Interview The Cody Rivers Show will never be just two guys in an office

Since 2006, when Mike Mathieu and Andrew Connor first started hitting the road as sketch duo The Cody Rivers Show, people have been at a loss to describe the Bellingham, Washington group. “Performance art” and “absurdist” are the labels most often bandied about for their shows, but anyone who saw Meanwhile, Everywhere last year knows there’s just one word to describe them: funny. The bold clothesline of live sketches are intensely physical and cerebral, like one where the pair riffs while dressed as wrestlers on the mathematical probabilities of people having the same pin numbers. Like clockwork, The Cody Rivers Show has been cranking out a new revue every year, and 2010 is no different as they hit the Bovine Metropolis Theater Friday night behind their latest, Right Back Where We Finished. Mathieu and Connor describe the show as being like “running a marathon, doing algebra, and eating cake,” but the only way to know for sure is seeing it in person. Before coming to town, The A.V. Club talked to the two about why they’re often not considered sketch, the importance of choreography, and how the misuse of the word “random” is absurd.

The A.V. Club: How do you define sketch comedy?

Mike Mathieu: Broadly, if I had to do it in a sentence I would say sketch comedy is a live performance format made up of short scenes, which I guess would be from one to eight minutes or something, and the point is to make people laugh. There's generally an element of fictional characters, as opposed to playing yourself and delivering a stand-up routine. It's a theatrical presentation, so anything that you can do in a short-ish scene that is performance and trying to invigorate people into laughter would qualify, which is why we do dances, and puppeteering, and try to change up to find as many things as we can do besides two guys in their apartment arguing about something they saw on TV.

AVC: Is that what you feel most sketch comedy is like?

MM: I feel that it's very tempting.

Andrew Connor: That's kind of the first look, so it's natural that a lot of people might default to that.

MM: Or people sitting around the office.

AVC: Filing a report, and someone comes in rapping? This actually happened at Sketchfest in Chicago last year.

MM: [Laughs.] It's happening right now on tape somewhere.

AC: It's kind of emblematic, maybe, of the state of things that people feel the need to sometimes say that to us or other groups aren't really doing sketch, or what you're doing is more than sketch.

AVC: Why do you think that is?

AC: Well, I think what they mean is, “We've been disappointed by a lot of the sketch that we've seen,” or “It's only been so adventurous.” It fits into a very narrow mode, and if you step outside of that, people are tempted to say “You're not really sketch. If you were sketch, that would be two guys sitting around their apartment talking.”

AVC: You mentioned dancing in your shows, which was definitely an element of last year’s show. Is choreography important to you? Do you feel it’s often overlooked in sketch?

MM: I bet it has a lot to do with our feel. We're certainly not afraid of moving, dancing, and I think men who move uninhibitedly, how do I say, especially in the comedy world is pretty unusual.

AC: Depends on what your goals are.

MM: [Laughs.] Because we're not trying to look silly. We're trying to look cool.

AC: [Laughs.] Silly and cool.

MM: We've had a number of pieces that are strictly dance. From the very beginning, from the first show that we created, there was dance and a lot of active blocking because my feeling is that a show would be boring if you didn't do that.

AVC: Just two guys standing around in an apartment?

MM: An hour is a long time to watch two guys standing around.

AC: In the same apartment or office. [Laughs.]

MM: I think it can be gimmicky, and we sort of backed off it for a few shows. It was like every show we had a big dance production number for a while.

AVC: Is there one in this upcoming one?

AC: This is smaller, but this is a bit of a throwback. For a couple years, we just sort of stopped. It started to feel like we were just doing it for the sake of doing it. And I think that sometimes gets deployed in sketch shows because people want a big finale or something. So it can feel gimmicky to do it just for the sake of doing it, but I think that a lot of times people come to comedy through a very cerebral—a lot of peoples' access to comedy is either Saturday Night Live or stand-up. And so the myriad ways to use the stage are often overlooked, and I think that dance kind of falls in that category.

It's a missed opportunity. You can reduce so many ideas to “guys in an office,” or you can take them in so many different directions. Most ideas have potential to be taken advantage of in other ways, and to be staged and composed differently physically on the stage. Which I think is totally throwing away some dimension if it's just like, “Let's sit around and talk about it.” We might as well be listening to a record of it.

MM: A lot of the impact of our show comes from how active we are. We can afford to not be funny for minutes at a time because we're working our asses off on stage. [Laughs.]

AVC: Not to harp on labels still, but in another interview they asked you about being “absurdist,” and it seems like you bristled at the implication.

MM: [Laughs.] How did you know we bristled at that?

AC: Thank you for asking. Where's my soapbox? The thing about absurdism—

MM: Keeping in mind that our theater history is shitty.

AC: Absurdism started in the 1700s—

MM: When Christopher Columbus—

AC: —brought theater to the New World. But he didn't. He thought he was going to India, and everyone was like, "Whoa!" This is an interesting thing that I think is similarly a generational thing. Absurdism was a really innovative, cool, interesting, provocative idea in the '60s or '70s, as I understand it, kind of in its heyday. I think it's been so deeply integrated into the status-quo aesthetic of a lot of things—advertising. Half of all advertising is based on effectively absurdist notions. So people who have been very well-schooled in absurdism and clever non-sequiturs, or sort of the compositional elements of making absurd things that are still intriguing. It is still an artform to do that and do that well, but you can have absurdist stuff that is just boring, flat, or stupid, or you can have absurdist stuff that really fires you up for some reason or makes you want to buy something. I think that it has also really pervaded comedy.

AVC: But it’s so prevalent now that anything earnest or sincere seems to get what absurdism was originally after.

AC: That's the more radical thing. Our sense is the easy road, and the familiar road, and the road that is taken too frequently for our tastes is arbitrary of my understanding.

MM: I think we're coming from a standpoint where to us, absurd performance is performance that is inexplicable, pointless, and—

AC: Not rooted in any sense.

MM: And the reason that we bristled at it is we're unusual, and maybe surreal is the right word, but our work is bound by some rules. A piece may be radically different from another piece, and the rules that define a given scene may be pointless and inexplicable, like why we chose to embrace them, but the fact that there is logic that binds them. Within a scene, it's not true that simply anything can happen. There's a logic that dictates the progression within a scene or a piece. And that takes a lot of work. That's were all the brainstorming work happens: finding those rules, for lack of a better word. So that's why we bristled at it.

AC: Kind of the same way people use random to mean strange, and not actually meaning random. They use absurd to just mean strange, you know? Without a sense of what that actually means.

MM: Yeah, I've never thought of that. That's absurd.

AC: [Laughs.] That's a funny sort of egocentricity in a way. If I haven't come up with it, it would be out of the realm of sense. I just thought of an image: A fishing pole, and you cast the thing way far out, and the sketch is reeling it back in. We taunt absurdity in a way, but force things to make a certain kind of sense, and I think that's an exciting balance.