Inside With: Jared Logan and Kumail Nanjiani, Co-Founders of A Demon Who Never Appeared
To finish our special weeklong highlight of the Bastion's Pick of the Week, A Demon Who Never Appeared! (Saturday, Nov. 4, midnight at the Playground Theater), we sat down with Jared Logan and Kumail Nanjiani, co-founders of the monthly midnight comedy revue, to try and figure out from where the madness stems. Take a look inside... if you dare!
First off the bat: can you please introduce yourself to the readers: where you hail from, when you landed in Chicago, what you've done artistically since you've gotten here, your favorite movie/band/comic book, and your measurements.
Jared: I'm Jared Logan. I'm from Morgantown, WV. I lived in Knoxville, TN for a while. I went to college at the University of Memphis and I moved to Chicago in 2003. Since I've gotten here I've been doing stand-up comedy nonstop, but I also found time to stage manage one play (called Mexican Wrestling Macbeth) and do the lighting design for two other small productions. I'm also a student at i.O. on and off. My favorite movie is Quiz Show. My favorite band is The Flaming Lips. My favorite comic book right now is called Checkmate. It's about super-powered spies that work for the United Nations. I weigh somewhere around 260 lbs, but I like to think I look like I only weigh 230-240.
Kumail: Kumail Nanjiani. From Karachi, Pakistan. Holla. Moved to Iowa in 1997, to Chicago in 2001. Started doing stand-up in 2002, and have been performing ever since. I have probably performed stand-up close to a thousand times now and it gets a little more fun each time. Haven't really performed on stage in any other capacity really. Took a writing class at Second City. I like Before Sunset, Midnight's Children, and Bruce Springsteen.
So, how did the Demon come about? Describe the process of crafting the idea and how it was molded into the creature it is now. In your words, what IS that creature?
Jared: Demon came about when I was in Don't Spit the Water (Saturdays at 10:30pm Playground Theater). That's the great show run by Steve Gadlin and it's put on by Blewt! Productions, his production company that Demon is also a part of. Tyler Lansdown, a hilarious improvisor, plays Big Dummy, the announcer, in that show. He's in the booth and makes occasional wisecracks over the god mic. I saw how funny he was, but due to the constraints of that show, he can't just talk and talk. I thought, wouldn't be funny if there was someone up there on that microphone who is trying to ruin the show? Insulting the guests, interrupting, being a bastard. But of course, it wouldn't be funny if it was a person you could see, so Kumail and I came up with The Demon.
The Demon is a creature from the netherworld with no body or tangible form. All he can do is talk and pull off bits of really unimpressive magic (like making the lights go on and off.) Occasionally, he possesses people or grants wishes, but only if it might ruin the show and we have enough in the budget that month for special effects. He's a complete and total piece of shit. I guess he's supposed to represent everything that can go wrong in a show.
Kumail: Basically we thought it would be a funny idea to take this creature from Hell, with awesome powers and rage and all of that, basicallly an evil being used to getting his way, and strip away all of his powers, and then have him sit in on a show at midnight on Belmont and Halsted. So it ends up being this creature who believes he can send forth rivers of lava, but here he is unable to even ruin a tiny local show, mostly because he is incorporeal now. And he is, as Jared, a total piece of shit. He is petty and mean and jealous and... basically everything bad.
You've been doing this... eight months now, right? How do you think the show is now in comparison to when it first began?
Jared: The show is much tighter now than when we started. We do a new script every month, which is great practice for writers, having to get it prepared and everything. Now, we've got the process down so we always have a rough script two weeks before the show. That way everybody in the show can give notes and have time to learn their lines. We're much more rehearsed now than we were, but we don't want to lose that 'doing it for the first time' anything-can-happen excitement of those early shows, so we always write in bits that are meant to be improvised.
Kumail: Plus, our characters have really developed into having actual personalities and relationships. In the beginning, we had no idea how these guys were going to turn out. We basically had, you know, "This is the announcer character. He is dumb. This is the band leader. She is also dumb." But over time, these characters have evolved into very idiosyncratic and specific people. And they have relationships with each other that stay very consistent. For instance, in the beginning the Demon was just this presence trying to ruin the show. But the rest of the cast has spent so much time with him now that we all kind of know each other. And I think that's why we see a lot of repeat audience members; it's rewarding to see these relationships and characters develop over time.
Remind me: what were some of the highlights in the early months? How about recently?
Jared: My favorite show is the one where Colonel Wigsplitter, our announcer character played by Josh Cheney, fell in love with Maestro Hannah, our bandleader, at the Demon's prompting. It was when Andy Ross first started helping us write and it's the first time all the elements of the show came together. Andy wrote great scenes and Josh and Hannah had all these funny little moments.
My favorite joke was when the Demon was acting like a producer and trying to get the show's ratings up. Colonel Wigsplitter had a chart showing that the current audience share for A Demon Who Never Appeared was .0000000000002% of Chicagoans. There was a beat and then Wigsplitter points at the number two and says "Whoops. That's supposed to be a one." Big laugh.
You get that type of old timey humor in the show with one-liners and slapstick, it's just given to you in a satanic package covered in slime and weirdness.
Kumail: Yeah, having Andy write the show with us really helped us define these characters, because he pays a lot of attention to that kind of stuff. And I thought his portrayal as the Homunculus was one of my favorite moments. Our regular announcer could not make it, so the Demon hired this Homunculus, sewn from the flesh of a hundred murderers, to fill in as the announcer. The idea was obviously that the Homunculus was going to kill us all. But it turned out that he had been sitting alone in his lab for so many years that he had realized the importance of human contact, of company, so he spent the whole show trying to befriend and impress us instead. Plus all he had in his lab was this old black and white television, so he would make all these Night Court and MASH references.
What's the strangest thing that's ever happened at a Demon show?
Jared: The second show had Lannie and Emmie, a hilarious improv duo (Alanna Johnston and Emily Candini). They're real hot and sexy, which is why I booked them, but they make any show they're in very strange. They were pouring beer on audience members and generally destroying the stage as much as possible. We're having them back. Then, when we were cleaning up, this...guy came in the back door and tried to make off with a bunch of stuff from the dressing room. He actually got away with Emily's purse. It had her apartment keys and everything. You'd think she would have been more upset about it but she and Lannie just kept cracking jokes because they're not right in the head. Kumail almost got his bag stolen but he fought the guy when he saw the guy making a break for it out the door. That was dangerous. He was much bigger than you, Kumail.
Kumail: I know. Plus from the looks of it he had very little to lose. But i was in full enforcer mode. That whole night was insane. It was the drunkest crowd we've every had, so they were "participating" in the show, then either Lannie or Emmie kept calling one of the drunk guys a rapist, then the whole bag snatching incident.
What does the future hold for Demon? Any special surprises we should look forward to?
Jared: I want to do shows that are even more way out there. As we get our process down even more, it'll open avenues to experiment even more. I want to do a show where the theme is communism, and the Demon becomes like Joseph McCarthy. I want to do a show that guest stars actually terrifying demons, like from Hellraiser, which would be wildly out-of-tone with the rest of the show. I think that would be funny. And I want every stand-up comedian you see in the Chicago scene to do our show and try something strange that they've always wanted to try but didn't have the venue for. I'm not asking people to go up there and 'be weird' but I know every comic has at least one really weird idea that they've never tried.
Kumail: The good thing about the premise of the show is that it affords us opportunities to do pretty much whatever. So that's what we wanna do. Pretty much whatever.
What else have Jared and Kumail collaborated on? Are you work-soulmates?
Jared: Kumail and I wrote a movie script together. It was our first script, so as you can imagine, it's Oscarworthy.
Kumail: Yeah there has been Oscar buzz all over this thing. "But we haven't even made it yet" we told the Oscar committee. They would have none of it.
Jared: We're working with Andy Ross on a script for another project, unrelated to Demon, right now.
Kumail: Yeah it's a half hour sitcom pilot. There are a couple of other folks involved with that one too.
Jared: We want to do other stage projects, and take our stand-up on the road. We've got lots of plans.
Kumail: We're trying to set up a stand-up "show" together, tour together. Plus we've kicked around ideas for other stage shows in the future.
Jared: People do joke that we're 'work-soulmates' or what have you. We just have very similar tastes. That means that we can write a script together without much arguing and then hang out and watch a movie afterwards without arguing about which one we're watching. We're just both big horror nerds.
Kumail: I would say the three worst movies I have ever seen were with Jared. Wait, no, I watched Bio Dome on my own.
Catch the Demon tomorrow night, with special guests Naomi Ashley, Joel Chmara, and Nick Vatterott.
Photos from the top: Dr. Kumail, possessed by the Demon, October 2006, taken by Krystle Gemnich.
"Maestro" Hannah Gansen, March 2006 (first Demon show).
Josh Cheney as Colonel Wigsplitter, October 2006, taken by Krystle Gemnich.
