Away with Words

by Joe Berkowitz

  But Ziek isn’t thinking about the O. Henry now. He’s thinking about Jeopardy! Although he’s appeared on five TV game shows before, Jeopardy! is his white whale. He watches the show religiously and he’s tried out for it several times, including once in college. (Interestingly, Washington Post columnist and punster Alexandra Petri, who has bested Ziek in Punniest of Show but never Punslingers, did appear on the show as a freshman at Harvard.) Until now, though, he had never passed the initial test, which means he is closer to the dream than ever before.

  Ziek’s devotion to game shows may seem like a hobby or a quirk at first, but it’s more than that. Game shows are his life and livelihood. When he moved to California over a decade ago, it was to pursue a lifelong goal of breaking into the field, both as a contestant and on the production side. He lives in a three-bedroom apartment with four roommates—don’t ask about the sleeping arrangements—with whom he runs a side business. Ziek’s day job, which he works at night, is at the Burbank Marriott, but he’s also a founding partner in Home Game Enterprizes. It’s a company that brings the game-show experience directly to corporate seminars and trivia junkies who have very specific ideas about how to party. Imagine The Price Is Right on wheels and you’re there. A video on the company’s website reveals a TED Talk–headsetted Ziek rising from behind a podium like a genie and strutting across the lavender-lit stage in front of a projection of the Press Your Luck scoreboard. “Four score,” he says in a Lincoln-like timbre, gesturing at the board. We never get to see just how many whammies are forthcoming.

  When Ziek and his merry band of Bobs Barker are not putting on game shows for paying customers, they’re devouring them at home. Every time a new show rolls out, they analyze and dissect it with clinical detachment to determine which elements are missing. With the recent rise of Match Game and Family Feud, they’re sensing in a licked-finger-in-the-air kind of way a full-blown resurgence of the prime-time game-show craze that took television by storm in the late ’90s, just before the onset of the reality TV pandemic. Perhaps there’ll soon come a day when Home Game Enterprizes morphs from The Price Is Right on wheels into the next Price Is Right. Or at least, that’s the dream.

  Because Ziek hopes to transition into the production area of game shows, he doesn’t try out for them much anymore. Potential contestants are immediately disqualified from appearing on shows if they know anybody on staff, and Ziek knows somebody at pretty much every game in town. Some of the other roommates are among this coterie of contacts, having managed to secure jobs at game shows in recent years. Jeopardy! is one of the few options still open for Ziek to audition on. He is currently twitchy with callback anticipation now that he’s finally passed the test. Game shows are his world and pun competitions are merely a small subsection within that world.

  It just so happens that the kind of trivia knowledge that kills on Jeopardy! is also what’s required to rule Punslingers, even more so than punning. If the category is Beer, it’s not enough to say “Your friend is smart, but my bud’s wiser” or “Overnight success usually takes fifteen beers.” You have to dig in with the omnidirectional breadth of knowledge to produce brands, brewers, ingredients, varietals, glassware, aspects of the fermentation process, and perhaps even alcohol-related illnesses and paths to recovery. You have to be ready to field questions on the American Civil War and every other topic that Gary Hallock, David Gugenheim, and Brian Oakley have cooked up in the pun lab. You have to be Ken Jennings, essentially, but like if Ken Jennings were also Carrot Top.

  O. Henry isn’t the only pun competition that resembles a game show, though. Punderdome also has some strains in its DNA. Fred Firestone has always been a game-show obsessive, but in a different way than Ben Ziek. Instead of the trivia aspect, he admired the banter between host and guests, and the general pizzazz of it all. When he was raising Jo Firestone, Fred kept a makeshift set in the garage, where he’d often stage game shows, sometimes involving a ventriloquist dummy and a fake squirrel. Many years later, when they were putting together the Punderdome concept, it was Fred’s idea to include the human clap-o-meter—a nod to the Mad Men–era game show Queen for a Day. And before the duo started having audience members sing sitcom theme songs while the puntestants write their puns down, they originally played the Jeopardy! theme.

  Because game literally recognize game, when America’s Got Talent was holding open auditions in New York, producers from the show approached the Firestones. Word about Punderdome had reached the show’s representatives, who thought there might be a place for puns in the upcoming tenth season. They asked Jo and Fred to send the most recent winners in for a tryout, which is how Forest Wittyker and Punky Brewster ended up in a warehouse on the far west side of Manhattan one day in fall 2014, auditioning for America’s Got Talent.

  Tim and Rekha cautiously approached Pier 94, which was disconcertingly close to Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club. The two friends strode past a squadron of dancers in sequin jumpsuits, an elderly puppeteer, several small children fiddling with bow ties, and a steel drum band playing “Hot Hot Hot” along the way. Eventually, after much filling out of forms, they made it into the austere audition space. Standing between them and their shot at getting on TV sat a matronly woman at a long folding table, a mysterious earpiece jutting out of one ear.

  When the woman asked what their talent was, Rekha simply said, “Puns.”

  “Okay,” she replied. “Go!”

  Tim did his best to briefly explain how Punderdome works, and the gatekeeper seemed to get it. She distributed pens and paper and offered up as a topic Fast-Food Restaurants. Rekha and Tim gingerly began scribbling away for the usual ninety seconds. After they were done, the woman noted aloud that in no way would ninety seconds of dead air fly on the show. Her observation proved Fred and Jo prescient for getting audience members to lead DuckTales theme song sing-alongs during this downtime. With this preamble out of the way, the woman let Tim and Rekha do their thing.

  “Porta-potties with pizza are called Pop-up Johns,” Rekha said.

  “I heard the doors on those porta-potties, you have to jiggle them,” Tim shot back. “You have to Jimmy Johns open.”

  Though she never actually laughed, the Cerberus of America’s Got Talent found this pun duel amusing. She didn’t think it was TV-worthy in its current state, but she sensed something there. Since Rekha had been to O. Henry before, she recited her sandwich-based Punniest of Show routine as an example of a prepared bit. The woman was further impressed. She asked the two to make a video performing a new routine as a duo and submit it to the producer who’d initially reached out. Rekha and Tim agreed and left happy, walking past the handlers of a giant Chinese dragon on the way back to the mainland.

  Although they were intrigued at first, the idea of competing on TV shed its appeal the more they thought about it. The frenetic alchemy that occurs within Littlefield’s walls could never translate to a studio audience that big, they realized, let alone the greater community of Nick Cannon fans watching from home. After a long debate, Tim and Rekha decided not to submit a video.

  Had the opportunity fallen to Words Nightmare, though, she surely would have gone through with it. Ally is the only Punderdome champ anywhere near as obsessed with game shows as Ben Ziek. Her father tried for decades to get on Jeopardy!, but never made it. Since then Ally and her brother have attemped to make their father’s dreams come true vicariously by trying out for Jeopardy! whenever possible. Last summer, Ally finally passed online. She was invited out to Boston for an interview and a separate in-person test. Ally went through with it, but she left Boston with the queasy feeling that neither test nor interview had gone well. She hasn’t heard back yet.

  A game-show fixation isn’t the only thing Ally shares with Ziek, though. She is also well versed in the other major talent that led him to victory so many times at O. Henry: improv.

  A group of people walks onstage, probably wearing a lot of plaid. They have nothing prepared. Somebody tosses out a prompt and then the group
has to create something with it that will make strangers laugh. This description could easily apply to either a pun competition or an improv show, also possibly just a scheduling disaster on the part of an overtaxed booker.

  It’s not a coincidence that every O. Henry champion of the past decade has improv in their background. And not just because improv teams always seem to be named something like Gonorrhea Perlman or I Fart Huckabees. Punning uses a lot of the same skills as improv, and both are forms of humor that a lot of people think they despise, but actually only do when it’s really bad.

  When improv goes well, there’s nothing like it. A series of spontaneous, twisted theater pieces materialize seamlessly, with no evidence of how they came together. The tone flips on a dime, and the performers make it feel like it was headed that way all along. The dialogue zings like something out of a movie, probably because a lot of movies now aim for an improvised feel. Improv done right is such an impressive feat, schools like The Groundlings and Second City consistently surface future stars like Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, and Key and Peele, who then use those skills to conquer the world.

  When improv goes not so well, though, there’s also nothing like it. At least bad puns are finished the instant they start. Bad puns rarely spend minutes siphoning off a reservoir of patience before collapsing into a chasm of wacky chairwork. Bad puns spoil conversations, sure, but a bad improv scene will ruin your day and end friendships.

  It’s partly because of how painful a bad improv scene can be for all involved, though, that performers come into their careers coated with comedy Teflon. Before an improviser’s instincts lead him or her anywhere funny, they’ll first lead them into a sarlacc pit of stupidity again and again. And that’s if the training goes well. Failing miserably a bunch of times is the first step toward mastery. A lot of amazing scenes come from a performer’s willingness to risk things going terribly. By the time an improviser has any sort of grip on what he or she is doing, they will have endured failure so many times it has less impact than a cloudy day. The part of them that’s afraid of messing up or looking stupid simply gets burned off like leftover gunk in a self-cleaning oven. After thirteen years of performing improv, for instance, Ben Ziek’s fear-oven is sparkly clean.

  Because my own personal oven is disgusting, though, as if a vat of fully loaded buffalo nachos exploded inside and was left unattended for weeks, I sign up for a one-off class at People’s Improv Theater to see what improv failure really feels like.

  Turns out it feels like extreme discomfort and embarrassment.

  The very first thing we do is stomp around in a circle on the hardwood floor like we’re protesting the size of the room. Our unruly group forms less a circle than a small child’s drawing of a circle, with fat smudge lines. We’re told to look fully into one another’s eyes, which everybody is now doing with sunny, hypercaffeinated smiles. It’s been less than three minutes and I’m already in over my head. The indoor march of the penguins soon evolves when the instructor asks us to chase each other around, the sound of our shuffling footsteps occasionally punctuated with racquetball squeaks. Anyone viewing through the window would assume we were playing a kindergarten recess game invented by other kindergartners.

  Later, we’re urged to partner up with someone and stare into that person’s eyes. I turn toward the straw-haired ex-biker lady standing next to me and we mutually shrug. I take a deep breath, settle into what I hope is a neutral but game expression, and peer into her soul. The intensity of this exercise instantly melts my brain into a meat-puddle. If I was in over my head before, I am now dead and buried. I start thinking irrational thoughts like She knows! and try to force my vision to go blurry. My partner clears her throat without moving her face, like a ventriloquist, and I want to run out of the room screaming bloody murder.

  All is silent except for the instructor’s voice, which is soft like a guided meditation.

  “Do nothing,” he says. “Each time you worry you should be doing something, do even less.”

  I now know my stare partner’s eye color in more elaborate detail than my wife’s. Someone adjusts posture slightly, and a floorboard creaks. I think: Don’t move. Every now and then, a burst of shouting wafts in from some other room, cutting the quiet, and I can only imagine what’s going on in there.

  “Look at this person across from you and know that at some point today, they either have pooped or will poop.”

  The face across from me convulses into a smile that screams “Yep!” Her joy is conspiratorial. She’s looking at me like I maybe poop more than the average person, either in amount or frequency. I so want this to be over.

  When the exercise does end, it’s as if we’re released from an enchantment, unstuck in time. We had been staring at each other’s faces for five minutes and twenty-seven seconds, which is at least five minutes longer than I’d ever stared into someone’s face before or since.

  Later, we actually do improvise some scenes and I get the full thrust of what improv failure feels like. When I trade terms of endearment with a British Ira Glass look-alike in front of class that day, it is to dead silence. A total void. A black hole of antilaughter. It feels like I just got turned down for a marriage proposal, and continuing on with the scene afterward feels like asking the nearest bystander to marry me instead. Suddenly I realize just how much I’ve been graded on a curve at Punderdome. It’s such a supportive crowd, with such a specific sensibility, that most of the time, as long as you make any sort of effort at a joke, you get a bubble cushion of polite laughter. Here, there were no guarantees other than a guarantee that you would not get a laugh unless you did something amazing, and the key to figuring out how to do that involved completely laughless vacuums like this one. I can scarcely imagine how anyone could continue doing this until they master it.

  Ben Ziek has stuck with it since 1998, when he tried starting an improv group as a college student in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. The group went on to perform one show together, which a local paper wrote up—mainly because one of the members had gotten a perfect score on his SATs and there was apparently no news about Monica Lewinsky that day. Eventually, Ziek moved to California and began taking classes at Comedy Sportz, the organization whose name best describes what pun competitions are. Although he never joined one of the house teams of pro performers there, Ziek worked for a long time on the Rec League, which puts on Monday night shows for free. Years later, while doing a show with a theater called the LA Connection, for a private school in Studio City, he performed alongside LL Cool J. Although the star of NCIS: Los Angeles didn’t do much improv himself, when he approved of something Ziek did, he made him turn it into a song. Jamming out for Ladies Love is one of Ziek’s fondest professional memories. He may have gotten the most mileage out of his improv skills so far, though, on the O. Henry stage.

  One of the central tenets of improvisation is “Yes-and.” It’s the idea of agreeing with your scene partner and building off whatever they’ve just said. When Ziek squares off against an opponent in Punslingers, his ears are wide open and his antennae are tingling. All that training in letting one idea trigger another has taught him to listen reflexively and return fire rapidly. It’s also taught him to observe more. In addition to listening onstage, sometimes Ziek will look out into the crowd and scan the surroundings. If he has a moment while his opponent is sweating out a pun, Ziek will search the nearby buildings, the food vendors, the trees, the lawn-chair-bound spectators—looking for anything he can build into a pun. No matter what the topic, there’s bound to be visual material out there somewhere—and improvisers know how to use the whole buffalo.

  Of course, Ziek wasn’t the first improviser to make the pilgrimage to pun mecca. When I visited Austin, I kept hearing about the improv scene’s impact on the O. Henry over the past decade, and Valerie Ward was often cited as Patient Zero.

  Valerie is an improv performer and teacher at Austin’s Hideout Theater, the owner of a vegan ice cream shop, and a former champion and judge at the O. Henry.
She first discovered pun competitions as a college student in 2004, at a point when she’d already been doing improv for years. Although she went home empty-handed her first competition, she had so much fun she decided to make a tradition of going every year. The next time, she nearly beat David Gugenheim, who now runs the O. Henry, in a half-hour nail-biter that clinched her an MVP Award.

  Gugenheim couldn’t have known it at the time, but it was the end of an era.

  “I went up at O. Henry, then a few other improvisers did it independently,” Valerie says, showing me around the Hideout Theater. Her floral headscarf kind of matches the colorful triptych of canvasses suspended by wires above the stage, which together form an apocalyptic sky.

  “It felt for a long time like the Pun-Off was a local thing, something just for . . . the old group,” she says, eyes wide like she has scorching gossip about mutual friends. “Then, more recently, it started getting injected with newer, younger people from around the country—improv people and slam poets.”

  Some of these new people arrived in Austin unexpectedly, under less than ideal circumstances. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a group of displaced New Orleanians sought refuge in Austin while assessing the damage to their homes. Arthur Simone was among their number, part of a group of improvisers who ran a theater together back in New Orleans. Despite their dismal situation, or perhaps because of it, they spent this purgatorial time in Austin exploring the city’s thriving improv community. When their houses ultimately proved damaged beyond repair, they decided to stick around and set up shop. A pair of local business owners let Simone and the others from New Orleans use the back of their video store as a performance arts space for a couple months, rent-free. It was here that the group founded ColdTowne Theater, on a budget of $500 and with only six students. They then went on to open their own space and further grow the theater. Their success energized an already flourishing scene and eventually spun off a second theater called the New Movement. Simone also joined Valerie Ward as one of the first improvisers to participate in the O. Henry, along with Matt Pollock, a computer programmer who also performed improv at the Hideout.