Interview by: Josephine Clarke, Guest Writer
This interview is part of The Grappler's Mess Fest Interview Series. Robert Vetter is the head of the BUMF and Stupid Smart events in the event. He is a BFA3 Comedy Arts Major.
To start, what is BUMF?
So there is a type of comedy, there’s a comedy scene in Chicago that a lot of people have come up through and it’s called live lit. Samantha Irby came up through it. She's extremely talented and she wrote the book We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, she wrote Meaty, she wrote Wow, No Thank You, she’s writing another one soon, she’s extremely funny. And those are events where people bring comedic writing and comedic essays that are written to be performed. It’s a form of comedic storytelling. Sometimes it is, sometimes it’s not necessarily storytelling, sometimes it’s just an essay. It functions a lot like standup in the way that someone goes up to a mic and they read, but comedy writing is just kind of a different practice than standup in terms of how you focus things, how you put jokes in, how the jokes work. You can put in a lot more sleeper jokes in writing pieces, I’ve found. For the record, a sleeper joke, it’s a joke where you can plow through it with more context and more exposition and then people go back and go like, “oh shit, I get it” or you can set up a lot and loop back around, you can do a lot more with wordplay. It functions differently than stand up, whereas in a standup routine you would move through a couple of things in a very short period of time, with live lit you would stay on one thing, but there’s more written exploration. So it’s an open mic of people reading their writing.
And what is Stupid Smart?
Stupid Smart is a conference on comedic theory studies. It takes a scientific, or sociological, or a look at comedy as a cultural phenomenon. So a bunch of people wrote academic papers about comedy and they’re giving those presentations at this conference which is extremely exciting because people see comedy as –and it is– sort of goofy, but it has a mathematical reason for why it works and it has such a purpose and there’s so much to explore within literally just the biological phenomenon of laughing and writing things that aren’t true but are funny and doing things that aren’t true but are funny. Or “aren’t true.”
Josephine: Aren’t objectively true-
Aren’t objectively true but are funny. So I think that there’s a lot of stuff to explore there that hasn’t been explored academically at the college level, that I know of, in terms of universities that offer comedy theory degrees and comedy studies degrees and I think that’s really interesting.
What have you learned throughout this process?
That the people that I work with are extremely capable and I can trust them. This process has really solidified my trust in other people because both of my events are open-mic style events and so I could just go, “oh, by the way, by this date I need this, by this date I need this,” and then I look at it, I give them feedback, rather than needing to helicopter them. I’m very grateful for all the people that I’ve gotten to work with because they’re all super capable. That goes for both. It’s been very nice to have such a hands-off process and allow parts to move without me watching them move, just because I trust that they know what they’re doing.
How do these projects fit into your own personal practice?
I am a comedy writer as my job now. I got hired by the Hard Times, and my first article with them went up about a week ago. And in my own comedic practice, I write a lot. I’m writing a lot of stuff for Mess Fest and just kind of helping out where writing needs to be done like I’m writing some stuff for hosting for one of the events. I'm not gonna host but I’m ghostwriting it. Tonight I have to ghost-write a Tinder bio for someone cause that’s also something that I do as a freelancer. I’m a freelance writer, so that means I belong to a lot of different conglomerates and a lot of different groups, but at the end of the day it’s my work. I think it perfectly encompasses that. I think, with my comedic writing, it’s just kind of bringing pieces that I’ve already written which is really exciting. And then with my Stupid Smart presentation, I’m a documentary studies minor, and so this is a really cool way to combine them both. As someone who’s studying comedy, you have to justify why you’re studying it all the time to yourself and other people because it is a really funny thing to study. And I’m working for one of the biggest comedy writing websites that is on the internet and I am not making very much money. It’s just something where you have to remind yourself why you do it and so I took time to interrogate that and go, “well why? What is my comedy reacting to? What is my comedic purpose? What is my artistic purpose?” It’s cool looking at it through that lens.
And then today (for reference we’re doing this after we teched some stuff) I saw the presentations for the academic conference and I’m so excited because they’re so good but they’re all so different. I’m really grateful I got to work with so many amazing people.
This is the first time Comedy Arts has had a full show, so what has that been like?
I hope it goes up in the future because I think it’s been very successful and it’s been a really nice way to bring so many other people into it and share the space with them. I’m really grateful we have some talented improvisers from other majors. For example, there are some really talented improvisers in CHIP Chats who are not from Comedy Arts. BUMF has four Comedy Arts majors and two Playwrights. I think everyone can be funny, but it’s about shifting your mindset of being in the headspace of writing comedy, which essentially is a normal practice, but applying pressure and having no time to do it and going up with a half-formed show, not half-formed necessarily but not fully formed, and you have to exercise a lot of autonomy. I’ve tried to do that with my participants by saying, “you can do whatever you want with these prompts. I will be overseeing it, but if it’s funny and you can sell it to me, who am I to say no?” So I think that that’s really fun. I think in the future, I think we need to sit everybody down and be like, “It’s okay that’s it’s going to be not fully together. That being said, anticipate that it’s not fully together.” Because I think this year it’s been really nice, but there are some parts that are like, “Oh crap, this isn’t feeling like the vision that we had.” In my events, that’s happened too, but you just have to roll with the punches. Where there is an obstacle, there are so many ways around it. If there’s a hurdle in your path, you can walk around it. Who’s to say you have to jump it?
How has working with people outside of comedy arts influenced you?
It’s fun to see people outside of how regimented the Theatre School is sometimes. It’s really cool because this has been a space where you can really go, “I know that you have good ideas. Just bring them.” What I found very inspiring was being in a room with people and having them be really engaged in it. That being said, especially with comedy because I am protective of it because I’m studying it and it’s what I do now, professionally. I think in the future it would be cool to have improv seminars with the Mess Fest company. I think we could do that in the future to get people into the collaboration mindset because my improv classes have helped me so much with working with other people. I think, had I not taken so much improv over the last year and a half and read all of Improv for the Theatre I would be in a different place.
What are you hoping audiences will take from the performances?
I’m hoping people laugh at the comedy writing because it’s so individual that it’s even a little bit more of the individual’s voice. The idea of bombing with something that is written in my voice and it’s not funny? But I trust it, I trust it will be good, and I’ve been workshopping my stuff. And then with Stupid Smart, I hope people don’t get bored. I hope that they enjoy it and I hope that they see purpose to it because I think that the event has a lot of purpose and it’s a very worthwhile endeavor to get a bunch of people together to give academic talks for a couple hours about comedy. Like, it’s a couple HOURS. That’s what’s so exciting to me, that you can fill a couple hours’ worth of materials. I’m hoping people enjoy it and don’t get bored. And I’m hoping people find the comedy writing funny. It’s extremely hard to write comedy and then throw it out to the void of the Internet because for every piece I’ve gotten probably twenty rejections. It’s so subjective. So it’s about finding where your voice fits. I have a piece that’s out right now that I’m waiting to hear back about and it’s been in the pool for a while.
Any further comments?
Something that I thought about a lot with this is how to market it right within the voice of the show. So giving a thematic voice to the marketing and making the marketing itself funny. I taught myself a lot of graphic design stuff for this and a lot of the graphics have come out very well, cause it’s so student-produced. Which is exciting because while it has felt like a big project, me and everybody else in Comedy Arts, we’re doing this so constantly that it’s been like, “pull some pieces out of the hopper.” So it’s been really interesting working with other majors in it. It’s a little satisfying because I feel like people are starting to realize, “Oh! This is hard. This is very hard to do. And I have to do it. And I will want to do it again in the future. But it’s hard.” I feel like I’m just better as a producer, which is good. As a producer and as a writer.
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Josephine (she/her) is a third-year dramaturg. She is incredibly interested in dramaturgy and comedy and how the two intersect. Her practice is defined by flexibility and creativity, and she strives to make dramaturgy as dynamic as possible.
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