For.

Humor.

Helps enhance our wellbeing through happiness in relationships and happiness.

Humor helps enhance wellbeing by creating positive emotions in relation ships.

Humor enhances wellbeing by strengthening how people get along.

It helps smooth interpersonal and cultural exchanges by reducing conflict.

Tonight we meet a comedian to learn how he uses his talent to keep us laughing.

I'm so happy you're joining us.

And then you from Los Angeles.

This is Clark's PBS.

Welcome to everybody with Angela Williamson and Innovation, Arts, education and public affairs program.

Everybody, with Angela Williamson is made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

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What about from way downtown.

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We win a lot on the field, and we want to help you win a seat.

This season, FanDuel is hosting their biggest free survivor contest ever, with 250 K up for grabs.

Ma'am.

Chris Sanders is our guest.

And whoa, that real that we just saw with those commercials?

Very interesting.

How did you get into character for those?

FanDuel was was really fun because they, they let us just play most of the time commercials are, pretty rigid.

Yeah.

Because the, the ultimate, decision maker is the end client.

Whatever product that you're, you're hawking, they decide they everything is is written in stone.

And with them, this was a, the director was a big comedy director.

The costume guy was actually, Sacha Baron Cohen's costume guy who worked with him on Borat and, all of his.

That the Showtime show he did, but it was, it was just this really neat team of of and the FanDuel people, the, the actual client, they were so interested in trying to make this like, character spokespeople, but actually funny, entertaining commercials because they were all fans of the old, like, 80s comedies like Airplane and Naked Gun and those kind of things.

And one of the guys on the team, was from Australia, and he was making the point that in Australia, the number one commercial that you see, is, online, it's just sports betting companies.

And nearly every bar there is a there are two types of ATMs.

There's an ATM for just with your bank to get cash and then there's like a sports betting, a type ATM.

So how do you go from FanDuel to AT&T?

And that does is pretty iconic commercial.

Do you do we always see that person in that commercial.

Yeah.

But then you have to come in and make your own way to.

that was well, right.

So Lilly is the character.

Milana Van Strub is the, person who she's been Lilly since.

Oh, geez.

Like 2012 or 13 or something.

She took a break.

in 2017 or 18.

She stepped away, took a few year break, but then came back.

She is actually now, she directs most of her own commercials and most of just AT&T commercials in general.

The production company that that shoots them.

Hungry man.

she is one of their in-house directors, so she also directs plenty of their other commercials for some of their other brands.

she's she's an incredibly talented and just busy woman.

She I don't know how she does it all.

I mean, while we were shooting that commercial, in between takes, there were teams of people coming up to review like, shots with her.

And I think they're just reviewing, like, some of the shots for that day.

But no, it was for the other commercial that she's shooting.

She's directing like over the next couple days.

So she's and and at the time she was, like seven, eight months pregnant.

and they were doing everything they could to, to hide it because the character Lily wasn't pregnant.

but.

Yeah.

Okay.

Again, though, improv background.

And that's what Melania Trump came from.

So walking onto a set with her, she was just extremely welcoming, all about just playing and just being this character.

And they just wanted a, an unrecognizable guy with a recognizable sports voice to just, be silly and have fun.

But it was also very weird because it was 2021, so it was very heavy Covid protocols.

So everything we shot, we shot opposite a table, kind of just like this, but we had to shoot everything at least twice because only one person could be unmasked at a time.

So which would everything for me unmasked over her shoulder.

And then we flip it and then you do a wide and I would mask and she wouldn't.

And then we'd switch.

And then in post they do a split screen where they cut everything together, and that's how they shot all of their commercials for.

They were one of the first, production companies that got back after Covid lockdowns, and they shot all their commercials like that until, those have you protocols started, get lifted.

But that was a good two years, at.

Least two years.

And not only that, she's coming in 7 or 8 months pregnant.

You need to be really careful on set.

Wow.

And I love that you're giving us a little bit of insight of how production worked during Covid, because we've talked to independent filmmakers, but it's interesting to hear how they shot commercials as well.

What we started out with what you're doing now, but I want to go back to how does Chris even move in to this type of acting that you're doing right now?

So tell us a little bit about who you are.

Well, it's been a long well, well, actually, I got to, casually I am Chris, but professionally, I have to be Christopher Christopher because, well, I'm just another white guy named Chris in Hollywood.

there's kind of a lot of us, a lot of names.

So I. I want to make sure we get that right.

I have a steep.

I have a steep hill to climb, I prefer, I prefer Chris, I, I've always gone by Chris, but, actually, when I, when I earned my way into SAG, I had to register with them.

you put in your name to register, and you just write in your name as it is.

If you don't have, like, a screen name and it a warning, pop back and said, like, you might want to try a different name for that one.

Chris is extremely popular.

And then to Chris Sanders is a, an animation guy.

He's he directed Lilo and Stitch and wrote it.

He voices a bunch of people.

He does a bunch of Pixar movies.

And I'm glad you said that, because that explains my research in why I was having a hard time getting to actual you.

Yeah.

So if you look up Christopher Sanders, then usually I come a little closer to the top, but still, there are other.

There's a Christoph Sanders that has been and stuff out here.

I, I've thought about changing my name to Christopher Street just to make it a little easier.

Like in Marie.

Yeah.

I you I'm sorry, I don't know.

You want to.

Break off a little nepotism.

That's all I do.

it could work.

I mean.

You never know.

You never know, but.

But.

Yes, that he searched it to see if it's.

What Christopher Street was.

Say, how are we going to get SAG all in trouble?

Oh, yeah.

Well, that was, I recently met Chris Sullivan.

who was Toby on?

This Is Us?

Yes, he he is registered through SAG as just Sully because Chris and Chris Sullivan are just too common of a combination of names.

but to get back to your question about, like, how did we get here?

I love.

To sidetrack on the show, so that's good.

I do too.

it's a it's been a very long road.

So originally from Michigan.

started found art and acting and and the key thing that I had the power to make people laugh was what made me want to do that.

when did you realize that?

I mean, where you five.

I a little bit older.

Okay.

There was a, My mom is really from Massachusetts.

Every summer we would drive out there, to visit my nana, her mom, and, one summer, I had to have been, oh, around ten, 11, maybe, we had gone to my godmother and her husband.

had a boat.

Or maybe they run at a about.

But we went tubing on a lake with them.

he had my my uncle had a, the old camcorder, like, shoulder mounted camcorder and was videotaping everything all day.

at one point, it was my brother's turn to go out on the to my older brother by, like 15 months.

He gets on the tube and starts to go out, and I, hilariously quipped, what?

You don't know, Tom, is that the rope is not attached to the boat.

And everybody laughed around me and I didn't realize it at the moment.

But later on that night, when we were all watching the tape that my uncle got and and we're watching that moment happen, and I hear everybody, on the tape laugh.

But then I hear everybody around me watching it laugh at the same time.

and I had I buttoned it with smile.

You're on Candid Camera, which was a topical reference at the time because Candid Camera was this huge, hilarious home video show.

so I not only nailed, I not only nailed, social humor, I nailed topical humor at the same time without even knowing it.

And but I realized that I made everybody laugh while I was on the boat.

But then it was also making everybody else laugh around me.

And I had just this moment of like, I did that and the feeling it gave me, I mean, it was, it's it's adrenaline rush.

Yeah.

It's it's what is that epinephrine.

Yeah.

Not epinephrine.

That's the happy pen.

Don't don't.

Dopamine.

Yes.

It was a dopamine rush, right.

Yes.

Which one of those means you're there?

It was a it was a drug.

And, I was hooked and needed to do that with the rest of my life.

But, as I got out of high school and I went to, I started going to Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the area I'm from, and then a recruiter from the Army called at the right time.

I didn't have any money for the next semester of college, and that's what I needed.

And this was pre 911.

So the only thing that the military was really attracting people with was you can get money for college.

fast forward to getting out of the military and started going to Second City Theater in Chicago and their training center.

Tell us again, our audience, we know Second City, but tell our audience about Second City.

Second city is the it's the home of of Improvization.

I mean, where most of the people, the biggest stars from, like, Saturday Night Live came from, back in the day, like the Dan Ackroyd's and Chris Farley.

one of my one of my instructors at Second City in Chicago was on the main stage was with Chris Farley back when he was on it.

So he regaled us with stories about, how we were just wild of a person.

Chris Farley was in the, they'd rush out on stage thinking, how is this going to happen?

But Chris would just, like, do his thing and say, game time.

And then he would perform.

yeah.

So he ended up doing that.

And that's where we bring our audience to what you're doing today.

Oh, well, it's still a long road.

Yes.

while in Chicago, I, start I was able to link my military service into acting.

a theater company there called Catharsis Productions, had just secured this big contract with, the military and specifically with the Army.

They didn't have any veterans on their staff among the current actors or anyone else at the time, they were still very small.

and I responded to just I think it was on Craigslist, just an ad looking for a current, veteran combat or not, but just a veteran to come look at their script and talk to their actors to see if you could Mike, teach them some of the lingo in the jargon, yada yada.

Read the script.

It was very good.

It was also a partially improvised show.

While talking with their actors, one of them, we recognize each other from Second City.

and then that made the, the, to owners, creators of the of the company in the show say, oh, are you an actor?

And I was like, well, I'm trying to be, Service in the military does not a hero make.

Or you may be thinking someone like me, who the army taught how to solve problems with murder.

Oh, sorry to ruin your patriotic fantasy, but what is it?

What is it that you think we do?

but they they gave me an audition a month or so later, a couple of months after that, I was actually hired and thought it would be just a few month gig.

And then next thing I knew, it was over.

Seven years later, I stopped counting at a thousand shows in all 50 states and 7 or 8 different countries.

always wanted to come out here to try to get into the actual television film commercial market, because Chicago is, in Chicago is is 95% live theater.

You're not going to there is some industry there, but it's LA is still and probably always will be the capital of television, film and commercial.

well, thank you for giving us a lot to that backstory.

That was fantastic because it actually goes into what you're doing next.

So when we come back, you will tell us what you're doing next so we can support you.

Great, great.

Come back to hear more from Christopher, Put a frog in a pot of boiling water and it'll jump right out.

But put a frog in a pot of cool water again and slowly heat it up.

And that from World War II veterans, we can tell ourselves a lie that it's easier to stay in that boiling water to disconnect.

But you've never been interested in.

Easy.

You are not a frog.

Find resources.

Advocate.

Reach.

Welcome back Chris.

When we left off you were talking about how you learned everything you started to practice, put it into motion at Second City, and then you ended up getting a job that you saw on Craigslist.

And that was because they needed someone from the military who used your humor to talk about sensitive issues.

How does that actually relate to what you're doing now at the Geffen?

what I did the Geffen was this this monologue that we saw part of.

and that is through one of their many educational initiatives.

they do well for the past seven, eight years.

they do a veterans writing and performance workshop series, where they, hundreds of veterans apply.

you don't have to be related to the entertainment industry.

in fact, most of the people in my cohort last year, were some of them were related, but not not performers.

One of the guys was the, he was the stunt turtle for Michelangelo and Teenage Mutant Turtles.

Two secret of the Jews.

this guy, Nick Palmer, he's a really awesome guy.

He still does, comic arts and stuff in the fall.

Michelangelo.

Oh my goodness.

really cool guy.

But not a not a performer in that sense.

Like a stage performer.

Okay.

anyways, to get back to your question, the this program, they want you to come in and they take you wherever you are, and they want you to write a cultural identity monologue.

it's a monologue or.

No.

It is a monologue.

Okay.

Still, it is a single person on stage telling a story.

It's not a monologue in the sense that it's a, it's a speech that's part of a larger play.

It's just a, it is.

It's just a standalone monologue, in and of itself.

That is a, they call them cultural identity monologues, and they want you to base it on a, an object that has personal significance to you.

So a cultural artifact, so that can be something related to your military service, or it could be something completely different.

in one of the previous year's cohorts, a Vietnam veteran had a, you know, a BIC lighter.

Okay.

Yes, yes, a metal ones that he had with him in Vietnam.

And there's just this unbelievab and, yeah, it, it it allows the people that don't have any sort of writing background to have a place to start from, and then ideas spawn from there.

And when I enter the program, I, I'm not a, I don't have that much.

I'm not a material person, so I don't hold on to a lot of things.

And I was briefly struggling with, what am I going to write about?

And then suddenly I remembered that I have this, Camelbak backpack.

This bright green Camelbak backpack that I bought in for myself in 2003 when I was in the military, because we had just gotten our orders for a year of combat in Afghanistan.

And I still have this bag.

This bag has stayed with me all the way through a year of combat in Afghanistan.

it moved with me back to Michigan before I moved to Chicago and was going to Second City.

It traveled with me to all 50 states and 78 different countries.

when I was performing with that theater company.

And it has been, to several national parks, it was most recently in Yosemite, where I carried, my then three and a half year old on my shoulders with it on my back to see Yosemite Falls.

and it's, it I can't believe that I had forgotten about it, but I, I guess I realize I did because it for a just a couple of years when my two boys were being born, it was just kind of sitting in the garage because we weren't able to do anything.

but I realized that there was a whole lot of, the monologue is called baggage because there's a lot more than just the bag itself and my own baggage attached to that.

Now, there is the, the, the service of and the legacy of all the guys I served with, the ones that did make it back and are now doing their own things and in their civilian life.

But then the ones that stayed in, and either didn't make it out of that year that we were in Afghanistan together or that stayed in, but then got deployed again later on a few years later, and then were killed in Iraq or Afghanistan again, or the, way too many that have, succumbed to suicide because of, the pressures of, of PTSD, that I don't even like to call PTSD because the D is, it's not a disorder, it's just post-traumatic stress.

Right?

friend, I have likes to call it, or likes to say that it most of his traumatic stress is from a lack of traumatic stress.

Because when you're in combat, in those situations, you are constantly in fight mode.

and you it it just becomes your it's it's the dopamine shot from the moment that I had when I learned I could make people laugh.

You end up craving that moment and your your body needs it to function.

And when you're pulled out of that, it just takes it takes a very long time.

And a lot of, a lot of therapy or group therapy or, talking it out with people you served with to, to kind of work through it.

So the, monologue ended up being about kind of the relationship to this bag I have, but more importantly, the relationship to the, the phrase that gets thrown at veterans now just so blindly, which is thank you for your service.

There's nothing wrong with the phrase itself, but for most veterans, when that gets tossed at us, a lot of times we don't know how to respond.

or we'll roll our eyes or we'll just politely say like, yeah, thanks.

I guess, you know, you know, because you're usually only saying it because we've been trained to say it, because, we automatically ever since 911, any public servant is immediately put on a pedestal simply because they're a public servant.

it's not based on what it should be based on character or, like, actual service.

because we don't know.

You don't know who that person is.

I mean, they may not.

They may not have seen combat.

they may be a genuinely shitty person serving in the military or on a police force or a fire department doesn't make you a hero automatically.

Right.

and the the monologue, it ends up being about kind of the my growth in the response to that, to that phrase, where I used to take it as that, I used to I would it get thrown at me and I would just politely smile or roll my eyes or just not know how to respond.

And, few years ago, a friend, that I served with and that stayed in for 20 years and, saw a lot of stuff to, we were talking and he, he said that he started trying something else, and it made me not just try it, but I do it now is anytime someone says thank you for your service, you should respond with, you were worth it.

So you change your perspective.

Yeah.

And it changes their perspective too.

it that is actually the the closing line of, of that monologue is you are worth it because you end up realizing that.

By attaching the service and the legacy of these guys I serve with.

But really any any combat veteran to your own baggage, you're doing that so that you can try to make their service worth it.

Right?

And then that makes you have to respond to anyone that does say that does.

Thank you for your own service.

You have to tell them what you have to tell yourself.

And all those guys that didn't make it is that you were worth it.

And since I've started doing that now for several years, it often takes people off guard because you're not expecting a response like that.

You never get that.

but the several people have just it's it's just frozen them in their tracks, and they actually have this deep, reflective moment where they they weren't expecting it, and they actually, like, they they suddenly stop and either break into tears or, or just they have to stop themselves and think like, am I worth it?

I don't think I am.

And then then they just start thanking me even more because I open their eyes.

But then I have to sit there and tell them story of like, well, look at it.

It wasn't me.

All right.

so you attribute it to where you got it from?

Yeah, but what is so interesting about our conversation, I can't believe our time is almost.

Oh, it's actually done, but that you have used your gift for humor to actually enlighten us and enlighten audiences about sensitive topics.

And that is what's so incredible about our conversation.

And today it's an awesome two.

When I actually go for it, I'm going to think twice before I say that, because it gives all of us a new perspective of how we treat our military and how we tell them we are thankful.

Yeah, so.

I love it, I love it.

Okay, so before we end, tell our audience how they can keep in touch with you.

I guess the easiest way is, you can find me on Instagram at Christopher Sanders full name with the middle initial.

oh.

Yeah, that's probably the easiest way.

Just to make sure our audience sees that as well, too.

Well, thank you so much.

And and make sure to keep in touch with us, especially with things that are going on with you so you can come back.

I will, because.

The more projects.

I am, expanding that monologue into a much longer, aiming for like an hour long one man show type deal because the, it got a very, very good response at the Geffen.

I'll just say that.

And that's good, because our audience will want to see more about that.

So maybe everybody can be on location with Christopher and we can.

Yeah.

See, I'm getting you going there.

Okay.

So think about that while I do the closing.

Okay.

And thank you for joining us on everybody with Angela Williamson.

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Good night and stay well.

Very good