The P! Company is a sketch group that took their comedy from Katy, Texas all the way to Austin. Self-described as comedy for nerds by nerds, these boys (and occasionally a girl or two) tackle the issues they care about most: videogames, science fiction, anime, and movies.
That Other Paper contributor Jill Morris talked with P! Company’s Kyle Sweeney about his troupe, their influences, and Nintendo. Kyle and The P! Company will be performing at the 10pm show this Thursday, January 24, at ColdTowne’s see.hear.speak. comedy festival.
That Other Paper You do a lot of video sketches. Do you prefer video sketch comedy to live sketch comedy?
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Kyle Sweeney We’ve actually been loosely doing video sketches since 1996. Not a lot of the early ones were very good, but over time we’ve really honed our craft and also grown as comedians. We grew up making videos on our parents’ video cameras the good ol’ analog way. When other people were playing sports or hanging out with girls, we were making goofy parodies or epic short films. We grew up doing theater, aspiring to be filmmakers, and we also studied film in college. We’re filmmakers now. So working with the medium of video for sketch comedy was always such a no-brainer.
We also grew up on television. We force-fed it to ourselves and in a way I feel that aspect of pop culture has heavily influenced our comedy. It helped shape what we thought was funny and specifically educated us on how to accomplish comedy by exploiting this visual medium. There’s a level of control and definitive communication that goes into a video sketch. So we invest ourselves in the video much more than had we just played the roles on stage. Because of that, I feel that it’s just that much more rewarding to have a funny video piece versus a live bit.
All that said, we still perform live sketches at our shows. It helps break up the videos and gives another varied flavor to things. We just dig the live element so much, too. Nothing is quite like the few moments before stepping on to the stage — just hoping everything serendipitously falls into place and that you remember your lines. It’s quite a rush.
TOP You have an entire sketch dedicated to Super Mario Brothers. Is that your favorite Nintendo game?
KS To choose a favorite Nintendo game would be tough. Contra, Super Mario Bros. 3, Metroid, Tetris, Legend of Zelda, Crystalis, TMNT 2, any of the Mega Man games — they all have a special place in our hearts. I think part of the draw is simply because this stuff defined our youth as well as our lives after that. The countless hours attempting to defeat the machine and emerge victorious — that’s what we lived for. So doing a sketch that references this particular staple of our youth automatically connects us to the people across the country who had that shared experience. It’s great.
TOP Have you ever had a sketch idea that is just too nerdy to do because it’s so obscure?
KS Well, anything we see is game for a sketch as long as it makes us laugh. We keep that in mind when we’re creating a show. We make sketches that make us laugh and create a show that we would want to see. If it passes that test then we’re doing a great job.
We’ve had comedy ideas come from an obscure anime or an awful low budget sci-fi movie or something like that. We would find the humor in what was presented. Early on, our material was littered with inside jokes, which was awesome, but it was ultimately important to make the material more accessible. However, we do indulge ourselves every now and again with something totally off the wall.
TOP What was something totally off the wall that you indulged in?
KS We’ve done a bunch of little things pulled from a list of way too nerdy sources. We had just watched the 1992 Dan Poole Spiderman fan film. He had used a lesser known Howard Jones song in the film, and we were obsessed with that song and listened to it over and over again. We then came up with handful of sketches that contained that obscure music cue. It wasn’t so much about it being another awesome Howard Jones song as its association with the fan film. Drawing from the anime influences, like Evangelion among others, we had always wanted to make a sketch involving the glaring stereotypes of the “children save the world in giant robots” type of anime. We affectionately referred to it as the DARPA Giant Robot Project. It’s one of those things that we keep saying to ourselves that we’ll get to it one of these days. More often than not the sketches become nerdy due to the types of characters or the themes rather than the dime-a-dozen references.
TOP What was the Katy, Texas comedy scene like?
KS It’s a suburb. I’m not sure there was ever a real scene — that is unless you count us showing our videos at our friends’ birthday parties in high school a comedy scene.
Watching the occasional SNL or MadTV on Saturday night was all we had — and Comedy Central if you had cable. We found our own fun while growing up there.
TOP Is everyone in the P! Company also an improviser?
KS They’re all improvisers. But it’s not mandatory. We shoot sketches with a lot of non-improvisers, too. My twin brother, Kirk Sweeney, has been in countless sketches with us, but he hasn’t had any formal training doing improv. Although in a way, he’s just as capable as the rest of us based on how we go about making the videos.
TOP And how do you do that?
KS First, we’ll get a bizarre idea involving one or more of the following: nerd culture, awkward situations, and/or one or more of the archetypal P! Company characters. Then we start shooting. We’ll do a series of improvised takes to see where our vague idea goes — generally with hilarious results. After really boiling it down, we’ll trim a lot of the useless but funny fat of a scene, and the result will be a highly entertaining beat outline of what we need to cover to get from point A to point Z in the sketch. We will then shoot the remainder of the video with proper coverage and piece it together as best as we can in editing. It’s a very unique process, as generally we start shooting with ideas rather than completed scripts. It gives the performer more ownership than just reading the lines provided. Also, I feel it gives us an added freshness to the material we’re performing.
TOP Is The P! Company like the Menudo of sketch comedy, or do you perform with girls as well? All your video stuff I’ve seen is all boys.
KS Although I think we’re most comfortable with honing in on that male/nerd sensibility, we do occasionally stray from that and have women in our sketches or have them perform with us. In the first set of shows we did at the ColdTowne Theater, Sarah Parker was in both the live show and video sketches. Tami Nelson of ColdTowne has also been in some video sketches with us. Leah Moss of the improv troupe Look Cookie will be performing with us in our February show, Hangin’ With Mr. The P! Company. But it’s definitely not an exclusive thing. We love funny girls, and we like to think that they love us too. It just seems that the majority of the time when Andy [Petruzzo] and I are coming up with sketch ideas, it usually comes from out of our “two dudes” dynamic and results in more choice roles for the guy players of our ensemble. But we can get out of our heads sometimes, and when we do it’s really awesome.
Catch The P! Company at see.hear.speak. on Thursday, January 24 at 10pm. That Other Paper is proud to sponsor this festival. And if you can’t make it to the festival, Hangin’ with Mr. The P! Company is happening on Thursday, February 21 at 11:39pm at ColdTowne Theater.
Comments
whats the story behind their name? does p stand for something?
it stands for pee
they don’t stand for pee
From their Facebook group: The “P” in “P! Company” stands for an unpronounceable word we came up with while playing with alphabet blocks in 7th Grade.
http://www.thepcompany.com/Videos/thefriend.mov