Kirstin Eggers (BFA '01) has been around the comedy block. She has studied and performed at Groundlings in Los Angeles, toured with her one-woman comedy sketch show, "Fakesweet," and even won the Best Sketch Comedy award with her troupe Summer of Tears at the 2007 HBO U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen. Now, Eggers is passing down her knowledge. She currently teaches here, at USC's School of Dramatic Arts, and her classes are open to all theatre majors. I met Kirstin last semester when she taught THTR 470 Sketch Comedy for Theatre, a class that serves as a writer's room, and coalesces into a 90-minute sketch show at the end of the semester.
Kirstin took time to chat with me last week. We took over a couch in MCC, and talked about her work, teaching, and comedy.
Here are highlights from our conversation, with some responses edited for clarity and space.
Q: What was your focus while you were in school here?
I was a BFA acting major. The school was called the School of Theater then, and I was in the improv comedy group, Commedus Interruptus, which was a big deal at the time. I wrote for the daily Trojan, a little—I was the theater reviewer—and I had a column at some point.
Q: What was your best takeaway from USC?
I have some really great friends still from USC, and great connections also, career-wise, and that comes up all the time. I auditioned for something, and then I knew someone—she was in my directing class at USC like 15, almost 20 years ago. [She said] 'let's cast her in the show,' in the episode that she wrote. And [the producers] were like, 'great.' And so those connections, they come up all the time.
Q: What has teaching taught you?
It's taught me the value of discipline and doing the work, because I feel like as an actor, and as a student, I felt like maybe I could get away with stuff without doing as much work as I should. It's satisfying to know that work ethic plays such a big part in success in the arts. I don't think people really think about that, and that's something that's become obvious for me, which is nice to think about and apply it to myself.
Q: What was your first acting job out of college?
Can I talk about my theme park thing? I guess that was my first real professional acting job because I was being paid to act. So after school—I think I was out of school a year, maybe a little less—and I saw an ad for auditions for Universal Studios Japan for improv actors. It was a big open call for improv actors, dancers, singers and stunt people. So we did improv stuff, and they kept cutting people all day long, and I was there from 9:00 in the morning until 5:00 at night, auditioning. Then they gave us a job interview right there on that same day. I think it was probably maybe like a month later they called, and gave me the invitation to go to Japan, and so I accepted. It was in Osaka, and I ended up staying two years there [being an] atmosphere performer.
Q: Oh, what's that?
I did all of the outdoor comedy shows, so some days I was Merton Gert, the tacky American tourist. And we went around and did street bits and stuff in my wacky—
Q: In Japanese?
Yeah, mostly. It was a lot of physical comedy, and I didn't know any Japanese when I got there, but then you just pick up more and more every day, and come up with Japanese jokes and stuff like that.
Q: Was there anything from your time in Japan that helped you later on in your career?
So, a few things. In the very technical, practical sense, I got my SAG card. I got a commercial agent—I wasn't union or anything—but I got my SAG card because they needed a Caucasian person who spoke Japanese to play a translator. They had to Taft-Hartley me to be SAG for that.
And then acting wise, it kind of took the preciousness of acting away, in a good way, because I had to do like five or six shows a day at the theme park, and it was just like, 'Oh, time to do another one.' There were no nerves going into acting, and you knew you always had another one coming, so any self-judgment and self-consciousness was erased.
Q: Tell us a little bit about 'Work It.'
The way I got on 'Work It' is an interesting story. I cannot remember how I originally met these casting directors, it might have been from one of those weird casting director workshops. They called me in a couple of times for itty bitty, co-star rolls on other shows, and then they call[ed] me in for 'Work It,' which was an ABC Sit-com, for a series regular role. I didn't have any [theatrical] representation, so I didn't have real pilot seasons or anything like that. So I audition, and then that same day—they were going through my commercial agent because I had no representation—my commercial agent was like, 'Um, they want you back tomorrow for the call back.' I didn't even have headshots; I was at the Kinko's an hour before making color copies, spending a fortune on one random headshot that I had, with a non-existent resume— it was terrible. I didn't know what I was doing, but then I did the studio test, and then the network test and then I got it, which was crazy! I was on a network sit-com without representation—my commercial agent [was] acting as my representation. It was really insane. So then, what do you even do? You just call up people and say, 'Hi, I'm a network series regular, would you like to have a meeting with me? And possibly represent me?'
Q: And is that what you ended up doing? Did you just call them?
I asked the casting directors who cast me to start getting meetings, and they kind of helped me out in that way.
Q: You also had a solo show called 'Fake Sweet.' Can you talk a little bit about that? What it was about, how you came up with it, and what you did with it?
I called it a one-woman sketch show, and it was character monologues that I had written in my level three Groundlings class. I turned it into a show of playing characters, and it was fully costumed, and I got to go a lot of places with it. The way it started was I invited anyone I could find to come to a theater that I borrowed from someone, and I think I literally had six people there, but it was just to make tape of me doing a mock up of the show. Then I sent that tape to the LA Comedy Festival, and I did the show, and I actually got attention from that, and had meetings with people. Then I decided to try and do the sketch festival circuit, so I went to the New York Sketch Festival, then Sacramento Sketch Fest. I did the Comedy Central Stage with that and it was satisfying to just be able to do something on [my] own.
Q: What advice do you have for women trying to break into comedy, especially college-age women who are about to jump into that?
I think there's such a strength that has to come with it, whether it's real or imagined. I think there is a 'fake it till you make it' that needs to happen, and staying strong to telling your own stories and keeping your own point of view. I struggled with that for a very long time, trying to fit into the male humor and stuff that I did not find funny, and I think it's skewing away from that, but there is a difference a lot of times to what men and women find funny. I don't have to find male humor funny, and they don't necessarily have to find my humor funny, but being strong and being like, 'this is what I find funny,' and sticking with it, and not trying to rewrite my own point of view, that is really key and important.