Vanity Project

On reclaiming our story and our identity fifteen years in, warts and all

Fifteen years ago today, on March 14, 2010, two 29-year-old house-team improvisers at the Magnet Theater walked into Armando Diaz’s four-week “Dynamic Duos” class with absolutely no idea of where it would eventually lead us. At that point in time, it’s fair to say, we were pretty terrible improvisers. We didn’t listen, we were hyperfixated on cultural and historical references, and we filled every silence with irrelevant, frantic dialogue. We weren’t much interested in becoming better improvisers; we were interested in becoming successful at the Magnet as a stepping stone to forging real careers in comedy. The Dynamic Duos class, we thought, was a means to that end.

We were both right and wrong about that. We don’t remember much about the class, other than that Armando took a lot of bathroom breaks. It didn’t teach us how to be a good improv duo, and it didn’t make us any more successful at the Magnet. Indeed, within five years, our days as performers there would be over, along with our ambitions of climbing the NYC comedy ladder toward lucrative careers in film and television. And yet taking Armando’s class marked our first step toward what would eventually become the most important, fulfilling, and special thing that either of us had ever done with our lives: our comedy duo, From Justin to Kelly.

It’s weird to look back on the past fifteen years and realize that we have, indeed, built ourselves real careers in comedy, albeit not in any of the ways that we initially expected. We didn’t end up on SNL; we’ve never booked a Motorola commercial; we don’t have an irritating comedy podcast or do guest spots on Hulu sitcoms or have development deals or anything of the sort. Our careers, we think, have been much more interesting than that.

We’ve spent the last fifteen years living out our DIY ethic in the most fulfilling ways imaginable. With our friends in the Wisconsin trio Glassworks, we pioneered the process of touring the country as independent improvisers. We’ve performed and taught close to 1,000 times over the past decade, all over the world. We founded and ran New York’s first pop-up comedy space, Countdown Theater. Again with Glassworks, we founded and ran the first-ever “improv summit” for producers, directors, theater owners, and independent artists. We run the biggest and best improv festival in the world. And now, along with three friends—Cowboy Kevin, Harmonica John, and Matt V. Walker, Esq.—we operate a cool-ass theater space in our favorite city in America.

Oh, yeah, and along the way we managed to become the best goddamn improv duo in the world, and we will fight anyone who disagrees.

If the credits and the money and the development deals and the guest spots are the measure of the career, then you’d have to say that we’ve wasted the last fifteen years of our lives. But if the work itself, as opposed to the bourgeois trappings of success, is the measure of the career—if the beautiful show and the transformative workshops and the commitment to community and the opportunities we’ve created for others are what matter—then we will put our career up against any comedians’ careers, in any medium, at any point. The past decade and a half has brought us so much more than we ever could have expected when we began this journey in 2010.

But lately, something terrible has happened to us.

We hardly ever perform anymore.

In fact, for all intents and purposes, at this moment, From Justin to Kelly could rightly be called a dormant project. A dead letter.

And as if that weren’t bad enough, hardly anyone has seemed to notice or care that we no longer do very many shows. Indeed, at times it feels like nobody remembers or cares about our long careers in the first place, which in turn sometimes makes us wonder: Did it ever matter that we did any of this? Are our accomplishments all in our mind? Was our “career” ever anything more than just a vanity project?

**

Today also marks five years since March 14, 2020, a point in time that dramatically shifted our (and everyone’s) priorities, virtually overnight. The show on which we had worked so meticulously and tirelessly for years was suddenly undoable as we knew it. That was OK, at first. The death of a live improv show was the literal last thing anyone needed to mourn at that time. We turned our energies towards our production projects, and we basically invented the online comedy festival in the process. It turned out we were really good at those things, too. (A lot better than we were at trying to translate our physical, breathy improv show to Zoom.) It sounds tone deaf to say it, but on some level, we did thrive during that time.

But, our show understandably atrophied, as did our vigor for chronicling our journey and touring in general. We stopped updating our website. We started blogging and stopped. (That will probably happen again, but never mind.) We launched a Patreon but never turned it into anything. (That Patreon still exists, and you can give us money there if you want!) From Justin to Kelly just kept getting shifted to back burner after back burner until it was no longer even in the fucking kitchen anymore.

And reader, that felt bad. It still does – not just that we deprioritized ourselves, but moreso that no one seemed to notice that we did. We gradually stopped doing the thing that made us us, the thing that mattered most in our portfolio, and the world didn’t really seem to miss it. Which made us wonder: Why did we even try so hard with our show, and with everything else, in the first place? If our show dies as if it never existed the moment we stop doing it, the moment we stop trying so hard to keep it alive, was it ever really there to begin with?

From 2022 to 2024, we tried very hard to avoid having to answer these questions. We squeezed all things FJTK into the ever-narrowing cracks of our time, now filled to the brim with mounting obligations. In the late 2010s, it had been the exact opposite; our show was our main priority, and everything else got the scraps of our time.  But in the post-pandemic era, the show became the optional thing, and our obligations felt immovable, as they often do in one’s 40s. Countdown gradually went from a three-month-per-year unpaid job to a nine-month-per-year unpaid job. Our day jobs became more and more onerous. Someone needed to let the ceiling repair guys in at the Commodore for the 14^th fucking time. In terms of performing shows as FJTK, our mantra became, in the words of Snoopy¹: We’ll do it tomorrow.

At some point in late 2024, we turned around and looked in horror at the writing on the wall. It was our own epitaph. We realized, to our lament, that Snoopy was dead wrong, and that there actually weren’t a lot of tomorrows left for us, creative-wise. We realized that our show had gotten weaker; that when we did perform together, half the time it felt like a shadow of its past self. We took it hard, kicking and screaming (mostly at each other) and blaming everything and everyone (but mostly each other) for what felt like the slow demise of our show and our creeping creative irrelevance. 

But the hard truth was that we’d done it to ourselves. And in order to get to this point where we’re writing this today, we first had to live in that truth, in the fact that just as we were the ones responsible for building our show and our career up from nothing, we were also the ones responsible for almost killing it.

Almost.

**

And yet…

Fuck it, we’re not dead yet. Stop the presses on our obituary.

We’re two driven, stubborn people who still love and believe in each other. We still have work to create and things to say that only this weird, beautiful thing that exists in the space between the two of us can say. We had a good run of shows to close out 2024 that restored our own confidence not just in our show, but in the fact that our show is the thing that matters most in our portfolio, the one thing that we’d give up everything else for. We have a lot to rebuild, not only in terms of our national reputation and our goals, but in our trust and faith in ourselves and each other and this thing that once felt unshakable. We refuse to let the choices we’ve made—and especially the inertia and alluring stability of midlife—be our undoing for one more fucking day.

We know our career has meant something. We suspect it’s been the career that we were both meant to have. We’d still choose our weird career ten times out of ten over the careers of most of our old Magnet buddies, with their GEICO commercials and their Netflix credits and their talky, boring improv that hasn’t grown or evolved since 2010. We’re fuckin’ Justin and Kelly, and even if most of the world has forgotten what that means—if they ever knew to begin with—we sure as shit remember. It means that we do the best shows of anyone, we teach the best workshops of anyone, we run the best festival of anyone, we hang out later than anyone, we’re nicer than anyone, and we always remember everybody’s name. It means that we go our own way and make our own meaning. It means that nobody but us can kill us.  

So we’re putting our money where our mouths are and mounting our most ambitious creative project yet. And, to reclaim what had become a toxic mantra: We’re doing it today.

This year, in collaboration with Matt V. Walker, Esq., we plan to conceive, film, and release Vanity Project, a documentary centering on our duo that seeks to answer the question: If you spend your career creating art that few people see and even fewer people like or understand, did it ever even matter that you created it at all? What is art without recognition or even awareness; what are artistic careers that exist entirely in the underground devoid of any of those bourgeois trappings of success? Are the work and the careers still meaningful?  meaningful Or is it all just a vanity project?

This project is partially for us, to remind ourselves of where we’ve been, and of who we are now and what we’re still capable of. But if you do improv, or pursue any niche art form, it’s for you, too.

The beauty and downfall of improv is that it is ephemeral. (And also, that it is often very, very bad.) When you’re up there performing, creating something out of nothing and cooking with gas, there is absolutely nothing like that feeling. Then, when you get the blackout, it’s gone forever. You might relive and dissect and celebrate it over beers after the show. But, the next day, the laughs and the scenes start to recede from memory. A couple weeks later you might ask: What was that show about, again? And the cycle repeats, over and over, for as long as you choose to call yourself an improviser. You can’t really document the show. You can’t successfully monetize it. There are no leave-behinds. There’s nothing there for the machinery of capital to get hold of and sell and rank and canonize. The show exists in the moment, exclusively for the people who’d come together in that moment, and then it’s gone, baby, forever. You can’t put a price tag on it and it never appreciates in value. Is a valueless thing also a worthless thing? Is a project that exists exclusively for the people who experience it in the moment anything more than a vanity project?

Some bold people over the years have tried to bottle improv and these hard-to-pin-down qualities and translate them to recorded media. (It hasn’t really worked.) There are also countless tour movies, documenting the ups and down of life on the road. Vanity Project isn’t either one of these things. We aren’t going to try to convince you that watching improv on tape as is as good as seeing it live (it’s not), and we’re not gonna make our own, shittier version of the same tour documentary that others have done with higher budgets and bigger names. This documentary isn’t just going to be about us. But, with it, we’re going to reclaim our own unique story and identity, and we hope that by telling that story, it inspires you to reclaim yours, too.

Over the coming months, we’ll be booking tour stops all across the country, and with luck we’ll finally return to doing shows in New York City, the city where we still nominally live. (Or we won’t, because fuck New York, sort of.) You’ll see us a lot in Tampa, where weirdly enough we’ve found fertile ground for both our own sensibilities and the arts writ large. You’ll see a lot of us in our favorite place—the car.

We want you to be part of it. Some of you have reached out already. Let’s make these shows happen. We’ll get in touch with you—and, please, feel free get in touch with us. Our first weeklong tour this year is provisionally scheduled for May, with longer tours to follow in September and December, and weekend stops in between.

We’re also relaunching this Substack. And you can hold us to that, this time. (Please don’t hold us to that, lol.) We’ve held back in this space and we’ve let it languish, a function of overcommitting ourselves everywhere else, or of worrying about how we and our opinions and strong point of view might be perceived and potentially jeopardize opportunities for us. Well, fuck it, we’ve always made our own opportunities anyway, and we no longer care what you think about what we think about ourselves (we’re great), or about other people in improv (mostly great with some notable exceptions), or about the world of improv writ large (pretty bad and unambitious on the main, again with some notable exceptions), or about New York City (it fuckin’ sucks). We’re reclaiming our own story and relaunching our show and recontextualizing our career, and we don’t care what anyone else thinks, and we don’t care if nobody else cares.

This whole plan might fall apart, who knows, and boy will we be embarrassed if it does. But we’re gonna give it a shot anyway, because the best opportunities we’ve ever gotten have always been the ones we made for ourselves. Our work matters because we say it matters, and if we don’t think it matters, then nobody else will, either.

Please join us in this journey of recommitment and rediscovery.

And happy fifteen years to us.

1. A few years ago in Tampa we saw a guy wearing a T-shirt with a big drawing of Snoopy over a caption reading “I’ll Do It Tomorrow.” We thought this was really funny, because laziness and procrastination aren’t really Snoopy things, they’re Garfield things. (“Manic delusions” are Snoopy’s thing.) We suspect that the captions got mixed up in some T-shirt factory half a world away, and that someone out there right now is wearing a T-shirt with Garfield’s face on it over the words “Curse You, Red Baron!”