🎧 Audio postcard: A peek behind the curtain at Vermont Comedy Club

Via Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship, in partnership with Vermont Public. 

Natalie Miller co-owns the Vermont Comedy Club. She also performs with The Kingdom Kids — an improv team made up of three comedians from the Northeast Kingdom. She says she took an improv class in college and hated it. But since then, it’s completely shaped her life.

🎧 This story was produced for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript below.

Natalie Miller: Hi, my name is Natalie Miller and I am one of the owners of Vermont Comedy Club in Burlington. 

So, how did the three of us come together?

Well, Nathan and I are married. And we met a million years ago, I don’t know, 16 years ago, 17 years ago maybe now? A long time before we met Brian. And we met Brian about ten years ago. 

So it took two or three years, I think, before we invited Brian onto our team, The Unmentionables, which was the original mainstage team here. And once he was on that team, we really started clicking. 

Being from the Northeast Kingdom, like, you have a shared perspective and a shared history, even though we — none of us grew up together — but we all have the same reference points and have experienced really similar things.

So, we just really clicked.

Over the last seven years, we’ve gotten to know each other really, really well. We trust each other, and respect each other, and the more time you spend with someone, the better your improv will be. 

So, the form we did last night, or I should say the opening we did last night, was ‘premise pulling.’ So, we went to a couple different members of the audience and asked them for stories. 

And so, when you’re listening to the people talk, you’re thinking like, what do I find interesting about this? What’s different? Did they say something that was different? What sticks out? What got laughs? 

There were these girls in the audience who went to a hockey boarding school, so we brought that in to the story. 

In college, I had to take an improv class and I hated it because I was a perfectionist, and a control freak, and yeah, I was used to just doing scripted stuff. So the idea of like, not knowing what to say and, like, at that time I was like ‘No, there has to be a right thing to say.’ And I didn’t want to say the wrong thing.

It wasn’t until I came back to it, like, six or seven years later, when I was a more confident adult that I was like ‘Oh! This is actually great.’ 

If someone sees a bad stand up comedian, they’re like ‘I don’t like that stand up comedian.’ If someone sees a bad improv show, they say ‘I don’t like improv.’

I hope that that will start to go away a little bit, where people will be like ‘Oh, ok, I didn’t love that improv team, but I still love improv.’