Laugh, or We Kill the Lobster

Ben Westhoff gets inside the odd mix of cerebral and naughty humor that’s taken S.F. comedy troupe Killing My Lobster to the edge of national fame.

(We hear the sounds of a couple engaged in lovemaking. Tossing, turning, soft grunting. Rene is a French prostitute. Pedro is a Spanish stranger.)

Rene: Oui! … Yes … Paco …
Pedro: Pedro.
Rene: Pedro … Pedro … Parlez anglais, si’l vous plaît …
Pedro: Eh … No hablo inglés.
Rene: Hablo inglés! PLEASE! Ohhh … J’adore la langue d’anglais …
It make me CRAZY!

(Intrigued but reluctant, Pedro reaches for his knapsack on the floor, pulls out an enormous and unsexy Spanish/English dictionary, and tries to place it somewhere discreetly on the bed …)

Pedro: (reads) Where can I buy a postcard?
Rene: OOOOhhh!
Pedro: (thrusts) I am attending a convention.
Rene: Oui! Yes! Convention!
Pedro: (thrusts again) I want to press these clothes!
Rene: Oui … Oh! … OH!

(Rene rolls over so that she is now on top.)

Pedro: Is there a cost for children?
Rene: Parlez, parlez, vite! … Plus vite!
Pedro: (frantically flipping through the pages) Do you have a safe for valuables?!
Rene: AAAiiii!

Don’t let the edgy sketch fool you. The members of Killing My Lobster are not the punk rockers of sketch comedy. They do not have messy or greasy hair. They lack the brazen cool of the Ramones, the “fuck you” attitude of the Clash, the technical ineptitude of the Sex Pistols.

No, if Killing My Lobster were a band, it would be Weezer: larger than life onstage, borderline geeky in person, and evidencing a surprising longevity.

The revolving cast of about 12 members of Killing My Lobster has produced at least two full-length shows of new material every year
since the group’s inception in 1997. Their last, Circus of Failure, sold out three-quarters of its 20-performance run at A Traveling
Jewish Theatre, which houses 88 seats — despite competition from the World Series — and some shows were so crowded that people had to sit in the aisles. Film versions of their sketches have been shown at the Sundance Film Festival and featured on Comedy Central’s Web site, where they were described as “An orgy of comic genius.” The critical response to the Lobsters’ shtick has been almost universally positive, and they count Robin Williams among their fans.

So does that mean, as suggested by the title of their 2001 show, that the Lobsters are Breaking the Bank?

Not exactly.

“They’re paying me 200 bucks,” says new Lobster Gabe Weisert of his two-month commitment for the group’s newest show, Tales of a Lonely Planet. His duties include four or five rehearsals a week now, and five performances a week when the show opens, all on top of errand-running and envelope-sealing duties.

If being a Lobster in 2003 is a labor of love, when things got started back in 1997, there was even more labor for even less love. The
Lobsters’ first show was at the Grasshopper Palace, a tiny performance space in the Mission where they recruited 20 of their friends to fill the seats. The group’s nucleus was just forming, and even the name itself had only recently been conceived.

“We’d all had a few drinks,” says Daniel Lee, describing a get-together where the group was playing the name game Celebrity.
“Some of us had had more than a few drinks. I wrote down Lauryn Hill on a little slip of paper.”

The task fell to group co-founder Paul Charney to describe the singer without using her name.

“She sang the song ‘Killing My Lobster,'” blurted out an intoxicated Charney, referring to the song “Killing Me Softly,” then a hit for
Hill’s band, the Fugees. The phrase was oft repeated by the group, and members used it to mean “bumming me out,” as in, “Cheer up, man, you’re killing my lobster.”

Before it became the troupe’s name, Killing My Lobster was actually the title of the group’s first show. Back then, they called themselves
“Are You There God? It’s Us, The Art Collective.”

The first script read-through for the Lobsters’ new show — Tales of a Lonely Planet — is conducted on a rainy mid-January night in their
office on the second floor of the Digipop building at the corner of 17th Street and Folsom, a corner popular for, among other activities,
prostitution.

The cast and crew — writers, directors, DJs, costume and set designers, and five new actors — are by and large clean-cut, with jeans and tennis shoes the favored fashion statement. Individually, in passing conversation, none of them comes across as particularly hilarious. But the neon-green walls of the office seem to draw comedy out of these middle-class Ivy Leaguers.

Tales of a Lonely Planet has a travel theme, and promises “sketches and shenanigans all about the hazards of over packing, under
budgeting, and being a Middle American in a far away land.” In addition to the Spanish spoken by Pedro and the French of his prostitute Rene, British, Scottish, Japanese, and Inuit accents make appearances in the show. Exotic locales are the norm; complicated premises that depend on semantic miscommunication abound. If you were to accuse Daniel Lee, the director of the show, of having a penchant for highbrow humor, well, you wouldn’t be the first.

“A lot of our humor can be a little bit cerebral, in good and bad ways,” he says, admitting that he almost majored in art semiotics before focusing his studies on political science at Brown University in Rhode Island. “Language seems to be a thing that we’re interested in: the use of language, the communication issues.”

But Lee, a lanky Korean-American who’s studied voice at the Juilliard School and acting at the American Conservatory Theater, doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as a comic intellectual. “We try to offset [the cerebral humor] with more physical humor. We also have naughty, dirty sketches.”

Humiliating ones, too. Just ask James Bewley, a goateed, smirking Lobster who carries around a few extra pounds. While he played a
dancing student who goes to great lengths to please his instructor, Bewley was nude onstage for an entire six-performance run seen by
thousands. “Most people thought I was wearing a ‘naked suit’ until I turned around,” whereupon the audience saw his bare, very real ass. He grins. “But why would I wear a suit like this?”

The non-cerebral strand of Lobster humor was foreshadowed by Out of Bounds, a comedy group founded at Brown University by many of the core Lobsters, who attended the school in the early ’90s. Perhaps the most notorious incident was a sketch that called for actor Jon Wolanske to literally piss his pants onstage.

“It was in the script but unrehearsed,” recalls Wolanske, who is tall, innocent-looking, and almost unnervingly sincere. “I drank four or
five beers before going onstage in an effort to work up the fluid count.” As well as, presumably, the nerve.

“In the scene I was really nervous about asking a girl for a date. She said yes, and I said I was so excited that I was going to piss my pants. And then I did.”

So much fluid came out onto the floor that people thought it was fake, he says. The rest of Out of Bounds’ performance that evening was done with the urine pooled onstage.

“I still have the underwear,” Wolanske adds.

Out of Bounds-ers Daniel Lee, Marc Vogl, and Paul Charney left the East Coast for San Francisco the year after their graduation from
Brown in 1995. They launched Killing My Lobster with fellow alums Brian L. Perkins and Mike Zurer. Brown graduates Wolanske, Mara
Gerstein, Erin Bradley, and Bill Donohue, Vassar alums Abby Paige and Maura Madden, and Rhode Island School of Design alum Bewley joined in the next few years.

Gerstein had pulled in Madden, a hometown friend from Manhattan, who brought in Paige, a fellow comedienne from Vassar. Bewley had met the Brown group members through participation in a production of Six Degrees of Separation in Rhode Island.

But why San Francisco, when New York would seem the obvious destination for East Coast collegians looking for a comedy career? For
one thing, Lee says, he spent a year after college there and found it overwhelming. Also, Vogl says, San Francisco had a lower cost of
living than the Big Apple and a reputation as a supportive environment for the performing arts. And finally, many in the group had a desire “to get 3,000 miles away from our families and hometowns,” says Vogl.

Once here, they had immediate intentions to start performing together. “We were just at an age when we thought we could do stuff,” Charney asserts. Without consulting the others, he reserved the theater space at Grasshopper Palace — with no performance planned. Essentially, he dared the Lobsters-to-be to improvise. “I told them, ‘Either you can do something with me, or I’ll be doing a really bad one-person show.'”

The performance went reasonably well, but the group toiled in near-obscurity for the next few years. Vogl and Charney in particular
contributed large amounts of their own money to the organization, which was run out of an apartment shared by a few members in the Lower Haight. The costume room was the back porch. All 12 members had their own apartment keys; someone was there almost every hour of the day making press kits, sending out postcards, or honing sketches. The Lobsters, then as now, were disciplined about their work, and stories of wild parties and debauchery are few and far between. When compared to the wild times of comedians like John Belushi and Chris Farley, the Lobsters’ lives seem downright tame. “No Lobsters have been to rehab,” says Vogl.

The seriousness of their effort paid off, however, when a performance at the 1999 San Francisco Fringe Festival called Killing My Lobster
Boards Flight 354 finally propelled them into orbit. The Fringe Festival booked them at the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, which, at 300
seats, was the biggest space they’d ever performed in.

The hourlong show took place in an airport and was highlighted by a skit about a Palo Alto high school Spanish teacher who called herself
Señora Lori Dow-Moore. Sra. Dow-Moore, played by Paige, was leading her “Spanish Dos” class when she mistook a man reading a Gabriel García Márquez novel for an actual Colombian. She pestered the man ad nauseam with rudimentary Spanish questions; of course he didn’t speak a lick of the language.

The sketch went over so well that the group received a “Best of the Fringe” award and was invited to do three more performances for the
festival. The Lobsters wrote up 354 as a pilot TV script, and, at the instigation of Wolanske, who lived in Los Angeles at the time, they acquired an agent and found themselves shuttling between Northern and Southern California on an almost weekly basis.

They ended up doing a showcase for HBO executives at that network’s performance space in Hollywood, and for a year were in contact with them about the possibility of filming a series à la Mr. Show or Kids in the Hall. In the end HBO didn’t bite.

Vogl, the most caffeinated and hippest-dressing of the group and its main public-relations person, seems uncharacteristically reluctant to
talk about the disappointment. “When it all came down, our first obligation was to do good work here,” he says. It seems likely that had the HBO gig worked out, the Lobsters would have flown the Bay Area coop. But they’re still here, and trying to make the best of it.

“We want to keep establishing a strong audience base, to grow into an institution, to make [the Lobsters] a part of what the San Francisco experience is,” Wolanske says.

Vogl’s long-term goal is for the group to own its own performance space for live shows and the hi/lo (that is, high concept/ low budget)
film festival, which the Lobsters organize. To make this happen, they are relying on a disciplined work ethic and business model emphasized since the inception of the troupe.

“A lot of people we work with aren’t comedians at all,” says Vogl. “Some of our friends are MBAs, they sit down with us once in a while
and say, ‘If you want to do all this, this is what you have to do.'” The Lobster Theatre Project is now a nonprofit arts organization, of
which the Killing My Lobster sketch comedy group is the “comedy subsidiary.” The Lobsters receive foundation grants, and in 2003 are, for the first time, able to pay members a stipend.

Vogl takes as a model the Second City troupe in Chicago, which was founded by University of Chicago students but now has franchises all over the country. In the short term, however, Vogl would just like to quit his day job. “Nobody can survive in San Francisco doing Lobster
stuff,” he says. “But that’s the goal.”

They aren’t Second City yet, but the Lobsters now have their own office space, complete with a scanner, copier, computer, television,
VCR, and some floor area in which to practice. The performance venues have expanded over time, too. The group’s 19th full-length show begins this week at the Brava Theater, a one-time Mission District movie house with approximately 370 seats.

The humor has grown up, as well. One of the group’s signature sketches, performed recently at S.F. Sketchfest, is called “Sunday
Afternoon.” Starring Charney and Lee, it focuses on the breakup of a gay couple who do not speak actual dialogue. Instead, the characters mouth semantic descriptions of platitudes:

Man 1: Awkward greeting.
Man 2: Nervous greeting.
Man 1: Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit …
Man 2: Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit …
Man 1: Awkward pause.
Man 2: Filler, filler, filler …
Man 1: Obligatory comment about the weather, obligatory comment about the weather.
Man 2: Insincere laughter.
Man 1: Probing question.
Man 2: Evasive remark.
Man 1: Confusion … slightly suspicious.
Man 2: Blatant lie.
Man 1: Acceptance. Second thought, probing question.
Man 2: Restructuring blatant lie.
Man 1: Recognition of blatant lie … expressing doubt.
Man 2: Defensive remark.
Man 1: Accusation.
Man 2: Irrelevant counteraccusation.
Man 1: Shock. Thoughtless remark
Man 2: Sigh of utter disgust.
Man 1: Fake apology, fake apology, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit …
Man 2: Serious remark.
Man 1: Shifting into serious tone …

Man 2 eventually breaks up with Man 1, who slaps him, and who then is given an “obligatory offering of continuing friendship,” which he
refuses.

In late January, the group takes a night off from rehearsals to work on a side project. The Killing My Lobster Cabaret is a variety show
put on the last Wednesday of every month at the Make-Out Room, a Mission District bar. It is a benefit for the Coalition on Homelessness and features local sketch comedy groups, stand-up acts, short films, bands, and, sometimes, yodeling.

Though many of the Cabaret’s performers are Lobsters, its spontaneity and anything-goes mantra are a big departure from the carefully crafted sketches of the group’s stage performances.

January’s show is hosted by Bewley, in character as his alter ego Dale, a parody of a host you might see as a comedy act in a
second-rate Reno casino. Dale wears oversize, tinted sunglasses and a cheap suit, and spouts the type of one-liners that are normally heard with a drum tap afterward.

“I’ve had a few drinks,” he says lazily, climbing onto the Make-Out Room’s elevated stage with exaggerated difficulty. It is the first
Cabaret since its venue changed from Cafe Du Nord, and about 30 people are in the audience.

The crowd is never quite sure when Bewley is being serious and when he isn’t. He says he does caricatures, and calls up a young woman who sits patiently while he draws a figure that looks nothing like her and is wearing pirate garb. “I only know how to draw pirates,” Dale/Bewley finally admits.

He calls up Wolanske twice to perform, first as the character Alden Mount, a soft-spoken gentleman who recites terrible puns from his
“pocket book of boners.” Wolanske’s enthusiasm never flags, even when a flutter of boos hangs in the air. His second character is an inept impressionist who attempts to portray Eleanor Roosevelt and Beverly D’Angelo, but can’t even do Jack Nicholson right.

This goes over fabulously, but not every part of the Cabaret is received as well. A duo calling itself “The Doctor and Captain Show” organizes a laborious multimedia game involving members of the audience playing a variation of Scrabble. The video screen is blurry, and the game drags out for more than 15 minutes.

Comedy perfection is not the Cabaret’s aim, says Gabe Weisert, an admirer of the variety show before he joined the Lobsters. “They take risks; they’re not afraid to go out there and bomb in search of something different. They’re not afraid to die for their cause.”

Bewley gathers much of the talent for the Cabaret through connections made from his day job as program director at New Langton Arts, an art gallery and performance space South of Market. Other Lobsters work as waitresses, freelance writers, film and video teachers, and in public relations for the American Conservatory Theater, among other professions. Although none of them has been able to quit a day job, almost all the Lobsters have been able to avoid desk work of the downtown, mind-numbing variety.

Instead, they satirize it.

Their short film 8+4, which aired on Comedy Central’s Web site, recalls the movie Office Space in its “Why are we here?” ponderings of corporate life. But the Lobster critique is more ruthless.

In the first scene, an anonymous and slightly dim office worker played by Wolanske is taking an order from a corporate client. The caller says that he wants four more “units” to go along with the eight units he ordered last time.

“OK,” says Wolanske, thinking hard. “That’s just simple math.”

He writes “8 + 4” down on a scrap of paper. “OK. Just need to run the numbers now.” A confused look comes over his face.

“So you ordered eight last week. I’m just trying to, you know, sort this all out now. Trying to get a good picture of where you’re coming
from.” Under his breath: “Eight, and then, you’re calling back because you need four more ….”

He takes out a set of Popsicle sticks. “Just walk with me here for a second. Because oftentimes when you do the math, you forget that
you’re working with real things.” He counts out sticks for a few moments, but this doesn’t help either.

“It could be a negative number, couldn’t it?”

He looks around frantically for assistance.

“Can I put you on hold for a second? I just want to run it through our accounts-receivable department and get a more accurate number from them. OK? I’m just gonna put you on hold for one second. I think it’s some nice music today, Yanni at Red Rocks.”

Someone from accounts receivable enters, and then soon the head of accounting. The group discusses possible methods for determining the sum, including the use of multiplication, subtraction, and Venn diagrams.

Eventually an entire task force is assembled to seek a solution, but it fails, bounced from one meeting room to another by departments that have already reserved the rooms. Meanwhile, the client stays on hold.

It’s a simple joke, and over the course of the 20-minute video, it gets pounded into the ground, again and again, in unconscious reflection of the Lobster comic aesthetic and work ethic. They may seem like slackers, but they’re not going to quit telling jokes until you start laughing.