Police Chief Rumble: A Sketch Show Journal

[PCR]

Kula here.

After a full Christmas week with the family in Michigan, it felt extremely good to get back into town on Friday night and get right back into the swing of the sketch show. It seemed like, while I was home, all I did with my curious relatives was bask in self-indulgence - talking about the show, talking about PCR, talking about my goals, blah blah blah. So it was quite a joy to stop TALKING and start DOING.

And as it were, we were "doing" without Ang and Dave, who, as I've become fond of saying, are the two people on our team who can successfully play "married." (Case in point: they play a married couple in TRUTH and a different married couple in BUTTERGUN.) So, with them missing, we found ourselves looking at a fairly short list of scenes for the night:

LOAN APPLICATION - This was my first time seeing this scene (born from the mind of Will McLaughlin), as it'd debuted last week while I was out of town. The audience seemed pretty much with it from the start, and given the (shocking!) content of the scene, I thought it was a pretty good indicator that they'd make for a good PCR crowd, i.e. "sweetly retarded."

LIT AGENT - We tried the new rewrite, and good God this scene is long! I had a moment onstage where it felt like "Okay, cool, this has about run its course..." - and there were still four pages to get through. But the new slant of the scene is great, and I think it can be really good once we get it cut down and tightened up.

THE LORD - Remember when I talked earlier of basking in self-indulgence? Well, THE LORD is a scene I wrote in which I play, yes, THE Lord. That should tell you everything you need to know about Chris Kula, and His view of Himself.

This scene's a lot of fun for me - I enjoy the rhythm of it. Hiller did the opposite part on Friday, and he was quite excellent as the straight man. (I will resist the temptation to make any "Hiller as straight man" jokes here.)

TATTOO - I spent the first five or six lines of this scene pulling stray hairs from the God wig out of my mouth. I think we've pretty much got this one down; it's just fun and simple. There's a part in the end segment where Charlie slams me up against the stage left door. On Friday he slammed me not so much "up against" it as "through" it. So the theatre now has a door that swings open both ways. Sorry, Alex.

DON'T GO THERE - Last week while scouring Grand Rapids-area Goodwills, I found a t-shirt front-stenciled with the phrase "DON'T EVEN GO THERE." So of course I bought it and of course I wrote a sketch around it. When I emailed it to the group, this was Jake's response:

That's funny...you big dumb asshole. "Hey, look at me! I found a funny shirt and I wrote a sketch about!! Blah blah blah, I'm Chris Kula! I'm a big dumb asshole!"

Pretty much, yeah. The starring order for this scene is definitely the t-shirt first, Bobby second, the "Baker Street" sound cue third, and me a distant fourth. Hence, it worked.

I think I was really jonesing for some improv after the holiday layoff, so, at least to me, our set felt really good this week. We had Colton Dunn act as monologist, and we did scenes inspired by his monologues; I'm pretty sure this was an improv first. It worked really well for us, though, generated a lot of ideas, so I think we'll keep using monologists through January.

So come out to the show - you could very well end up doing monologues for us. I know: put THAT on your resume.

 

[PCR]

Jeremy Piven here. (jk, rotflol! it’s Chris Kula!)

The crowds at the theatre this whole past week of New Year’s were ridiculously good. Holiday commitments were over, I guess, and people wanted to get out of the house. Harold Night on Tuesday the 30th was basically filled, and this past Friday the Swarm had something like 230 people in the audience. So in turn, we had our best yet midnight crowd. Billy was nice enough to plug the Cockhorse show (my goodness, such language) during the Swarm outro, and I believe we actually did get some holdover people from their crowd.

At the top of the show, we asked the audience how they’d heard about the show, and more than a few people held up the flyers we’d distributed in Union Square earlier in the evening. This was fairly shocking. Generally you hand out flyers and just assume they’re as good as ignored, or if there’s any spark of UCB recognition, that the person will come out some time in the future and see, like, Mother. So to get some instant flyering gratification was pretty cool.

(There was one crunchy couple that Ang flyered who showed up and sat front row, and then waited to talk to her afterwards. I was just about to thank them for coming when I heard the guy telling Ang, “Yeah, man, we’re in the arts, too, but more like, you know, poetry slams” – he had that look in his eyes of “Please – please – talk to me about my thing.” So I just nodded to them sans eye contact and busied myself picking up the same three Scrabble pieces over and over.)

We’ve now got a very good idea of the core scenes that will be The Show; we basically just need a way to open and close it. Jake’s laid out that the rest of January will be for fine-tuning and polishing the scenes, devising a running order with transitions, and looking for connections/callbacks. Fun director-y type stuff.

The more we get into the crafting of the show, the more I am dually 1) envious of the role Jake gets to play and 2) quite glad that it’s him playing that role and not me. Like with cutting down scenes: I LOVE rewriting and streamlining scenes, but whereas it’s fine for me to suggest someone add this or drop that, it’d be slightly dicey for me to be really cutthroat with any performer’s writing other than my own. But as director, Jake’s got the freedom and authority to be merciless with his cuts – he bears the responsibility of killing people’s babies FOR them.

I’ll get a chance to do that soon enough with other people and other shows. But right now, though, me just have fun play with wigs lmao!

 

[PCR]

Police Chief Rumble in...
Piece of Bullsh*t Pie

UCBT Harold team Police Chief Rumble serves up hot sketch comedy that lies to your face, talks behind your back, and sleeps with your best friend. The truth is bitter – bullsh*t pie is delicious.

Written and performed by:
Katie Dippold
Angeliki George
Jeff Hiller
Chris Kula
David Martin
Will McLaughlin
Bobby Moynihan
Charlie Sanders

Directed by:
Jake Fogelnest

What people are saying about “Piece of Bullsh*t Pie”:

“I loved Bullsh*t Pie! Also, I have a dick.” –Hilary Duff

“I haven’t laughed this hard since I choked a mime unconscious!” –Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

“Police Chief Rumble? Yeah, I’d fuck those guys.” –Louis Gossett, Jr.
------------------------------------

So there you have it: a show title and description as of Tuesday, January 20th. We (this is Kula, by the way ... (nods) 'Sup.) spent way too long deliberating on a title and scrambled the last couple of days to get something in to Owen. It fits the general theme of the show, so we're pleased.

I think our second choice for titles was "Richard Dawson is Coming...", with the postcard design to be of Richard Dawson standing on top of the earth, masturbating.

We've got a meeting tomorrow night to go over every scene that's going in the show and look for any more possible opportunities for jokes, jokes, jokes.

Only two midnight shows left, so looking beyond that it's postcards, email lists, front window displays, Harold Night hosting - and then we open the primetime show. Exciting.

 

[PCR]

Dippold here. Well, it’s opening day. Many changes have been made, new sketches put in last week, plenty of rewrites, and I’m excited for the show. Dave’s literary agent sketch has seen so many versions it’s become a “Choose your own adventure”. Last week, a certain line was said on accident and it was a sort of “oh, we’re going this way tonight, interesting.”

Wednesday we met and rehearsed from 8pm till 2am. Boston Market is a great place to meet and talk, people. A whole large downstairs. Anyway, we went over every little detail, and when we were going over props, I asked, “So who has a large stuffed animal dog?” Will sternly replies, “Katie, I am 35 years old.” (More embarrassing for me, the only reason I asked was because I didn’t want to bring my favorite stuffed dog anymore)

I've really learned late hours lead to strange ideas. We are last minute putting in this quick idea that started off as a “ha, imagine how bad it would be if we did this?” Everyone laughs at the idea of actually doing that. Jake says, “Actually, that could be really funny.” (Slowly heads turn to each other, Will looks up from his Oswald Biography, slow chant starts, Jake says stop chanting). So I’m very curious in seeing how this reads. One might guess not at all, but let it be known it was hilarious at midnight.

Come see the show and decide!!!

 

[PCR]

Kula here. It's been two and a half months since we last updated this thinly veiled celebration of ourselves, a time during which we've been focusing on a more public celebration of ourselves called Piece of Bullsh*t Pie. There's a special one-off IFC showcase running in place of the show this week, meaning our first Friday off from PCR in six months. Not sure … what to … DO … with self…

Doing the show is the most fun I have during the week, and I do believe that goes for everyone else in the group. Including McLaughlin, even despite our best efforts to cast him in the role of "begrudging and bitter old man who hates the show" in the running bits that spring up before every show.

Best example: to get Will "fired up" for the show, every week David Martin sings a new, completely terrible song parody with lyrics changed in such a way as to honor Will (Ex. "Where have you gone, Will DiMaggio / A nation turns its lonely eyes to Will ['ill 'ill 'ill]"). Best one still remains "MacArthur Park" transposed to "Will Park." No, not the obvious "McLaughlin Park" - "Will Park."

We clock in at 7, do the show at 8, go to the bar at 9 - it's a blast to be able set your watch to a stress-free show every week. And we're now comfortable with the show to the point that we know where all the laughs lay, so we've got the freedom to play around with those other, non-crucial-joke moments and ad-lib new stuff from week to week.

Basically, we try to make each other break. Bobby is the best; I'm convinced he spends his drive in from Westchester just thinking up change-ups to throw at us. Although, Sanders had a string of like two or three shows in a row where he was just killing me at this one certain point in the Lit Agent scene. The line is "Can I see your elephant?" and is, in the script at least, being delivered to Bobby. Nothing extraordinary.

But in performance, Sanders would inconveniently crane his head directly towards me, eyes widened, and Shatnerize the line to "Can I … SEE … your … … … elephant?" I think he'd even affect the slightest German accent, too. Whatever, it's done the trick: even when I make the effort to avoid eye contact with him, he still gets me to bite my lip just from the fact that I KNOW he's looking right at me - and, as it must seem to the audience, for no apparent reason.