Interview by: Camille Pugliese, Managing Editor
Welcome to the Mess Fest Interview Series! Through and beyond Mess Fest, we will be sharing interviews with many great comedic minds from across the festival. Camille sat down with Kathryn Courtney and Robert Vetter, fourth-year Comedy Arts majors and members of the production team for Mess Fest, after the festival ended to discuss how Mess Fest has evolved, the mechanics of running a student-led festival, and the joy of getting a show up on its feet.
Can you introduce yourself and your role in the creation of Mess Fest and any shows you participated in?
Kathryn: I'm Kathryn Courtney. I am the executive producer of Mess Fest, so I've been in charge of the whole festival, as well as in the Anchor Show, which performs every night of the festival and was directed by Jeff Booth.
I've done a couple other things. I was in Chip Chats and I was in The Adventures of Fates and Fellows.
Robert: I ran the marketing for Mess Fest, so that entailed the marketing for the Mess Fest Festival as a whole–graphic design and putting together a cohesive visual story for it.
Then reaching out to different places to write about Mess Fest and Cover Mess Fest. So like the TTS marketing office, The Grappler, The Chicago Reader, and the Annoyance, getting together with them to figure out how we are going to work together to publicize this best.
It’s really been finding and meeting comedy and theatre outlets in the city and then figuring out how they can promote Mess Fest. I also worked with all of the show heads to create a marketing plan for how they were gonna market their individual show.
In the festival, I had my standup that opened for Dwight Drizzle D. I had the Midnight Puppet show. I had the drag show. I gave a Chip Chat and then what else? Oh, and then I got interviewed for the S Train Press Junket Late Night Show. Oh, and I have a staged reading series on Saturday.
What was the process of choosing shows for Mess Fest like?
Kathryn: I worked on green-lighting all of the shows. Liz [Joynt-Sandberg] and I decided that we've got this space for four days, let's see how much we can pack in here.
The shows go from five to midnight every night. It's like seven hours of shows for four days straight. It’s insane. And then there are shows happening in two theatres, so there's ten plus shows happening each night. There was very little that I wasn't like, “yeah, go for it.”
This year with Mess Fest, it was really a trial and error process of seeing what students can actually accomplish on their own with student directing and producing.
I think in years' future that might change and the selection process might be more decisive, but this year I just wanted every student to be a part of something that they were passionate about and wanted to make.
How did you find The Annoyance as your home for the festival?
Robert: Liz works really closely with The Annoyance. She’s part of a team that performs at the Annoyance every Friday night called Baby Wine. A lot of us in Comedy Arts open for them. I've opened for them four times. One of the producers at The Annoyance, Joe McDaniel, has been a pretty big fan of the work that we do in Comedy Arts, and he's been really supportive.
Kathryn: During the school year, we have Sunday night shows. So every Sunday we get about a 90-minute slot at The Annoyance to make whatever comedy we want. It is student produced, and I think through that partnership of us getting to perform at The Annoyance, we figured out that it was just a good space for us. It's a comedy theatre, everybody who works there is suited for what we're doing and they get it.
If we say like, “it's just an improv show, pull the light.” So there is a language barrier of comedy, but it isn't as big of an issue there because you're speaking the same comedic language. There's less formality being able to have a whole crew of comedians.
Robert: It's just kind of a known hub for new and upcoming comedy in the city, and so it fits very nicely, like what Mess Fest is about.
So what do you feel Mess Fest is about?
Robert: Last year's Mess Fest was put up at DePaul, and so we got the experience of rehearsing and putting up a comedy show, which was extremely helpful. But having done comedy in the city since then, it's just a very different experience than Mess Fest at DePaul was. So this is feeling a lot closer to it.
There's not as much formal preparation because a lot of it is going off and rehearsing with people and doing that on your own schedule, but showing up prepared. And you really grind for that week and then you're just there in and out of other people's shows backstage for a while.
You have very tight turnarounds, you can go to the bar in between shows and you can interact with the audience more in between shows. The theatres are smaller and a little bit more intimate, which is really nice.
Do you find that this very ‘do it yourself’ nature of Mess Fest speaks to what's happening now in the comedy industry?
Robert: I think so. I mean, I hope so because it's been very fun putting it up this way.
Kathryn: Absolutely. There's something really interesting going on in comedy, and we're seeing it really closely within Mess Fest.
During the pandemic, with Second City falling apart and then having to be rebuilt and IO falling apart and later closing–we're seeing these big comedy institutions that are built on hierarchical ideas fall apart, and we’re also watching them realize that they are not adhering to the ethos of the new fresh comedy that they claim to make. Mess Fest is a really gorgeous example of how if you just let people make what they want, they will make it and it will be good.
Robert: There also has been, especially with the pandemic and people just kind of like making their own comedy work and more people breaking out through social media. I mean, like Sarah Squirm getting on SNL was a really momentous moment for us in our class. I remember the next day we came class to class and we felt if she can do that, we can do anything like it.
It does feel like the tide is shifting. More and more people are adjusting toward the dream. It’s very artistically fulfilling. A lot of people were feeling the same way with Mess Fest. It feels like people doing stuff that they want to do and is very uniquely theirs.
"Mess Fest is a really gorgeous example of how if you just let people make what they want, they will make it and it will be good."
How has the unique position of being a comedy student in Chicago shaped your work and the creation of Mess Fest?
Robert: I've had a really nice community of people being in the city. I found people I know that I really like to work with. We all gravitate towards different aspects of comedy, but it's nice to see people you like go to their different areas and support them there.
Kathryn: There is this really beautiful sense of community and then now that the festival's happened, you can feel it backstage of people being like, “I gotta run, do my show. But like, your show was great.”
Robert: Yeah. I think having a community and wanting to keep that sense of community has been very helpful in shaping Mess Fest. It just felt very supportive. Everyone backstage is checking in with each other.
Kathryn: There is never a moment where that backstage area is not full of people all saying, “I can't believe we're doing this. I've got a show in 10 minutes.” It's just awesome in the way that people are rising to this challenge. They’re doing it with poise as well as tenacity and they’re funny!
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