Dying is easy, Comedy is hard: The Doubtful Guests
I’m going to start by talking about film, and then I promise I will get back to theatre.
“Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”
This famous aphorism made its way into popular culture by Peter O’Toole in the movie My Favorite Year. My Favorite Year is about a has-been actor reduced to doing a television comedy show in the 1950s. However, O’Toole’s line is a version of an actual death-bed statement from actor Edmund Gwenn.
Edmund Gwenn
Gwenn is best known for playing Santa Claus in the famous 1947 movie Miracle on 34th Street, although he had a long stage career. At the age of 81, Gwenn was in bed, literally dying of pneumonia and in great pain when one of his friends said to him, “It must be very difficult for you, Teddy.” Gwenn took a breath and said, “Not as difficult as playing comedy.”
And then he died.
Really.
No, really.
Comedy is generally not honored. Look at all 92 “Best Picture” Oscar winners (excluding musicals) and where are the comedies? It Happened One Night (1935), You Can’t Take It With You (1939), Tom Jones (1963), The Sting (1973), Annie Hall (1977), and Shakespeare in Love (1998). And 75 dramas.
If you look at the “Best Play” Tony Award winners, the percentages are similar.
The comedian Jon Lovitz once complained that comic performances tend not to win awards, because, he theorized, people look at those performances and think, “Oh, well, they’re not doing anything special, that’s just what they do.” He said that when comedians win awards it’s frequently for not doing “what they do.” Like Robin Williams winning for Good Will Hunting, or Mo’Nique for Precious. Lovitz’s example of performance worthy of a best-actor Oscar was Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor, who played five roles in that film - all of them funny, and all of them human.
There are two ways to account for comedy getting short shrift. One idea is that comedy is not seen as serious art form. (It was not possible to construct that sentence without the word “serious” in it. Sorry.) And the other way to account for it is that drama is easy compared to comedy. As a result, there are much fewer examples of good comedy. So of course, drama gets honored more. The truth probably lies somewhere between the two. But if I had to guess, I would say it lists toward the idea that comedy is harder than drama. Much harder.
Which brings me to The Doubtful Guests. I will try to describe what they do in the most vivid way possible, which in fact might not be possible. So hang in there.
The Doubtful Guests are Jason Ades, Sabrina Hill, Todd Stashwick, and Ezra Weisz, four actor/comedians who do a long-form improv show. Long-form improv is exactly what it sounds like: one evening-length improvisation where characters, themes, and plots recur and have a dramatic arc. And it’s funny. Long-form improv, which is now performed quite liberally, was pioneered by comedy legends Del Close and Charna Halpern in Chicago in the 1980s. Del Close’s incarnation of it was called “The Harold.”
However, The Doubtful Guests longed for something more creative than what they called “improv in t-shirts,” which was basically all that improv offered at the time: “Give us the name of a place!” “Give us a profession!” “Give us an object you might find in the kitchen!”
The concept of the The Doubtful Guests is the brainchild of actor Todd Stashwick, an improv and Second City veteran. Stashwick, noting improv’s disrespected status, has described it as “a shame-based art form,” and believes that “many people don’t want to consider it real theatre or real acting.” (please refer to my thesis above…)
Inspired by Shockheaded Peter, the British musical based on a gruesome German children’s book, Stashwick envisioned an improv show with similar production values: a cross between Chaplin, Grand Guignol and Edward Gorey, and maybe a little Clockwork Orange.
Collaborating with Hill, Weisz and Ades, they created the characters of Vesta, Vascillus, Riffus and Bawk: four British Victorians who died in a brothel fire in 1888 and were tortured in hell by being forced to perform improv for all eternity in a cabaret of the damned. And it’s a musical.
Now, that’s a show.
Ezra Weisz, Todd Stashwick, Jason Ades and Sabrina Hill
Photo by Steve Rogers
I saw the show in Los Angeles, and I could not believe that they were actually going to do what was advertised:
AN ENTIRELY IMPROVISED MACABRE BURLESQUE
A CROSS BETWEEN MONTY PYTHON AND BERTOLT BRECHT
A character-based, Victorian, ghastly, musical-comedy which was completely made up on the spot?
Really? Where do I get tickets?
If you can picture Sweeney Todd, where the entire plot is invented right before your eyes, along with music and lyrics, you are close to understanding the magic and brilliance of their show.
Sabrina Hill and Todd Stashwick / Photo by Steve Rogers
Other than the fact that the show was hilarious, and like nothing I had ever seen, I was impressed by their rigorous adherence to the concept: four dead Victorians being forced to do improv. Although it was completely spontaneously invented, there was not a single reference to anything more recent than 1888. Let’s let that sink for in a moment. It would have been easy for them to come up with lines about some current event, or the latest movie, or celebrities, or some contemporary catchphrase, and that would have generated some easy laughs - BUT THEY DIDN’T. I can’t underline the significance of this enough. By creating that restriction, and making it that much harder for themselves, it was infinitely more satisfying to the audience. You were watching scrupulously-trained performers at the top of their game.
The Penny Dreadful. Left to right: Weston Walls, Geoffrey Schumann and Joe Lima / Photo by Steve Rogers
The show was accompanied by their own band, The Penny Dreadful. The musicians came from an improv background themselves, as they needed the flexibility to follow where the actors were taking the show each night.
Todd Stashwick, Ezra Weisz,m Jason Ades and Sabrina Hill.
Photo by Steve Rogers
On the subject of “Dying is easy” Sabrina Hill told me:
“It was dark. Someone always died or got murdered in a horrible way in every show.”
On the subject of “Comedy is hard” she said:
“The hardest thing is the level of energy and commitment it takes to do each show. If we’re doing a show on Halloween that means we have to start rehearsing in August. You have to build your endurance back up to it and we have to get that connection going between us and that chemistry. I’ve done a lot of stage work and I’ve never had the kind of chemistry that the four of us have doing that show.”
This is the twentieth anniversary of The Doubtful Guests. They have not performed together in a while because all four have individual creative projects, which has made it difficult for them to get together. But then again, they’re a group who are consigned to do improv for all eternity. So, as someone who has died and gone on to live again many times, Hill is optimistic:
“Hopefully, we’re not finished for good.”
