Interview: Comedian Shawn Westfall

Quit with the sex jokes and Dr. Evil impressions, forget what you think is funny, stop thinking about yourself, and act on impulse! The beautiful and truly hilarious moments in comedic improv result when people stop thinking about themselves and start reacting in the moment to contribute to the whole group scene. One must essentially abandon all that they know, strip themselves of their egos and logic, turn off their brains, and allow oneself to act in the “now” in order to create something out of nothing. When the “funny” arrives naturally, it is like no other experience and one is unable to explain why in fact the scene was so hilarious; those participating and in the audience indulge in a unique experience when engaging in improv. Take classes, write sketches, and get involved in a community, Shawn Westfall advises. His experiences as an improv performer and DC Improv instructor have proven him to be overly qualified in the improv world. With his unpleasant childhood, experience in the military, travel, English Literature background, and work as an advertising creative, Westfall surely has a wide range of skills and talents that have immensely benefited him in his comedy career. The following is a question and answer section that he granted over the phone:

Q: Can you tell me about your childhood growing up in Indiana? What were your dreams? Did you aspire to do comedy?

Westfall: “You’re right, I was born and raised in Indiana and if you can avoid at all being born and raised in Indiana, look into that.” (laughs) “I would not say that I had a very happy childhood. But it did benefit me because I think that when your childhood or adolescence is by terms, awful and boring- because it was either very very bad or very very boring-when this happens, your imagination tends to become more intensified for some reason. So, I found myself in situations where I was experiencing some pretty not-too-happy stuff or bored out of my mind and talking to myself in various voices and stuff like that. And doing a lot of thinking, staying up in my own head, which in turn made me somewhat self-conscious, which is a thing you need I think to be a performer in any medium. You have a degree of self-consciousness in order to understand how you appear onstage or how you come off in front of other people because you have to use that as a tool to become different personas and to understand how that persona may come off in front of them. So, growing up how I did, yeah, did contribute to my becoming an improvisational comedian because things were boring and I needed to find ways to entertain myself. I turned those tendencies of my personality into something that could benefit me.”

Q: You were in the military for some time, which in terms of comedy is ironic, how did your experience in the military affect you and your comedy?

Westfall: “The military did a couple of things for me. First of all, it taught me that I did not want to be in the military.” (laughs) “Second of all, some military experiences were rather boring, you find yourself at places stationed in god-forsaken places where there really isn’t anything else to do except entertain yourself and your fellow soldiers. I’ve been stationed in a lot of out-of-the-way places: Northern Maine, islands in the middle of the Atlantic where there really wasn’t much else to do besides do a lot of drinking and entertaining. So you sort of learn some things about your craft that way. Also, one things that the military does, and its very helpful for improvisational comedians or people that have to become different personas a lot is that you do meet a wide swath of the population. You meet a lot of people you never would have had you not spent time with them in the military dormitory and marching along side of them in god-forsaken places.”

“You know, Herman Melville, the great author, the guy who wrote Moby Dick, never went to college or set foot in a university and his famous phrase is that “a whale ship was my Harvard.” And I am not going to be that pretentious to say that my military service was my Harvard, but my military service did teach me a lot about life and the various types of people.”

Q: How has your majoring in English affected your comedy career?

Westfall: “Well, I don’t know if it’s helped my improv career but I do write for a living, I work in advertising. It’s interesting, I think my improv experience and my English Literature background have sort of coalesced into the job that I have now. I work in advertising, I am an advertising creative and my job is to think up new ways to sell products and services and a lot of that involves a lot of brainstorming in a specifically creative atmosphere. I think improv shows you that you do have to collaborate under high-pressure situations. Having had that kind of experience really does help me in my job. The creative process in which I have to indulge in every day is a lot like the improv process; where you start out and where you think you’re going to go are two completely different things and may have little to do with each other. Where you start out, you may think you’re going down one path, and then someone comes up with a completely different idea and you have to take that idea and kind of transform it into something else. The creative process that I go through in creating ads is a macrocosm of the creative process I go through on stage creating an improv stage out of basically nothing, working with other actors.”

Q: Have you received any kind of formal improv training?

Westfall: “Yeah, I did. I think that most improvisational actors do these days. Very few improvisational actors walk into a troupe off the street having had no improv training whatsoever. Almost everyone has gone through some class of some sort or have been bitten by the improv bug and taken it a step further for additional classes. So I highly recommend anyone wanting to do this to find a class either in your local area or if you find yourself on vacation in New York or Los Angeles, to go to one of the improv theaters and check out their classes and workshops.”

“It’s interesting how church-like--and I don’t mean that in a repressive way--improv is in that many of us look to one or two single people who sort of shape this art form and many of us take pride in that we’re taught by those that have gone and done this stuff a couple of decades ago. And the beauty of it is that you can go anywhere in the country that there is improv and receive training that’s similar in many ways to the training that people we’ve heard of like John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Mike Meyers, Chris Farley, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey and those people all received. The principles are all the same, they have changed very little; if you pay attention to the principles, you can be trained somewhat in the same way that your comedy heroes have been trained.”

Q: Delivery is crucial in comedy, what is you advice on delivering a joke or a line?

Westfall: “This is a question a lot of beginning improv students ask and this is my answer which may not make much sense, but: delivery is crucial in stand-up comedy because it’s just you up there on a brick wall façade with a microphone telling jokes, so the timing of your jokes are important otherwise its not going to be funny. In improv, to be funny, the last thing you should be doing is telling a joke. This is where a lot of people who come to improv have a misconception about it. They think that their job on an improv stage is to tell jokes. When people find out that I teach improv at the DC Improv, they say ‘oh okay, so you teach people to be funny?’ and I have to correct them and say, that what I actually teach them to do is to get the hell out of their own way because the thing that is preventing them from being funny is this sort of ego-driven, logic-driven mechanism in their brain that says ‘I am going to steer this scene that I am in into a categorically, understandably funny way that is comprehensible to me.’ Well, the problem with that is that there is sometimes one, or in some cases, two or three people on stage, who don’t think in the same funny way that you do. If you start indulging your ego and thinking about the way that you’re going to steer a scene into a funny premise or into a funny line is the second in which the scene gets very very confusing and goes off the rails rather quickly. It becomes the opposite of funny; the audience starts worrying about you because they start to substitute you with themselves.”

“True humor and the funny in improv happens when the people stop thinking and stop worrying about what’s going to happen next and they behave in the moment. The funny arises when they are feeling brave and honest enough to open up their mouths and say the first thing that pops into their heads at that moment. One of the last things we worry about in improv, which is distinct from improv since they do have to worry about these things, is whether or not we are delivering the line right. We can worry about delivering the lines honestly rather than funnily.”

Q: Are there any specific characters or personalities that you like to imitate?

Westfall: “Well, most improvisational actors can do a Christopher Walken or a Jack Nicholson and things like that. I don’t know that I necessarily have a specific impression, but I’m really good at playing angry characters and I’m not going to bore you with the psycho-drama behind that but I am really very good at being angry. For the most part, what I try to do as a character-based improvisational comedian, and there are other types of improvisational comedians to be fair, just as equally valid and funny, is to pay attention to what’s happening in front of me and then make a character choice that deserves that scene in some way. Anything as subtle from being a waiter in a scene with two other actors that are in a restaurant to perhaps playing a father figure to a son, daughter, or other younger character of some sort—however, I can serve the scene is going to drive the personalities that I choose.”

Q: What is the best way to approach improv?

Westfall: “I believe that the best way to approach improv is without any pre-conceived notions whatsoever. And I don’t mean that in the ‘oh be in the moment’ way; even those gifted, seasoned improvisational actors tend to stay in certain comedic ruts and the comedic ruts seem to derive from the audience for comedy these days. There are certain things that are always funny and they end up in movies a lot, you know? Like sex jokes are always funny and relationship situations are always funny and for the most part that’s true. And if I could wave a magic wand over my beginning students, I would have them abandon any notion of what they historically know to be funny because in many cases, at least in my experience, improv is sort of “found” comedy. It’s happening in the moment, you’re building scenes brick by brick, moment by moment, and the thing that might not make any sense to anyone outside the context of the scene, will end up being the funniest thing. Its so often for people who are nervous of the improv audience go away from a show unable to explain to people who weren’t there why this was so funny, you know? Why an umbrella being held in the hand of a man who--I don’t know, make something up--happened to be a dog salesman was funny. Well, in the context of the scene, if you were there, it would be clear to you why that was funny. Improv is contextual and its one of those things where you simply had to be there to see it otherwise it doesn’t make sense. Beginning improv students keep wanting to walk into my scene, doing jokes and characters even that they’ve already seen in movies. A lot of them want to do Dr. Evil, well, Dr. Evil is a character that Mike Meyers, a brilliant improvisational actor, created. So, I sort have to pull them away from that and say “look, that’s Mike Meyers’s creation. You can create something just as valid from your own imagination, why not do that?”…Until Mike Meyers thought that up, that wasn’t a funny character. You have the same opportunity and luxury and responsibility to do that.”

Q: What is your favorite: performing, teaching, observing?

Westfall: “I love performing, but I must admit—you know, I have a graduate degree in English Lit and I went through 12 years of schooling just like everyone else and I’ve had good and bad teachers, so I know what good teaching is like and I’m a really good teacher. And I think I am a really good teacher because I think I enjoy so much. I think we’ve all been able to have classroom experiences where we know that the teacher simply hated the material or was intimidated or put off by the fact that he or she had to teach. I love teaching and I’ve been doing it for seven years and I really enjoy and always have. My favorite moment in teaching is when—it happens like mid-way through my beginning classes—when the variety of different personalities begin coalescing and begin understanding, almost in like a fox-hole-esque mentality, that they’re all in this together. They all start, you know, maybe with a partner, and they’re all suspicious and checking each other out and wondering who is the funniest—am I the funniest? Are they? And by class three, all of those ego-driven motives disappear; they are all sitting there exchanging e-mails, they’re getting together after class—that’s my favorite part teaching. This art form is generous in so many ways and primarily, you are entertained and then it also brings people together who would of otherwise never have been together.”

Q: In performing in general, it seems that one either has “it” or they don’t. Do you agree?

Westfall: “In a limited way, yes. There are some people who are natural performers, they just like being up in front of other people, and they’re not intimidated by it at all. That said, when I first began teaching improv, I learned some pretty interesting lessons about the learning curve involved in this. The first couple classes, I would sort of “rack and stack” my students and say to myself ‘he’s got it or she’s got it and he’s going to struggle’ and I’d be surprised, in those initial classes, about who took the next steps, who actually came out of nowhere...so those students that I initially wrote off in my own head, actually taught me some significant lessons about how to get to the funny and showing me that even the paths that I thought were not the paths that you should walk towards in improv aren’t necessarily the ones. So as a teacher, I am constantly learning these lessons. You should refrain from categorizing one as less-gifted because he or she will always surprise you, without a doubt.”

Q: Why have you traveled so much? What was/is your favorite place to perform?

Westfall: “I have traveled so much because, well, I spent four years in the military. After I got out of the military, I married a woman, for 12 years, who was also in the military. So, as she perused her military career, I kind of followed her around so that’s why I’ve lived in Utah, Texas, Hawaii, and I actually lived in the D.C. area in the early nineties when my ex-wife was stationed at the Pentagon. Where do I enjoy performing the most? Definitely D.C. It’s my home now and I never plan on leaving. I love the community that I’m able to be a part of.”

Q: What is your favorite TV show?

Westfall: “My favorite show is Curb Your Enthusiasm because it does show you how much improv has permeated performances and Hollywood productions. I mean if you had gone to a studio head or network head 30 years and ago and said “we’re going to do a sitcom and we’re not going to write it, we’re going to make it up,” the studio head would have frogmarched you out of his office and said “there’s no way that that’s ever going to happen.” I love Curb Your Enthusiasm because it has shown how we actually live in an improv world. The world is improv-ridden now, there’s no going back.”

“The old model for getting your own sitcom or to become a movie star was to tour as a stand-up comedian for years and years and years until a producer plucked you out and threw you on the Johnny Carson Show where you killed and then studios began throwing contracts and money at you. That model is dead. What directors are discovering now is that you need improvisational actors that can not only say the lines but also enhance the script by being able to add character…But perhaps you’ve seen 40 Year Old Virgin or whatever, in which some of the funniest parts of the movie were parts that got left out where Judd Apatow will throw in a couple of scenes in which you see Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd improvising the scene in which the final scene got cut. That’s that thing that I’m most proud to be a part of…It’s going to be harder and harder for stand-up comedians to make the transition like they used to two or three decades ago.”

Q: What is your advice for those who do aspire to get involved with comedy?

Westfall: “First of all, take a lot of improv classes. Taking a lot of improv classes gives you grounding in improv training. Second of all, you need to get involved in a community and this is something that I cannot stress enough as far as “making it.” You know, you don’t make it alone; you make it with a bunch of other people because if you have the ability to be around other funny, creative people and you bounce ideas off of them and you decide to work together

Taking improv classes throws you into a community in which maybe two or three different people use it as a catalyst to create something new…”

“Also, write. I mean write, write, write, write, write. One of the reasons that Tina Fey was head and shoulders above some of the very talented performers she was coming up with in her own improv training is that while she was doing improv, she wasn’t lazy; she was also writing a one-woman show and sketches and stuff like that. Having a wide skill-set in comedy can only help you not hinder you. If you’re someone who can do characters, great, but if you’re someone who can do characters and write really really good sketch comedy, you’re going to be much more marketable and people are going to want to work with you more because they can see that you’re creative in multi-faceted ways.”