An Interview with Eliza Skinner, Comedy Overachiever

Will Hell Yes Fest be your first Austin trip?

No, actually the first and only time I went there was when I was in college and had gotten into my first improv group and they were doing The Big Stinkin' Festival in Austin and I was like, what, improv? What is this? I guess I'm good at it! I don't know how I got into this group! I want to go find out about it! So I packed up my car and my best friend and drove 27 hours to Austin to go see what improv was. It was great. It was really fun. A really great city. A really great festival. And now I get to go back and perform.

You're performing with improv duo Chris and Tami. Have you done a set with them before?

We did a show together. I haven't played with them, but we did a show in Oberlin, a few years ago where I Eat Pandas performed and they performed. We didn't get to be on stage at the same time I don't think, but I loved watching them. So, I'm excited to play with them.

When you join another group for a show like that, do you rehearse together or do you see what happens onstage?

I think it will probably be going on stage and seeing what happens. I've done that before, in improv you kind of just do that sometimes. Once you've done a whole bunch of shows, it's fun to just jump in with new people and have that be your variable, your wild card. What's it going to be like in front of these people? I already know they're really funny and fun to watch, so, it should be really funny and fun to play with them.

You teach musical improv - does studying that very greatly from studying "classic" improv?

Sure, there are differences. Obviously the music aspect is the clearest difference. Also, musical improv is kind of based on musical theater. The big thing that drives musical theater is emotion. So, most of the songs come out of what people are most in love with, most scared of, and most angry about. So, its got really heightened emotions. I think it's really fun to play with those, and what they mean to characters. Why would this character care so much about this thing? So, that's besides learning how to work with music and how to structure songs. That's the big difference.

Do you recommend improvisers have a background in musical theater going into it?

That's a great way. That definately makes the journey shorter. If you don't have a background in musical theater, then getting one is good. In my classes I usually assign a lot of homework, which is mostly listening to music and trying to pick out different things, like a song that has a certain structure. Or, a song that makes you feel a certain way. Or, a song that serves the historian a certain way, like maybe a hero song, or a villian song. If you listen to a lot of musical theater listening for those specific things you'll fill your brain up with a lot of musical theater so you can spit it back out on stage.

You're working on a book now, right?

I am. It's based on a website that I do, a daily website called Nasty Cute, which is the evil, interior thoughts and monologues of animals. There is a cute picture of an animal everyday and do a caption of what they're thinking. We're working on making that a book.

You also write a lot of sketches.

I've made a lot of them into videos and a couple of sketch shows. I also have my solo show, which is kind of a one-woman sketch show, which I'll be doing in Austin, and I really like writing. Improv is so fun being in the moment and building on other people's ideas, but it just disappears when you're finished. I feel you have to have the other side of it, which is sketch or humor writing, where you have something to walk away with at the end of the day. That you haven't just done all your hilarious comedy to the wind.

Does writing for Nasty Cute feel different than writing sketches or for your act?

Well, it depends. Nasty Cute is a 365 project, so I have to do it every day and sometimes it's really light and easy and fun and sometimes it's a chore, but the valuable thing about it for me has been having something that I have to do every day and getting that discipline. The other problem that improvisers have is we're not very disciplined. We have kind of the easiest type of entertainment as far as preparation. You don't even need to have a costume. You just get on stage, so it's been good having something that I have to do every single day. How I do it does sort of change a little bit every day.

When you're writing do you know, when you start out, that this is going to be a video, or this is going to go into your show?

Not always. Sometimes the same thing will be useful in a bunch of different ways. For instance, one of my first videos was a piece that I wrote for my sketch show, for my solo show, and then after I'd done it for a while I thought this piece could kind of stand on its own, I can make it into a video and I did. Another one of my videos was originally a blog post, because I don't just have a regular blog at elizaskinner.com, and then I made it into a stand up bit and then I made it into a video. Basically, the same material has a number of different ways of presenting itself. Sometimes things are just suited to one thing, but a lot of times you can find different ways to use it. That helps it evolve also. Something that's a funny one-liner on Twitter can end up being a 5-minute chunk of stand up if you sit down and think about it and start building on it. I try to use all the pieces of the buffalo, the comedy buffalo.

Eliza Skinner will be performing in two shows at Hell Yes Fest; catch her Saturday, April 9 at 9 p.m. with Chelsea Peretti, Kyle Kinane, Karl Hess, Matt Ingebretson, Amber Bixby, James Adomian and JT Habersaat at Red 7, or see her Sunday, April 10 at 9 p.m. with Chris and Tami at Spiderhouse Ballroom.