Going Out: June 2025
Hi.
I think I’m going to be using this newsletter to document my reactions to the live shows I see over the course of the next year. I would call myself a homebody, but that conjures visions of coziness and curated space that are inaccurate to my life and apartment, in which entropy currently has the upper hand. More precisely, I am lazy, timid, and inertial: I don’t often feel like I have enough energy to go out in the evening, I’m shy and uncomfortable around other people, and having been accustomed to not going out at night for decades on end, it can be hard to stand far back enough to get the leverage to move that particular gear.
But I want to try. In part because I’m starting a program of self-assigned study in all the other major arts that interest me (recorded music, comics, prose fiction, film/video) and live performance felt like a gap that needed filling. But in larger part because whenever I do go out — have gone out, over the past twelve years that I’ve lived in this city — I invariably have a great time, am buoyed mentally, nourished spiritually, feel more connected with the people around me and the broader audience of the performers in question, and tell myself I should do this more often. And then I don’t, for months or years on end.
So I’m making a small commitment to myself, and to the readers of this newsletter: Once a month, I will try to see something that is people in person creating sound waves with their bodies that reach my ears directly, reflecting light off their bodies that reaches my eyes directly, and — no, just those two senses, I think. Or hope. Music, theater, and comedy are the major, and most immediately attractive to me, categories of performance, but maybe I’ll go see dance or sports or political events too. Movie screenings are a separate category; I’ll be writing about them, if and as I see any, on my blog.
On to this month’s Going Out.
Last Sunday evening, I took the Red Line down to Lake and entered the Chicago Theatre for a show that the marquee called Dropout Improv.
Okay, let me back up.
Dropout is a comedy streaming service that began in fall 2018 as the subscription wing of CollegeHumor (you see the pun). I’ve been subscribed to Dropout since April 2020, when the doldrums of COVID-19 quarantine and a burgeoning interest in the deeply nerdy world of recorded tabletop role-playing games (referred to as “actual play” in the TTRPG space for long and boring reasons) convinced me that I could spare the then-$4.99/mo. subscription. CollegeHumor as a website and full-time production house had collapsed in January of 2020, but Dropout kept going on a work-for-hire basis, now owned outright by its CEO Sam Reich, and its actual play show, Dimension 20, was the flagship: a passionately nerdy fandom (of the kind that most frequently forms around anime, comic books, and genre television in which two handsome men gaze wordlessly at each other but do not kiss) had sprung up around the show in the fifteen months during which Dropout still had corporate backing, and were just enough to (barely) sustain it over a year of Zoom shows and intermittent fandom drama.
Just before the axe came from its corporate parent, Dropout had premiered the second season of a little game show hosted by Reich. Called Game Changer, the premise was simple: a different game every show, with players from CollegeHumor’s stable, and eventually the broader L.A. comedy scene, competing to figure out the game, how to play it, how to win, and what devious trickery Reich had up his pinstripe sleeve this time around. It was Dropout’s second big hit, especially once clips started to rack up views on short-form video platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels, and after four seasons Reich spun off a handful of “game samers” — Dirty Laundry, a boozy, chatty spin on the UK panel show Would I Lie to You? (spun off of a Game Changer episode modeled on the party game Never Have I Ever), Play It by Ear, a showcase for improvised musical comedy led by master musical improvisers Jess McKenna and Zach Reino (spun off a Game Changer episode designed as a showcase for their talents), and Make Some Noise, a millennial update of Whose Line Is It Anyway? where short-form improv prompts result in variably hilarious mini-scenes (spun off of a series of Game Changer episodes which began unassumingly with Josh Ruben, Zac Oyama and Brennan Lee Mulligan making animal noises and bantering).
Make Some Noise quickly became the third most popular show on Dropout, an undemanding and generously-edited improv showcase which has lured major comedy figures like Paul F. Tompkins, Ben Schwartz, and Wayne Brady to join the fun, as well as a host of younger comedians who have become superstars among Dropout’s young, chronically-online audience, like disarmingly sincere SoCal dirtbag Jacob Wysocki, tense, manic weirdo Vic Michaelis, and fearlessly aggro charmer Lisa Gilroy (all of whom are also familiar to the 2020s audience of Comedy Bang Bang, the long-running character-improv comedy podcast). In 2024, after Dimension 20 made headlines for selling out Madison Square Garden with a one-night show of D&D actual play, Reich started to take the troupe he had amassed over three seasons of Make Some Noise out to do live shows as Dropout Improv, where they did short-form games of a kind that would be familiar to anyone who has ever been to an improv show; but due to the parasocial intimacy engendered by the fandom that has accrued around the streaming service, ordinary improv became must-see because it’s them — for which read, our friends from the internet — doing it.
Which brings us at long last to Sunday night.
The lineup for the evening could have been seen on an average $5 comedy night in L.A. pre-COVID: emceed by the gregarious Kurt Maloney, who self-deprecatingly referred to himself as “the Wish.com version of Sam Reich,” with imp Jeremy Culhane, sweetie Oscar Montoya, wildcard Kimia Behpoornia, mastermind Rekha Shankar, abiding dude Jacob Wysocki, and acclaimed actor Lou Wilson (whose presence added an extra thrill for Dimension 20 fans), most of whom have been sharing improv stages, writers’ rooms, and filming sets for closing in on a decade, and all of whom are beloved by the Dropout audience for multiple appearances across a variety of shows (with the exception of Maloney, who has only appeared on Make Some Noise to date).
The Chicago Theatre was built in 1921 by the Balaban family of theater empresarios, and the seats are in a big wide semicircle, perfect for dramatic theater and (during the Depression) movie-theater spectacle. These days it’s primarily a venue for live comedy and sedate musicians, with a sound system designed to carry subtleties to a seated, attentive listener — which was not the atmosphere on Sunday night. The energy in the audience was rapturous, even hungry for a sliver of connection with their online faves, and whenever Maloney asked for audience suggestions, which was often — this being a short-form improv show — an undistinguishable mass of shouting rang off the vaulted ceiling of the theater. And once the comedy got going, when the audience roared with delight on recognizing a Dropout reference, the headset mics that the performers were wearing were quickly overwhelmed.
Eventually, like the pros they are, they figured out the rhythm, cadence, and space of the room — Maloney adapted to asking specific people instead of the entire audience for suggestions, and after an early, feisty period, during which Wysocki had to gently but firmly shut down someone who was screaming unintelligibly for seconds at a time, the audience eventually settled into a single repetitive bit, which was to holler “cheese” in unison at the vaguest mention of dairy, a bit that got so tedious that it was only rescued when Maloney talked to an audience member named Colby in the lead-up to the final game, and the performers exploded with victorious joy as much as the audience did.
Audiences doing bits at performers is, I’m afraid, exactly the kind of thing that Dropout has, not entirely consciously but undeniably actively, cultivated. The lean early years meant that social-media word of mouth and intimate engagement with the audience they had was their only avenue toward growth, and as a Vulture article speculated last week, that kind of deeply engaged, almost fanatically committed (and none too subtly demanding) audience can be felt as an albatross around the neck of a platform trying to make the move up from extremely niche — kept on life support by a D&D actual play — to only sort of niche — hosting comedy specials from the normie likes of Hank Green and Cameron Esposito; creating casually queer hangout shows with Drag Race stars; attempting comedy-forward versions of cooking competitions, Mythbusters-style experimentation, and, um, PowerPoint presentations.
While in the audience, I kept thinking of a bit from that last (frequently very entertaining) show, Smartypants (hosted by Rekha Shankar, who flipped double birds at anyone who referenced it during the show on Sunday): in its first season, cherubic Dropout regular Anna Garcia gave a presentation titled “Do We Forgive Theater Kids?” which ended, naturally, in the Spartacus-like declaration that she, like everyone else in the room, was a theater kid. It was received rapturously by the Dropout audience, which is itself broadly populated by theater kids, and the (not atypical, by 2020s comedy show standards) eagerness to join in on the making of the comedy on the part of the audience on Sunday is ultimately part and parcel of cultivating an engaged, Internet-fueled audience.
The last time I was in the Chicago Theatre back in 2018, it was to see the McElroy family of comedy podcasters, whose travails with live audience participation are a matter of public record. I don’t remember the sound being as bad then, but in 2018 I wasn’t sitting next to a wall so that the roar of the audience bounced off the domed roof directly at me, not to mention that the McElroys are just more low-key than the larger-than-life Dropout players. I left the theater in a mood to grumble about nerd audiences — my previous most recent comedy outings have been to see Paul F. Tompkins, both with his own Varietopia show and as part of the Thrilling Adventure Hour troupe, and his audiences are older and more relaxed; normies, in the half-pitying, half-envying sense with which nerd spaces often refer to people who don’t make media consumption the center of their life. Which I guess — I pray — makes me a normie too.
Even though all my writing is about nothing other than my media consumption, often extremely nerdy in its specificity and lack of interest to most people. I do try to do more than fannishly enthuse, of course — providing context, making judgments, and crafting accurate descriptions matter more to me than simply broadcasting my consumption. I don’t know if I’ve entirely succeeded with this initial attempt; but the process of writing it has made me hungry to see things that I don’t have a prior relationship with from the internet. Stay tuned, I guess.