The Nerdist Way_ How to Reach the Next Level (In Real Life) - Chris Hardwick [16]
A comedy theater I’ve had the extreme pleasure of performing at for the last several years is the UCB (Upright Citizens Brigade) in New York and L.A. Founders Matt Besser, Matt Walsh, Ian Roberts, and Amy Poehler were students of Improv Olympic in Chicago and trained by improv legend Del Close himself. In addition to showcasing some of the best performers in comedy, the UCB also has improv training classes. If you buy a sticker, T-shirt, or sweatshirt from the UCB, it’s likely to have the following imperative phrase on it: “Don’t Think.” Of course, there are many, many more rules to good improv, but the basic philosophy is solid. Don’t let your brain get in your way and disrupt your flow.
In 2008, Rob Zombie called me (lemme just pick up that name I dropped) and asked if my Nerdy musical comedy band Hard ’n Phirm (i.e., Chris Hardwick and Mike Phirman) would be interested in doing the theme song to an animated film he was making, The Haunted World of El Superbeasto, which was based on his comic book of the same name. “Of course, Rob Zombie!” I said. After we turned it in, Rob called back and said, “Would you want to just go ahead and do all of the songs so there’s a consistent comedic tone to the music? Only thing is, we’re in the process of mixing sound so we’d need them all, well, now . . .” “Uh . . . sure, Rob. We can . . . do that . . . NO PROBLEM.” [nervous chuckle, pee trickle exits body]
So we did it. In five days. The process went like this: Get the scene in the morning that needed a song, write it, record it, send it back. From start to finish, each song took about six hours. It was like a goddamn comedy music boot camp. And it was AWESOME. It was easily one of the most valuable writing experiences of my life. We didn’t have time to second-guess. We didn’t have time to procrastinate with doubts. And you know what? I can’t say we would have been any happier with the results had we labored and pulled our hair out over it. Granted, Rob didn’t love every single one of them. We turned in one song called “Velvet Von Black’s Theme” that he HATED. I got the call at 8:00 a.m. “Hey, yeah, that’s not really directionally where I wanted to go with that.” Despite his image, Rob did not pull our still-beating hearts out of our rib cages while slurping out the blood to a cackling demonic incantation. He’s a kind and thoughtful dude. Because we had zero time to beat ourselves up about it, we took a completely different pass, which ended up becoming his favorite track of the lot.
Aside from trying to tell you what your limitations are, your brain will also try to run emotion programs to get you to react to things spontaneously. As cool as it would be, however, YOU ARE NOT A ROBOT, and you can choose not to run these programs. Here’s another example! As a cable and new media “star,” I get a lot of emails/tweets/comments from people about various things. Sometimes it’s to tell me I suck or it’s an aggressive query as to why I would do something I did. One time the E! channel aired an episode of my show Web Soup in place of an episode of the original The Soup. Sacrilege, I know. The email went something like this:
Hey asshole. The next time you decide to run your shitty show instead of The Soup, can you please let my fucking DVR know so I don’t have to look at your stupid face???
There were several things that made me laugh about this. Number one, any email that starts with the salutation “Hey asshole” is going to be gold. Second, I appreciate the fact that this gentleman thinks I have enough power at NBC Universal to inform programming decisions. Third, he seems to think I’m a DVR Whisperer who can talk to machinery. My first impulse was to invite him to eat a dick salad with fuck-off dressing. But then I imagined what his day might have been like. He probably worked hard at a crappy job he hates, and one can only assume that the fact that he clearly has acid for blood and spiders where his heart