by M. Berru

Popular comedy troupe Kasper Hauser is infinitely more entertaining than an omelette, even one from the tasty Alcove Café in Los Feliz. I discovered this last week, when we met for an early breakfast interview before their flight back to San Francisco. The group had performed at the Comedy Central Stage in Hollywood the previous night, delighting the audience with Powerpoint presentations, fake pregnancies, monks, and ill-fated karate kicks. John Reichmuth — who wore sunglasses for the duration of the morning, distinguishing him from his twin brother, James — suggested I turn to fellow groupmates Dan Klein or Rob Baedeker if dealing with the four of them got overwhelming.

“We promise if we ever tell you something that’s not true,” says Dan, sensing my difficulty in assessing John’s dry sarcasm, “someone will say ‘that’s not true.’”

“That’s not true,” John quips, and the table laughs.

Kasper Hauser are a well-known sketch troupe based in San Francisco and have participated in such acclaimed events as San Francisco Sketch Fest and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. They published their first book, SkyMaul: Happy Crap You Can Buy From a Plane, in October 2006, and their popular podcast was an iTunes staff favorite last year. Though at first glance they may appear to be your average sketch troupe, I got the distinct sense from the group that Kasper Hauser haven’t gotten to where they are — or where they’re going — by any traditional comedy model.

The foursome met at a Stanford University summer camp in Lake Tahoe. James and John, inevitable performers who grew up in Ashland, Oregon — a place they describe as being “funky and thespian” — soon drew the attention of Rob and Dan (who both hailed from Southern California).

“The first time [Dan] saw us perform he came up to me afterwards and said that he wanted to be my agent,” says John.

“There was a lot of alcohol,” Dan responds.

“At camp?” I ask.

“It was an alcohol camp,” says John. “For heroin addicts.” They immediately began performing together at the camp.

After a couple of “false starts,” as James puts it (including a paying college dorm show, whose profits went to the always-reliable causes of pizza and beer), the timing wasn’t quite right. In the next five years, Dan, James, John, and Rob would collaborate in various forms creatively while each pursued his own career. It’s here that the comedy troupe’s path deviates sharply from the norm.

Dan Klein is the bearded member of Kasper Hauser, who is perhaps the most recognizable of the four as his illustrated self (image above). His distinguished gray highlights suit his employment as a drama professor at Stanford, where he just got a sketch comedy class curriculum approved for next semester. Rob Baedeker, the soft-spoken blonde member of the group and appointed troupe diplomat, is a freelance writer and sometime lit professor (he dropped out of a Ph. D program at Penn, essentially, to be in Kasper Hauser). John Reichmuth is a public defender and member of a “super secret thing where everybody I represent is innocent.” And James Reichmuth, sharing his twin’s receding hairline and intense, dark expressions, is a psychiatrist.

Kasper Hauser is loath to use their professions as any kind of gimmick. “Comedy is a big deal for us,” James explains. “It’s a great deal of commitment and it’s a serious vocation for us; we just happen to be doing it at the same time as these very novel and unusual job combinations. But we’re just terrified of this ‘The Doctor of Comedy!’ kind of thing.”

They don’t always go for “smart jokes” either. “We’re sort of high/low,” James continues. “We’re not intellectual comedians; that would not be the best way to describe us. We’re not afraid of vulgarity at all and, frankly, we’re a little vulgar. It’s kind of a mixture.”

Their careers may not play directly into their artistic product, but they’ve definitely underwritten Kasper Hauser’s trajectory. As their jobs — and, now, families — are based in San Francisco, the sketch troupe has used what may seem to be a disadvantageous geographic placement to create comedic material based more on longevity than instant fame.

“The star model and the jackpot model, where it’s like you’ll break out and become a star? I don’t think that’s really our model,” says Rob.

“That’s not our model for sure,” Dan agrees. “I love my day jobs. It would be great to not have to do them but get to do them.” In an almost tender moment, Rob, James, and John laugh, sharing Dan’s sentiment.

The danger of the group breaking up due to a member getting cast on Saturday Night Live is simply not a factor for Kasper Hauser. “A lot of troupes form as a vehicle to showcase individual talents,” explains John.

“Which we don’t have,” adds James.

While each of the four men brings his own strengths to the group, what comes out so brilliantly in Kasper Hauser’s comedy (from the podcasts, to the book, to the live shows) is a clear sensibility and direction. It’s a product of brutal self-editing — they admit to cutting out so much it may be a fault — and of unity. No sketch has been written by a single member; everything is collaborative.

The process is not without its difficulties. Besides the excruciating pace set by making decisions such as “the potatoes” versus “some potatoes,” Rob says that “part of the problem with being just four people writing in a room is that after a while things have to go further to make each other laugh. You can detach from the mother ship and just … get a little too far out there. You then put it onstage and occasionally, it’s like, ‘We went too far.’”

In SkyMaul, Kasper Hauser found the perfect vehicle for their humor. Danielle Svetkov, who is now the group’s book agent, approached the group after a live show to see if they’d be interested in writing a book. The parody of the Sky Mall in-flight magazine was one of the first ideas pitched, and St. Martin’s Griffin publishers bought it within a week. Items described in the pages include the Banana-ganizer (“Grab the banana you want when you want”) and the Face Melter (FCMLTR: $99.99, Replacement Face: $8,000.00). In keeping with the group’s self-described high/low sensibility, images range from slick Photoshop jobs to royalty-free photos lifted off websites.

James describes SkyMaul as “a quilt. A comedy quilt.” He adds, “If we were writing a narrative it would be a little different, because John’s sections would be like, ‘HEY I GOT A PERM!’, and mine would be really tight and funny.”

Kasper Hauser’s most recent live stage show (based on SkyMaul) focuses on a recurring obsession in their work: born losers striving to reach unrealistic goals. The super-positive Blaine Cardoza, a motivational speaker “just 18 units away from getting an online Masters,” “engaged to the same beautiful woman for the past 11 years,” and “this close to realizing his childhood dream of owning his own dolphin,” is a prime example of the surreal characters crafted by Kasper Hauser. By design, these individuals aren’t “zany” or wacky; instead, they’re real persons operating in a universe where their own logic, however warped, is what drives them to comedic glory.

It’s for this reason that the group balks at comparisons between themselves and Monty Python. “They were, of course, great, and totally influential,” explains Rob, “but there’s also this association with randomness and wackiness that gets attached to that, and we really want to avoid that.”

Kasper Hauser’s emphasis has always been on writing and acting, and reaching past the trappings that others frequently rely on — often unsuccessfully — to mask weak jokes. In the early days of Kasper Hauser, the quartet would wear harlequin suits on stage in lieu of costumes, eschewing sound and light cues, wigs, and props. “It drove industry and critics bonkers,” says John, “because they thought if they didn’t understand the reasons for the suits then they were out of the joke or whatever.”

Like the harlequin suits, the parodies of This American Life — that’s Rob’s spot-on impersonation of Ira Glass, by the way — or KHraigslist (fake Craigslist ads, which can be found on their website) are just a backdrop, compelling even to those who are unfamiliar with the initial premises. “It really doesn’t even matter what the show is,” says Rob. “We could be parodying anything, and we’re just sort of using that as an excuse to create a world that we like, a comic universe.”

In the last few moments of our interview, we discuss the future of Kasper Hauser. My food has grown cold, long forgotten in the élan of the morning. I fight my inherited impulse to imitate my mother and exclaim, “Well, it sounds like you boys really have your heads on straight!” But it’s true — they do. Not only are they published authors (they allude to a possible second book), seasoned performers, and versatile writers, but they’re realists who understand their goals.

“People dream about what they want to be, and they don’t often dream about what they want to do,” says James. “What is that day job you’re dreaming about?” For the gentlemen of Kasper Hauser, this includes emailing Nigerian scammers, writing wedding announcements for the New York Times, videoblogging from the 14th century, and receiving emails from fans.

James adds a final word of caution. “If you’re gonna write a fan letter, don’t title it, ‘Add three inches to your penis.’ That’s the last thing I need, is three inches of penis.”