Online comedy's very important person
Vic Michaelis is a face of Dropout's social media success.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
This doubles as Vic Michaelis’s audition for your next tornado movie, btw. —Kate
It’s nice to know in the current media environment that there is such a thing as a beloved company coming back from the dead. Founded in 1999, CollegeHumor helped launch many now-beloved comedians’ careers. But after spending the 2010s battling with Facebook’s video algorithm and eventually restructuring, the company had been reduced to, in Vulture’s words, “a zombie shell of itself.”
Which is why it may be surprising to know that the studio, now owned by Chief Creative Officer Sam Reich and renamed Dropout, is behind some of the most viral videos on TikTok. Early series like Dimension 20, a riff on Dungeons & Dragons, and Game Changer, a game show in which the game…changes, were chopped, clipped, and dispersed across the app in order to drive people to Dropout’s subscription platform which, in September 2023, had reached somewhere in the “mid-hundreds of thousands of subscribers.”
While I had seen and appreciated these clips, I wasn’t fully on board with Dropout until Vic Michaelis ended up on my FYP. They’re the host of one of the latest shows, Very Important People—a resurrection of Josh Ruben and Pat Cassels’ Hello My Name Is from the early 2010s. Each week, a new comedian is surprised with a full makeover, one they must improvise a character for while under Michaelis’s questioning. If you came across any clip from the show, it was probably this one.
I was interested in talking to Michaelis to learn not only how they came to their sharp and irreverent comedy, but also how they’ve helped crack the code that few else have for a thriving subscription service that also thrives on social media.
All the comments that you get are about specifically your improvising and how fast you are. Was improv something that, when you started doing it, you just took to immediately?
You know, that's very kind. What I'll say is that that would've been like eight years ago now. I've been in LA for the last six and a half, seven years, and it really is nuts doing stuff online. You spend so much of your improv career doing shows and it is the best thing. The best advice that I could possibly give anybody is like, do shows everywhere and for anyone if you can and have the ability to do it, and just bombing in front of nobody as a way to get your inner voice strong, to be like, “That was a funny thing that I said. It just wasn't the right audience for it.”
After I took UCB writing classes I was in a sketch comedy group, and we were constantly performing for an audience of exclusively the other people performing in the show.
A rite of passage.
How much was the internet a part of shaping your comedy?
I mean, huge. Especially being involved in the real life improv scene out here, there does seem to be a pretty big delineation between when things shut down initially when the pandemic started, and then all of a sudden the way that people were able to continue to perform was online. But I mean, watching old CollegeHumor sketches, Very Mary Kate, which really was my inciting incident with comedy.
I think she just made a TikTok.
Yeah. Elaine Carroll really had such a profound impact on me, her sense of humor, and now it's sort of coming full circle, actually knowing her a bit as a person and her just being so wonderful and so supportive. I think that, too, was something that is really mind blowing to me, is that people on the whole are so unbelievably supportive of the people that are coming after them. It really is incredible.
Do you remember when you started to put yourself on the internet? Was it pandemic related?
I would say I'm a pretty private person in my personal life. When the pandemic started and all of a sudden, you don't have the option to go out into theaters anymore, it sort of became like, “Okay, time to time to start building this.” The internet still feels that way a little bit, but especially a few years ago really felt like, “Oh yeah, people are getting TV show deals off of characters that they're doing that are just TikToks that they were making” and that was very, very exciting.
When I was doing some research for the interview, I didn't realize you were the person behind a TikTok that my sister and I really love, which is the horse podcast one.
Oh, no way.
What's so funny is that you can not realize you actually are already familiar with someone's work, and then that moment of putting it all together is so wild.
Well thank you so much for watching. Full disclosure, I did show that one to my dad 'cause I show him all of them before I post them and he went, “I don't get it. Don't post that one. I really don't understand that one. Are you sure this is one you wanna post?”
Two girls in Brooklyn really liked it, so you can bring that back to him.
My cousin is my personal tastemaker, so I sent it to him as well and he was like, “Yeah, it's a hit.” And I was like, “Okay, alright. I'm gonna trust you. My dad hates it.” And he goes, “He's gonna hate it. You gotta post it.”
It's like the angel and the devil on your shoulder. So how did you end up coming to Dropout?
I have like a weird long roundabout way to ending up at Dropout, which is that I had started working freelance for CollegeHumor the year before they sort of folded in, I guess. I was getting to submit sketches every month to potentially be written and produced, and then everything shut down. And then when Make Some Noise, that first full season, came up, I got an email out of the blue from Sam being like, “Hey, is this something you would be interested in?” I think one of my deep dark secrets is that I'm not a chill person at all, so I 30 seconds later responded to the email was like, “Yes. I don't know if there's anything else I need to know, but yeah, I'll absolutely do it. What is it?”
I came across you through Very Important People, doing these interviews with improvised characters. How did this show come about?
This show is a show that Josh Ruben and Pat Cassels did under the name, Hello My Name Is years ago. I mean, both just real powerhouses and old CollegeHumor staples. And Josh now does a lot of stuff with Dropout. I got an email from Sam May of last year being like, “Hey, we're looking to reboot this, give it a new take. We were wondering if you'd be interested in hosting.” Once again. Like I got like halfway down the email like, “Yep.”
I think one of the things I love most about working with Dropout is they really allow a lot of creative freedom, which I think having worked a little bit with a couple of very deeply failed pilots, watching behind the scenes and how tightly a lot of like people that are in charge of those companies hold onto those creative projects, with Dropout it is not lost on me how much trust and faith is put in us and how much they let us pour in creatively to these shows. I'm so unbelievably grateful.I feel like the word collaborative gets used a lot, but it really, really is and it really feels that way, which feels very special.
I think what stands out about your performance, at least in this specific show, is you're playing ostensibly the straight man, but it’s so fun. How do you approach your character on the show?
We're gonna get into the weeds of improv, which is my favorite thing to talk about. That is true, that it's a voice of reason. I love playing voice of reason. It's my favorite type of character to play. And I think people often don't see a voice of reason as a three dimensional character. And I really think the voice of reason is like anybody else, they have their weird things also that come up when they come up. And we just don't really get into it, 'cause we're focusing on this snapshot in time where it's this person who's bouncing off of this unusual person.
We and the director, Tamar Levine, talked a ton about this host Vic character having their own thing going on. And it's not the focus of any one episode, but it's a reason to watch the thing as a whole, especially as these characters carousel in and out, to parse out some of this information about this character. And we had a couple of ideas, but mostly it was coming to us as the episodes were coming out and cataloging all the canon that we've created in episodes so we could go back afterwards and be like, “Okay, this is what we said, this is what happens.”
A Show Bible. I listen to the Office Ladies podcast and they're constantly referring to the deep lore that every single side character has.
Totally. We had a Show Bible at the beginning of this that started out two pages, and it's gotta be like 15, 16 pages now of just like, stuff that we improvised and created. But it is one of those things where it's easy because it's my face on stuff, but host Vic really was a big heroic effort between me and Tamar and then also like all of the producers just really coming together and being like, “What about this? Is this something we wanna lean into? This might be something satisfying for later and if it doesn't come up in the improv, then it doesn't come up and that's totally fine.” But trying to make sure that we had something cohesive for that character, which is something that was special and important to myself and Tamar. And so then seeing that come to life and seeing that be taken very preciously was very exciting.
The show has found so much success on TikTok, but it does so in these isolated bursts. You have these longer storylines that you're working on, but how much are you also thinking about social media virality?
I think it goes hand in hand, right? Dropout being a very small streamer and that being how a lot of people end up coming to the streaming service, it's one of those things. I don't think at any point we would wanna sacrifice anything for social media, but again, it never feels like that because I think the conceit itself plays so well in vertical. For the most part, it's a clip of one person and then you can cut to the clip of the second person. And I know Sam has said in other interviews that when coming up with conceits for shows in the first place, stuff that will play on social media is a big way that he thinks about that.
I feel lucky that it hasn't had to be something that I've had to think a ton about because just by nature of the show, it plays so well in the vertical naturally just with two people because its core really is a first date scene, which is classic improv where it's just two people, get to know you, where you're from, and then jump off from there. So it's like, the easiest thing in the world for me.
You mentioned that you're a bit more private on social media, but I think I feel this way in sort of the journalism industry, and I imagine in acting and comedy it's there as well, there's this pressure to have your own distinct online brand and to become an independent figure. How much do you feel that, and is that something you're interested in?
We live in this world right now where everybody, regardless of what industry you're in, we're all striving to be like, “What's your brand?” We're all little companies. How much do I think about it? I mean, I feel very fortunate, especially performing live on stage—I don't know if this is gonna answer your question totally, but this is the answer that I'm thinking of right now where I feel very grounded in my life outside of online in terms of performance, getting to do that, and having some of the freedom of something that lives and dies just on stage. And then also having things that I'm doing outside of comedy. Anytime I get really into one thing, anything that I'm putting online and something doesn't do well, then you have that moment of like, “Am I just terrible at this?” I feel like having other things going on—like, I'm getting really into pottery.
Oh my gosh, I make pottery.
Do you? Do you have any of your pieces around you?
I was drinking out of a mug that I made, but the one time I put a mug away after I'm done with it is when I could've used it. But especially if you do online stuff, it's really rewarding to have a hands hobby.
Yeah. It's one of those things where comedy can't be the thing that I do and also my hobby and also my partner in life. I'm also a worse comedian when that starts feeling that way. That is my big thing that I'm doing right now, especially as the show is taking off and I'm so grateful that people are liking it, 'cause again, like I said earlier, I feel like I have spent years and years and years as most people do coming up at improv, performing for five people that are waiting for their turn to get up on stage. It is not lost on me, having an audience of people that really are interested and excited about the work that you're putting out there. It means the entire world to me. And I don't think it is overreaching speaking for the team being like, we're just so grateful people are liking what we're doing. It really does mean the entire world. That, period, and, new sentence: I am making sure that I have other things going on in my life. I really am so appreciative that everybody loves what I'm doing, but people's personal opinions on me, as soon as I start getting too in that, I feel like it makes me sad. So I am very interested in having things in my life that I'm also invested in and interested in. And my family keeps me very grounded, which I'm very grateful for.
They're like, “This isn't funny.”
Yes, exactly.
I know you've mentioned you've been in pilots. Is there a bucket list thing you'd really like to achieve in comedy in the future?
I mean, this show is my wildest dream. I love doing film and television stuff. And I think I gotta recalculate what that is for me. I've always said if I could just do improv, especially live stage improv, if I could do that forever and the money was there in order to be able to just make a living doing that, I would. And this really does feel like that and I feel so unbelievably grateful. Other than that, a tornado movie maybe.