Eric Hunicutt - Part 1 -2/14/07
Eric Hunicutt was raised in North Carolina where he performed and trained with ComedySportz. In 1999, he moved to Chicago to pursue his study of improvisation at Improv Olympic, where he performed with The Reckoning. In 2005, he moved to Los Angeles where he currently is the Training Center Director of IO West and performs on the Harold team Trophy Wife.
JF: Where were you born?
EH: Virginia, but I grew up in North Carolina, so I claim North Carolina.
JF: What were some early influences on your sense of humor?
EH: Well, that’s a good question. My dad for sure. [laughs] My dad used to cut my hair in character. He had this character called ‘Tony, the barber.’ He cut my hair until I was about twelve years old. He’d set up a stool in the bathroom and pretend it was a barber shop. He’d have me wait outside, come in and sit down. He’d ask me what I wanted done on my hair even though it didn’t matter. I think that was the first character I’d ever seen, Tony, the barber. My dad and my grandfather were hilarious.
JF: How have your early influences shaped what you’ve done as an adult with comedy?
EH: I think having my parents like what I do is huge for me. Not having people ask why that would be something I want to do, acting or comedy. The value of that never came into question. They were always as excited about what I was doing about I am. That’s continued, and I think that makes it a lot easier.
JF: When did you know you wanted to be a performer?
EH: I know when I knew for sure was when I started taking improv classes in High School. It was one of those things where I knew I didn’t want to do anything else. I tried to talk myself into doing a bunch of other things, but they always paled in comparison. I think I had an inkling when I was doing school plays and stuff, but I don’t think you can count that, because you’re sort of just doing that like you’re soccer or baseball. It’s just another activity. I started taking classes at ComedySportz in Raleigh, North Carolina and when I started doing that I really felt like I had found my thing.
JF: What brought you into improv? How did you hear about those classes?
EH: My best friend at the time, actually he’s still one of my best friends, Jim Woods, had started taking classes. We were in high school together. We were in drama class. He came back from Summer break and said ‘I started taking these classes. They’re really cool.’ Our acting teacher in high school was really into improv. She had studied in Chicago and knew stuff about the scene that was starting there in the early 90’s and brought a lot of it into our classes. So, we got introduced to it really early, which was nice. Yeah, Jim told me I should get involved and I did. That was 13 or 14 years ago, back in 92. We still play together out here, which is really cool.
JF: Wow, are you guys on a team together?
EH: No, not officially, but we’ve been doing some shows together. If either of our teams are short people, the other person will sit in or whatever, so we look for opportunities.
JF: Did you guys move to Chicago together too?
EH: Yeah, we moved to Chicago in 99, took classes and all that stuff, then he left to do Boom Chicago for two and a half years. We wound up in the same place out here, so it’s very cool.
JF: So, what were those early classes like at ComedySportz?
EH: A lot of it was learning the games and stuff. A lot of it was stumbling through learning how to build character or agreement exercises. They were great, because it was all new. We’d never heard any of that before. We’d never heard ‘Here are the elements of a scene that you can do in a moment.’ All of the other stuff I had before was from high school acting class, which is all about looking at text and looking for beats and all that crap. [laughs] I don’t say crap because I don’t agree with it. That was so much more intellectual and this was so much more intuitive I felt.
JF: What was the North Carolina improv scene like at the time?
EH: It’d be hard to say what all of North Carolina was like, because we were so into what we were doing. There was a group in Chapel Hill called The Transactors, which did like themed shows. They’d do an hour like ‘The Transactors present this murder mystery show,’ or a musical show. I don’t know if it was long-form necessarily, but it was more of a show and less of a game format. Then there was us, ComedySportz, which was all short-form games and the premise of competition. We were so into what we were doing we didn’t see much else. It was time away from getting to do it. It didn’t feel like much of a community. It was kind of just patches of people doing whatever kind of improv they did.
I was in a teen improv group that was attempting long-form stuff at the time, not knowing that was what we were doing. That was the first time I heard the word Harold. We did our training wheels version of it. There definitely wasn’t a scene like there is now. There’s several theaters and several groups doing a lot of different stuff with Zach.
JF: Why do you think the North Carolina improv scene has grown so much? And how did you see it grow when you were there?
EH: It grew a lot after I left. It’s grown by leaps and bound in the last six years. I just think you had so many people doing in that time when we were doing it, and it seemed new, something we were discovering rather than gloming onto something people had been doing for a long time. I think the reason it’s big now is because a lot of people felt that energy and sense of discovery, wanted to make it their own and went on and did other things with it, whether it was moving to Chicago then moving back, or staying there and branching out and trying to do more with it. I think there was a lot of people who got infected with that energy and once you feel that it’s hard to do anything else, or it’s hard to let go. There are a lot of people who, it’s not what they do for a living, but it is what they do every weekend, and that’s great.
JF: How did you develop as an improviser down there, when you were in college and high school?
EH: I definitely got confidence from that. I definitely felt like I had a right to do it. Getting introduced to it and being in an environment where we felt like we were helping to build that scene or build that theater gave a sense of ownership that brought confidence. I guess confidence is a word. We always felt like we were pretty decent at it. We always felt like it was ok for us to do it and to call it our own and to want to do more with it.
But I don’t think I had a real strong grasp of what was going elsewhere in terms of what else could be done with improv. The first time I saw a Harold I didn’t have any idea what was going on. I knew it was something I had never seen, but I didn’t know why or what the people were doing, which was great. It made me wanted to move to Chicago and find out.
JF: Would you say that there’s a particular North Carolina style that separates it from the rest of the country?
EH: No, I don’t think so. Certainly, not at this point, because the people who are there now are people who have come from other places. There are people who have come from New York and Chicago, so the philosophies of both those place are pretty active in what’s going on there. If there is one thing, there’s enthusiasm. There’s a great energy there that’s about just doing good stuff, trying to do good work, and try to different things. There’s not that pressure of ‘Oh, you’re in the Mecca of improv,’ or ‘Oh, you’re in L.A. You don’t know who’s going to be in the audience that night.’ You’re just working to work, or I should say playing to play. Work makes it sound entirely...
JF: Unfun?
EH: Yeah, or labor intensive or whatever. I think there are shows where it is work, where you’re trying to work out something. Everybody there is so nice and such a sponge when people come in from other places to either teach or perform. It’s Southern hospitality. It’s also a great young energy, because, again, they’re building something together rather than riding the coattails of something else.
JF: So, what was it like moving to Chicago?
EH: Awful for the first year and a half, for sure. For that first year, I did not enjoy it. I liked class, but I was working at Starbucks at Jackson St. down by the Art Institute. I was working the opening shift. I had to get up to go to work at 4:15, 4:30, so I didn’t see a lot of shows that year. I had to go to by 10 at the very latest. Yeah, I would go to class and that was pretty much the highlight of my week. At the same time I was frustrated because I wasn’t getting to perform anywhere, but in retrospect it was the best possible thing I could have done. I was coming from a place where I’m getting to perform constantly, and feeling like a big fish in a small pond, although that probably isn’t the best phrasing. I had been in North Carolina for a long time. I felt comfortable with that. Leaving that meant starting over, admitting I didn’t know anything, which I didn’t, and taking class again, being intimidated again. It was by far the best thing I could have done, but it was scary and it was uncomfortable.
JF: It was intimidating for you sometimes in those classes?
EH: Oh God, all the time. Chicago, in general, was intimidating to me. There are all those people there who you’re like ‘I can’t do what they do,’ or ‘I can’t do it the way they do it.’ I’ve only been gone for a little over year, even having left, I still look at it like ‘I’m still really intimidated by a lot of people.’ And that intimidation should be respect. It shouldn’t be intimidation. It should be admiration or respect, but intimidation is kind of self-defeating. It’s part of the reason why I think that making the move out here was probably good for me. It sort of allowed me to put that away to a certain extent, and sort of come out and go ‘Ok, now I’m my own person, making my own way,’ rather than ‘Oh, this person has seen me really suck,’ or ‘This person saw me have a really horrible class. I wonder if they still remember that? Because I certainly do.’
JF: Yeah, I know I’ve had that. I think a lot of other people have had that, but it’s reassuring to hear the Artistic Director of IO West say that.
EH: I’m not the Artistic Director of IO West.
JF: You’re not!?
EH: I’m the Training Center Director.
JF: Oh, alright.
EH: Just so the Artistic Director doesn’t get pissed. But yeah, you remember your failures way more than anybody else who saw them does. But I remember bad shows and bad classes. I remember being embarrassed, and I remember who was there. It doesn’t matter to anybody but it’s something that kind of sits there, like ‘Oh, this person really saw me be terrible.’
JF: So, were you ever frustrated in those early classes, because you had probably been doing it by six or seven years at that point?
EH: Yeah, it was frustrating, but at the same time the material was so new. I think frustrated maybe is the wrong word. I impatient is better. I was impatient to get to the point where I felt as good at this new stuff as the stuff I had been doing. I think that’s every young person who comes to take improv classes, who’s been doing it in anyway prior. It’s easy to be like ‘I know I can do this. Why am I not doing it right now?’ You don’t realize that there’s nobody we look at and go ‘Those people are phenomenal improvisers’ and those people are twenty two. It takes time. It takes time to figure out how to do it. You have to screw up again. I think at some point I realized that ‘Ok, these guys who I really enjoy watching are all several years down the road from me.’ That’s not a coincidence.
JF: Did your experience with short-form help you with long-form?
EH: Yeah, I think so. The biggest thing I think having done short-form helped me to do early on was editing. I think you get that muscle of when to edit a scene, or when the beats are. I think short-form really develops that, because you’re trying to end on a high point. You’re attuned to the way the energy functions in a scene in short-form. I also think it helps getting into the scene a little faster. You find that character, you find that hook a little faster, because you have to do it in a short amount of time. But certainly in editing.
JF: Were there any habits that you got in short-form that maybe didn’t help you in long-form?
EH: Yeah, being jokey, knowing the funny reference and going for that instead of being patient and letting the humor of the scene develop what’s going on between the two characters. If there was one downside, that would be it, but I would say that you get cured of that pretty quickly, because you realize you’re pulling the rug out under your scene partner as well. You could feel how bad the energy was after you did that. Your scene partner was like ‘Oh, great. Thank you for making a joke.’ God bless every teacher who was like ‘Great, but here’s a better choice: stay in the scene, instead of working at your audience.’
JF: So, how did you start having fun in Chicago?
EH: I got to play more. For me, it was also about people going ‘Ok, what you have to offer is valuable enough to put on stage.’ I care a great deal about what other people think in the sense of whether or not how I feel about my work and how other people care about my work line up. I need to know that I’m not getting up there and looking horrible or looking like the guy that has no idea what’s going on. More importantly, I need the people I’m playing with to do that for me. I need people to want to play with me. Once people started saying ‘Hey, come play a show,’ or ‘Hey, let’s put something together,’ that made all the difference in the world.
JF: Where were you born?
EH: Virginia, but I grew up in North Carolina, so I claim North Carolina.
JF: What were some early influences on your sense of humor?
EH: Well, that’s a good question. My dad for sure. [laughs] My dad used to cut my hair in character. He had this character called ‘Tony, the barber.’ He cut my hair until I was about twelve years old. He’d set up a stool in the bathroom and pretend it was a barber shop. He’d have me wait outside, come in and sit down. He’d ask me what I wanted done on my hair even though it didn’t matter. I think that was the first character I’d ever seen, Tony, the barber. My dad and my grandfather were hilarious.
JF: How have your early influences shaped what you’ve done as an adult with comedy?
EH: I think having my parents like what I do is huge for me. Not having people ask why that would be something I want to do, acting or comedy. The value of that never came into question. They were always as excited about what I was doing about I am. That’s continued, and I think that makes it a lot easier.
JF: When did you know you wanted to be a performer?
EH: I know when I knew for sure was when I started taking improv classes in High School. It was one of those things where I knew I didn’t want to do anything else. I tried to talk myself into doing a bunch of other things, but they always paled in comparison. I think I had an inkling when I was doing school plays and stuff, but I don’t think you can count that, because you’re sort of just doing that like you’re soccer or baseball. It’s just another activity. I started taking classes at ComedySportz in Raleigh, North Carolina and when I started doing that I really felt like I had found my thing.
JF: What brought you into improv? How did you hear about those classes?
EH: My best friend at the time, actually he’s still one of my best friends, Jim Woods, had started taking classes. We were in high school together. We were in drama class. He came back from Summer break and said ‘I started taking these classes. They’re really cool.’ Our acting teacher in high school was really into improv. She had studied in Chicago and knew stuff about the scene that was starting there in the early 90’s and brought a lot of it into our classes. So, we got introduced to it really early, which was nice. Yeah, Jim told me I should get involved and I did. That was 13 or 14 years ago, back in 92. We still play together out here, which is really cool.
JF: Wow, are you guys on a team together?
EH: No, not officially, but we’ve been doing some shows together. If either of our teams are short people, the other person will sit in or whatever, so we look for opportunities.
JF: Did you guys move to Chicago together too?
EH: Yeah, we moved to Chicago in 99, took classes and all that stuff, then he left to do Boom Chicago for two and a half years. We wound up in the same place out here, so it’s very cool.
JF: So, what were those early classes like at ComedySportz?
EH: A lot of it was learning the games and stuff. A lot of it was stumbling through learning how to build character or agreement exercises. They were great, because it was all new. We’d never heard any of that before. We’d never heard ‘Here are the elements of a scene that you can do in a moment.’ All of the other stuff I had before was from high school acting class, which is all about looking at text and looking for beats and all that crap. [laughs] I don’t say crap because I don’t agree with it. That was so much more intellectual and this was so much more intuitive I felt.
JF: What was the North Carolina improv scene like at the time?
EH: It’d be hard to say what all of North Carolina was like, because we were so into what we were doing. There was a group in Chapel Hill called The Transactors, which did like themed shows. They’d do an hour like ‘The Transactors present this murder mystery show,’ or a musical show. I don’t know if it was long-form necessarily, but it was more of a show and less of a game format. Then there was us, ComedySportz, which was all short-form games and the premise of competition. We were so into what we were doing we didn’t see much else. It was time away from getting to do it. It didn’t feel like much of a community. It was kind of just patches of people doing whatever kind of improv they did.
I was in a teen improv group that was attempting long-form stuff at the time, not knowing that was what we were doing. That was the first time I heard the word Harold. We did our training wheels version of it. There definitely wasn’t a scene like there is now. There’s several theaters and several groups doing a lot of different stuff with Zach.
JF: Why do you think the North Carolina improv scene has grown so much? And how did you see it grow when you were there?
EH: It grew a lot after I left. It’s grown by leaps and bound in the last six years. I just think you had so many people doing in that time when we were doing it, and it seemed new, something we were discovering rather than gloming onto something people had been doing for a long time. I think the reason it’s big now is because a lot of people felt that energy and sense of discovery, wanted to make it their own and went on and did other things with it, whether it was moving to Chicago then moving back, or staying there and branching out and trying to do more with it. I think there was a lot of people who got infected with that energy and once you feel that it’s hard to do anything else, or it’s hard to let go. There are a lot of people who, it’s not what they do for a living, but it is what they do every weekend, and that’s great.
JF: How did you develop as an improviser down there, when you were in college and high school?
EH: I definitely got confidence from that. I definitely felt like I had a right to do it. Getting introduced to it and being in an environment where we felt like we were helping to build that scene or build that theater gave a sense of ownership that brought confidence. I guess confidence is a word. We always felt like we were pretty decent at it. We always felt like it was ok for us to do it and to call it our own and to want to do more with it.
But I don’t think I had a real strong grasp of what was going elsewhere in terms of what else could be done with improv. The first time I saw a Harold I didn’t have any idea what was going on. I knew it was something I had never seen, but I didn’t know why or what the people were doing, which was great. It made me wanted to move to Chicago and find out.
JF: Would you say that there’s a particular North Carolina style that separates it from the rest of the country?
EH: No, I don’t think so. Certainly, not at this point, because the people who are there now are people who have come from other places. There are people who have come from New York and Chicago, so the philosophies of both those place are pretty active in what’s going on there. If there is one thing, there’s enthusiasm. There’s a great energy there that’s about just doing good stuff, trying to do good work, and try to different things. There’s not that pressure of ‘Oh, you’re in the Mecca of improv,’ or ‘Oh, you’re in L.A. You don’t know who’s going to be in the audience that night.’ You’re just working to work, or I should say playing to play. Work makes it sound entirely...
JF: Unfun?
EH: Yeah, or labor intensive or whatever. I think there are shows where it is work, where you’re trying to work out something. Everybody there is so nice and such a sponge when people come in from other places to either teach or perform. It’s Southern hospitality. It’s also a great young energy, because, again, they’re building something together rather than riding the coattails of something else.
JF: So, what was it like moving to Chicago?
EH: Awful for the first year and a half, for sure. For that first year, I did not enjoy it. I liked class, but I was working at Starbucks at Jackson St. down by the Art Institute. I was working the opening shift. I had to get up to go to work at 4:15, 4:30, so I didn’t see a lot of shows that year. I had to go to by 10 at the very latest. Yeah, I would go to class and that was pretty much the highlight of my week. At the same time I was frustrated because I wasn’t getting to perform anywhere, but in retrospect it was the best possible thing I could have done. I was coming from a place where I’m getting to perform constantly, and feeling like a big fish in a small pond, although that probably isn’t the best phrasing. I had been in North Carolina for a long time. I felt comfortable with that. Leaving that meant starting over, admitting I didn’t know anything, which I didn’t, and taking class again, being intimidated again. It was by far the best thing I could have done, but it was scary and it was uncomfortable.
JF: It was intimidating for you sometimes in those classes?
EH: Oh God, all the time. Chicago, in general, was intimidating to me. There are all those people there who you’re like ‘I can’t do what they do,’ or ‘I can’t do it the way they do it.’ I’ve only been gone for a little over year, even having left, I still look at it like ‘I’m still really intimidated by a lot of people.’ And that intimidation should be respect. It shouldn’t be intimidation. It should be admiration or respect, but intimidation is kind of self-defeating. It’s part of the reason why I think that making the move out here was probably good for me. It sort of allowed me to put that away to a certain extent, and sort of come out and go ‘Ok, now I’m my own person, making my own way,’ rather than ‘Oh, this person has seen me really suck,’ or ‘This person saw me have a really horrible class. I wonder if they still remember that? Because I certainly do.’
JF: Yeah, I know I’ve had that. I think a lot of other people have had that, but it’s reassuring to hear the Artistic Director of IO West say that.
EH: I’m not the Artistic Director of IO West.
JF: You’re not!?
EH: I’m the Training Center Director.
JF: Oh, alright.
EH: Just so the Artistic Director doesn’t get pissed. But yeah, you remember your failures way more than anybody else who saw them does. But I remember bad shows and bad classes. I remember being embarrassed, and I remember who was there. It doesn’t matter to anybody but it’s something that kind of sits there, like ‘Oh, this person really saw me be terrible.’
JF: So, were you ever frustrated in those early classes, because you had probably been doing it by six or seven years at that point?
EH: Yeah, it was frustrating, but at the same time the material was so new. I think frustrated maybe is the wrong word. I impatient is better. I was impatient to get to the point where I felt as good at this new stuff as the stuff I had been doing. I think that’s every young person who comes to take improv classes, who’s been doing it in anyway prior. It’s easy to be like ‘I know I can do this. Why am I not doing it right now?’ You don’t realize that there’s nobody we look at and go ‘Those people are phenomenal improvisers’ and those people are twenty two. It takes time. It takes time to figure out how to do it. You have to screw up again. I think at some point I realized that ‘Ok, these guys who I really enjoy watching are all several years down the road from me.’ That’s not a coincidence.
JF: Did your experience with short-form help you with long-form?
EH: Yeah, I think so. The biggest thing I think having done short-form helped me to do early on was editing. I think you get that muscle of when to edit a scene, or when the beats are. I think short-form really develops that, because you’re trying to end on a high point. You’re attuned to the way the energy functions in a scene in short-form. I also think it helps getting into the scene a little faster. You find that character, you find that hook a little faster, because you have to do it in a short amount of time. But certainly in editing.
JF: Were there any habits that you got in short-form that maybe didn’t help you in long-form?
EH: Yeah, being jokey, knowing the funny reference and going for that instead of being patient and letting the humor of the scene develop what’s going on between the two characters. If there was one downside, that would be it, but I would say that you get cured of that pretty quickly, because you realize you’re pulling the rug out under your scene partner as well. You could feel how bad the energy was after you did that. Your scene partner was like ‘Oh, great. Thank you for making a joke.’ God bless every teacher who was like ‘Great, but here’s a better choice: stay in the scene, instead of working at your audience.’
JF: So, how did you start having fun in Chicago?
EH: I got to play more. For me, it was also about people going ‘Ok, what you have to offer is valuable enough to put on stage.’ I care a great deal about what other people think in the sense of whether or not how I feel about my work and how other people care about my work line up. I need to know that I’m not getting up there and looking horrible or looking like the guy that has no idea what’s going on. More importantly, I need the people I’m playing with to do that for me. I need people to want to play with me. Once people started saying ‘Hey, come play a show,’ or ‘Hey, let’s put something together,’ that made all the difference in the world.
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