PLUME: Was NYU always your first choice?
KENNEY-SILVER: Yes, it was. Yeah, Tom and I had met as high school students at Northwestern Summer School acting camp, and said, “Where do you want to go?” “I don’t know.” We decided to meet at NYU. And called each other to be on the same dorm, the same floor.
PLUME: What was Tom like then?
KENNEY-SILVER: Tom was… if you can picture this, he would wear jeans everywhere. I hadn’t seen him in shorts ’til about ten years ago. It was the first time I saw him in shorts.
PLUME: And that was for a sketch…
KENNEY-SILVER: Yeah, exactly, it was the shorts guy. No, but he would wear jeans only. He would wear a jacket, like a sports jacket.
PLUME: Like a Members Only thing?
KENNEY-SILVER: No, like a suit jacket. A dress shirt, bow tie and cowboy boots everywhere, all the time, 24 hours a day. If we were playing basketball, he would be wearing cowboy boots, jeans, suit jacket, shirt, and tie.
PLUME: So essentially he was Garrison Keillor.
KENNEY-SILVER: Essentially he was Garrison Keillor, right. Except without all the Lake Wobegon stuff.
PLUME: Well, that would come later. He has to mature into that.
KENNEY-SILVER: It hasn’t come yet.
PLUME: So. at what point were you first thrown together at that camp?
KENNEY-SILVER: It was 1988.
PLUME: So, you’re about to celebrate your 20th anniversary.
KENNEY-SILVER: Yeah, exactly. It was 1988. No no, it was 1980… hold on. It was summer of ’86.
PLUME: So literally it’s been 20 years.
KENNEY-SILVER: Yes, 20 years we’ve worked together. That’s crazy. And we’re still doing the same crap. For four more dollars.
PLUME: Well, it’s the four dollars that makes it all worth it. If you didn’t have that, you two would’ve broken up long ago.
KENNEY-SILVER: It’s so true. Can you imagine?
PLUME: When you have a moment like that, that obviously now has led to 20 years of a creative partnership, what was the vibe that you initially got when you were thrown into a performance with him? Was there a spark that you immediately saw – like, “Hey, I gel with this person?”
KENNEY-SILVER: Definitely. It happened with everybody in The State. It was like…
PLUME: Except for David Wain.
KENNEY-SILVER: Except for David, obviously. He was sort of the water on the spark.
PLUME: He was the one that someone just showed up with…
KENNEY-SILVER: Right. He was the water on the spark of comedy. No, it really was, as silly as it all sounds, it really was as magical as it can get for a performer, and continues to be. It’s a really powerful partnership with all of us. I can’t really explain… I never thought 20 years after knowing people I would say, you know… I mean, knowing people in the sense that I see them every single day for 20 years, that they still are my favorite performers, the funniest people I know, the most talented, most inspiring. They continue to inspire me every day. It’s incredible. Really incredible. I mean, if nothing else ever happened, I would feel that I was completely fulfilled having worked with those people and gotten to really explore every avenue. We’ve done TV shows together, we’ve done pilots together, we’ve done movies together, we wrote a book together, we did an album together, we traveled all around together, we’ve been at each other’s weddings, or kids’ births. All that kind of stuff. It really is storybook exactly how I would dream to have partners.
PLUME: How would you describe having that kind of copasetic feeling with another performer to where… I assume that you feel that you always have each other’s backs…
KENNEY-SILVER: Yeah. Well, you feel really safe. You have to have that in improv, certainly, that you don’t go out there and feel like this person’s just gonna drop me and I’m gonna be swimming around just trying to make something of this piece or whatever. But also there’s something that happens in a room when we’re coming up with something that just feels that it’s a safe place to be, to throw out, “Hey, here’s a dumb idea.” I really, really commend people who do that for a living on network shows and stuff where there’s people they don’t even know. I can’t imagine that. I’ve always thrown stuff around in a room with people who are like my brothers that I’ve known forever and it still feels scary, so…
PLUME: Do you ever get self-conscious when there’s an outsider in that dynamic?
KENNEY-SILVER: Yeah, sometimes. I mean, I think we’re solid enough with each other that I don’t feel like I’m comfortable in pitches and stuff. But certainly there’s always that aspect of, someone’s gonna look at me and say, “You’re a sham and that’s not funny and please leave my office and don’t come back.” I think that’s pretty common.
PLUME: Has that feeling – with success and the fact that you have been able to sustain it for so long – has it begun to alleviate somewhat? Are you starting to feel that “Yes, I’ve earned this. I do have the talent commensurate with being able to maintain this.”
KENNEY-SILVER: Yes and no. Again, on a daily basis I say, “Oh I’m doing really well. I’ve got this great show on cable that people really like, and we’re doing a movie, and it’s a character people recognize and isn’t this nice.” And then the very next day I’ll go, “What? I’m still doing the same old crap on basic cable, and is this as good as it gets?” I’m never completely satisfied. The only thing I am satisfied with is having worked with my partners for so long it just feels like such a great thing… you know, not a lot of people can say that they lasted that long with people.
PLUME: Has there ever been a point where you ever felt that you crossed a line or there was something you couldn’t say? Or some place you couldn’t go?
KENNEY-SILVER: No. You mean with them?
PLUME: With them.
KENNEY-SILVER: No, no, no, never. No, quite the opposite. We push each other into those places, I think. It’s encouraged to be inappropriate and to go out there and make an ass out of yourself and then your friends are still there at the end of it, and then you’re back down to earth and then you come up with something realistic. It’s just a safe, great place to be.
PLUME: Have you found that that can be intimidating to people who are outside the group, who come in? Particularly when you started Reno…
KENNEY-SILVER: Definitely guest actors come on who we admire and they’ll say, “By the way, this is kinda scary, because you guys have been doing this together for so long.” And we’ll say, “What? We’re scary? No, not at all!” I think, in general, it’s an intimidating art form. Comedy and improv is intimidating. It’s about completely taking risks and making a fool of yourself. So, it’s an intimidating place to be.
PLUME: What has been for you, in your experience, the most frightening, disastrous freefall of an improv you’ve been in that you can recall?
KENNEY-SILVER: Oh, they happen daily. I couldn’t even point to one. I mean, the thing that people don’t realize about Reno is we shoot on video – which is real cheap, so we can spew crap all day that we don’t use. We overshoot a lot. So there are entire pieces that don’t work that we just throw on the editing room floor and then we do another and it’ll work. I mean, we’ve certainly gotten better. Our ratio of what works and doesn’t work is certainly better than it was. But there are plenty of times when we open our mouths and nothing comes out, and we look like fools. But it’s not a live show.
PLUME: Where is your mind, as a performer, during those kind of freefall moments?
KENNEY-SILVER: Oh, panicking. Freefall is a great word for it. That’s exactly how it feels. I go in a total panic – like, I can’t hear anything, everything goes blank, and it’s like you can’t breathe. It’s completely terrifying. It’s the actor’s nightmare come to life. But then all of a sudden something will happen or someone will say something that will dislodge or make you think of something and you’re back on track. The stakes are really low because we’re not on a stage in front of people. Our crew has been around with us since the beginning. We’re with our friends, and if anything, you do something bad and at least take a step back and go, “Well that was really dumb.” You can really laugh at yourself and go, “Wow, how retarded am I?”
PLUME: So where does the pressure come from in the performance?
KENNEY-SILVER: Yourself. Certainly yourself. You don’t want to… when you come up with an idea and you have 50 people out there who are getting paid to stand around you quietly, powder puffing your nose and feeding your sandwiches so that you can do your great comedy, and out of your mouth comes fart sounds and that’s all you can think of, you feel like an idiot. So the pressure comes from yourself going, “Someone’s gonna come take away my comedy badge and say, ‘Excuse me, you snuck in and you were not supposed to be here, so if you could please just step aside and take your bag of funny wigs and noses with you.'”
PLUME: And tear off your epaulets. But do you feel though that, as the years go by. those moments become less? Or that the severity has decreased?
KENNEY-SILVER: Yes and no. Yeah, I mean, that terror feeling happens… it depends on where you are. I mean, if I’m on someone else’s show, it’s back again, and it’s scary. But part of the scary is the excitement. You know? I mean, that’s why it’s great, and that’s why I love getting a chance to do someone else’s show that’s live or in front of an audience, or not pre-taped, because it feels like there’s that excited fear again.
PLUME: At what point are you most comfortable as a performer?
KENNEY-SILVER: On stage in front of a live audience. It’s less comfortable to be unafraid for me. When I am comfortable, and we are on location and there is very little pressure because it’s just us, and our crew and everything is going smoothly, I’m not as comfortable, because I don’t have anything pushing me farther. When I’m on stage in front of a live audience and there’s that danger zone of I could fall off the edge because if I take a breath too long here or I don’t do this line a certain way, or I miss a cue or something happens, there’s that danger that it’s gonna fall to pieces, and that’s what’s so great about it and that’s exciting because then when you do it properly and you get that laugh, or you are convincing or whatever it is, there’s nothing like that feeling. That’s why I do it.
PLUME: I thought it was interesting to see the difference in how performers handle that kind of pressure, particularly improv-ing on stage. It was particularly evident in the Aspen appearance you all did for Reno – it was almost as if everyone was shoved out of a plane.
KENNEY-SILVER: Right, yeah. That’s how it feels. It’s amazing. And I’ve jumped out of a plane before, it’s a very similar feeling.
PLUME: What’s the dynamic you feel when you’re in a scene with multiple actors? Particularly when Reno first started, let’s say. Here you are with Ben and Tom, and you guys were a very cohesive unit for years, and then you had this influx of people that weren’t familiar to you…
KENNEY-SILVER: Yeah. Well, it runs the gamut for me. It goes from feeling… because when it’s with Ben and Tom it’s predictable in a way that feels comfortable. I pretty much know that we’re going to go a direction that’s gonna work and it’s gonna be funny. To me, anyway. It might not translate, but I’ll probably feel comfortable and if I drop the ball, Ben will pick it up. If Tom drops the ball, I’ll pick it up. So it’s predictable in a way that feels like it’s gonna work. When we started working with new people, it felt at times exhilarating, like “Oh, there’s something new”… it’s like you’ve been having sex with the same partner for 20 years and then all of a sudden along comes this young stud and wow, this is new and exciting, and this person just fed me something that my partners never woulda thought of. On the downside, there’s that frustrating time when it’s like, “Come on, I just gave you something, throw it back to me. Why is there nothing there? I’m used to it being there.” So, you know, it’s all those feelings.
PLUME: So you have to sort of balance that newness with the fact that the dynamic hasn’t gelled in the same way.
KENNEY-SILVER: Yeah, exactly. It can be great and it can be frustrating, but we have an amazing cast and an amazing bunch of people, and it’s as good as it can be, I think.
PLUME: Just the success of the show, I think, bears that out.
KENNEY-SILVER: Yeah. People care about these characters.
PLUME: Does that surprise you at all?
KENNEY-SILVER: Very much so. We expected this was just gonna be a sketch show. In fact, in the beginning, we were all going to play multiple characters, and not have guest stars. We were just gonna all play the perpetrators ourselves. And the cops were incidental to lead us to these sketch characters. After we did the pilot and Fox said – because this was originally a pilot for Fox – Fox said “No, we want you to play the deputies, and we want other people playing other parts.” We were like, “Well, alright.” So we brought in other people and started to realize that what people were tuning back in for were these cops, and what was going to happen with Dangle and Wiegel, and what’s gonna happen with Junior. And we were shocked. And that’s why we’re still on the air, I’m sure of it, because if it were just about the drunk guy on the corner, I think we would have been gone many seasons ago, because you can only do that for so long.
PLUME: Going into it with the idea that essentially the cops would be linking characters, at what point did Wiegel gel for you, as a character?
KENNEY-SILVER: You know, I felt like she gelled for me, surprisingly so, right in the very beginning. She’s sort of like a character that was waiting to come out of me, I think. We all joke that we’re more like our characters than we’re willing to admit. So there’s, you know, when you do improv there’s a large amount of honesty that comes out, whether you like it or not.
PLUME: So what are you willing to admit to, with Wiegel?
KENNEY-SILVER: Oh, so much. I mean, I think a lot of it is me times a thousand. I think I have in me the ability to be that insecure. I certainly have the ability in me to be that hypochondriac. To be that needing of attention. You know, all these little things that I’m not shy about in my daily life. I’m a normal, functioning human being, but when you amplify them, they’re difficult to be around! (laughing) In such a delightful way. I love it. I love people who have sort of emotional disabilities. I think it’s fascinating, it’s fun, and something I love to laugh about in myself, certainly, on a daily basis.
PLUME: I think Wiegel is the master of the destructively naïve faux pas.
KENNEY-SILVER: Yeah, that’s a great way to put it. Yeah, there’s something wonderful about someone who is that inappropriate and makes no apologies for it.
PLUME: Because she doesn’t perceive any negative aspect whatsoever to anything that she might say or do.
KENNEY-SILVER: Yeah. It’s horrible. It’s like watching a train wreck happen, and there’s some part of you that in real life wants to be that bull in a china shop that can walk into a room and just say what you think. So on that level it’s really fun. It’s fun for me to play her because I get it all out. But I’m certainly not saying that everything she says is things that I’m thinking as a person – it’s just, you know, funny things I can think of to say as that character.
PLUME: Is there anything that you remember that really hit you close to home as soon as it came out of your mouth?
KENNEY-SILVER: Oh, I say dumb stuff all the time that… before I had my son I really didn’t think I could have kids, so I would say things like, “Well, I’m barren.” I guess it’s those kinds of things that you laugh to keep from crying about things, and I guess I thought, you know… I like to make light of everything. There is nothing that is off limits for me. Except maybe my son. I think maybe there are certain aspects that I couldn’t go there anymore, when I used to be able to go there with jokes. If it involves children, I can’t go there anymore. Something happens when you have a kid. But I would say 99.999% of things are fine.
PLUME: Being a mother, and she’s a mother now too…
KENNEY-SILVER: Right.
PLUME: What kind of mother do you perceive her to be?
KENNEY-SILVER: Well, I’ll be totally honest with you. The way that we write the show is we leave the season not knowing ourselves what’s going to happen. So we left it as open as we could. I can tell you that today, neither Tom nor Ben nor I know, A) did she really have a baby, B) was it human? We can go… we began a season with everything being Kenny Rogers’s dream, so we certainly take liberties. So I can’t tell you that…
PLUME: See, I believe that, right now, we’re all living in Kenny Rogers’s dream…
KENNEY-SILVER: See, there you go!
PLUME: In fact, I just took a gamble on telling you that.
KENNEY-SILVER: Wow. No, I knew it.
PLUME: I honestly felt that I could take that love to town.
KENNEY-SILVER: Thank you. I’m glad you feel safe.
PLUME: Not for long. Now that I’ve said that, the jig is up.
KENNEY-SILVER: Yeah! (laughing)
PLUME: Now you’ll call me on everything I say.
KENNEY-SILVER: Right, right.
PLUME: Is there any fear going in, or is it sort of “sky’s the limit” knowing that you can go into a season and do anything?
KENNEY-SILVER: Oh, there’s no fear. It’s fun. I mean, I think the fear would be if I were doing it by myself, but we keep each other in check and say, “Could we do this? Is this too much?” And two of us will go, “No, you know what, that is too much, let’s not do it.” So it’s just exciting. It’s just fun. At this point, too, we’ve been going for so long, it’s like…
PLUME: Are you surprised by how long it’s gone?
KENNEY-SILVER: Very. Very, very surprised. You know, we’re sort of used to doing these little cable shows and they last for a couple years and then they’re gone. So I think that’s what we thought all along was gonna happen. So we’re very shocked.
PLUME: How would you compare it to the experience you had with Viva Variety?
KENNEY-SILVER: It’s very different. Viva Variety was very tightly scripted. I was not a part of the writing of Viva Variety because I was doing the band at the time.
PLUME: That was Cake Like, right?
KENNEY-SILVER: Yeah. So for me it was just coming in and doing the show and leaving. Rehearsing and leaving. So it was very different, in that sense. But obviously it was with Tom and Ben. And we had Michael Black in the mix, and he was Johnny Blue Jeans on Viva Variety. He moved back to Connecticut with his family, so that’s why he’s not doing Reno with us.
PLUME: And did Stella…
KENNEY-SILVER: Yeah, Stella just ended this year, but he’s doing a thousand other things…
PLUME: Most of them, it seems, with VH1.
KENNEY-SILVER: Yeah, and he just made his own movie.
PLUME: It seems like everyone’s making movies now.
KENNEY-SILVER: Yeah, they are. It’s a big year for State movies. I just did, obviously, the Reno movie. I did a little part on Balls of Fury with Tom and Ben, their movie. And then I did a part in The Ten, which is David Wain and Michael Showalter’s movie. So there’s a lot going on.
PLUME: So what is your movie going to be?
KENNEY-SILVER: Oh, that’s a good question. My movie is me with baby vomit all over me, feeding my son while I’m trying to change a diaper at the same time. That’s the movie of my life right now.
PLUME: I like it. It’s got this sort of French appeal to it.
KENNEY-SILVER: Yeah, it’s not a comedy.
PLUME: No, I see it as a very dramatic piece.
KENNEY-SILVER: Yeah, it’s a dramatic documentary.
PLUME: Actually, it’s the comedy of life.
KENNEY-SILVER: It is, because you wonder, “Is he gonna throw up and poop at the same time, or is he gonna throw up and then he’s gonna poop?” You don’t know.
PLUME: You’re now passing on the improv torch to him.
KENNEY-SILVER: Yeah, exactly! (laughing) The improv of life.
PLUME: Now I’m wanting to see this. At a small art house showing where the print breaks halfway through and you have to do something to fill time.
KENNEY-SILVER: Right.
PLUME: A little mini Q&A entirely in Latvian.
KENNEY-SILVER: Yeah, I would stay for that.
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