DAY 20 - EXTENDED PLAY

HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE SHOW TONIGHT?

GRIFF: We had fun despite the lack of an audience. It sucks trying to get performers to laugh. You can’t rely on that to feel good about yourself.

JAMES: It’s always tough to play to a small house. But it’s something that you really can’t avoid unless you’re TJ and/or Dave. Tonight we played to just the other teams featured in Extended Play, and it was a quiet house to say the least.We played with Ryan Nallen, who worked a magical duel into the show for the second time (I like this guy’s style), and Anthony Oberbeck, who I could have watched do magic tricks with an invisible knife for an hour. I liked the show because we stayed true to the stuff that I’ve been wanting to work on (keeping all of the characters in one world, making them relate and interact with each other), and the other guys were making me laugh. THere was one point when we basically had two different scenes going on at once, which bothered me. One of us should have given up the focus, and it probably should have been me.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN ABOUT GRIFF / JAMES?

GRIFF: He’s able to have fun and make himself laugh regardless of the situation surrounding him. James enjoys improv more than performing. That sounds weird. I mean as far as priorities go, improv is way up there, then enjoying himself, then his mustache, then the audience. Wish I was there.

JAMES:I don’t know how Ryan did it by himself when he did this month of improv back in January. Being able to talk about the show with Griff afterwards and compare it to other shows that we’ve done is one of the only things keeping me sane right now. So that’s not really something that I learned about him, but I’ll watch closely tonight for something more interesting.

HOW DO YOU FEEL / WHAT DID YOU LEARN ABOUT IMPROV?

GRIFF: When you’ve got nothing you have to focus on the other players. I wish I had done that harder and jumped in full force rather than feeling like “No one is laughing. This must not be fun”. It is really hard to make an empty room laugh but you can definitely make yourself and your friends happy. Also I learned how much I truly love Anthony Oberbeck and Ryan Nallen. They are two of the most solid dudes I’ve ever met. That’s what I learned about improv. Make friends. Don’t be a dick.

JAMES: You have to make it fun for you, especially when it’s a small house. When you’ve got a huge crowd that’s really into it, you can get caught up in the wave of energy and just ride that through the show. When you’ve got little to no audience response, you need to find the energy in the other people you’re onstage with. At one point we turned the show inward and that’s when it got really fun for me.

WHAT’S THE REAL LAST QUESTION TODAY YOU DIPSHIT?

IF GRIFFIN WAS TO DISAPPEAR FROM THE FACE OF THE EARTH, WOULD ANYONE NOTICE AND/OR CARE?

GRIFF: No, because everyone was still in shock from the brutal reenactment of 9/11 performed by James Dugan (editor's note: James kept changing his name to the word "me" here because he's afraid of truth). Singlehandedly. In New York.

JAMES: Hey man, my dad reads this blog (im a butthole) keep it clean (I eat children’s poop).

GRIFF: He’s gotta grow up sooner or later and see the monster his son has become.

JAMES: I think I’d be concerned until I got hungry and thought about other more important things.

GRIFF: Let’s just post this. Truce?

JAMES: Truce.