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Welcome to another episode of the Comedic Pursuits podcast. I’m your host, Seth Payne, and today, we get to experience the amazing energy that is Kaitlin Kemp.
I met Kaitlin in an audition for an improv project about a year ago, and I gotta tell you guys, I was blown away by her commitment to characters. Her dramatic roles and her weird, strange characters that she comes up with are so original and so much fun. I’ve since become good friends with her, and sadly she moved to New York City, so I don’t get to hang out with her as much as I used to. But on a more happy note, she’s in New York City, and she’s killing it.

Highlights from my interview with Kaitlin Kemp
I recorded this interview right before Kaitlin moved. I can give you the update that she’s killing it in the Big Apple, and now you guys get the “from humble beginnings” interview experience today. So without further ado Kaitlin Kemp.
Some of the responses have been edited for clarity. You can hear Kaitlin’s interview in full by listening to the podcast.
How did you get into comedy?
I guess it kind of starts from how I got into theater, which is through my mom. She was a theater teacher. She originally wanted to be an actress, but she didn’t really have the support in the way that I did. She took the teaching route, and she’s phenomenal at it. She was (and still is) a high school theater teacher. But that’s kind of how I got involved because she would put me in shows that she was doing when I was three and four years old, so I kind of grew up in that environment. I guess that’s how I got into performance.
We did improv stuff in high school, but we mostly just did warm-ups and exercises. In college, I was a theater major at Rome University, and I kind of got a taste for improv when I did a devised show called Kill Me Now, which is based on So You Think You Can Dance and dance competition shows. We had to play a dance character and then transition to a judge character, which was our alter ego. There was a lot of improv involved in that.
That was kind of where my memory of improv starts. My mom would probably say we did more than that in high school, but in my memory of things, that show was when I realized I really love this stuff. I felt like I was those characters, and I could live and speak as those characters. That’s where I first, I guess, started becoming interested in comedy and actually pursuing it.
After college, I had an interest in doing improv, and then I went out to California and saw a Groundlings show and all this stuff. That was probably my first introduction to improv on a professional level.
Then I actually took a class, just an afternoon two-hour class at Second City, out there. The teacher was just so welcoming and genuine and not abrasive. She was so encouraging, and I didn’t feel any different than the people who were there taking classes regularly, and I felt very comfortable. So that was kind of the click for me to sign up for some classes back in DC.
How did you discover WIT?
I actually have a family friend who knows Reaves McElveen from WIT. I’ve never met him before in my life. I don’t know why our paths have not crossed, but I still have not met him. To me, he’s just this mythical creature that I’ve never met, but my friend was like, “You have to take classes at the Washington Improv Theater. My friend works there.