Beth Lapides has done so much for other people in her professional life. Much of what we enjoy on Comedy Central and other television stations has roots that go back to the Un-Cabaret which she founded in the early 90s. Comic luminaries such as Bob Goldthwait, Bob Odenkirk and even Jerry Stahl have passed through creating wonderful content for their live stage shows, all of which set the stage for the current comedy revolution. The Sarah Silverman Program, Comedians of Comedy and so much more all owe a great debt to Lapides. In the past few years Un-Cabaret has been blowing up with CDs and classes and Lapides released a collection of haikus. I got a chance to talk with the multi-hyphenate from her home in Los Angeles.
Check out the official website for Un-Cabaret
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?
Beth Lapides: Today, relishing the beauty, working on the writing, moving forward with the new projects.
DRE: What are the new projects?
Beth: Were doing a package thats called The Other Network Writers Room, where I interviewed eight Emmy Award winning TV writers about what it takes to be a writer in TV now. Its geared toward if you want to be in the business. I did interviews with Larry Charles, who just directed Borat, Michael Patrick King who did Sex and the City and John Riggi whos on 30 Rock now. Then were doing a CD which is me doing a lot of the stuff that we teach in the Un-Cab lab about creativity and taking your writing to the stage and then back to the page and developing your own voice. So thats the project were working on now. Then Im working on my newsletter that goes out in March, TWISEN which stands for The World Is So Exciting Now. Then a little yoga and after that Ill be doing a little research into DNA. Im very excited about DNA.
DRE: Just so you can claim Anna Nicoles baby or something?
Beth: Yeah. [laughs] So I can have my DNA activated.
DRE: So are the haikus in this book ones that you did for Say the Word?
Beth: Some of them are haikus that I wrote specifically for Say the Word in the past couple of years. But a lot of them were things that I was saying at the Un-Cabaret embedded within the context of my standup without realizing that they were haikus.
DRE: Who told you that they were haikus?
Beth: I did. We moved into this house and Im unpacking boxes which had all of these notes from Un-Cabaret, which was ten years of performance where I really never had an act. I was hosting it, and the idea was that you really dont have an act. I generated massive amounts of material that I never really turned into anything. So I was having the feeling of, theres got to be a book or a movie or a TV show in this. I was looking for my Running With Scissors or something. I wasnt looking for a book of haiku and then I just started seeing that a lot of what I had written as haiku. I just saw it on the page and I started circling them. At the end of reading through the notes, I had circled like 500 haikus. It was insane. Some of them were maybe a paragraph or too off or needed a third line but they were haikus. Some of them were in exact 5-7-5 and thats how the book came to be.
DRE: I remember being taught haikus in grade school. Was haiku or poetry in general something that you had affinity for?
Beth: Haikus were never something that I particularly had it in for. I would say that Ive always loved poetry. From when I was a teenage girl, I was writing poetry. But I never imagined, Im going to grow up and be a poet. I knew I loved writing. Haikus are about noticing a small moment or the bigness within a small moment, which is a big deal for me. I think its part of my yoga practice. But I think to be present in the now is really important.
DRE: You have a really positive outlook for someone who hangs around with Hollywood TV writers and comedians.
Beth: I know. Im like the Anne Frank of comedy. Im very up with people. I struggle with my dark side. Im not Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm but I definitely am a New Yorker at heart. I also have a bright outlook. I do love life.
DRE: How did you develop such a positive outlook?
Beth: I feel in some ways Im born to it and in some ways Im choosing it. I feel like were up against such an enormous challenge right now in terms of fear and the imminent decimation of earth. I was coming from such a dark place about four or five years ago. There was the whole 9-11 mindset of feeling so powerless. I had a few friends die right around then. The darkness was so heavy that I really felt that I couldnt live that way. Everyday I choose love. Now part of that means unplugging from the constant news cycle so I keep up with the news but I dont keep up with every minute. Im maybe more tuned into some alternative news sources. But I really feel that one of the things that keeps me positive is not buying into the news feeds that they plug into you. You are what you eat, you are what you read and see as well. I cant even comprehend the level of gossip that people keep up with. Of course I know about Anna Nicole Im not some freak. [laughs] But you can pick it up out of a corner of your eye. You dont need to look right at it. Theres so much going on in the consciousness movement and the power of the brain and the power of thought and the power of love. I was just reading about the placebo effect when it comes to surgery. They put the people under, they cut the knee, but they did nothing. They did three groups and you didnt know whether you were having placebo surgery or real surgery. The people who had the placebo surgery totally had knee recovery and were playing basketball.
DRE: Hmm, is that a good thing?
Beth: Thats a good thing because that means that it was through their mind that the surgery worked. It means that you have the power in your mind. Its like, are we going to create peace? Can we create peace through our mind or are we really at the whim of George Bush? Does it have to be up to him or can it be us?
DRE: With the projects you mentioned and all the contests you guys are doing it seems like things are really taking off.
Beth: Yeah, totally. Its very interesting because weve been around for years and things cycle in and out but theres a lot of energy right now.
DRE: What was the original intention of Un-Cabaret?
Beth: The original show was made up of people who already had careers. I had toured the world as a performance artist. Julia Sweeney had already been on Saturday Night Live. People had done stuff. It wasnt like, Oh these are a bunch of young upstarts that no one has ever heard of. The sentence that I kept saying was, Why are people funnier on the phone then they are in shows? Cant we make a show where people are as funny as they are when we talk to them on the phone? We wanted to break them out of their comedy act, where everybody had gotten into this thing where they were trying to get ten minutes together to get on Letterman. It was this ossified type of comedy where you knew what was going to happen and it wasnt funny. We wanted to create a situation where people are really telling the story of their lives. We were trying to create a forum that would take the comedy out of the comedy clubs. The comedy clubs are so kitschy and going to these clubs was awful. There were caricatures of comics on the walls and they were so horrible. The audiences were all tourists. Then one night I had to follow Andrew Dice Clay at The Comedy Store and I just couldnt do it.
DRE: So it must be very gratifying to see people like Patton Oswalt and David Cross doing well, not only because you gave them a forum, but because theyve done well using the idea that you originally had.
Beth: The fact that it has carried means that it was a big idea. I see people starting new stuff all the time that came out of all the stuff that we were working with, the natural conversational form. Our idea was that you always could remember who said what because there was no sense of a generic comedy format. Everybody was very specifically themselves. Un-Cab started because I was doing a show and retooling it to take to Europe. I did it at this crazy little space in downtown LA called The Womens Building. It was basically lesbian artists in the audience and they were laughing way too hard. I would just say, Um, and they would laugh. I was like, When was the last time you laughed? This isnt as funny as you think it is. They were like, We never get to laugh because we cant go to comedy clubs, because were artists and were lesbians and were women so they just make fun of us. I was like, Ill make you a show and it will be un-homophobic, un-xenophobic and un-misogynist. Itll be the Un-Cabaret. That was really the moment of inception. Ive never had a project just burst like that. That was our first audience and part of it was there was a huge untapped audience that wasnt being served. Even now, the word comedy is something that is still a goofy word that implies a lot of stuff.
DRE: It brings up the idea of the comedian making fun of people in the audience.
Beth: Yes, the adversarialness. In a mainstream comedy club, the comedian is just lashing into the audience. Its so filled with hate which was really not for me. Un-Cab is a place where people who are quote-unquote other could also laugh. That to me is a big part of what the world is. To me, whats considered other makes up much more of the world than whats isnt other.
DRE: So what is the next step, do you want it to be where Un-Cabaret Productions producing stuff?
Beth: Yes, well be producing more stuff. The Other Network continues. The classes continue. That is really about opening comedy and these techniques up. We have rockers who want to be able to talk between their songs better, lawyers, teachers, writers who dont quite get their voice. We have a politician. We have actors. So its really not just wannabe stand-ups at all. Its really using these techniques to understand your voice and be clear in it. For me, its moving on to the other books. The Un-Cab live shows will continue at a much scaled-back pace. We do about one a month so we dont keep up that pace that the live shows had in the early days. But we keep it going. There are books in the works. There are more audio products. Theres information, theres education, theres comedy. Then world domination and galactic domination after that.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Check out the official website for Un-Cabaret
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?
Beth Lapides: Today, relishing the beauty, working on the writing, moving forward with the new projects.
DRE: What are the new projects?
Beth: Were doing a package thats called The Other Network Writers Room, where I interviewed eight Emmy Award winning TV writers about what it takes to be a writer in TV now. Its geared toward if you want to be in the business. I did interviews with Larry Charles, who just directed Borat, Michael Patrick King who did Sex and the City and John Riggi whos on 30 Rock now. Then were doing a CD which is me doing a lot of the stuff that we teach in the Un-Cab lab about creativity and taking your writing to the stage and then back to the page and developing your own voice. So thats the project were working on now. Then Im working on my newsletter that goes out in March, TWISEN which stands for The World Is So Exciting Now. Then a little yoga and after that Ill be doing a little research into DNA. Im very excited about DNA.
DRE: Just so you can claim Anna Nicoles baby or something?
Beth: Yeah. [laughs] So I can have my DNA activated.
DRE: So are the haikus in this book ones that you did for Say the Word?
Beth: Some of them are haikus that I wrote specifically for Say the Word in the past couple of years. But a lot of them were things that I was saying at the Un-Cabaret embedded within the context of my standup without realizing that they were haikus.
DRE: Who told you that they were haikus?
Beth: I did. We moved into this house and Im unpacking boxes which had all of these notes from Un-Cabaret, which was ten years of performance where I really never had an act. I was hosting it, and the idea was that you really dont have an act. I generated massive amounts of material that I never really turned into anything. So I was having the feeling of, theres got to be a book or a movie or a TV show in this. I was looking for my Running With Scissors or something. I wasnt looking for a book of haiku and then I just started seeing that a lot of what I had written as haiku. I just saw it on the page and I started circling them. At the end of reading through the notes, I had circled like 500 haikus. It was insane. Some of them were maybe a paragraph or too off or needed a third line but they were haikus. Some of them were in exact 5-7-5 and thats how the book came to be.
DRE: I remember being taught haikus in grade school. Was haiku or poetry in general something that you had affinity for?
Beth: Haikus were never something that I particularly had it in for. I would say that Ive always loved poetry. From when I was a teenage girl, I was writing poetry. But I never imagined, Im going to grow up and be a poet. I knew I loved writing. Haikus are about noticing a small moment or the bigness within a small moment, which is a big deal for me. I think its part of my yoga practice. But I think to be present in the now is really important.
DRE: You have a really positive outlook for someone who hangs around with Hollywood TV writers and comedians.
Beth: I know. Im like the Anne Frank of comedy. Im very up with people. I struggle with my dark side. Im not Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm but I definitely am a New Yorker at heart. I also have a bright outlook. I do love life.
DRE: How did you develop such a positive outlook?
Beth: I feel in some ways Im born to it and in some ways Im choosing it. I feel like were up against such an enormous challenge right now in terms of fear and the imminent decimation of earth. I was coming from such a dark place about four or five years ago. There was the whole 9-11 mindset of feeling so powerless. I had a few friends die right around then. The darkness was so heavy that I really felt that I couldnt live that way. Everyday I choose love. Now part of that means unplugging from the constant news cycle so I keep up with the news but I dont keep up with every minute. Im maybe more tuned into some alternative news sources. But I really feel that one of the things that keeps me positive is not buying into the news feeds that they plug into you. You are what you eat, you are what you read and see as well. I cant even comprehend the level of gossip that people keep up with. Of course I know about Anna Nicole Im not some freak. [laughs] But you can pick it up out of a corner of your eye. You dont need to look right at it. Theres so much going on in the consciousness movement and the power of the brain and the power of thought and the power of love. I was just reading about the placebo effect when it comes to surgery. They put the people under, they cut the knee, but they did nothing. They did three groups and you didnt know whether you were having placebo surgery or real surgery. The people who had the placebo surgery totally had knee recovery and were playing basketball.
DRE: Hmm, is that a good thing?
Beth: Thats a good thing because that means that it was through their mind that the surgery worked. It means that you have the power in your mind. Its like, are we going to create peace? Can we create peace through our mind or are we really at the whim of George Bush? Does it have to be up to him or can it be us?
DRE: With the projects you mentioned and all the contests you guys are doing it seems like things are really taking off.
Beth: Yeah, totally. Its very interesting because weve been around for years and things cycle in and out but theres a lot of energy right now.
DRE: What was the original intention of Un-Cabaret?
Beth: The original show was made up of people who already had careers. I had toured the world as a performance artist. Julia Sweeney had already been on Saturday Night Live. People had done stuff. It wasnt like, Oh these are a bunch of young upstarts that no one has ever heard of. The sentence that I kept saying was, Why are people funnier on the phone then they are in shows? Cant we make a show where people are as funny as they are when we talk to them on the phone? We wanted to break them out of their comedy act, where everybody had gotten into this thing where they were trying to get ten minutes together to get on Letterman. It was this ossified type of comedy where you knew what was going to happen and it wasnt funny. We wanted to create a situation where people are really telling the story of their lives. We were trying to create a forum that would take the comedy out of the comedy clubs. The comedy clubs are so kitschy and going to these clubs was awful. There were caricatures of comics on the walls and they were so horrible. The audiences were all tourists. Then one night I had to follow Andrew Dice Clay at The Comedy Store and I just couldnt do it.
DRE: So it must be very gratifying to see people like Patton Oswalt and David Cross doing well, not only because you gave them a forum, but because theyve done well using the idea that you originally had.
Beth: The fact that it has carried means that it was a big idea. I see people starting new stuff all the time that came out of all the stuff that we were working with, the natural conversational form. Our idea was that you always could remember who said what because there was no sense of a generic comedy format. Everybody was very specifically themselves. Un-Cab started because I was doing a show and retooling it to take to Europe. I did it at this crazy little space in downtown LA called The Womens Building. It was basically lesbian artists in the audience and they were laughing way too hard. I would just say, Um, and they would laugh. I was like, When was the last time you laughed? This isnt as funny as you think it is. They were like, We never get to laugh because we cant go to comedy clubs, because were artists and were lesbians and were women so they just make fun of us. I was like, Ill make you a show and it will be un-homophobic, un-xenophobic and un-misogynist. Itll be the Un-Cabaret. That was really the moment of inception. Ive never had a project just burst like that. That was our first audience and part of it was there was a huge untapped audience that wasnt being served. Even now, the word comedy is something that is still a goofy word that implies a lot of stuff.
DRE: It brings up the idea of the comedian making fun of people in the audience.
Beth: Yes, the adversarialness. In a mainstream comedy club, the comedian is just lashing into the audience. Its so filled with hate which was really not for me. Un-Cab is a place where people who are quote-unquote other could also laugh. That to me is a big part of what the world is. To me, whats considered other makes up much more of the world than whats isnt other.
DRE: So what is the next step, do you want it to be where Un-Cabaret Productions producing stuff?
Beth: Yes, well be producing more stuff. The Other Network continues. The classes continue. That is really about opening comedy and these techniques up. We have rockers who want to be able to talk between their songs better, lawyers, teachers, writers who dont quite get their voice. We have a politician. We have actors. So its really not just wannabe stand-ups at all. Its really using these techniques to understand your voice and be clear in it. For me, its moving on to the other books. The Un-Cab live shows will continue at a much scaled-back pace. We do about one a month so we dont keep up that pace that the live shows had in the early days. But we keep it going. There are books in the works. There are more audio products. Theres information, theres education, theres comedy. Then world domination and galactic domination after that.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
Note to self:
Must.
Take.
Unlab classes.