In Chapter 16 of 19 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, standup comedian Matt Ruby answers "What Do You Enjoy Most About Working With Teams?" Group comedy writing, performance and production not only provides Ruby a collaborative feeling but also creates an optimistic creative energy that can be positively reinforcing as material gets created and shared or performed.
Matt Ruby is a standup comedian and comedy writer based in New York City. He co-produces the weekly show "Hot Soup", co-hosts the monthly show "We're All Friends Here", and manages a comedy blog "Sandpaper Suit". Ruby graduated from Northwestern University.
Transcript:
Erik Michielsen: What do you enjoy most about working with teams?
Matt Ruby: I mean I enjoy hanging out with other people so I think that’s just a constructive aspect on it just from a personal or emotional level I think it’s good to hang out with other people and to work on stuff together, I think, you know, comedy can a lot of times be sort of a lone wolf sort of thing so it’s nice to feel like there’s a group working on something. And then also, you know, it’s just nice to have like a group point-of-view to have like, “oh did you think about it this way?” Or like to have one person come up with an idea and you bounce it off them and then they’re like, well, what if we tried it this way or — like, they’ll take things in a direction that you never would’ve thought of and it could be really like cool and surprising and sort of like an interesting twist to an idea that you had but you never would’ve taken it there.
And I think it’s, you know, you got more juice behind you. I don’t know, it’s more like being a gang than just a vigilante, you know, there’s more of a group effort and you feel like you can accomplish more and do more, you know. At the very least, there’s this group of people who believes in what you’re doing and is excited about it, so that’s to me like more indicative that other people will be excited about it as opposed to like sometimes when you’re just on your own trying to come up with ideas, like you just don’t — you might think it’s good, but you don’t really know until you release it to the world, and you have to wait, you know, until that happens. Whereas like when you’re producing stuff as a group, at least you’re, hopefully, like pleasing each other or entertaining each other along the way and so you’ve got some clue that you’re on to something.