Shoot From The Hip first draft

Written by: Kat Mokrynski

Shoot From The Hip - an improvisational group made of Tom Mayo, Alexander 'AJ' Jeremy, Luke Manning and Sam Russell - has been leaving audiences in stitches for over a decade. Recently, we had the chance to chat with AJ and Tom about how they got started in the world of comedy, what has drawn them to improvisation and some of the gifts they've received from fans.

So how did you each first get started in the world of comedy?

Tom: We started through our university improv group. Basically, I was very bored at university and another member of the Holloway Players - because we were at Royal Holloway - said, "Hey, come along to this thing where we do improvised comedy!" It was about thirty people trying desperately to impress each other. I just carried on doing that throughout university, and the group whittled down. Then a group of us continued on after university - we were very lucky that AJ then joined when he graduated. He's the "manly baby-"

AJ: The "man-baby!"

Tom: [Laughs] The "man-baby" of the group, the youngest one, so he joined us a little bit later. But I personally just always needed attention, so that's what that was for me. AJ?

AJ: Same! It's all about attention, really, isn't it? And people laughing at what you're saying. Royal Holloway, heard that there was this thing called the Holloway Players, which was a Whose Line Is It Anyway?-type club, and I was like, "Oh, my God, I got to go and do that." So I went, and Tom was actually the first person I met! He was very tall, and still is. And then I remember coming in and, to be honest, just loving it from the get-go, and that was it! It was every Sunday and Wednesday, right?

Tom: Every Sunday and Wednesday, twice a week. I genuinely did a fourth year of uni so I could keep doing the Holloway Players - that was the thing I was enjoying. So I've not used my MA at any point. I've just used the improv! [Laughs]

AJ: Just the improv!

And what made you want to focus on improvisational comedy in particular?

Tom: For me, personally, it was just one of the lovely things, because I've done writing as well, and there's a couple of sketch things. But the immediacy of improv is fantastic. You have an idea of something that will be fun, and it is being performed a second later, right? Being able to just make it happen straight away, without worrying about going through all these long, slow artistic processes is fantastic. And it feels like the most positive collaborative experience because, despite how much time we spend going over schedules, there's much less of, "Oh, can we do this? Can we talk over this?" You just do it the moment. It's just immediate, which is lovely. And also, it remains fresh. Sam has done stand-up, and I think he's very good at stand-up and it's very enjoyable, but you're saying the same things over and over. Whereas improv, we've done thousands of hours of shows now, and somehow we still aren't repeating ourselves, which is fantastic. So a mix of those things to me, I suppose.

AJ: I think it's a different brain set. It's definitely a different thing. One is planned and then presented as, "I've planned this as a funny thing that I think is funny, and now I'm going to say it. Do you think it's funny or not?" Whereas improv is definitely attractive from an actor's perspective because you just get to play and perform as characters, and then if it's funny, that's great - and it usually is! You get to tell stories and be characters. For me, it's more in that world than it is in the stand-up world where you say jokes, which is just more my vibe. Honestly, the idea of doing a stand-up set to me is the most terrifying thing. I couldn't do it!

Tom: When we started, we just did the short-form games, so five minutes-ish. We've actually just put out one, but it's six minutes long, which is crazy long for a short-form for us! [Laughs] But now we also do long-forms which are half an hour. So the amazing thing we get to do - and again, this is coming from a writing perspective - is do a mini play out of nowhere with no idea what it will be, what the genre will be, anything before we start. So it's almost not comparable. I suppose we're comparing it to the other things we do. I'm comparing it to other writing, AJ also writes, so I guess part of you is comparing it to that but also comparing it to filmmaking. So for me, it wasn't this version of comedy versus other forms of comedy. It's more this form of telling stories, as opposed to the other forms of telling stories, which I also love but the benefits of just being able to put it out there straight away with a group of very close friends; incredible!

So for those who haven't been to a Shoot From The Hip show, can you tell us a bit about what they can expect?

AJ: You can expect four dudes on stage being really, really stupid.

AJ: There's more to it than that, I promise! But mainly, you're going to see four very silly boys doing silly things with a loose structure in terms of games. And then in the second half, we'll tell a long story.

Tom: Yeah, AJ has pretty much nailed it! So the first half, we do games which have formats and rules. We've got twenty games that existed long before us, and we've tweaked over the years, so we play them in our own way. But games in the first half; second half is an improvised play. We put the best ones of those up on YouTube, so we've got forty of those up at the moment as of this interview, so the latest one is "Strange Noises From A Hole in the Wall," which is like a Miyazaki film-level of weirdness with an ancient train conductor who is older than the Devil. We have a World War II story with escaped French prisoners, we have romantic stories, we have haunted houses and Wild West and all of that - a range of things. It's hard to know exactly what the second half will be, but the silliness is a key part of it. One of the novel things with us, as opposed to, broadly speaking, stand-up shows, and also a lot of improv, is that we aim in that second half to tell a full, emotionally complete story. Again, we've been going for thirteen years. That's the stuff that, for me, keeps it engaging - it is something where you will hopefully get a story that will have an emotional impact, as opposed to just making you laugh.

AJ: If you watched one of our long forms, a good one, you'd say, "That was a really fun story. It was really silly and they were just making it up!" But you don't want to be in the greenroom with us afterwards, because we get very serious about our story, about what should have happened in the story, and our storytelling. For people who have just met us, who come backstage, and then it's like, Tom being like, "At the end of the day, it has to be emotionally connected, you can't have this character do that!" And I'm being like, "Yeah, but Tom, in that moment, I felt like the carrot..." It's going to be weird and we're very serious. We sometimes get cross at each other, but it's all backstage.

Tom: Friendly disagreement! We aren't in screaming matches.

AJ: We're just quietly furious.

Tom: Yeah, quietly furious. The fury is still there, but it's not professional fury! [Laughs]

So how did you decide that this was going to be the format of your shows, starting with the short-form games and then going to the long-form play?

Tom: It was a slow evolution. When we started out, we just did short-form, so just games. We were doing about sixteen or so games a show, which now sounds crazy! And then we started doing some improvised scenes. It would be a scene without the rules of the game, so they would be a little bit longer. And we now do those as a flurry in the first half. So now we actually do about five games per show and a flurry of scenes, as well as a longer thing. A lot of it was developing because, when we started out, we'd each read a book and a short course on improv, but it was all self-taught. Although we were having a lot of fun, the shows were more up and down, so they would have peaks and troughs, whereas now, hopefully, we've reached a point where our weakest stuff is still solid and fun. It was a case of having to learn those skills as we went along.

But we did reach that point where, if you're playing the same sixteen games every show, you will get bored of them. So just to keep ourselves interested, we had to branch out and try something more free-form. And in the first half with the short games, you're showing the audience, "We can do this. We can make stuff up based on your suggestions as we go," and then once they trust you, you can go, "Now, please invest in this longer form, half-hour play." So it works to sell the audience on the idea because if you say 'a stand-up show', people know what that's going to look like before they get there. A lot of people still either haven't seen improv or they don't trust it, because in the same way there's a lot of rough stand-up out there, there is a lot of rough improv, and that has put some people off over the years. So the format hopefully engenders trust as the show goes along, and also ensures that we're engaged as we go over the hours and over the years of our shows.

AJ: I actually realised that I didn't know how the long-forms came about because I wasn't there for that! So was it literally that you were just doing scenes in the second half?

Tom: We did games both halves. And then it was a debate between two members who both had very valid points, one being, "The audience comes along to see the games and the games are the best content that we're doing," and the other team member going, "We need to evolve or die, because people go crazy playing these games over and over." Myself and another member were in the middle going, "Well, maybe we could . . . No? Okay, cool." [Laughs] So we used to just do games all the way through. And the audience would laugh at every one, but you could feel, pacing-wise, there weren't peaks and troughs. It was just too regular, whereas, again, the play will now often have larger stretches which don't have laughs because there's emotional stuff going on. So we would do that. And then we started doing a flurry of scenes towards the end of the first half without any rules. We got more interested in that, more engaged. Those got better, and instead of it being a five to ten-minute scene, maybe it could be one fifteen-minute long scene. And then we move from it being one fifteen-minute long scene to a twenty-minute improvised play in the second half. We'd have a game, improvised play, another game. And then we slowly got rid of those games from the second half as well and we'd just grown out that play, because at first we couldn't hold a narrative for five minutes, but now it's 35-40 minutes we can do a play, which is impressive!

AJ: The games is a great introduction to what we're doing, to get the audience on our side. They're really fun, easy to grasp. But it's the long-form that for us, as improvisers, is the most rewarding one, because it's more challenging and just way more rewarding if you get it right - and more upsetting if you don't! As Tom said, we have a YouTube channel, and we've found that the games is, again, great for getting people in. You're scrolling on TikTok or Instagram, like, "Oh, they're playing this game, they're great!" But then once you are in with us, and you like what we do, most people then end up on the long forms on YouTube, because it's different. It's like the main course.

Tom: It's also quite unique compared to a lot of "stuff" that's out there content-wise on the internet. And you can tell that is what really engages people because we have incredible fans, which is quite a new phenomenon for us, and they are lovely people - we're very lucky that they're lovely people! Some people have fans who are real assholes, but ours are nice, and they've created some amazing fan art, animations and fan fiction as well. That's always based off the long-forms because they get really attached to the characters - as do I! And they draw very complimentary pictures of the characters. I always end up with a more chiseled jawline!

AJ: You do, that's a good point! Maybe that's just what they see, Tom, whereas my bald head is way bigger and bolder!

Tom: Megamind!

AJ: Or One-Punch Man!

Tom: Well, it's the source of your power.

AJ: It's true!

On the note of fans and the internet, what has it been like bringing your comedy to places like YouTube and TikTok and seeing it go viral?

AJ: It's been the greatest gift ever. It's been the best thing that's happened in my life - there's nothing that I'm prouder of than the YouTube channel and that content. When we used to do the shows, there'd be amazing things that were always just like, "Well, no one will ever know that that amazing thing happened." But now, people remember them, and you can link them to that bit when that weird thing happened and it was hilarious. It becomes quotes that we can put on a t-shirt and all this stuff. It's been really wonderful!

Tom: You've 100% nailed it! There are certain bits I remember from non-filmed shows, and I thought that would always be the way of it. Just "Oh, that was amazing. It's gone." I used to say after almost every show - the guys must have gotten sick of it! - "I can't believe that's gone. It's just gone." And that's me comparing it to writing something, a book or whatever, whereas now it's immortalised in so many different ways. I've actually got a drive here which contains about half of what we've performed - AJ has the other [half]. We call them 'The Archives'. Just having that and being able to go back over that is wonderful, especially because you don't remember any of it afterwards - or I don't anyway! - so I watch it back.

AJ: People will come and quote stuff to us, and I have no idea what they're talking about!

AJ: They'll be like, "Oh, the elephant!" And you're like, "What? No idea." And they're like, "You know, when you played the rabid elephant!" And you're like, "I did?" And then they'll show you a drawing and you're like, "Oh, fuck yeah, I did do that!"

Tom: And you'll always be down on all fours, going crazy! "What the hell? What am I doing?" It doesn't work well for a transcript but you can see a couple of items made by fans. That's a knitted squid. I did a little squid thing once as a character and now it's become a whole beautiful thing! And then, somewhere there, there's a Sylvanian family version of a character I played about a decade ago in Stratford, "Oh My God, Is This A Joke?" - our first improvised play on YouTube. They've made, in the last six months, this Sylvanian figure version of that character, which is amazing. Again, it's just another way it's immortalised. I never thought we would be so fortunate.

What is it about improv that you think makes it so appealing to audiences?

AJ: I think it's very silly. Stand-up's monopolised the comedy world for quite a while now. On average, stand-up is often very political, especially in the UK, whereas this is more like a Python throwback where it's not political - we want to stay way away from any of that. We want it to just be silly fun that you would have giggling like when you were kids.

Tom: People say it's a safe space for them, which is lovely. Quite a lot of fans say that's what's special for them about what we do. It's a whole separate world away from and not commenting on the stuff that's stressing all of us out. We're creating something completely separate, coming to this wonderful, weird, as AJ says, silly world for a bit. And that's a big part of it.

I think also the fact that the audience, both online and in the room, can really engage with it - it's happening right now. Every time you see a stand-up have a funny thought on stage, you know that 75% chance they're having that funny thought every time they do the show, which is fair enough - again, crafting something fantastic - but it's nice to know, wow, this is really coming from the fact that I shouted that out a minute ago, and this is what they're doing based on that. So there is that amazing level of engaging with the people who are watching. And we involve them in some of the games! There's a game called "Pillars" where we bring up a pair of audience members and you tap them for words as you go. So the fact that they can engage with that and be part of a show, that's a huge thing, which, again, we've almost become used to, but it's amazing that it's happening based on their ideas, and it's going to be completely unique for them. There's lots of great things, isn't it? Improv, nice guys.

And finally, how would you describe a Shoot From The Hip show in one word?

Tom: I want to be a dick and say 'indescribable'. [Laughs]

Tom: If I had two, it'd be 'indescribable chaos'. But I guess I'll go 'chaos' - the best kind.

AJ: Mine would just be 'silly'.

Tom: [Laughs] So much more low-key! It's silly, Tom. Don't oversell it, mate.

AJ: It's silly.

Tom: Chaos to your world, I will bring!

AJ: Silly chaos.

More information and tickets for future performances

The Shoot From The Hip YouTube channel can be found at youtube.com/@shootimpro