A Magic Ride Through The Internet
Interview with Alli Goldberg & Jen Jamula, creators of 2 Girls 1 Show
By Sebastian Gonzalez de Leon
If you haven’t watched 2 Girls 1 Show, you are truly missing out on one of the most original, witty, and hilarious shows out there. It does a marvelous job of highlighting the times we are living in and the rabbit hole of the vast internet. A great deal of the show produced by the two minds featured in this piece, Alli Goldberg and Jen Jamula, is real. This fact only makes this series more engaging.
You can watch the show on WHOHAHA, and read the exclusive interview with Alli Goldberg and Jen Jamula here in Women In Comedy.
Women In Comedy: How did you two start to work together?
Alli Goldberg & Jen Jamula: We went to college together and worked on a few shows together there, but it wasn’t until a few years after college when we reconnected over the same frustrations with traditional theater; namely, waiting in line for the stereotypical parts available to women.
Around the same time, oh man, we hate to say it, but that’s when the internet as we know it was really taking off. We reconnected around 2010; sure, Facebook and YouTube were already around for about 5 years, but that’s when suddenly everyone and her mother had a blog. As storytellers, we were really fascinated by this, and so we created a stage show called Blogologues, where we reimagined blog posts as monologues and scenes. Turns out, it was comedy.
It’s crazy how much things have changed; we’ve talked a bunch about renaming the show, since now it’s all about social media, memes, and gifs. Gifologues, where every scene repeats thrice? JK, that’s the worst joke we’ve ever written.
Anywho, we finally decided to turn our lives spending too much time on the internet into a web series, and here we are.
Women In Comedy: It is a very original show. Why the deep web concept? What inspired you?
Alli Goldberg & Jen Jamula: Thanks! Through Blogologues, we became very interested in how willing people are to divulge their deepest, darkest secrets to the internet. It feels very anonymous (though it really isn’t, especially as we’re seeing with all the newest privacy scandals and data hacks). We’re also fascinated by how the internet has allowed so-called fringe communities to flourish and find each other, as well as find their own unique voice. We wanted to highlight all this in our series.
And then, in particular: Bronies is almost mainstream now amongst internet culture enthusiasts. Mpreg was simply one of the most mind-blowing communities that we found and, YES, we totally want it to be a thing!! Semenology was the craziest, but we also love how the author is perfectly delightful once you break down those barriers and speak with him. We chose Tinder so that we’ve got a, um, palatable episode. And finally we were intrigued by how the age-old concept of sugar dating has found an expanded life online.
Women In Comedy: Can you walk us through your process from research to execution of both the recorded and live shows?
Alli Goldberg & Jen Jamula: Sure! For the live shows, we find material online that really gets us for some reasons: It’s surprising, or misogynist (those are always fun to perform as two women), or “disgusting”, or maybe it’s even poignant. From there, we take the text and copy and paste it into a google doc, and we imagine that it’s now a script, but for some reason all of the stage and character directions have been deleted.
How do we fill in the blanks? Who is saying this, and why? Where are they? What lighting, sound, music, or projection cues can we add to fill in the story? If we divide up the text in an unusual way, can it become a different story entirely? We try anywhere from one to a dozen scenarios and characters on the text, and there are always ones that, for some reason, make sense. We like to play with identify in the digital age, and essentially catfish the audience: If you read this post and think it’s written by a confused young boy, we’ll probably do it as two mischievous grandmas.
For the web series, we decided to dive deep and finally meet the people behind the posts. We identified the posts/communities we wanted to highlight (it was definitely difficult to narrow it down), arranged for unscripted interviews, and then created scripted shenanigans in which we go off the rails with the information we “learn” from the interview.
In terms of the nitty gritty of film production — that could be its own post, and all we can say is OOYYYY. We learned way too much on the go. Our one tidbit of advice is: If you want to work with female filmmakers, start building that arsenal NOW. They are hard to find. They’re either cut out of the pipeline early and/or not given the experience you need, or they’re the few that make it to the top and are therefore too difficult to contact for your web series. Find your ladies NOW.
Women In Comedy: Are all the interviews you conduct on the show real? Do they know the are going to be on your show?
Alli Goldberg & Jen Jamula: They are real! We were honest with everyone about where the interviews would end up. At Bronycon, we asked first if we could speak with them, and explained that we were creating a web series. After the interview, we’d have them sign a release.
For Mpreg — Justin is the best! He is so open and a pleasure to talk to.
For the author of Semenology, we actually have a sort of funny story. We were all set to Skype with him, and the night before the shoot, he wrote us a long email about how he was very concerned about showing his face, because he actually has a very legit day job. But we must add that his freak out was so polite and he apologized a million times for possibly inconveniencing us. We wrote back pretty immediately something along the lines of: No prob, how ‘bout just audio? And he was down. The thing is, we don’t actually want to make anyone uncomfortable or misconstrue their words or jeopardize their jobs. And that goes for all of our projects. We actually have a podcast called 2 Girls 1 Podcast — launched after the Daily Dot saw a screening of 2 Girls 1 Show — where we interview people from the internet every week. We definitely want people to feel welcome and safe with us.
The Tindering on the street was more planned than we would have liked, but it’s a little difficult to do a totally impromptu street scene in NYC, what with equipment, permits, etc. Also, shoving people right and left haphazardly (a.k.a. “Real like Tindering”) is probably never a good idea.
Lastly, those sugar babies are absolutely real and knew what they were getting into! One works in PR for Seeking Arrangement, and the other was actually in a documentary with Lisa Ling about Sugar Dating, so we were old hat for her.
Women In Comedy: What reactions have you received from your audience?
Alli Goldberg & Jen Jamula: The episodes are pretty out there. We get it. There’s been a lot of: “This is hilarious!” and also “OMG what is happening!” For better or worse, even though it’s comedy, it’s not exactly something you can view lightly, while maybe you’ve got other browsers open. You’ve really gotta dive in and go there.
Women In Comedy: What upcoming topics are you excited about?
Alli Goldberg & Jen Jamula: We’d love to do an episode about adult babies, looners, furries, or vampires. The list is really too long. In the meantime, you can tune in to2 Girls 1 Podcast to hear new interviews every week with different internet subcultures and experts.
Women In Comedy: Is there a message that you would like to send to your fans?
Alli Goldberg & Jen Jamula: Nothing is as weird as it sounds. Also, support women in comedy! You can check out our other projects here.
