley, Oliver Wortel, Greg Lindsey, Lisa Trask, Al Samuels. In our first wave, we had someone named Kara McNamara, Rob Reese, and Paul Vallaincourt. Paul, Kara, and Rob left to pursue other interests. We replaced them with Craig Cackowski, Rich Talarico, and Lawrence Peters.
JF: When did Baby Wants Candy form?
PG: That was after Faulty Wiring broke up. I was sort of kicking around and Charna offered me the chance to put together an experimental team, which basically meant I could pick some players and be a team together. The idea that I wanted to do was to do by the book Harolds, really stick to that format and see what you could do. So, I picked a bunch of the underrated people, I thought, on sort of the midrange teams, because they didn't really have many stand out, superstar teams. So I picked them. That was the first incarnation of Baby Wants Candy.
JF: That's a huge amount of responsibility that Charna gave you, that you could just go in and pick people from preexisting teams.
PG: Yeah, I cannot hide the fact that I was kind of a Charna's favorite, as embarrassing as that may be. If she trusts you and you're good, she will give you opportunities like this, and she still does it with people today.
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