Sometime next month, Action Boyz podcast subscribers will listen to comedians Jon Gabrus, Ben Rodgers, and Ryan Stanger give a warmly received, nearly three-hour play-by-play breakdown of the 1985 Chuck Norris cop flick Code of Silence to a packed Chicago ballroom. And when they hear those three improvisers and friends perform a tsunami of inspired riffs, impressions, and inside jokes, in all likelihood, those subscribers will be listening alone.
Over at the bar, someone has left out a cardboard box of red buttons with the words “janitor” and “kisses for Stanger” emblazoned on them, nods to recurring jokes about the show’s listenership (“Who is cleaning all the middle schools?!” jokes Gabrus at the top of the show) and fan solidarity with the lovingly razzed cohost.
For Matt Besser, a founding member of the Upright Citizens Brigade who now hosts Improv4humans, putting his ASSSCAT-inspired podcast in front of a live audience—like the one at the Apollo in Lincoln Park the night before—is something of a homecoming and return to form for the show. (ASSSCAT is the UCB’s signature improv show, in which an audience suggestion inspires a story, which is then the basis for long-form improv.) The more complicated challenge for Besser came when he first launched the series, which took a comedy club performance format into a studio with microphones.
It can also present an interesting catch-22 for performers that encourages them to step out of their studio-based comfort zone. “The one trap that I think a lot of shows get caught in [for] their live shows is they try to do it exactly the same as in their normal shows,” says Please Make This cohost Spencer D. Blair. A regular episode with cohosts Laura Petro and Hobert Thompson involves conceptualizing and writing a spec screenplay to be performed by guest actors; for live shows, they condense about an hour’s worth of script pitching to about 20 minutes. “We were talking afterwards about how utterly exhausted we were.”
