As part of the Ivy Film Festival, Michael Showalter '92 regaled a packed Salomon 101 Saturday night with his talk, titled, "The life and times of a relatively obscure basic cable sketch comedian." Relative obscurity notwithstanding, Showalter drew a capacity crowd to the auditorium for a lecture loosely focused on overcoming criticism and his experiences in the entertainment industry.
Showalter's entry into the entertainment industry came immediately after he graduated from the University. After transferring to Brown from New York University, he maintained his involvement in an NYU sketch comedy troupe called the New Group. After graduation, the group became the cast of "The State," a sketch comedy show on MTV. The show ended after four seasons, when Showalter said the group stopped getting along. After that, he joked, he "went into a deep depression and did nothing for a few months but play chess, smoke cigarettes and read lots of Stephen King novels."
In 1997 Showalter teamed up with Michael Ian Black and David Wain to create "Stella," which began as a show at a New York nightclub and was eventually picked up by Comedy Central.
In 2000 Showalter and Wain made the cult film classic "Wet Hot American Summer," which succeeded in as far as it, according to Showalter, "barely got into the Sundance Film Festival, was sparsely attended, and definitely won no awards." It was then shown in "tens of movie theaters" and received "an enthusiastic thumbs down from Roger Ebert."
When asked for advice on how to deal with this sort of criticism, Showalter said, "I don't like being criticized, at all, and I take it very personally."
In response to criticism, Showalter said he finds that writing nasty letters to critics helps. He read the audience excerpts of one such letter to a New York Times critic, beginning, "Please don't take this the wrong way, but I bet you have bread crumbs in your vagina" and continued in a similar vein with several references to hoagies. "In a roundabout way, that's my advice - it's write hate mail."
Showalter's blunt humor elicited tremendous laughter from the audience, but the audience perhaps identified most with his jokes about his experiences at the University. He reminisced on the classes he took in the Salomon Center "that I rarely, if ever, went to."
Showalter called the invitation to speak at Brown a "major honor and kind of a joke," since, as he said, he was "barely allowed to graduate."
"If drinking beer at the Grad Center Bar" had been a concentration, he said he would never have studied semiotics.
But he welcomed questions on semiotics if only to test his ability to give "bullshitty answers."
Nevertheless, Showalter told The Herald he did in fact like his classes at Brown. "Students here were really smart. ... It wasn't geeky smart, they were just cool," he said.
He also said he found a "great community of artists and musicians" at the University. His roommate, John Hamburg '92, went on to write "Along Came Polly" and co-write "Zoolander" and "Meet the Parents," he said.
Showalter identified the first defining moment of his life as occurring in fourth grade when he saw "Animal House" for the first time. After which, he "wanted to be John Belushi," an actor in the film, and he had a toga party inspired by the film for his birthday.
The second defining influence of his young life was a summer spent at a camp called Mohawk in the Berkshires, where, in between field trips, making spin art and "masturbating in our sleeping bags," he and his friends discovered hip hop, he told the audience.
Showalter mocked his fleeting teenage interests in pretending to be a "true gangsta." He showed the audience photos of himself and joked, "that's a scowl that says I've had a hard-knock (expletive) life," as he said, on the streets of suburban New Jersey, where he was raised by Ivy League academics.
Showalter got his start writing in high school, where he was the editor of his high school's literary magazine as well as a contributor. He read a poem that "wasn't meant to be a joke" but contained memorable lines including "there is a whore in my apartment building" and "I smoked a reefer with them. They didn't know (expletive) about (expletive)."
The third major moment in his life was his freshman year at NYU, where he met the members of what would become the MTV show "The State," he said.
At NYU he was the smartest student in all his classes and "completely miserable," he said.
"I wasn't smart enough to get into Brown straight out of high school," he said. "My essays were boring because my mother forced me to write about my summers abroad and how I could fold my own laundry." After transferring to Brown he was back at the bottom of the academic hierarchy where he "really flourished," he said.
At Brown, he joined IMPROVidence and auditioned for the Brown Derbies. "What's funnier than a bunch of dudes in old tiny hats singing a cappella?"
Showalter told The Herald the greatest reward of relative fame is the opportunity "to connect with people and make friends." He said he gets to meet a lot of the "kind of person that likes the kind of comedy I do and I tend to like those people."
