By Sandi Masori in San Diego
One of the longest running shows in San Diego is the Improv Comedy show by National Comedy Theater. It’s been running in their 100-seat theater every weekend since 1999, with the exception of when they were forced to close because of the pandemic.
In case you’re not familiar with improv comedy, it’s a show that is completely unscripted and is written and performed live with the help of the audience.
I had a chance to interview Jewish community member Gary Kramer, aka the “Big Cheese.” I learned many interesting things, like aggregating their regular show schedule and private and corporate events, they do more than a couple hundred shows a year.
There are performances every Thursday – Sunday, with two performances each on Saturday and Sunday. Since they started in October 1999, they have performed over 7000 shows in that theater at 3717 India Street. A regular cast member stays with the show for an average of 12 years, so they must be doing something right.
But they don’t just perform in the theater, as a company of 100 people (10 people per show), they are available to travel for private or corporate shows. They have done four tours with the Armed Forces Entertainment, including some during Desert Storm that took them to such exotic locations as Bahrain, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Spain, Greece, Italy, Djibouti and more.
Since many of those countries are not exactly known for being so welcoming to Jews, I was curious what Kramer’s experience was there as a Jewish man.
After some thought he responded that some of them were fine, and that since they were guests of the US military, they knew that they were safe, but that it did give him pause. When prompted to enter his religion on the visa entry form in Saudi Arabia, he figured it might just be better to mark “non-denominational,” just in case. He also noted that had his mother still been alive, she would have been panicking.
Of course, being a show for the armed forces there were rules as to what they could and couldn’t poke fun at. They were not allowed to be political, but as a rule anyway they stay away from political or overtly blue material. They found that for the armed forces shows, making fun of other branches always went over well, for example, the army likes to make fun of the marines, the marines like to make fun of the navy, and everyone likes to poke fun at the air force.
This made me wonder how trends have changed in the 26 years he’s been doing it. Kramer said, “What we’re trying to do is find a commonality, which ain’t so easy in 2026. … I think it’s more important that we find a way to connect- us to the audience and the audience to each other. If you’re looking for a higher reason in doing comedy, it’s finding a connection, and can’t we all agree that we are humans together, and we have more in common than we have not in common? There’s plenty of people doing political comedy. I’ll leave that to Jon Stewart and the gang.”
What about ethnic humor I wondered? Basically, the guidelines are that you can make fun of your own ethnicity, and you can punch up, but you can’t make fun of other ethnicities (except White), and you can’t punch down. If you’re making fun of your own family though, that’s generally something that all audiences can relate to, even if their mom isn’t Mexican, or Chinese, or whatever the comic might be.
I knew that for many Jews in entertainment the world became a lot more challenging post 10/7. He said that while he felt some guilt for getting up on stage and making people laugh when things were so serious in other parts of the world, it was also a welcome break from the intensity of the news. As for experiencing backlash, mostly what he got was silence, with the exception of one employee whom he had to have a little talk with. Out of a company of 100, that’s literally only 1%.
Knowing how artificial intelligence (ai) is upending so many industries, I was curious if he thinks it will hurt or help live theater. He said, “The hope is it replaces all of our performers so we don’t have to pay them anymore. So that would be great, except it would replace me, too, probably. That’s a question of our day, isn’t it, right? We do live theater, and until the robots get really good at doing comedy, it’s not about the mechanics, it’s about the timing, I think. Robots are great at a lot of things; comedic timing is not one of them. I think, for a little bit, live theater is safe.”
It is this writer’s opinion that the more ai takes over, and we don’t know what is real or invented by ai, the more we will gravitate to in-person events and experiences where we can see, touch, and feel what’s happening for ourselves.
While they do all sorts of private and corporate events, there’s one event that is really not a good fit for their show, and that’s a Purim event. Why you might wonder? Well with everyone getting drunk and all the other booths and festivities, people are not in the frame of mind to sit and be entertained. I wondered if Passover might be a better time, I mean we’re all sitting there anyway- perhaps we could do an improv comedy Seder? He chuckled and said maybe.
We also talked about how comedy can unify people and cross barriers.
“What if the person next to me, elbows me, like, ‘oh my god, that’s so funny,’ and this guy’s a redneck or something, or someone who is wearing a red hat next to me. We both found the same thing funny. That’s why sports can work, you high-five someone completely opposite. I don’t know about their hate or whatever, but we connected on that. Can we expand on that [connection]?”
While every show is unscripted and takes suggestions from the audience, there are some special shows coming up, like on March 7 they are improvising…… A MUSICAL! That’s right, they are going to improvise the music, the lyrics, everything completely based off of suggestions from the audience. They also have a murder mystery coming up and some other fun surprises.
They offer classes as well. The classes run for six weeks, on a revolving basis, but every six weeks they have a free two-hour workshop so people can test it out and see how it feels.
To learn more about classes or to experience the unifying power of improv comedy for yourself go to https://nationalcomedy.com/
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Associate Editor Sandi Masori is a theater and food reviewer for San Diego Jewish World. She also helps people self-publish and dabbles in video production.