SHOWCASE
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COMEDY Still Crazy After All These Years
A couple of class clowns are keeping San Francisco in stitches. by Marisa Milanese |
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A MIME TROUPE embarks on an imaginary canoe trip. Paddles to water, they push along, clearly taken with their surroundings, when one starts to screech. Another, a particularly militant mime, throws his hands up in frustration. “John!” he says. “What are you doing?” "Doesn’t that sound like a howler monkey?” “Yes, but this is mime. There are no sounds in mime.” “I just thought there was no talking in mime.” The men behind this biting little repartee are James and John Reichmuth, identical twins with their own particular brand of comedy. It isn’t funny “ha ha” so much as funny “hmmmm.” It doesn’t depend on punch lines or pratfalls but on the brothers’ own preternatural intelligence and very strange take on the world. As undergraduates, James, ’92, and John, ’92, JD ’96, were considered two of the hands-down funniest people around. Ten years postgraduation, an ever-widening audience is reaching the same conclusion. James and John are the stars of two cult-hit films in which they play Roy and Gil, ingeniously idiotic brothers who claim expertise on such subjects as engines, puppies, diseases and puppy diseases. They’re also one half of sketch-comedy troupe Kasper Hauser, whose other members are Rob Baedeker, ’93, and Dan Klein, ’90, and whose routines include those mimes mired in interpersonal tension. Kasper Hauser performs regularly in San Francisco, where the twins live. The city is undergoing something of a sketch-comedy renaissance, and the troupe, formed early last year, has become the biggest star among the eight or so active groups. This summer, they’re traveling to Scotland to perform nightly at the three-week Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which has hosted the likes of comics Eddie Izzard and Jack Black. “There’s one Kasper Hauser member for each sector of society, like a boy band,” John says. “Rob’s the cute one. Dan is Mountain Mike with fatherly charm. James is the monomaniacal assbuster.” “And you’re the brooding psychopath,” James says. He’s mostly kidding. James and John, raised by counterculture parents in Ashland and Medford, Ore., have always existed just outside of the fray. At Stanford, John had a Mohawk haircut and pet tarantula. He was repeatedly rejected as a Stanford Daily columnist because his submissions kept returning to the subject of rattlesnakes. James rarely wore shoes and put on strange little puppet shows to Velvet Underground songs for friends. He once sent a friend’s wedding guests into hysterics by simply reading aloud from the medical opus, Plagues and Peoples. Even their day jobs suggest an attraction to the peculiar: James is a psychiatrist, John an assistant federal public defender with special expertise in firearms cases.
The summer after their sophomore year, both brothers worked as summer staffers at Stanford Sierra Camp near Lake Tahoe. It was at the camp’s talent show that Roy and Gil were born. The Reichmuths based them on real-life characters they’d met around the lake—men who droned on in arcane detail about cars or the volunteer fire department. Klein, also a staffer that summer, remembers the audience literally pounding the floor in laughter. For John, making people laugh has been mostly an extracurricular pleasure, while James admits to a lifelong obsession with comedy. He knows the routines and career paths of other comedians like the back of his own unusually long-fingered hand. The response of Sierra Camp audiences to Roy and Gil inspired him to take the requisite first step of a professional comedian: before heading off to med school, he tried out a couple of stand-up routines at “depressing” mall comedy clubs. There were maybe six people in the audience—all comedians waiting for stage time—along with his mother, whose lone laugh helped a little. It wasn’t until a few years later that he got his first real break. Gabe Weisert, ’94, another friend from Sierra Camp, produced and directed Fishing with Gandhi (1998) as a screen vehicle for Roy and Gil. Cow Monkey (2001) came three years later. Both films follow loose story lines—a road trip, a hunt for Bigfoot—around which James and John become dueling banjos, improvising and riffing off each other in Roy and Gil’s clenched-jaw lisps. The films have won numerous awards at independent film festivals and acquired a small but Trekkie-esque fan base. Weisert knows of one guy who wore out a videotape from continual watching. “People use the movies like a litmus test, to see if their friends have a sense of humor,” Weisert says. A Roy and Gil cartoon, produced for TV by Los Angeles comedy writer Ross McCall, ’93, is also being shopped around. With Kasper Hauser, the Reichmuths have widened their circle of stage alter egos. There are, among others, a file clerk convinced he’s a sci-fi character, an Army sergeant stuck teaching yoga in jail, and a Dr. Watson doing a disturbingly accurate impersonation of the Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill character from Silence of the Lambs (“It puts the lotion in the basket.”). The twins’ 6-foot-2 charisma and startling features—intensely blue eyes and protruding browlines that suggest overstuffed craniums—transfer powerfully from the screen to the stage. Kasper Hauser productions are bare-bones. They have no costume changes (the four wear harlequin suits) or props (except for the occasional wig). Each sketch is thus reduced to its essence—the concept, the careful scripting, the interpretation by the performers. It can hit or miss with equal force: for every few audience members crying with laughter, one sits stone-faced, unsure of what to make of a sketch about a game show called “Phone Call to the 14th Century,” for example. “We’ve certainly had people say to us all our lives: ‘I don’t get your humor,’” says James. But at least one guy with impressive comedy credentials of his own gets it. On the recommendation of his manager, Robin Williams showed up at a Kasper Hauser show during January’s San Francisco Sketchfest. Afterwards, he complimented and congratulated them, singling out the Dr. Watson/Jame Gumb character. Then he did what has always come naturally to the Reichmuths: he riffed off the material. Marisa Milanese, ’93, is a San Francisco-based writer and frequent STANFORD contributor. |
