Laughing away life’s aches and pains at Kyle Cease’s Comedy Boot Camp
By Carl Kozlowski
“I’m 19, unemployed and pregnant. My ex-boyfriend’s not happy about the baby — but the guy who got me pregnant was.”
Those words come from the mouth of a 20-year-old woman named Katie Wood. She’s standing before a room of strangers, revealing dark truths about herself — including the fact that up until she learned of her pregnancy, she had been casually using marijuana and cocaine for the past couple years.
She then evokes gasps by admitting she still takes “a few puffs on about five cigarettes a day. If my baby’s craving it, who am I to deny it?”
You might think that Katie is speaking to a support group before a circle of fellow single moms and drug users. Actually, she’s standing, microphone in hand, on the elaborately decorated, beach-themed stage of the Jon Lovitz Comedy Club at Universal CityWalk, learning how to turn her personal pain into big laughs as part of the Kyle Cease Comedy Boot Camp.
Cease is one of comedy’s fastest-rising stars, having beaten out even mega-selling monolith Dane Cook last year to win the “Comedy Central Standup Showdown,” in which fans voted for their favorite comic. He’s parlayed that into becoming a frequent presence on the network — his special, “Weirder. Blacker. Dimpler,” has become the channel’s most-played standup performance and led to the taping of a second one-hour special this week in his hometown of Seattle.
I have also come here, both as a reporter and as a 13-year part-time professional comic, to hone my skills and see what all the hype was about.
In Katie’s case, Cease isn’t trying to exploit her by prodding her to reveal her innermost self. He’s trying to get her (and everyone else he teaches in his intensive five-day, 60-hour camp) to break down their personal walls and reveal who they really are — in a (hopefully) funny way.
The idea is not just that it will it make their own comedy more unique, but will also build a movement in which Cease hopes comedy will become more of a part of American culture again in a way that brings positive change to both individuals and society.
It may sound like pie-in-the-sky ambition. But as Katie finally opens up, her thoughts spill out rapidly and — most importantly — humorously, leading Cease to say Katie could be the next Roseanne if she continues building on this breakthrough. It’s clear that a transformation has occurred, as this young woman who took the stage nervous and fearful just 20 minutes prior runs offstage to a wave of applause from Cease and her classmates.
“When he was asking me why I had walls up, I felt I should tell him and he made me feel really good about it,” Katie says. “Everything I said was true, and to get that response from people was amazing. It gave me the courage to run out and finally tell my mom about my pregnancy … It made me see how powerful standup comedy is as an art — not just about making people laugh, but as living art.”
Thought control
At the ripe old age of 32, Cease is already a 17-year veteran of professional comedy, performing at age 15 in Seattle, where performance venues were all-ages and his parents were supportive enough to drive him to Los Angeles for occasional auditions soon after he told them comedy was the only thing he wanted to do with his life.
That support paid off early. Cease scored a role as Bogey Lowenstein in the 1999 teen hit film “10 Things I Hate About You.” After his short but attention-getting part as the Slow Clapper in 2001’s “Not Another Teen Movie,” he fast became a college audience favorite and upped his appearances to over 200 shows a year. Young, level-headed enough to steer clear of drugs and with a seemingly never-ending supply of fans, Cease looked to be soaring into the stratosphere. But he instead collapsed with a combination of illness and severe stage fright that nearly derailed his promising career.
“I learned about the psychology of all this in 2004, when I got exhausted and was getting dizzy and worrying onstage and worried I’d make myself faint,” Cease recalls. “Then I started learning how we have control of our thoughts, but most people think their thoughts control them. Once I learned that, I took control of my act.”
The key, however, came when Cease began following the principles of self-help kingpin Tony Robbins. While Robbins is often derided as a late-night TV pitchman hawking an endless array of conferences, motivational books and tapes, Cease has become a firm believer in his teachings. He credits them not only with helping him regain his confidence as a performer, but also giving him the insights needed to build healthy relationships that led to his current engagement to fellow comic Jules Kline. It also helped him lose 50 pounds within two months.
“Live as if you’re already a master of what you do, and it will happen,” Cease says.
Sharing the pain
It’s become a cliché that comedians are often the saddest people around, but as veteran actor and comic Thomas Wilson takes the stage, he reads off a litany of zany entertainers who ultimately died way before their time from alcoholism, drug abuse and suicide.
“John Belushi, Chris Farley, Sam Kinison …,” Wilson intones solemnly, with many more names following. He achieved his own greatest fame between 1985 and 1990 as the villainous Biff in the “Back to the Future” movies, but has maintained a thriving standup career and gets steady work as a supporting actor in films like “The Informant!” and TV series like “Freaks and Geeks.”
The ability to hang in when others have flamed out is paramount to his lesson to boot campers: don’t let your career and desire for laughs become your entire identity. Stay grounded with good things outside of the treacheries of show business.
“Comedy is my passion, but it’s not my life,” says Wilson. “If you don’t find balance and grounding and self-worth in real family, friends and other interests, this will eat you up.”
The students hang on every word as they hear Lovitz — a star many grew up watching on “Saturday Night Live” — talk about the struggles of his early days while urging them to find balance in life. They hear Anderson explain how he poured the pain from his bad relationship with his father into a career that earned him millions but left him bereft of true happiness until he was able to forgive his dad.
And most powerfully of all, they hear Ant tell the story of his longtime relationship with his partner, and of the mix of funny and sad moments that seasoned his last year, before dying last November of non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
“I’m sharing the pain of my true experiences with you not only to honor him, but also to show that I’m willing to put it all up on the stage, just like I’m asking you to,” says Ant. “If you bring real truth to the stage about who you are, it will be unique and funny and heartfelt and memorable.”
Add in talks by Cease’s agent and manager as well as constant feedback from the Lovitz club’s co-owner Frank Kelley, who spent many years running the top Improv comedy clubs in the country, and the admittedly steep tuition of $599, $799 and $999 for various levels of interaction with the pros make a bit more sense. Still, the program has drawn some sniping on online message boards.
“Everything that anyone does that’s new and different is criticized,” Cease says in response to the naysayers. “They get hated until it really starts proving itself. I want to make things better for comedy; I want to get clubs full again, get a passion for comedy revived that’s been lacking.
“The work you get instantly and near-instantly, like me taking the best students to open shows for me, or Louie offering five minutes opening for him in Vegas to anyone who asks, or Frank Kelley offering spots right here at the club, and the long-term connections you get like meeting and exchanging numbers with 13 headlining comics — that’s priceless. You make way more back than you spent. I taught technique after technique on learning how to end nerves, market yourself — and anyone who chooses to can take action anytime. And we have a big crew filming it all so you get an amazing reel to use at the end.”
After each guest lecture, students indeed get to take direct action. Breaking into rotating groups or intermittently taking the stage for solo spotlight attention, attendees get to work out big chunks of material within the small group or receive one-on-one guidance from each star who visits. Within minutes, each person involved goes from being a face in the crowd of nearly 40 students to a readily identifiable, unique individual.
Among them was Myke Dehu, a 44-year-old Phoenix resident who spent the years from ages 16 to 32 bouncing in and out of jail before deciding to fly straight and narrow, only to develop and survive testicular cancer at the expense of a testicle. “Some of you are looking at me like you’ve seen me somewhere before. I have to admit, I was on one of the first ‘Star Search’-style reality shows. You might have seen me. It was ‘America’s Most Wanted.’”
Then there’s Lukas Seely, a 27-year-old who’s the youngest and only American-born member of a Laotian refugee family that got plunked down into the middle of Montana. “When we first got to Montana, we took a look around and realized there were no Asian people. So we opened a nail salon, a restaurant and a Laundromat.”
The Big Moment
Throughout the camp experience, I had seen people prompted into opening their personal closets and letting out their darkest secrets, confessions often accompanied by tears, before ultimately scoring a triumphant breakthrough to deeper, richer comedy than they had ever thought possible.
As I took the stage, I wondered what psychological Jedi mind trick they were going to use to make me break down and cry like a baby. I had no way to get pregnant and had never abused drugs or been abused, but I do suffer from narcolepsy and had made it my goal to write a killer routine about it that week. But the goal was for it to make people laugh, not cry.
So I grabbed the mic and started running through my new jokes professionally, timed just right, moving the way I planned — all to a deafening silence. It looked like I was about to be crying after all.
“It’s just not working for me,” says Kelley, as I feel a thousand daggers stabbing at my insides, certain that 15 years of performing was going down the drain. But then Kyle comes up with a solution that led to my own personal breakthrough.
“Carl, you tell more one-liners than almost anyone these days, and they’re mostly about your life,” says Cease. “It’s a really ‘50s style, or like vaudeville, one after another. Why don’t you try doing your material way over the top, but filtered through that general style?”
Within moments, I was completely out of control, acting like a ’50s Catskills comic, punctuating every joke with a “Zing!” a “Badabing!” or a “Zowie!” while punching or kicking wildly at the air. Kelley loved it, my classmates cheered it on. And with the addition of Cease backing me up with rim-shot sound effects during the night’s official showcase, I scored the wildest response of my entire career.
I now have a shot that I never had before at better quality stage time, and meetings with agents and managers who came to see the show. But most of all — like the dozens of other students at this and Cease’s prior boot camp in May — I had discovered new possibilities within myself.
“What I’ve learned from camp is that people who come here are not just numbers to make money or help the camp grow,” says Cease. “Each person has a story; even the quiet ones who seem boring have great stories. The second they learn that and that that story is their strength, their life changes. That’s great.”
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