Q&A: A talk with Benjamin Apple, ‘Cubed’ star, ‘comedy person’

A few weeks ago I devoted my entire weekly Critic’s Pick to self-described “comedy person” and video maker Benjamin Apple, whose dry, deadpan sketch series “Cubed” (brief encounters in a faceless workplace) I had seen on the YouTube channel Above Average, a division of Lorne Michaels’ Broadway Video. I followed Apple’s trail in due course to his own, less illuminated corner of YouTube, Channel “Ben,” where he posts videos with astonishing regularity, usually in weeklong thematic groups; overall, I find them brilliant, original and very funny.

Although these pieces were made as comedy, or a kind of comedy, they also have unusual formal ambitions. Were you to run across some of these works in a gallery or museum, you would not blink. They play with language and perception, the social conventions of the Internet and the mechanics of the Web — literally, as in “How to Get Car for Free” and “How to Type,” in which the story is all told through a progression of hyperlinks and the movement of the mouse. In “Questions & Answers,” Apple gives straightforward, serious answers to rhetorical questions from routines by Jerry Seinfeld (“Why doesn’t the glue stick to the inside of the bottle?” “If he’s the best man, why isn’t she marrying him?”), with increasing spiritual exhaustion as the series progresses.

Like many better-known names in contemporary comedy, Apple came up through (and is still connected to) the Upright Citizens Brigade (New York chapter). He spent a year writing for “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” and has contributed to the Onion, but otherwise “Cubed,” which has the added lift of the Above Average platform, is as high as his profile has yet to rise. Its first episode, “Zombie Movie With Real Zombies,” has logged nearly 60,000 views. And if the videos at Channel “Ben,” with certain breakout exceptions (like his “Sad Full House” series), have had substantially fewer — about 59,800 fewer on average — that is not how we judge worth around here.

I had occasion recently to talk to Apple about his work and the world in which he is now making his way.

You started at the Upright Citizens Brigade.

Benjamin Apple: Yeah. I just started going to shows and then I kind of got the improv bug, started taking classes. I went through the sketch program and got on one of their sketch teams. I had moved to New York to take a job as a Web programmer. I had an interest in writing and had a vague idea that I wanted to end up as a film director, but I wasn’t really taking any steps in that direction, I was just kind of being a programmer until I found UCB. It was an easy way to get started in terms of performing and writing and getting involved in a community.

But you still had to be good at it. There’s a kind of winnowing process, I’d assume.

Well, even to take an improv class was terrifying; I think probably the first filter is being willing to sign up in the first place. But there is a winnowing process in the classes, and the audition process and submission process is very competitive now. I think I auditioned five times before I got on an improv team. In the meantime, I was doing independent shows and performing a lot with teams I would put together with friends, you know, in bar basements. And sometimes we would rent a space and usually eat the expenses because it’s hard to get people to come out to shows. There was a lot of that before I got on my first UCB house teams and had a place to regularly perform and write.

When did you start making videos?

Pretty soon after I started taking improv classes I had some ideas for sketches, and I got together with one of my improv teams and shot them and had a lot of fun with it. I started teaching myself how to use a camera, how to edit. And then I was pretty distracted for a while with UCB and wasn’t making videos regularly; and then I got a job writing for “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon,” so that basically took up my whole life for about a year. And after that I just wanted to get back into it hardcore, so I had the idea to promise everybody, promise myself, that I was going to make a video every day. I knew that sounded a little ridiculous and impossible, but that was kind of the point. I had had this job that was high-profile and glamorous and paid well. And I just wanted to hit reset and break through my self-consciousness over the fact I was no longer employed. So I decided to make stuff really quickly without much filtering, so that I could keep those juices flowing and move past the point where I was afraid to put things down because I didn’t know if anyone was going to like it.

Several times I almost abandoned the YouTube channel altogether. But then I would say to myself, “Don’t give up, because if you break the chain, it’ll be over.” So I would do the first thing that came into my mind, and it started turning into kind of a stream-of-consciousness thing: I would seize on an idea Sunday night, or even sometimes Monday morning, and I would just do it, no matter how weird it seemed. I really wanted to get into the habit of making something and then releasing it very, very quickly after making it, and also of making it very quickly after conceiving it. I just wanted to shorten the entire process so that I could be making as much as possible with as little self-doubt as possible.

Was it a personal project or a get-famous-through-the-Internet sort of plan?

I would love for my Web videos to gain a following. I think it’s unlikely just because of how weird and how specific they are. I think the answer is I wanted a creative outlet where the fact that nobody was watching was almost a kind of benefit, where it’s like, if a video gets 27 views, that’s fine — in fact, all the better, because when I make tomorrow’s video I’ll be even less self-conscious.

How did you wind up working on “Late Night”?

I was writing for a sketch team at UCB called Onassis, and we were doing pretty well. And every once in a while one of the New York-based shows will contact the artistic director at the UCB or another theater and say, “Can you put together a showcase for us?” Because they need to hire some writers or performers or whatever the case may be. So Fallon contacted the UCB; they wanted to see writer-performers. I did a sketch that I’d written just a few weeks earlier about this research professor who was presenting his findings to a board that had invested in his clinic and telling them what he has been spending their money on for the last five years. And he’s telling them that he’s cutting off men’s heads and trying to sew them on to pigs’ bodies. He gives a very straightforward review of how that doesn’t work; the performance was very straight and the content was absolutely insane. And it went super well, so they brought me in for a meeting and I got hired off of that.

What happened to end it?

It happened because there was not as much of an overlap between my voice and the show’s voice as both of us initially had hoped. It just seemed when I pitched stuff I was super-excited about, it usually did not get on the show, and when I tried to pitch stuff I felt was in the show’s voice, because I wanted to be a useful member of the team, that stuff wasn’t really fun for me. The guys that are there are really good at finding a balance between their voice and the show’s voice, and I worked really hard on it for a year, and it just did not happen.

I like the fact, in videos like “Chicken” [the camera zooms in on an image of a cow as colors change and a chicken clucks] or “Dog Sad” [the camera pulls back from the painted image of a dog into a photograph of the Oval Office, where President Obama seems to be moving a couch], and in “Cubed” too, that there’s often no context or explanation. But that you do them in series does give them a kind of authority.

I do like things that are mathematical or “formulaic” in the sense that at the beginning of the video you know where it’s going to end, but in the sense that you couldn’t possibly have seen where it was going to go. But once you look back, you see it had a clearly defined shape — kind of like the “Dog Sad” video [embedded here], where when you zoom all the way out you see there’s only one image. The video component just draws your attention through the frame. In a way, it’s very linear and nothing happens, but at the same time things are happening the whole time.

There’s a kind of narrative there. I felt that way about the “Cubed” videos too. They had content and movement even when there was only a single line of dialogue.

What you’re saying reminds me of when I went to school, I took a class in logic, like classic Aristotelian logic, and learned about syllogisms and motus ponens and everything, but the most fascinating element to me that we learned about was the enthymeme, which is a syllogism with a missing premise. Like the classic syllogism “All men are mortal, Aristotle is a man, therefore Aristotle is mortal” — that’s what’s used to teach the classic “This is what an argument looks like.” So the enthymeme version of that would be “Aristotle is a man, therefore Aristotle is mortal.” It’s missing a premise, but you can figure out what the missing premise must be in order for this to be a valid argument.

So it’s algebra.

It’s algebra in the form of language, basically. I love to do sketches and videos and moments where there are things that are not said but are filled in by the viewer, by the audience, where there’s, like, a particular value for x that I want them to come up with on their own, or it’s a question mark, where they’re just kind of left wondering but they know there’s something there that’s not being stated. That stuff excites me.

When did “Cubed” come into the picture?

I co-produced a show at UCB called “Sketch Cram,” where once a month we make a sketch show in a single day and it premieres that night. I was brought on as the video guy and would make a video in a day. It seemed crazy at the time. I didn’t know that a couple years later I would be doing that every day. After my run at “Fallon” ended a little over a year ago, I just thought, “All right, what’s next? I know where I’d like to be in three to five years now, what are the steps to get there?” And not in a heartless way. I just said, “What are the stepping stones I need to make for myself so I can end up in a place where I’m happy creatively?” I loved writing dialogue-driven scenes, and I love being the straight man, so I thought of a context where both of those things could happen. And I kind of became infatuated with this image of one person who’s at their work station trying to accomplish something and the other person is kind of lazily hanging over the wall, where it’s like, “Hey, I’m going to come bother you.” I feel like that fits my persona pretty well. I went ahead and found the space, found the actors before I’d even finished writing to make sure that I would get it done. And then we just shot all 12 episodes in two days over a weekend last February.

As the Web becomes more integrated into the whole nexus of what we might call television, it seems to me that we’re moving beyond the need for a series or episode to being any particular length and that you can take something seriously that lasts less than a minute, that length is now a function of the idea and you don’t need to go on longer than necessary.I am constantly scribbling down ideas for individual lines of dialogue or remarks that someone might make or arguments that someone might have, where it could be something between two established characters but it could also just be almost like an overheard conversation, like when you’re on the subway and hear two people talking and you start laughing. You don’t need to know their back stories or where they’re taking the train to; it’s just this thing that’s happening right now that’s engaging or interesting for some reason. And when you come at it with the conviction that it’s worth sharing this 45-second bit of conversation, I feel that comes across and that you can hold people’s interest; they don’t have to be, like, “What is this? What am I watching?” because they’re already paying attention.

Another thing is that your production values have to go up with the length, almost of necessity. You have these Vine videos. According to the standards that we’ve established watching TV and movies, Vine looks terrible, but because we know how it was made — you know or assume it was made with the same exact equipment you have, which is a smartphone — all is forgiven. You don’t care that it looks bad; it’s just completely democratized. Everybody understands that it doesn’t need to look good. But as soon as you are shooting dialogue or some kind of action that looks like it’s kind of coming from the same place as a sitcom, you need to be able to match those production values or at least get as close as you can. People won’t stand for it otherwise.

There are more and more potential homes for projects I’d like to work on, where a few years ago the list wouldn’t have been super long. But now between the dedicated comedy channels like Comedy Central and then channels that are becoming comedy-centric, like FX and IFC, it feels like there are a lot of places on cable where the network’s goal is to be a conduit from the creatives to the audience and to not get in the way. There’s a kinship between all those good comedies that are being made right now, you get the same sense of, I almost want to say reckless abandon, but it’s also laser focus: They have a vision and they know what they want it to look like whether it’s “Portlandia” or “Broad City” or “Louie,” and you get the sense when they credits roll that they did exactly what they wanted to do. And that’s really cool. Whether that happens on a big cable network or on Netflix or Amazon, that part to me is not as important.

Follow Robert Lloyd on Twitter @LATimesTVLloyd