‘Parks and Recreation’ star Ben Schwartz on the joys of improv

“Henry, you gotta show your face! How dare you, Henry? I’ve never been double-crossed so early in an interview!”

On TV, Ben Schwartz is all energy — big hair, swinging limbs, quick answers. On Zoom, the American actor and writer is not dissimilar. Everything, even the fact that my laptop camera is not working, is a cause for comedy.

“I can tell you what I think you look like from your voice. Do you want me to tell you?” he asks rhetorically. “Eight-foot-one, 62 pounds. Really short fingers for a really tall person.”

My video eventually works, and Schwartz contains his disappointment to find out that we are dressed “kind of the same”. He consoles himself with a joke about speaking to the Financial Times: “My assumption is that 90 per cent of this is going to be talking about the Dow.”

Schwartz is best known for playing the absurdly annoying Jean-Ralphio in NBC’s Parks and Recreation. Now, with his comedy partner Thomas Middleditch (the Mark Zuckerberg-esque character in HBO’s Silicon Valley), he is bringing improvised comedy to TV — in the form of three Netflix specials.

“Netflix took a chance. It’s a hard risk for someone to give you airtime when they’ve no idea what you’re going to do,” says the 38-year-old New Yorker. “We’re gonna get cheers, and we’re gonna get people who are like, ‘What are these two grown men doing?’”

Most of us would probably prefer to be in quarantine with Sarah Palin than do improv in front of a live audience. But for Schwartz, this form of comedy has been an obsession for nearly two decades. He’s been doing it long enough that there is never “a bad, bad show”.

“It’s like training a muscle,” he explains. “One of the big things is to listen — I’m actively listening when someone is talking to me, instead of being on my phone.”

Comedy is definitely in demand. As death rates from coronavirus surge around the world, people are looking for an escape. And with isolation losing its novelty, TV viewers want that most social experience — laughter.

For Schwartz, this urge has manifested itself in watching a video of a baby flipping a bottle on a loop, as well as gorging on old Mel Brooks films. “I want to laugh and release my anxiety, and figure out why I’m waking up at 5am and not able to go back to sleep,” he says.

Before the pandemic, Schwartz was starting to come into his own as a performer. He was the lead voice in Sonic the Hedgehog, which, after being reanimated following a disastrous trailer, was the US’s third-biggest box office hit of the year so far.

He co-starred opposite Billy Crystal in the lyrical indie film Standing Up, Falling Down , about a failing comedian and his alcoholic dermatologist.

Best of all is Space Force , a classy comedy about the military under Donald Trump, which launches on Netflix later this month. Schwartz stars alongside Steve Carell, John Malkovich and Lisa Kudrow.

It cleverly dodges Trump himself, who is almost too extreme to satirise, and focuses on the struggles of those trying to put his bizarre wishes into practice.

“Obviously none of my stuff really matters at all,” says Schwartz, clutching his overgrown fringe like he’s drying a wet towel. “But it’s such a weird thing for my career to be having this nice little upward whatever, and we’re all trapped.”

Quite a few people are now trying to entertain themselves in an empty room. If anyone can show us how it’s done, it’s an improviser like Schwartz.

I sold a script, I’m writing that now, but I find it very difficult to concentrate because I’ll go on CNN and I’ll see the world is ending

Is lockdown a glorious time for a writer? He demurs. “I sold a script [a comedy starring himself and Sam Rockwell], I’m writing that now, but I find it very difficult to concentrate because I’ll go on CNN and I’ll see the world is ending.”

Schwartz adds: “It’s a little hard to pull any of that shit off . . . And don’t even get me started on working out. I am so unmotivated to work out it’s insane.”

A dog — a miniature goldendoodle — interrupts, nuzzling at Schwartz’s groin. “I love dogs. Especially now. Dogs are great.”

Are comedians good people to be in lockdown with? “You don’t want to be in quarantine with a comedian that needs attention all the time. When I’m on stage, I love to make people laugh. But once I’m home, a little bit — not a ton. There are some people it’s non-stop bits. That would drive someone absolutely insane.”

Schwartz has the confidence of a guy who loved high school. The son of a social worker and a teacher, he studied anthropology and psychology at college, and fell into comedy for want of a better plan. When he became obsessed with improv, his parents agreed to support him financially as if it were graduate school.

“I did nothing but make money and do comedy, because I didn’t want it to go away. There’s probably a piece of that still in me — the idea of failing, and it all going away, is terrifying because this is the thing I really love to do.”

All comedians start at the bottom. Schwartz’s improv career began at the Upright Citizens Brigade school in a New York basement, where unspecified liquids leaked from the supermarket above on to the stage.

He worked as an intern in exchange for free classes; his responsibilities included changing the rubbish bags catching effluent from the pipe. “We’d be performing and looking at the bag . . . I was in two different shows where the bag burst, and it was f**king vile.”

What UCB lacked in hygiene, it made up for in creativity. Amy Poehler and Aziz Ansari, both of Parks and Rec, performed there; Alec Baldwin and Mike Myers would stop by.

“It just felt like such a cool place — all the funniest people in the world were there, and nobody really knew about it . . . It blew my mind that they could be so funny.”

Schwartz’s best-known characters are, to put it bluntly, jerks. “Bring me the opposite of him,” Ron, a protagonist of Parks and Rec, says after meeting Jean-Ralphio. In House of Lies, a comedy about management consultants starring Don Cheadle, Schwartz’s character is not much better.

“Most of my characters have false confidence. Jean-Ralphio thinks he’s always nailing it. I really like playing people who have that confidence but probably are kind of stupid,” shrugs Schwartz.

In Space Force, which imagines the chaos and cronyism of Trump’s plans to put “boots on the moon”, Schwartz plays a media adviser known almost universally as “F**k Tony”. He irritates just about everyone, while taking charge of writing a daily “culturally relevant” tweet for a four-star general.

“There’s a lot of very serious stuff happening, and I’m like the injection and craziness,” says Schwartz. He protests that Tony is “a real human being”, unlike Jean-Ralphio, who ends up “a muppet”.

Schwartz writes as well as performs. Early on, as a page at David Letterman’s show, he pestered the producers until they looked at his jokes. He set up a website — Rejectedjokes.com — and wrote screenplays and books.

He moved to Los Angeles in early 2009 and was among a group of writers who won an Emmy for Hugh Jackman’s opening number at that year’s Oscars.

Since then, he has sold “five or six scripts and you have never seen one of them . . . It’s so hard to get a movie made.” He was due to direct an independent film before lockdown struck. But studio backing remains elusive.

“Think about how few comedies are being made. It’s really crazy because I grew up on [Adam Sandler’s] Billy Madison, and every Steve Martin movie, and every Bill Murray movie.”

Like many people, he is unclear how writers will respond to the epidemic. “Do you have to mention it? I wonder if people are going to be like, ‘Let’s just move on.’ For me, I think I can watch [only] one or two great movies made by great film-makers about what’s happening.”

One of the biggest rules in improv is you say, ‘Yes and . . . ’ ” Schwartz is now busy explaining to me. “You add to the idea that someone else did. You say any sentence — you don’t have to be funny, just any sentence like you’re about to initiate a conversation with me.”

I ask if Schwartz has had lunch.

“OK, not supposed to start with a question. But ‘Have you had lunch’ is great. If I said ‘no’ and stopped, then the conversation is over. But if I said, ‘Yes and I cannot believe what I just ate’, then all of a sudden you have something to respond to. We’re building off each other.”

In their show, Schwartz and Middleditch start by asking the audience to suggest an event they are dreading or excited about. Something comes up — a law exam, a wedding — and the comedians probe with two or three questions.

“I usually get a drink of water, and then we look at each other. I look at Thomas to see if he has an idea to start off anything, and if it doesn’t look like he does, or if I have a good one, I’ll come in. But I don’t have the whole show in my head — all I have is a starting point.”

If it brings me joy, and I’m not ruining the audience’s day, I’ll keep doing it

The specials see Middleditch and Schwartz barely containing their own laughter as they swap characters. But beyond the slapstick, improv is a deliberately ambitious art form.

“The phrase we use at UCB is you’d always play to the top of your intelligence. You never play [like] the audience will not understand something. Even if it’s an obscure reference to Teen Wolf, a Michael J Fox movie from the eighties, you don’t dumb down what you’re thinking because you’re not sure that the audience can keep up. You never want to treat the audience dumb.”

People have asked the pair if they plan to do promotion on Instagram Live, the platform of choice for many performers under lockdown. But Schwartz isn’t keen.

“It would be weird if the first time that people saw us doing improv would be two people Zoom-ing on their Instagram. Let’s let the specials be the thing that they see — as opposed to, ‘Oh yeah, I saw those guys do improv, one of their WiFis was terrible.’ ”

Schwartz is unmarried and has no kids. He is often viewed as a big child — because he plays video games, watches Disney movies and voices animated characters. “I do all the things that made me happy as a kid,” he says.

For him, one of the advantages of improv is that it doesn’t require him to open up. If he were a stand-up, he might have to riff on his sex life, his family, his Jewishness.

“I’m one of those people who doesn’t talk about my personal life . . . In improv, nothing is ever me or anyone I care about.”

His humour is reflexive, rather than reflective. Standing Up, Falling Down is perhaps the closest he has come to revealing much of himself. He plays a 34-year-old comedian who has to move back home with his parents. I enjoyed it, but left wondering what story Schwartz has of his own to share.

“I really love making people laugh . . . My comedy doesn’t come from a terrible moment in my life. I think comedy was used for me to make friends, comedy was in my family always.”

Speaking to Schwartz, you get the sense of Hollywood as an endless hustle — always looking for the next rung on the ladder. Do the established stars he works with have the same struggles?

“I wouldn’t even say struggles. [It’s] work ethic. [Don] Cheadle works his ass off, Billy Crystal right now is writing two scripts, just directed something. The people who stick around are the people who work their asses off.

“Jim Carrey — constantly working, when he came in to act he’d have a billion ideas . . . Billy Crystal had a great line once, ‘You never let them see you working.’ You do all your work beforehand. When you get on stage, you don’t let them see you struggling.”

Could he still be doing improv in 20 years? “When I was a kid coming up, I wondered what the expiration date was. I wondered what the expiration date of being a wizard pretending you’re transporting into another wizard’s asshole is.”

He stops himself. “Please don’t make that the goddamn focus of this article! I don’t know what the expiration date is . . . If it brings me joy, and I’m not ruining the audience’s day, I’ll keep doing it.”

In his career, as on stage, Schwartz seems happy to embrace the uncertainty. Right now, that feels like an approach we could all learn from.

‘Middleditch & Schwartz’ is available to stream now, and ‘Space Force’ is released on May 28, both on Netflix. Henry Mance is the FT’s chief features writer

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