First Draft Episode #224: Tim Baltz
December 17, 2019
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE
Tim Baltz, comedian and actor, co-created, co-wrote, and starred in Shrink, and can now be seen on HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones. He has also appeared in Bajillion Dollar Propertie$, The Opposition with Jordan Klepper, and Drunk History.
Sarah Enni: Hey everyone, welcome to First Draft. I have a few notes before we dive into this week's episode. First, there are a lot of ways you can support the podcast. And one of them, that you may not know about, is buying books through the First Draft website. When you go to firstdraftpod.com and check out the show notes for each episode, there's links to everything that the guest and I discuss.
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Secondly, I am about to tape another mailbag episode with a very special guest whom I'm so excited to chat with, and I would love to get questions from you. I want to hear your lovely voices. So if you could call 818-533-1998 with any questions you have about creativity, or writing, or books, or holiday etiquette, or whatever is on your mind, go ahead and give me a call and leave that question at the voicemail at 818-533-1998.
Lastly, I am currently right in the middle of drafting a novel and I've started posting updates on my Instagram stories, on the First Draft Instagram stories, I should say. So if you want some insight into how I write on a day-to-day basis, or don't write on a day-to-day basis, highs and lows, you can check that out. It's @FirstDraftPod on Instagram and it's been fun to hear people's feedback and to commiserate with other writers. Okay. That's all for now. Thank you so much for listening, and on with the show.
Sarah Enni: Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Tim Baltz, comedian and actor who co-created, co-wrote and starred in Shrink, and can now be seen on HBO's the Righteous Gemstones. He's also appeared in Bajillion Dollar Properties$, The Opposition with Jordan Klepper, and Drunk History among many, many more credits. I loved with Tim had to say about the value of early encouragement, the scourge of quote unquote "cool comedy", and how rare it is to find a protagonist with altruistic tendencies.
Sarah Enni: Also a side note to the listener, Tim and I kind of neglect to provide a ton of background for The Righteous Gemstones, which is the HBO series that Tim is currently appearing in. So I'm gonna give a little bit of background right now. The Righteous Gemstones is a comedy series about a world famous televangelist's family, with a long tradition of deviance, greed, and charitable work. John Goodman stars as Eli Gemstone and his children are played by series creator Danny McBride, Adam Divine, and Edi Patterson. Tim stars as Edi's fiance, BJ, who has to face the selfish underbelly of this TV evangelical family. Okay. That should be all you need to know to appreciate what Tim has to say about it. So now please sit back, relax, and enjoy the conversation.
Sarah Enni: Hi Tim, how are you?
Tim Baltz: Good, how are you?
Sarah Enni: I am so good. I'm so glad that we could get together and chat today. So excited.
Tim Baltz: Thanks for having me.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, so with my podcast, I like to start with some bio. I go way back to the very beginning. So I would love to know where you were born and raised.
Tim Baltz: I was born in Joliet, Illinois, which is about ninety minutes Southwest of Chicago.
Sarah Enni: My next question, which is about reading, and writing, and performing, and how that was a part of growing up for you. I understand that your dad was also... at home you were also learning about acting and stuff like that too, right?
Tim Baltz: Yeah. My dad was a professional actor on stage in the sixties and seventies. He got a masters in theatrical history from the University of Illinois in the late sixties, and he toured with the Goodman Theater. He toured nationally with a couple of shows, one by Bill Daily who was in Newhart and I dream of Jeannie. He worked on Off Broadway for a little bit in New York. He lived there for two years and he was married before he met my mom, and then got a divorce.
Tim Baltz: In the summer of ‘73 he walked from Joliet to South Dakota, which I thought he just loved walking. We grew up being like, "He walks everywhere, he loves walking." But really it was because he was going through a divorce. And I didn't find this out until I was twenty-one and I was going through a breakup, and my dad's like, "Why do you think I walked to South Dakota? I didn't want anyone to be in touch with me."
Sarah Enni: Oh my god.
Tim Baltz: "What?" He'd look at me like, "Kid, what? Who likes walking that much?"
Sarah Enni: Oh my God, that's so interesting.
Tim Baltz: So I would talk to him, he introduced me to a lot of comedy. He loved W.C. Fields, and Fawlty Towers, Monte Python, a lot of old traditional stuff. But then, he just had a great eye for actors and directors and he followed their careers in ways that is easier to do now that IMDb is there. Cause you can just sign up and kind of see what their trajectory is. And back then you just kind of had to know it. I mean there is obviously when you know the information and you keep it, and you value it, it's a much more intimate way to process and exchange that information than just Googling it.
Tim Baltz: And he was a storyteller. He wrote short stories and he loved Robert Service, the poet. And he had a one man show that was all Robert Service poems, which was fascinating. I never got to see it cause I think the last time he did it I was three years old. And then my mother was a Montessori teacher. And she's French. She's from the North of France.
Sarah Enni: I'm always interested in how people grow up to be creative. What factors are in their young life that encouraged that. It kind of seems like you were encouraged at home and at school to think differently. You're not going through the rote process of public school or something like that.
Tim Baltz: Yeah, it definitely felt like a very interesting environment. And then my high school was fascinating cause it was about 2,500 people. A tax referendum failed in my hometown before I started high school, and so it merged the two big public high schools together. Which was Joliet Central, where I went, and Juliet West. There were a lot of activities that you could do at Central, but at the time there wasn't a ton of participation.
Tim Baltz: So if you wanted to walk into any club or activity in school, you would get in. Not sports. Sports, especially basketball, was super competitive. We'd go to state every other year or so. And I played soccer all through high school and we were really good. And we were joined with this other school, so sports, to draw from 5,000 people, it's usually gonna mean you're gonna have pretty good teams.
Sarah Enni: And also you're not likely to be on those teams. That kinda sucks.
Tim Baltz: And there were teachers, great teachers, that were really dedicated in these clubs and activities. So when I started to do theater, I ended up doing ten plays throughout high school, and did a year of speech team at the end cause I was like, "Oh, I'm too cool for that." And then senior year I started doing it and I was like, "What was I thinking? I absolutely should have been doing this sooner." I think I wanted to be good at it because that was the history in my family. My father had been good at it and I'd have his friends tell me how good he was at it. So I didn't want to be bad at it.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. At speech and debate you mean?
Tim Baltz: Yeah. Or, acting or whatever. And when I started to do it, and really fell in love with it and liked it, then it was kind of like, "Well..." I didn't get in the way of my own passion for it. I slowly started to take more risks and eventually chose to go to college in Chicago at Loyola, because the improv community there that I'd been exposed to in high school, was so riveting.
Tim Baltz: And in the home itself, in terms of creativity, my mom's a very good student. I've always noticed that about her. And she draws well and she writes very eloquently. She can teach. She taught French and her grammar is impeccable in both languages. She also speaks Spanish and German. And my dad was always kind of making things with his hands and was a great writer. And in general, was just a very attentive, generous, kind, person.
Tim Baltz: And I think that because of his experiences in theater, and the reason that he started doing. Which was explore, I think, his own personality and a way to kind of break the mold that he'd maybe been born into in his hometown. They created an environment where there were not low stakes, but there was no pressure. They weren't stage parents. They would let us kind of orbit around a little hobby and try it out for a few weeks, and if we dropped it, they'd be like, "Oh, okay."
Tim Baltz: They never pressured us. In fact, there were times in high school where I'm like, "Hey, why aren't you pushing me harder?" Like, "I think I'm good at this stuff." But in hindsight, I'm really glad that they didn't, and they were super supportive when I went to Chicago and had no money and was doing improv five nights a week instead of probably getting a second job [chuckles].
Sarah Enni: Right, right, right. Well, that's so nice. It is interesting that tension between wanting someone to encourage you to take something seriously if you're good at it. But also we're professionalizing kids now in a way that's very distressing.
Tim Baltz: I can't imagine. But now it seems like you have to start thinking about it so early. Every step needs to go the right way. And I can't imagine the pressure that kids have to face about that. And I'm sure that maybe the kids that go through it are fire-tested in a way that benefits them. But artistically, increasingly there's some great Emma Thompson quote that I'm gonna butcher and paraphrase, but it's like, "The arts are becoming solely a playground for the children of rich people." People that have a safety net to allow them to take artistic risk.
Tim Baltz: And that is really dangerous for art. Because it means that art increasingly comes from perspectives that can try to simulate other perspectives, but can't fully understand them. I mean, in general, it is difficult to understand perspective when you're writing any character, let alone understanding it for yourself. I don't know when you write, do you ever write from first person perspective where essentially you are the character?
Sarah Enni: My first book, and the one I'm writing right now, both first person, which is intense.
Tim Baltz: Yeah. I mean, it's one thing to understand a character and be like, "Okay, the more I write about this character, the more I understand about this character. The more I get how they engage in the world." And then if you put another character next to them, you're like, "Oh, this is fun. I get to see how they respond to this person." And you just learn slowly about it.
Tim Baltz: There can be obstacles when you're writing about yourself, or when you're writing a character very close to yourself, because it can be uncomfortable to look at yourself as a character and realize, "Oh, I respond this way under these circumstances." Or it's just sometimes I find it harder to look at myself as a character than some fictional thing that I've made up and I'm slowly chipping away at.
Sarah Enni: I want to hear about how you got into improv, and what your early experiences with improv were, and your early experiences with coming up with character. Some people are more character-based improve, I think. And some people are really in their heads. And I'm not sure what your focus was on earlier, but I'm interested in all that.
Tim Baltz: Well, I'll start with how I was introduced to improv. I had a friend whose older stepbrother was on a team at Improv Olympic, as it was named back then. Now it's iO. This would've been '95, so I'm fourteen, and we go up with I think my parents, and his parents. And we go to iO and his stepbrother's team is opening. He was younger, he was like nineteen. So he's like a brand new team at iO and they were not great, but I didn't know any better.
Tim Baltz: And then there was a team that closed and they were incredible. I mean, I just didn't know. I considered myself someone who devoured comedy, anything that I could find. We didn't have cable, but I watched everything that I could get my hands on. Rewatch movies, not like I was studying them, it's what I loved to do. I'd sneak downstairs and watch SNL as a kid, on the lowest volume settings, so that I wouldn't get caught by my parents. And then sneak back upstairs. So that you could quote it on Monday with everybody else.
Tim Baltz: And I still think that passing things around, maybe now it's more YouTube videos, is something that younger people do. That's their gateway into comedy. You see something, you think it's funny, you memorize it, you repeat it. Everyone trades those things. And then you start to slowly kind of try out, essentially, original comedy. And you see what works. Improv, to me, just kind of blew that open. Because these were really smart adults, operating at the top of their intelligence, trying to be as funny as possible... collaboratively. And it took a certain amount of selflessness to create a cohesive improv show.
Tim Baltz: And they were doing The Harold, or at least iO, Chicago's version of that. And it was so three dimensional. And also kind of just weirdly poetic. I didn't know a ton about poetry then. I still don't know a ton about poetry, but that's what it felt [like]. There were these narratives and themes that purposefully, or not, came together to create this three dimensional product that appeared and vanished, like this weird Brigadoon.
Tim Baltz: And I was obsessed immediately. So any chance that we could get, which was usually only about three times a year, I would go up on the train with friends, see shows, and then come back. And then I started taking classes at these littler theaters. I knew iO, but I was almost too precious about it. I didn't want to start classes and be bad and then not make a team. Which in hindsight, is just some fear talking. But I started taking these beginner classes and then I took beginner classes at Second City and I fell in with some wonderful people.
Tim Baltz: And I was like twenty and bouncing off the walls. And these people that are in their mid to late twenties, some maybe forty-year-old accountants. They're like, "Geez kid, you gotta keep going. You're great at this!' And the first teacher that I had, I had a teacher named Judy who was at Second City, who was a great teacher. And I was a kid and I was about to go on a semester abroad.
Tim Baltz: And I had a fake ID. So I went out drinking with all these older people after our last class, and we're all pleasantly drunk, and I'm leaving. I'm Like, "Judy, thank you. It's taken me a long time to kind of work up the courage to take a class. And it was everything that I'd hoped for. I know it's just Level A at Second City, but this is what I want to do. And you were a great teacher." And she's like, "Don't worry, just keep going once you get back. You're gonna be on Main Stage someday at Second City." And I was like, "Ah, thank you. That's really nice."
Tim Baltz: And then the more I did it, the more in my head I'm like, "That's crazy!" To tell a twenty-year-old kid like, "You're gonna be on Main Stage. You're gonna get to the top of the ladder in this city." And it did wonders for my confidence. Still in hindsight, and Judy's passed away. She was a lovely pillar of the community in Chicago, but I'd see her once a year or something, and I waited until I got on a stage at Second City to tell her that. But it stayed in my head. And it was a very strong voice in my ear saying like, "Keep going. Keep doing this. You really love it."
Tim Baltz: Cause I did have a lot of fear. When you come from a place like Joliet, not a lot of people get out. And the ones that do I think have a mixture of survivors guilt and fear that it's not going to work. It's not a town that has an art system built into it. A pipeline that you can kind of just jump into. I think it's changed a little bit. It's grown by about fifty thousand people since I was a kid. But there aren't a ton of examples of people that have gone off and successfully worked in the arts.
Tim Baltz: So I needed help. I doubted myself a lot. And the community in Chicago created a very welcoming environment. But I think about Judy a lot, cause she told me something I needed to hear obviously.
Sarah Enni: Well it's so interesting. It's a little chicken and the egg, right? Because obviously, this is a person who it seems like was really experienced in that community, and knew a lot of people. So I'm sure she did see that much talent in you, but also knew you needed something to help move forward. You know what I mean?
Tim Baltz: I guess so. I mean, when I finally told her about it, she was like, "Yeah. I didn't worry about it. And then through the years I'd see you doing things, and I'd be like, "Oh, of course. Oh good. I'm glad Tim's doing that." But it was indispensable encouragement. And I try to give that to students whenever I had them. Cause teaching is really rewarding.
Tim Baltz: I miss that about not being in Chicago. I miss that about being here. As frustrating as teaching can be, sometimes when you have a lesson plan that you believe in, and it's not clicking. It's so rewarding to see talented people get it or grow incrementally. And then at the end of eight weeks, or whatever, thinking like, "Oh well, hopefully I imparted something, and they'll be better for it."
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Actually, I'm not super familiar with what the scene in Chicago is like, but was it character-based? What were you exploring at that time?
Tim Baltz: There's kind of three hubs in Chicago, which I like, they tend to keep each other honest to a certain extent. And all of this is relative to other cities. But I have lived in New York, I've lived here for awhile and obviously lived in Chicago for over ten years. There's Second City, which started in the late fifties, has a rich tradition, has pumped out tons of iconic people that have helped shape American comedy. They do a two-act sketch comedy review; scene, song, monologue.
Tim Baltz: In the early eighties, Cherna Halpern and Del Close create the Improv Olympic. That is exploring longterm improv through the herald. And then kind of everything that proliferates from that. That becomes a hub of talent because of its improv school. It creates a lot of great people that start to infiltrate Second City in the late eighties, early nineties, which produces some of the best shows.
Tim Baltz: The first big peak is Pinata Full of Bees, which is Adam McKay (co-writer and director of Anchorman and Talladega Nights, writer and director of The Big Short and Vice, creator of Succession, and much more), Rachel Dratch (comedian and actress from Saturday Night Live, Sisters, and Wanda Jo from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver). John Glaser (comedian and actor from Parks and Recreation and Inside Amy Schumer), Scott Adsit (comedian known for 30 Rock, Veep, and The Goldbergs), Jenna Jolovitz (comedian known for MadTV and Greetings from Tucson), and Tina Fey is in that. That's on the heels of Carrell and Colbert and Amy Sedaris. And there is a comedy snob audience in Chicago and also a tourist audience. And so you're performing to that. Then there's iO, which is very much kind of like, I don't know, I never wanna say jazz cause that's such a weird comparison. But long-form is a lot more exploratory than what Second City is.
Tim Baltz: And then there's The Annoyance Theater, which was founded by Mick Napier in Chicago and owned by he and Jen Estlin now. And that's very much like the punk rock stepchild of the scene. At least it was when it started. Now it's going on 30 years and it's a great place for people to kind of buck the trends that happen at the other two theaters. But, if you want to be the best in Chicago, you want to try to play at all of those places, master all the styles like Bruce Lee. Then you're becoming your own unique version of all those styles.
Sarah Enni: Combined like Voltron to be the primed comedian, right?
Tim Baltz: Yeah. In a nutshell, that's the scene that I kind of entered into. Although The Annoyance was dormant until 2006 cause they didn't have a physical space.
Tim Baltz: So entering into that space, I really just was obsessed with iO and I wanted to perform there. I loved what was happening there. And I slowly got to know more of what happened at Second City. And then I got hired to tour there when I was twenty-five, and toured for two-and-a-half years and was kind of off and running.
Sarah Enni: So when you tour, this is kind of crazy to me, when you tour for two-and-a-half years doing improv, how many times a week? What's the lifestyle of that?
Tim Baltz: I was working a desk job downtown in Chicago while touring. So I worked seven days a week for two-and-a-half years. Which I could, cause I was in my mid-twenties. But essentially, you have rehearsal a couple of times a week with your touring company. You're doing a mixture of archive scenes from anytime in the past at Second City, and original scenes that you're writing, that your director is helping you write, that you're testing. Usually in the improv sets after your shows.
Tim Baltz: And then sometimes you get to create an original show for the holidays, or for a summer run at a performing arts center someplace. And on weekends, or during the week, they book these shows. Now, it used to be a really heavy schedule. When I came along it had gone downhill. I don't know where it's at now. And we probably toured, out of the month, maybe anywhere between eight days to two weeks out of the month. But a lot of times that translated into two or three shows every weekend. So you'd be gone three days out of the week or something.
Sarah Enni: And that's a lot of performing. I mean, it kind of feels like this bootcamp. Where you grow in leaps because you're just doing it so consistently.
Tim Baltz: Absolutely. And you're doing this archive material, which some people don't always enjoy. I saw it coming from a more theatrical background as this acting challenge. And I think that's what helped get me hired. Cause you get hired as an understudy first, and then basically they give you the scripts and you understudy for someone when they're out of town or they're sick. And to me, you have the script, and then you also have the old tapes that you can watch to memorize the scene. I'm like, "This is the easiest thing. this is so easy. Are you kidding? You get to watch the tape. Just do what they do." And I think that helped me tour early on.
Tim Baltz: And then I just toured with some of the smartest, funniest people. And we had a core group that didn't really change for years, which really helped to build a lot of cohesion. And then slowly you start to write a little bit more, which as a writer I was very green. I toured with people that were incredibly good writers. So I learned a ton from them. And sketches.
Tim Baltz: Second City is a bit more character-based. And this is getting into one of your questions. You can write character-based comedy, you can write political-based comedy. You can write premise-based, game-based comedy. It all kind of goes into this two-act comedy review. You can write songs, you can write monologues, whatever the case is. Sometimes it can feel a bit aimed toward tourists, but that's also a good muscle to learn.
Tim Baltz: But I really enjoyed the character stuff, and looking at all the components of a show and saying, "Man, I'm really bad at writing this kind of stuff. I'm gonna challenge myself to write a solo character kind of thing." Or, I'd never written a song. So in the last show that I did there, I wrote a song. I loved that about Second City, about iO. I loved that you could really take your time and chew up scenery and strive to be as "in the moment" as possible. Really work the improv muscle. Force yourself to respond to the last thing that's said. Let time unspool and see where you end up from minute one, to minute thirty or forty-five or whatever.
Tim Baltz: And at The Annoyance, I loved that anything went. You had the craziest idea and you're like, "I really want to work hard at this. Mick, can you give us a slot next Wednesday. Or, two months from now. And we'll work really hard on this show." I was very lucky that I got to test all those things at all those different theaters. I worked really hard, but I also recognize that not everybody gets to do that.
Sarah Enni: I've gone through UCB (Upright Citizen's Brigade). So that's the format that I have known. And to me, as a storyteller, one of the things that's the most mind-boggling, going from just writing to getting this tiny little experience of performing, is that I bring myself to whatever I'm presenting. Which means that when I show up on stage, people expect a certain thing. Or will believe me more as one thing than another thing, basically. As opposed to, when you're right, you're just not even on the page. And you can just go wherever you want.
Tim Baltz: Oh, interesting.
Sarah Enni: It was fascinating to me to be like, "Well, I'm a woman on stage. I'm short on stage, or my scene partner is this person so they don't want to see us do this thing. Or they do want to see us do this thing." That was just something that I got kind of obsessed with. And, of course, it impacts how you are in a scene. I just want to know how you think about, since you're developing characters too. You're on stage, you're a man, you have a Midwestern accent. How do you deal with what you think people are perceiving? And do you subvert that? Or how do you mess with that, do you think?
Tim Baltz: I mean, I think it's definitely, there's a consciousness about it now in 2019 that's very different than when I started in the year 2000. I felt like improv allowed you to kind of do anything. Again, now there's a greater consciousness where I think there's a heightened sensitivity in a good way. Whereas, I'm not going to play a character of another race, or a point of view that I fundamentally do not understand.
Tim Baltz: I'd like to think that I never really did that. But there's definitely more sensitivity toward that now, which is a good thing. Especially in classes, I would encourage people to try whatever they wanted because you never know what talents you have. You never know what you're going to be good at character-wise. You never know when subverting your own point of view is actually going to lead to a new discovery for yourself.
Sarah Enni: I guess it's an engagement with audience question. Like, you are present in front of your audience. You physically are present in front of your audience, and you have to understand that, and negotiate with what you think people will expect of you. Even when you're playing some off-the-wall character. Or your character from The Opposition that is this kind of evil, GOP stooge, basically. Versus someone in Shrink who is like heartwarming.... I mean, you've played a variety of people, but the constancy is that you are in your body.
Tim Baltz: Yeah.
Sarah Enni: I'm just interested in how you think about that.
Tim Baltz: I try to believe whatever the character believes, just as a way to put yourself in a space where you can generate emotion for the character. Emotion generates investment from the audience, empathy from the audience, and allows you to create opinions about the people that you're on stage with more quickly.
Tim Baltz: Those opinions then create a chain reaction which develop a relationship more quickly than normal with your other scene partners. So when I make a character choice on stage, it always helped me to make it more emotionally, so that it can spur the chain reaction quicker and it takes me out of a place of cerebral detail-specific invention.
Tim Baltz: Because the devil is certainly in the details. And there might be a right answer, or a more right answer, or a funnier answer that you could come up with, when your writer brain engages. But it's so much more fluid and interesting to watch from my perspective, to see someone emotionally take stock of what's happening, knowing that the details are going to flow no matter what. To me, making those emotional choices with a character allowed the the floodgates for details to open more quickly. I hope that's more detailed response.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, It does. I mean you're kind of embodying it.
Tim Baltz: I mean, and I hate to say, "My theatrical background." That's not ever how I approached it. But it is the makeup of my entrance into the improv community, did come from that style. And so, if I could attach myself emotionally to something, if I could start with that, I always felt more comfortable. When I couldn't figure out what the emotional stakes were, what my emotional opinions were on stage about the thing that we were looking at, or the person that I'm talking to, or the environment that I'm in, I felt more lost.
Tim Baltz: I noticed that over the years. That wasn't a conscious choice. It was just in hindsight I realized, "Oh, that's what makes me feel comfortable." So then now I can reverse engineer that comfort, and try to find the comfort at the beginning of the scene, in order to speed up this process. I think that's a realization that I had a few years in.
Tim Baltz: I think on my first herald team, I had a teammate that was like, "You actually believe that this shit's happening on stage." [Chuckles]. I'm like, "Well, I'm not like challenged, you know? That's how I..." I had a director in high school who would bitch us out so hard if we broke.
Sarah Enni: Oh, interesting.
Tim Baltz: I mean he would stop everything and just be like, "What do you think we're doing here?" And this was with scripted material. That coupled with wanting to emotionally invest in scenes meant that... And then also watching what I enjoyed watching. I just always thought something was more powerful if you're not breaking. When you're breaking on stage and you're saying like, "Look at this spectacle of me enjoying myself so much." So as an audience, what are you saying? You're saying the audience wants to watch us just break down and giggle at each other.
Tim Baltz: I get that there's a place for that. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I've never broken, but when it seems like that's the point, when the point of the show is like, "Look at my precocious personality busting up over these things that I find funny." How is that more powerful of a product to give to an audience than not doing that, and committing to a character, and letting the chips fall where they may?
Sarah Enni: Ironic detachment is the worst.
Tim Baltz: Cool comedy can fucking die. I hate it. I hate cool comedy.
Sarah Enni: It's not engaging.
Tim Baltz: It's the worst. And I can't even go off on a tangent of where cool comedy has brought us. But I really, really have huge disdain for cool comedy. How is this the thing that you're gonna be cool at? Cool doesn't exist. It's a social construct. It's completely mutable. It's malleable. It changes based on every single ingredient in every single environment. Like band kids think football people are dorks. Football people think band kids are geeks.
Tim Baltz: It [takes a big breath in], it doesn't exist. But why drag it into comedy where you're trying to have a point of view, and express something about the human condition, based on how our American society is constructed? We feel these things starting in high school when our consciousness about society, and ourselves, and our relation to other people, is expanding. And we're saying like, "Hey, bullies are bad. We don't like this. I'm developing my point of view so that I can say something about what life is. And I want to do that through a comedic lens using dramatic structure." Right? Cause everything has dramatic structure.
Tim Baltz: Ultimately, you're trying to say something about these people that use levers of power, or their own positions, to bully people. It always kind of trickles back to this. Cause comedy is hoping to expose some kind of shared truth that we all recognize, and we have a recognition laugh about. Or we laugh about it cause we don't recognize it, and we're puzzled and curious and it tickles us. Whatever the case is like, "Why go be cool? What does cool... how does it multiply anything?" It doesn't, it divides things. It subtracts things. It reduces things. It's always a net negative. End rant.
Sarah Enni: [Ha!] Yeah. I appreciate that. I feel like we are moving into [pauses] I don't know, I hope, I'm an optimist, but I think we're moving into a more earnest phase. I write young adult books, so I'm preoccupied with what actually young adults are interested in and I think they are not detached. They're pretty engaged and earnest.
Tim Baltz: Yeah, it seems like a really great audience of people that are super engaged in a lot of different products. You can deliver a lot of different characters and scenarios and it's exploded over the last ten, fifteen years.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, it's been kind of wild. And also, I think younger kids are more into the Monty Python stuff, like the absurdism is back in a heartfelt way. Or, at least, that's what I'm self-selecting to some extent. But that's what I'm seeing and I think it's fun. I'm on Tic-Toc and I'm like, "This is funny." The kids are actually creating some pretty sweet, funny stuff.
Tim Baltz: I have a Tic-Toc account, but I haven't made anything yet.
Sarah Enni: Oh boy. I'm only there to observe. Trying to stay somewhat relevant. And it's addictive. You're like, "Oh, it's been forty-five minutes. I'm an adult. I need to actually move on." I really, really love all that. And we gotta move along just to make sure we get to your projects cause I really want to hear how Shrink came about. And that kind of being the beginning of moving on to a different phase of your career it seems like.
Tim Baltz: Yeah. I was very much kind of improv, sketch focused in Chicago. This guy, Ted Tremper, who was the co-creator of Shrink, had created a web series called Breakups. Which was basically a locked off, two-shot on two improvisers, in the hopes of capturing some of the magic of Chicago-style improv. And the premise was two people breaking up. And so you're seeing a snapshot of that anywhere from three minutes to ten minutes or whatever the case was.
Tim Baltz: And I think it won a couple of awards. It was a Vimeo staff pick, stuff like that. And it used a lot of great people in Chicago. And then a year after that he came to me, and I had done one episode with my good friend Mary Soane, and he came to me and was like, "So, I have a friend who essentially wanted to be a doctor, didn't get a residency, he's in crippling debt, and he's just hiding out in his mom's basement," or something like that.
Tim Baltz: The story was a little different detail-wise. But he's like, "I think that..." Because it wasn't about therapy at all, he was a proper doctor. He's like, "So here's the premise." And it was the premise for Shrink. He's like, "Do you think we could get some people together?" I think maybe six months, or even a year, passed after that. And then finally we were both in town. We had time.
Tim Baltz: I was on the ETC stage at Second City, so I had Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday off, cause it was just Thursday through Sunday. And so Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday we would film these hour-long sessions with a three camera Shoot. I was the character. So my life's kind of falling apart. I feel my goal was to become a neurosurgeon. I go through medical school, I take on half-a-million dollars in debt... this is for listeners who don't know. And I fail to match with any teaching hospitals and get a residency, which is what people who go through medical school need to do to become doctors.
Tim Baltz: So I'm stuck with all this debt. As a way to defer it, I basically default to trying to get a license in clinical therapy. So that is where the gist of the web series started. It started as a web series. And we would film for an hour, me and one other guest, or me and a couple. And we had three cameras. We were right next to the Fullerton CTA stop. So the trains are going by like every five minutes. So we're pausing every five minutes. We started in late September and we went through December. So by the end of the web series, we're all freezing cold, literally in huge coats and gloves filming this stuff. And I'm apologizing, but it's the only space that I have, it's this garage.
Tim Baltz: And then once we finished that, and it had success. There weren't a ton of... this was 2011, there weren't a ton of web series being made in Chicago at the time. Cause trends sometimes hit it later than in New York and LA. So it did well according to Chicago standards, and there was a lot of excitement about it. People were sharing it a lot. And then Ted had this idea, he's like, "I think that we can make it into a pilot if we film this chunk. We get a supervising therapist..." who ended up being Sue Gillan, who plays it brilliantly in the Seeso, the full season that we made. Claudia Wallace (actress from Shrink, Fred Claus, and The Oath), who's the secretary in her office who kind of grills me. She's brilliant in the original too.
Tim Baltz: Honestly, the first two minutes were so good with her, that that got us in the door everywhere. And then with Sue, everyone's comment was like, "Who's this real therapist you got to do this?" So it was like Claudia and Sue are the reason it got made. Well, they're the reason that it had a life beyond that point. And then we filmed the end of the original pilot, was the end of the full season.
Sarah Enni: Got it. Okay.
Tim Baltz: And we filmed that. We took it to the New York Television Festival. We won a couple of awards. And a producer from Jean Doumanian productions, this guy Patrick Daly, who's also mainly the reason why it got made. He's like, "I want to develop this with you guys. And then we'll go out and pitch it. We've got six months." And we're like, "Oh shit. Okay. Six months." Which is a lot of time [chuckles]. We were so bad at it. We over-wrote it. Oh my God. We would come in with like twenty page development pitches, and he's like, "Guys, this needs to be eight pages max. What are you doing?"
Tim Baltz: So we got it down. We pitched it. We pitched it to eight places in may of 2013. We sold it to Pivot, which doesn't exist anymore. And it sat in development there for two-and-a half-years. So we had a lot of time to stew on it. I had moved to LA at the time. I was going nuts not getting to make the show that I'd moved here after selling.
Tim Baltz: And then the CEO there ended up becoming the CEO at Seeso. His manager of scripted development ended up becoming one of the main directors at Seeso, Kelsey Balance. And I had done Bajillion Dollar Propertie$ and so they were like, "Everyone here knows you. We still love it. Come in." We came in. Forty-five minute meeting. It was sold basically.
Sarah Enni: That's great!
Tim Baltz: Yeah. And that was the long and short of it.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Okay. So I did not realize that Bajillion was before you got to do Shrink. That's so interesting.
Tim Baltz: Yeah. Before we get to make the season.
Sarah Enni: And Bajillion was so fun too.
Tim Baltz: Super fun.
Sarah Enni: Did they have everything for your character at the beginning or did you guys develop that?
Tim Baltz: They had a starting point, like he believes that his dad was one of the people from the original... from what Predator, the movie, is based on. His dad died in the jungle [chuckles]. And then he slowly realizes who his dad really is, no spoilers for people who want to go find it on iTunes or Pluto TV. And that was great. And it was fascinating to watch that happen. And I took a lot of what I learned from Bajillion into Shrink because it was fully improvised based off of outlines. And Shrink was about thirty percent improvised in the garage, where we would leave these huge open spaces in the scripts to fill with improv, that we'd gotten in the garage.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. So I'm interested about this in the basic level, as far as the balance between writing and trusting yourself on the day. And especially when you're writing for yourself, it seems to me that it'd be, I would either be tempted to overwrite and give myself something to fall back on, or to underwrite and be like, "Well, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'll just do it on the day and be fine."
Tim Baltz: Yeah [sighs]. Again, in hindsight, people said what we were going into it with, into production with, was super dangerous. But they did not tell us that [laughs].
Sarah Enni: Dangerous how?
Tim Baltz: It was dangerous to leave six to eight pages per script blank to fill with improv.
Sarah Enni: Okay. Cause that's almost ten minutes.
Tim Baltz: Yeah, it was probably, if we had thirty-two page scripts, we had about twenty-six pages scripted, usually. And then depending on what we got and where it fit, we would add a good six to eight minutes of improv. But it was usually in those sessions in the garage with patients, between me and a character, or characters, and then some with myself and Sue, the supervising therapist.
Tim Baltz: I think that because Ted and I had yielded so many good results, and we were in charge of the casting process, and we knew who we were going to get, so we were in control of the tone. Because that's the most important thing in comedy. If you know what the tone is and you cast it well [sighs], you can breathe a sigh of relief. Cause you're going to get results that will give you some wiggle room in post production.
Tim Baltz: So we were super controlling over who was going to be in the show. And Seeso was nice enough to not try to force any outside people. Cause the last thing that you wanted... and even then, we still showed up and you'd be doing something and great people would just be slightly off tone and you're like, "You're not a believable character who's coming into this garage for free therapy."
Sarah Enni: And just to be really clear on this, cause I'm so interested in this, how would you describe the tone? Tone is kind of a hard thing to describe. When you're just talking about Shrink, how would you describe the tone you were really going for?
Tim Baltz: Well, you wanted realism. You wanted a grounded character who's speaking emotionally about their lives, and you want the funniest parts of them talking about their life, or the discussion between them and their therapist. Therapy is overdone on TV. Scripted dramatic. Scripted comedy. And scripted comedy, when you're doing therapy too, it's always really hokey stuff. I'm rewatching Sopranos right now and there's still a lot of like, "Tony, tell me about your mother." He's like, "Jesus Christ, what does this have to do about my mother?"
Sarah Enni: I'm rewatching Frazier right now. So it's a whole other kind of...
Tim Baltz: Yes, exactly. There's a lot of pop psychology, and tropes. And we were like, "We don't want that at all." In fact, I didn't watch that stuff cause I'm like, "I don't want it anywhere near my brain." What we had landed on in the original, and through all the trial and error of that, A: we knew about percentage-wise what the results were going to be. So we knew we needed at least forty-five minutes to an hour with each person.
Tim Baltz: We knew the first five minutes were going to be kind of like greasing the wheel, getting into the tone, getting all the jokey improv energy out. Cause everyone's going for the joke. And you're like, "Get that out. Let's have a real conversation." And then you kind of have to get lost in the conversation, in order to stumble upon something funny, and continue going. Because again, this is the thing about breaking, is that if you're like, "Oh look, look at me, I'm so clever." Then you're done. You have betrayed the realism of the scene.
Tim Baltz: If that glint in your eye is like, "Okay, I'm about to be so clever." Or you just said something and you're like, "He, he, he, I'm so clever." Gone. Realism is gone. Reality is gone. Which is fine. If that's the comedy that you're doing, that's fine. That's a tone too. And then you should be on tone for that. Although I still think that committed acting makes a bad tone even better. Because then you can have people that are being clever and winking at the camera, and other people that are totally oblivious and it's like Dauber in Coach.
Tim Baltz: Or, characters like that, where you're like, "Does this person even know it's acting? That gives it reality. And so each session, I'm just explaining this so that you know what we were hoping to get. And there were times when the clock would run out and you'd be like, "Man, we might've gotten one sentence or one exchange between me and this person." Then you'd get to post and be like, "Oh no. We got two sentences." Or you'd think something was super funny and you get to post and you're like, "That's not real. It's not as good as I thought it was."
Tim Baltz: But knowing the margin of error for that, we felt comfortable going in as foolish as it was. And we did yield just enough. We probably only had two or three scenes that were deleted, that didn't make the episode, where we're like, "This should have been in an episode." It just didn't fit. But that's cutting it insanely close. Too close.
Tim Baltz: But it helped us, I think, allow for space in that pilot to demonstrate what the character's daily life was. And that was integral in establishing a tone and a pace for the episode. Because you get the tone, whereas if we're able to nail that tone in production, then you have this consistent, I don't want to call it filler, but you know that you can build these mini montages throughout the piece to complete the structure that we wanted to present.
Tim Baltz: And that was really important. Cause then even if you're not getting a ton of laughs, you are seeing what he's going through on a daily basis. And then when you pop over to these scripted moments where we're trying to demonstrate something dramatically that's happening in his life, or you're trying to support this premise for the episode, or the A or B or C storyline, then you have these mini-montages that can essentially thematically boost and support what you're trying to say.
Tim Baltz: So in the second episode, he misinterprets his supervising therapist's suggestion to have people write letters to each other. And he thinks they're supposed to say those things to each other. And it's these mini-montages of him screwing up, and watching everyone interpret it poorly, and him thinking like, "I'm doing... I'm doing good.I'm doing the work." And then him writing these letters himself and pissing people off and trying to chase down everything.
Tim Baltz: So everything serves the A storyline. And we could kind of blend the A, B, and C storylines a little bit, because these mini-montages were interesting enough. And they start to slowly make you fall in love with these side characters that you're tuning in. You're getting just enough laughs, and then you're back to the story.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. That's so great. I mean, I'm always fascinated at how improv can work in these traditionally scripted environments, and setting out tone. It's hard.
Tim Baltz: And tone kind of tells you what type of improv you can go for, and how much of it will be useful. Like with Bajillion, all of it was improvised based on outlines. Sometimes you'd have suggested dialogue and it'd be really funny, I'd be like, "Oh, I gotta say this." And you'd start the scene, and then the scene would go along and have a little fat around the edges. And then the more you do it, the more you refine it. Or, you nail it the first time, then you're like, "Okay, so we got that. We just need to get this piece from this angle, and then we can run long and go looking for new stuff here."
Tim Baltz: But also what I learned, especially watching that go through posts and watching finished episodes, and the editors of the show would tell me that too, and Kulap said, "If you're reacting emotionally, the camera needs it." The story, even though that's like these improvised little character bits that come in three beats, you still need to demonstrate what emotionally that character arc needs to accomplish. Or, what that scene needs to accomplish for the story as a whole for the episode.
Tim Baltz: So if you need to start this scene confused and end it angry so that you storm off, and the second beat of the B storyline is you coming in with a full head of steam in this scene, you have to accomplish that. So the improv has to serve that. You always have to ask yourself, what are we trying to accomplish in this scene? Does improv help us?
Tim Baltz: So in Shrink, I knew in those patient sessions what we're trying to accomplish. And coming from the original web series and pilot, we knew how to best approach that. But then with other scenes that were scripted, we'd look at it, we'd be like, "Okay, this scene's a page and a half. We feel pretty good about the script. But technically, if we're just ending with confusion here, we could improvise and just have people misunderstand each other." So you can improvise as much as you want.
Sarah Enni: And stay in confusion and you're fine.
Tim Baltz: Yeah. But you look at the script and be like, "We probably don't need to improvise until this point." Or you'd be like, "You can improvise some filler at the top of this scene. Then you need to nail this script, because we're bouncing from here to here in the episode. And then this beat here picks up later with this beat here in this character, feeling X, Y, Z." So those things are important. And that's all about story. You can't improvise story. No, you can, but it's probably not gonna be as good as if you're sitting and writing story. Which is why most improvisors and teachers are taught to avoid story and plot, because it ends up looking kind of sloppy.
Tim Baltz: But I also think that the biggest magic trick that you can pull is doing that successfully in an improv show.
Sarah Enni: I mean, that's when it's magic, right? When you're like, "I actually can't believe that wasn't written." That's so satisfying when you see that. That's fascinating. And it's very akin to in a book. I mean, in a book I think about tone and voice as being very similar. And especially right now, I'm drafting a book and it's very, I want a certain tone, but it's hard to police yourself all the time. And then on the page I'll write a bunch of alts for myself and be like, "Well, this is very funny to me, but it's definitely not serving what needs to happen before I get to chapter three."
Sarah Enni: It's just there to entertain me. So it has to go. But it's hard to maintain any kind of separation from that while you're in it. And you're in it the whole time. You're writing it, and performing in it, and editing it.
Tim Baltz: Producing it. Yeah, those hats were hard to juggle a little bit. One of the things that we mourned, cause we got season two green-lit, and we definitely grieved not being able to do it. Not just for the creative reasons, but also because we learned so much from season one. I came out of it, and I remember in post sitting around thinking like, "Okay, we're gonna get a season two, I need to write a document." I wrote pages and pages for like, "Here's what needs to change. Here's what worked. Here's what didn't work. Here was the kind of gray areas where we were all getting confused. If I'm gonna do this again wearing all three hats, then here's how we need to streamline this process so that we're avoiding these kinds of last minute discussions or arguments".
Tim Baltz: It's really shocking that it all went off, that we delivered the product that we did. Because we had a ton of obstacles that I publicly can't talk about.
Sarah Enni: Well, it ended up being like, it was such a surprise to me. I didn't know what to expect going into it. I'd seen Bajillion I think, and then I was like, "Oh yeah, I'll watch this." And it was just great. I loved it.
Tim Baltz: Oh thanks.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I'm happy that you got to do at least one season. Never say never for another one. It makes so much sense. It's interesting that you got to do Shrink after Bajillion because your character in Bajillion Dollar Propertie$ - I want to make sure to say the whole thing - is one of the most grounded. I mean, that's a pretty cuckoo cast and they got to go do some pretty bananas stuff. And then you always come back to Glen who was struggling.
Tim Baltz: I know [chuckles].
Sarah Enni: I read somewhere else you said that you really like playing naive characters.
Tim Baltz: Yes.
Sarah Enni: What about that particular type of character is appealing to you?
Tim Baltz: I think that low status offers a ton of flexibility. Because you can play it where you want high status. You can play it where you've never had a whiff of high status, you don't even know what it is, you know? You can get high status and not know what to do with it. You can get high status, become monster. You can get high status, fall back to low status. There's a lot of movement available to a low status person.
Tim Baltz: And also it doesn't restrict your emotional bandwidth or range at all. You can be a vengeful, jealous, low status person. You can be a naive, sweet, endearing, low status person. I think what I like about the naive people is that you can be [pauses] you can be dumb and smart at the same time. You can play dumb at the top of your intelligence. You can be altruistic, which I think is very rare in protagonists.
Tim Baltz: I would argue there's not as many naive protagonists currently in American comedy, as there are alphas or anti-heroes. And I grew up watching more naive protagonists, or altruistic protagonist, people that wanted to help. That was something about Shrink that we reflected on a lot, which was, we're touching on a subject that is dicey. We made it a point, "We're never gonna say crazy."
Tim Baltz: A lot of us in the room had been through therapy and had had positive experiences. And believe that talking to objective, third party, professionally trained people, can be really beneficial. No matter who you are. And the taboo is kind of wearing off, but hold strong in certain parts of the country. And we wanted to treat that with the respect that it deserved. But how do you do that without kind of anesthetizing or sterilizing the comedy?
Tim Baltz: And the naïveté, his desire to succeed because of this great financial pressure, which we thought was very relatable. And then also the naïveté and the altruism in saying like, "I was geared up to help people surgically, scientifically, medically. Does anyone want to hear how the drug works chemically?" [Both laugh]
Tim Baltz: But he was very much poised to do that, and then he has to switch tracks. And he's bad at helping people. That's all he wants to do. I struggled to find other comparable characters in that situation that you actually believed wanted to help people. That weren't selfish. And I think that selfishness is often injected into characters to drive conflict and story, and that's fine. But it means that there's a scarcity of characters like David in Shrink, where you're rooting for them and cringing.
Tim Baltz: Usually when you're cringing at someone, you're like, "Fuck this piece of shit character." Like, "Oh, ho. They're so funny." David Brent is unique, incredible character. You're cringing at him all the time, but they really save him doing the right thing for the end.
Tim Baltz: Michael Scott (portrayed by Steve Carrell) from the television show The Office, it's a little different. To my own shame, I only recently watched all of The Office this year.
Sarah Enni: Same, actually. I had only gone to, I think, season six or something. And then for the first time watched to the end.
Tim Baltz: I'd watch maybe three episodes ever. Cause I just loved the British Office so much, and I felt like I missed the boat. So I was like, "Well, I already missed the train on this." Holy smokes is it good! I know that's so dumb to say In 2019. It was so good. And Michael Scott is a brilliant character in that he continually fucks up, but is always proving his love for these people. Even when he can't stand someone. Except Toby. He hates Toby.
Sarah Enni: Which is great. I mean, Leslie Knope and her interaction with Jerry, right? You earn that sometimes when you have enough grounded emotional connection to all the other characters, then you can hate Toby. Yeah, Michael Scott has just enough of that, "Oh, it's there. He just wants friends. He's just bad at friendship."
Tim Baltz: Deep vulnerable need. And I think that when you're naive, you can live in a space of vulnerability. And choose to see it and react angrily, or be hurt by it. Or not see it. And not seeing your own vulnerability causes the audience to have a visceral reaction. And so I think there's power in those naive characters. I think even in Righteous Gemstones, that character is naive to a certain extent, or in the dark about how he's viewed. And then once he's had enough, once he kind of realizes and demonstrates his vulnerability, and puts his foot down, then the audience is like, "Good for you. Great!" Naive characters create a certain momentum. They're on a collision course with people. I don't know how you feel about them, or if it resonates at all.
Sarah Enni: It's interesting to think about. When you're talking about a naive character, I think there's a ticking clock that happens instantly, right? The audience is like, "When are they gonna realize? When are they gonna have that face-clearing moment?"
Tim Baltz: And, "Is it going to be dramatic? Violent? Is it going to be an epiphany?" Like, "How, how are they going to respond when they get the information that we already have?"
Sarah Enni: Yeah. It's interesting to think about all the tricks. Like when the audience knows something and the character doesn't, that's kind of a fun space to play. And then you can build the tension and really get people invested. So I want to get to Righteous Gemstones. The show is a lot of, I guess, would you call them betas trying to be alphas? I mean, they're kind of...
Tim Baltz: No, there's some true alphas in there.
Sarah Enni: I mean, John Goodman is John Goodman, so...
Tim Baltz: And Danny too is great at playing really flawed alphas. Maybe the skillset of some of those characters is not alpha, but... I think usually he's got his finger on the pulse of how to satirize that traditional stereotype. A lot of which are found probably, well, I mean all over the country. But he usually focuses them in the South and puts them through a cycle of overconfidence. Being a victim of your own mistakes. Having to repent and humble yourself. Being accepted for that repentance. Growing over-confident and repeating the same cycle. And that's brilliant cause we watch that happen over and over again in real life in America.
Tim Baltz: And sort of fit into that. And he described it as like, "You're kind of the eyes of the audience." You are looking at this family like, "What is wrong with them?" The same way that the audience is looking at them and analyzing their flaws. And so that was the pilot. And then when we came back, we just started reading scripts, and the way that they took every character was, I thought the arcs were super satisfying, really original. And then the more they came in, and I looked at what I was gonna get to do, I was thrilled.
Tim Baltz: Because it was fun to play that and then put my foot down. No spoilers for people. And kind of take the character in the direction that he goes in. Especially opposite Edi Patterson who's just the biggest joy to play with. That I can have these kinds of conversations with offscreen, and the same kind of respect for the craft, but also the foot hovering over the accelerator. And the hands nimble on the steering wheel. I really feel like we can go anywhere, at whatever speed, together. And I get to follow the craziness of that character, but also the emotional investment that they have with each other. That was so satisfying when I read that. And exciting to get to do.
Sarah Enni: It's such a gift to you, right? You're the eyes of the audience, but also that character is joining this family, wants things to work out. You want the best for them, even as you see how insane they are.
Tim Baltz: It felt very original. That you would have this character that is kind of naive, that's vulnerable, that isn't on the same level, that wants to be on the same level as this flawed family. Is learning about their flaws, but is so in love with this woman that he's like, "You think that I would react that way? I wouldn't. I want to be with you that much." It's a blip in his radar. And their love is very strong and pure, in a weird way. But also really easy to commit to emotionally, and dig in on. And I think a ton of great really original laughs come from that emotional investment.
Tim Baltz: Cause when you get an audience to emotionally invest in that, they don't see the left turns coming. They don't. Cause they're invested. Some of the greatest laughs of all time are unexpected, and you can't have unexpected laughs if you know exactly where someone's coming. Where everyone's tipping their hand, or winking at the camera, that a joke is coming.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. What I would love to get to, is talking about what else you would be developing. Or how you're thinking about writing for yourself going forward. And then I do have a question about, you said in an interview somewhere, that Randy Snutz is your girlfriend's favorite character.
Tim Baltz: Yeah [laughs].
Sarah Enni: I'm just curious about how, when you create characters like that...[pauses] and a lot of your CBB [Comedy Bang! Bang!] stuff, or characters, that you get to dive into and do over and over again. And when you have characters like that that are sort of coexisting with you, how they also coexist with people in your life. I mean, that's just interesting to me.
Tim Baltz: Well, and this comes back to something that I said early on in this interview, when you're watching TV and you're just mimicking things. I really loved doing impressions because of, maybe because of SNL, but the best impressions that I had were of people I knew. I was really good at impersonating my friends. And Randy Snutz, in particular, also I think is kind of region-less. [Lowers voice] "They're dudes that talk like this, all over the country."
Tim Baltz: [Continues in low voice] "And they all kind of have the same demeanor, you know? And, an overdeveloped twenty-five-cent vocabulary." [Resumes normal voice] that was maybe more prevalent in the 90s, but basically, I knew two guys that sounded exactly like that. They had nothing to do with each other. They just sounded like each other. And I'm like, "What is that voice? Is it a thing about just the way that their mouths and throats are formed, that they feel the need to speak that way? Is there, what is it?" And I really loved the vocabulary attached with that guy.
Tim Baltz: So when I would do the impression, my girlfriend would be like, "Oh man, I grew up with guys like that. I knew guys like that in Chicago. I knew guys like that in Colorado." And other people too. People would reach out from all over the country.
Sarah Enni: It reminds me of someone that I know in Tacoma, Washington.
Tim Baltz: Really?
Sarah Enni: Yeah.
Tim Baltz: Yeah. I don't know what it is, but I just love that there's always drama attached to the life. Like life is endearingly small town, like small world, like [effects that voice] "everything that happens in my world is like extremely like dramatic. And like can you believe like I've been betrayed again by this duplicitous behavior?" [Resumes normal voice] And the stakes are really high about low stakes things. But to me, what I love about that, is that they're taking their life so seriously.
Tim Baltz: This Randy Snutz guy takes his life so seriously. He feels like he's in some Greek tragedy or Shakespearian play where there are all these maneuvers going on around him. And he has to keep his eyes peeled, when really it's just kind of being overly precious about your life that probably doesn't have a ton going on in it. You can cut some of that drama out yourself, but cooked into your personality is this inherent dramatic flair. And in a guy, I just have always thought that was so funny.
Sarah Enni: It's very funny. I'm also just interested in how, I'm guessing if Randy is your girlfriend's favorite character, that she also has characters, maybe your character on The Opposition, that are just not her favorite. [Both laugh] Or, I'm just interested in how, cause I have friends that created characters and I'm like, "Oh, sometimes I just want to see you be this version of yourself." Like you access some thing and it could go forever, and it's just not the person I see the rest of the time. It's just so interesting. So I don't know how you think about people who know Tim. How do you think about how when they're presented with these other versions of you.
Tim Baltz: You know it's not always, and I'm sure you know this and you've obviously have observed this in your friends, they're not always received the same.
Sarah Enni: Right.
Tim Baltz: Sometimes well. Or people can be surprised by something new that you're doing and like it or not like it. As an artist, I'm sure you know, you're always fighting other people's perception of you and the box that they kind of naturally create, unconsciously or consciously. And then you stepping outside of that disappoints them to a certain extent.
Tim Baltz: You get to moonlight in a different space. You get to moonlight in a different way to make choices and value different things. And that's, I mean, it can be really freeing when you find a fun character that you just want to play with. And you don't really care if you're getting laughs with it. You're just exploring it and you feel like whatever comes out of your mouth is true for this character, and therefore you're just hunting around for the best punchlines to put in a character.
Tim Baltz: And if I test something out live, usually that's what I'm doing. I'm trying to do ten minutes of comedy to yield five minutes of really tight comedy. And hopefully go back through it and be like, "Okay, this didn't work. Okay, this really worked. I can punch this up. Here's the structure that kind of presents itself. These themes work for this character better than this. Seems like the audience views this character as this person. So maybe it's better to present them in this way." Stuff like that. And it has strengths and weaknesses.
Tim Baltz: The uh, the other question?
Sarah Enni: What you are writing or creating for yourself now. Or, how you're doing that now. And then we'll wrap up with advice.
Tim Baltz: Oh yeah. So right now working on developing some animated stuff that my girlfriend and I work on. And then looking at feature ideas, kind of trying to circle the wagons on what exactly... If there's a personal story that I would like to embody in the format of a feature. Because I really would love to tackle that. And any comedy would be so much fun.
Tim Baltz: I want another project like Shrink that takes the majority of a year, and you come out with a product, or a calling card, that you're really proud of. And that you're like, "Well, however it goes." It's not like I need something to explode. I've already gone through it with Shrink. I made my peace with the fact that it got the visibility that it got. The people that liked it enjoyed it, and reached out to me from it, understood it.
Tim Baltz: Would it be great to have something that I had created myself to be as big as Gemstones or other projects? Sure. But that doesn't lessen my pride in that particular project. So having gone through that and made peace with it, I think I now understand the levers of power and success in this town, and in the country, and can approach a project cognizant of those things. But also know that if it doesn't go the way that I expect it to go, or want it to go in terms of success, I'm fine with that if I'm proud of it.
Tim Baltz: I still, haven't watched Shrink in a year maybe, but the last time I did I was like, "There's a lot of laughs in this." Just a ton of laughs. And I love the way that it ends.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, that was a great ending. I mean, it's killing me that there's not a second season also, because as a viewer I was like, "Holy cow!" So, I always wrap up with advice. Like I said, most of my listeners are writers, so I'm interested in, especially since you have experience of writing for yourself, how you think about that. If someone is interested in writing something for themselves to perform, what do you advise them and how to think about that?
Tim Baltz: So for example, if you're writing a character, you need to do a five minute or seven or ten minute character, or whatever the case is. I try to start early enough. I am deadline driven, unfortunately. But I try to start early enough so that I can generate a bunch of ideas.
Tim Baltz: Some of them will come out in one sentence. It'll be inspired by a song, or something I read, or someone that I see in real life, a character that I want to explore. But I try to write all these down so that, just like if you're writing log lines for a script, a potential script, you can compare all these different ideas and say, "Okay, which one can I get to the next level with the easiest?"
Tim Baltz: And then I'll spend time writing on that. I'll fill out just a scrap page in a Google doc and try to write as many punchlines as possible. Sometimes the structure is perfectly there. Like, "Oh, I want this character. He's at a grocery store and here's what happens." And I know the structure already, and it has an emotional arc to it, and I feel confident. I'm just filling in punchlines.
Tim Baltz: Other times I'll work from punchlines. And if an idea allows me to write just a ton of jokes, then I'll go back and I'll stare at the jokes and just try to magic-eye a structure from it. And then if the structure kind of comes up naturally, I'm like, "Oh, okay. So I don't really have a good intro for this character. So we need to introduce this character. What introduction would make the most amount of these jokes work as possible?"
Tim Baltz: And then what kind of structure and skeleton can I put all these jokes into? Sometimes that doesn't work. Sometimes I'm like, "I just have a bunch of jokes on a page. So sorry. I'm moving on to the next document." But if I can start from there, build a bunch of ideas that I am technically excited about when I first think of them. And then upon reviewing them, I get more excited about some, I put some to bed. Then I at least have a little document, or a notebook, with a bunch of one-liners or paragraphs about characters so that the next time I have to write something, I'll go back. I'll look at what I've written.
Sarah Enni: That's so smart.
Tim Baltz: Ones that I didn't do, and be like, "Oh, look at this. Okay. Oh, you know what? I hadn't seen a structure come out naturally last time, but now I do based on new information that I've received in my life, in the news, or emotionally, or whatever. And now I have a better approach for this character." And so you can really use every part of the Buffalo, so to speak, if you keep all these different scraps.
Sarah Enni: That's really smart. Any way you can help yourself from having to start from scratch every time.
Tim Baltz: Any way. Like I did a character in Atlantic City at UCB that was a male witch. And it was based off an old idea I had where I'd been pulling tarot cards, like last year, and I just wanted to write jokes on tarot cards. And I was like, "I don't have the time to print these things out and put them on cards and whatever." But the majority of the jokes that I had written, fit into this male witch character.
Tim Baltz: And I was like, "Oh! So I'm just gonna take all these jokes and put them over here." And it worked. And then I figured out a structure and I tested it. And it was like a B-Plus. And I have the script and I noted it after the show and was like, "Okay, this would work next time. And I cut this, and this was too long. And I really thought this was gonna work... and it didn't." And then learn from it.
Tim Baltz: I like figuring out a process where you can kind of [pauses] if you're working from a deadline, and you have to work super fast, well that's gonna spur you in some direction. But try to give yourself the opportunity to not do that. So that you can learn from your mistakes and your obstacles, and see things with fresh eyes as many times as possible in your journey to a finished product. Or, in your journey to that deadline.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I think that's so smart. I love that. And yeah, that's very practical advice. I like that.
Tim Baltz: And in terms of scripts, I'm actually taking advice right now and not giving it [chuckles].
Sarah Enni: Great. All right, so findTim on Twitter and send him advice.
Sarah Enni: This has been so fun. Thank you for giving me all this time. I really appreciate it.
Tim Baltz: Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you.
Sarah Enni: Thank you so much to Tim. Follow him on Twitter @Tim_Baltz and on Instagram @Tim.Baltz and follow me on Twitter and Instagram both @SarahEnni and the show (Twitter and Instagram) @FirstDraftPod. For links to everything Tim and I talked about in this episode, which includes some truly amazing comedies, movies, TV shows, books, the works. Please check out the show notes @firstdraftpod.com.
Sarah Enni: If you enjoyed the show today, please subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen, or you can leave a rating or review on iTunes. I'm gonna read a recent five-star review that was left on iTunes. It is short and sweet and so kind. This review is left by Pete Malley. Pete Malley says, "I love it. Five Stars. I am a writer who really struggled to finish the first draft of my first book. And listening to this podcast helped me get through the slump. It was so nice to learn a lot from each episode." That's awesome! Pete, I'm so glad that you found the podcast helpful and that it in any way motivated you to finish the first draft of your first novel. That's incredible. Congrats!
Sarah Enni: And thank you so much for taking the time to leave that review. It helps so much in making sure that other people find the show and that kind of organic growth is great. Thank you.
Sarah Enni: Hayley Hershman produced this episode. The theme music is by Dan Bailey and the logo was designed by Colin Keith. Thanks to production assistant Tasneem Daud, and transcriptionist-at-large Julie Anderson. And. As ever, thanks to you, Pinatas Full of Bees for listening.
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