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The groundwork from die-hard local comics and TNM’s rapid pace and timing mesh nicely with the city’s entertainment “comeback” — not only are touring music acts filling up concert calendars, touring standup comics are stepping on stages where formerly comedians were absent. Paul F. Tompkins and Louis C.K. filled venues in 2010 and 2011, respectively, while bigger stages accommodated blockbuster headline monsters like Chris Tucker and Sinbad. More recently, Leon Blanda, who hosts a showcase at House of Blues on Thursdays, put his flyer in the hands of SNL alum Darrell Hammond, who now makes regular appearances at the show — which is free. Stupid Time Machine sold out recent appearances at Chicago’s and San Francisco’s Sketch Fests and was featured on the website FunnyOrDie.com. And at home, La Nuit Comedy Theater continues to host weekly performances, from improv groups to stand-up — Neil Hamburger recently appeared there, and the theater hosted dozens of others at a February comedy festival. TNM produced Hell Yes Fest, which drew national comic performers and exposed local comedians to larger audiences. TNM students already are producing new shows, like A Handsome, featuring TNM students Cyrus Cooper, Drew Platt and Addy Najera (who all perform stand-up, too). “It’s got a way more thriving scene than anything we had back then,” Patton says. “There’s more comics, they’re funnier comics, and they’re younger, too.” Standing outside Carrollton Station, Faucheux points to its door. “This has been a staple for stand-ups in this city,” he says. “It’s ridiculous that an open-mic [night] even has an audience. Open mics around the country generally do not. … I haven’t seen that since I started comedy. It has a sense of community really backing it.” That C-Word — not comedy, and not the other four-letter one, but “community” — is TNM’s most-used word. Nelson and Trew use it at least a dozen times in 30 minutes. Not only are they actively defying the conventions of 30-year-old improv doctrines, they’re rejecting the sausage-factory, assembly-line “graduations” of its students. Nelson and Trew begin most shows by asking the audience to “sound like a million people” for whoever’s next, whether it’s the guest headliner or a level one class with its first graduation recital. Everyone at every show is invited to the after-party. “This is a community about people who give a shit about doing something important, even if it’s just in their personal circumference,” Nelson says. “They want to do something that’s important. A lot of that translates into how to behave in the world, a lot of it will translate into how you behave yourself.” “My dream scenario is not to be Louis C.K. or Will Ferrell or someone famous on SNL right now,” Trew says. “Bestcase scenario for me is we help hundreds of people fulfill their comedy dreams, that we have a really strong following in the cities we give the most shit about, I get to sit in the lower bowl for the Hornets games all the time, and we get to eat out whenever we want. “We’re not obsessed with ‘What’s the next thing that has to get out of here to be in movies?’ We can do all that here.”
Gambit > bestofneworleans.com > february 28 > 2012
at LSU on Tiger TV and formed the online sketch group studio8 (named after his dorm room). He met Nelson in New Orleans after graduation. Later he went to Chicago to study at iO Improv and Second City and formed the improv group ColdTowne in New Orleans, which turned into ColdTowne in Austin when the group moved there in the wake of Katrina. When the group split, Nelson and Trew set off to open their own theater. “The thing Chris and I wanted to do and eventually did do, our vision never strayed, we wanted to teach a unique form of improv,” Nelson says. “Everyone else in Austin and elsewhere was teaching a watered-down version of what they learned at (iO Improv), UCB or Second City or whatever, and borrowing directly from syllabi they learned in Chicago, L.A. or New York. So when we opened The New Movement, we sat down like, ‘What do we like about improv, what do we like about how we do improv, what do we like about how we teach improv, and let’s try and articulate that in a syllabus.’ And we came up with a really good syllabus, and we’re super proud of it. We know, because we’ve seen the results of it. … Convincing everyone in Austin what we were doing was unique, it did have a specific voice, it will yield a different kind of product — that was challenging.” It worked. The Austin theater took off. While Nelson and Trew groomed their students to take over TNM theaters elsewhere in Texas, they tapped Stupid Time Machine to prepare New Orleans for TNM’s arrival. Along with Grace Blakeman, who also performs with Stupid Time Machine and sketch group Personality Plus, the group members now are TNM teachers. “We’ve all been like, ‘Should we go to Chicago?,’” Blakeman says. “When Chris and Tami had this idea, we thought, well, we can make what they have down here.” Blakeman says TNM can change that metric of success: instead of going to the jungle elsewhere, comics can “have fun and be really good.” “Let’s make this the type of theater and scene that makes us not want to go to Chicago, because there’s something so incredible happening here,” Hunt says. “If we can make that, we’re the ones starting this thing, we’re the ones who wanted it in the first place — where else would we go from this?” The theater already has more than a dozen graduates from its New Orleans camp, and more than 100 total from its Texas schools. Its opening month schedule features four performances from stand-ups Sean Patton and Kyle Kinane and almost nightly performances from its improv teams. Its alumni are touring the country, and TNM now has more locations than its “rival” theaters; TNM isn’t competing against other venues in New Orleans, but other cities in the U.S., to attract the next crop of up-andcoming comic performers — a first for a city without a national comedy reputation. “We have a chance to build a legacy in a city of such a badass section of America that we get to show people, ‘Come to New Orleans, it’s a place to celebrate,’” says Stupid Time Machine’s Spara. “The conversations happen multiple times with people in established comedy scenes in the other big three, where it’s like, ‘God, I really like New Orleans, and you guys are really doing something. There’s a scene now.’ I think you’re going to see that gaining momentum big time.”
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