An Evening of Laughter and Connection for CommUnify

The nonprofit CommUnify got a healthy — and often hilarious — dose of community support at last week’s special fundraising event at the Lobero Theatre featuring entertainers Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jane Lynch, and Brad Hall in a conversation moderated by producer Dante Di Loreto.

As CEO Patricia Keelean explained, the organization has been providing critical services to low -income neighbors here in Santa Barbara County since 1967, including 16 different programs that serve children, youth, their families, and seniors. “Vital programs like Head Start, which is currently in jeopardy of delayed funding and possibly even complete defunding,” said Keelean, nodding as the audience greeted that threat with a loud chorus of boos.

While the big names in comedy may have drawn most of the audience to the theater, two cleverly produced videos — one at the beginning called “Strength in Numbers” (view here), and one at the end called “Big Shots” (view here) — outlined dire stats: Last year, there were almost 70,000 people in Santa Barbara County living in poverty, and out of all 58 counties in California, Santa Barbara County has the second-highest percentage of its population living in poverty. However, the videos kept the group on task as to all of the ways CommUnify helps with free childcare, early education, weatherization of homes, upgrading health screenings, and more.

The live program, titled Off the Record: Laughter Connects Us All, was a very entertaining conversation with the three performers who are linked in various ways, including marriage (Louis-Dreyfus and Hall), working together (Louis-Dreyfus and Lynch, and Louis-Dreyfus and Hall), and Chicago, where all three of them lived at different points in their lives. 

Lynch shared a story about her midwestern parent’s love of performing songs from musicals, as well as the cocktail hour. “They loved having their Ten High Whiskey, which was a solid mash whiskey from Kentucky. It was terrible,” said Lynch. “You had to go to a gas station to buy it. But with my dad, always looking for the deal, always looking for the bargain. … There was always a little coupon on the bottom on the back of it, and if you filled it out and sent it to them, they would send you $1, a brand-new dollar bill, but one per household. When I was in college, I would get the $1 bill in the mail, because it was a different address.”

Growing up as the son of the late Rev. George Hall, the longtime rector at All Saints By-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Montecito, Brad Hall said, “the only liquor my father ever had was communion wine.” 

He shared the story of doing theater in Santa Barbara for the first time at age 10, when the choir director of All Saints tried to channel some of his misbehaving energy into the opera The Merry Wives of Windsor. “I had one line: ‘Sir, I bring you a bottle of Madeira wine.’ … I was really little, and the bottle of wine was a little bit bigger than I was, and so that was the bit.” Encouraged by laughter, “the next time, I really struggled with the wine, got a little bigger laugh. And the next time, I’m barely able to bring the thing in, for a little bit bigger laugh.” 

And so on … he was hooked on the fun of making people laugh. 

Louis-Dreyfus also caught the acting bug early, forming her own theater group, Julia and the Umbrella People, with her childhood neighbors, and charging their families $1 to come down to the basement and see the shows. 

“You knew you could charge money,” asked Di Loreto.

“Oh, you betcha,” said Louis-Dreyfus. “We made a fortune.”

She also spoke of the whirlwind experience of being hired (along with Hall) while she was finishing up her junior year at Northwestern, to join Saturday Night Live in 1982. For Louis-Dreyfus it was a dream job come true, but for Hall, it was a tough decision, as he was one of the founders of the Practical Theatre Company and didn’t want to leave them in the lurch. “We were a little bit torn,” said Hall, who managed to keep the company despite joining SNL and moving to New York.

That experience would prove to be very challenging for both of them. “I had no idea what I was doing,” said Louis-Dreyfus. “And I didn’t go to the show with a plan. We’d been doing ensemble work and improv, and we were all, you know, linked arms and it was a very joyful and organic ensemble work. And that was simply not the culture at SNL.”

“It was an agony for us,” said Hall, as he recounted being thrown into table reads unprepared, with actors whose best friends had just been fired and replaced by the two of them. And having his sketches trimmed down to all punchlines and no setups, which made no sense. 

“The one thing I do want to say about that experience was that it was very hard, for sure, but it was an extraordinary learning experience,” said Louis-Dreyfus. “And I really took away from that so much that I carried forward. So ultimately, even though it was really excruciating at the time, in many ways, it was, in fact, a wonderful experience in a strange, sort of upside-down kind of way, really.” 

“It was like a master’s degree in some way, probably,” said Hall.

While Lynch has classical theater training from Illinois State University, a role in The Real Live Brady Bunch stage show helped hone her comedy chops, and was what ultimately led her to Los Angeles and getting some TV work. Coach Sue Sylvester, on Glee (with Di Loreto producing), was one of her most iconic roles. Asked about creating the character, Lynch said, “I love awful people. … I love the person who walks into the room kind of like, ‘I’m the shit,’ and they’re so not, if you scratch beneath the surface. When I learned this actually was therapy, was that when you scratch beneath the surface, there’s always some fear; there’s always some huge insecurity. So, I always start with that. I found it to be such fertile ground.”

Of her famously awkward “Elaine Dance” on Seinfeld, Louis-Dreyfus said, “It’s not a pleasant look. It requires an enormous amount of confidence. I actually couldn’t do it with music, because it couldn’t be rhythmic (they took the music out and put it back in post-production). … I really had to come at it feeling super good about myself and really enjoying my life, and it may be one of the few times Elaine was really enjoying her life. And so that’s how I approached it: confidently. Nothing like a competent fool.”

While Seinfeld plummeted Julia into fame, not everyone was a fan. 

“You told a story that was after you had wrapped Seinfeld or right at the end, you were in New York together with the entire cast, and you decided you were going to eat outside at a restaurant,” shared Di Loreto.

“Yeah, we were going to blow this city’s mind,” said Louis-Dreyfus. “The four of us are going to sit outside and have dinner, and not a single person blinked — just when you think you’re huge. They pull you back.”

Asked what they’d do if they weren’t in show business, Louis-Dreyfus said, “I would be standing in the unemployment line. I have no other skills.”

Added Hall, “You know me better than I do. I might be in the same line.” 

“I’d be a drain on society too,” shrugged Lynch.

Lucky for audiences — and CommUnify — they landed in the right professions and have been entertaining us ever since. 

For more information about CommUnify, including how to donate to Head Start and other programs, and their new Adopt-a-Campus initiative, see communifysb.org.