CommUnify’s ‘Off the Record’: Laughter is the best medicine

CommUnify, the longstanding Santa Barbara County nonprofit, has provided a wide variety of important services to low-income local residents since the mid-1960s. Today, the committed servant of SB County’s most vulnerable is facing dire threats to its budget, and severe challenges to its roster of vital programs. These include the life-changing Head Start early education effort. But looming loss turned to laughter thanks to local luminaries determined to unite the community – the source of its recently re-branded name – and raise much needed funds. 

Members of Montecito’s movie and TV mob assembled a fearsome foursome that provided the fun via a friendly and sometimes probing conversation. With whom? Thanks for asking. Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Seinfeld, Veep), her husband, Brad Hall (Saturday Night Live, The Single Guy), and Jane Lynch (Glee, Only Murders in the Building, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Weakest Link) delightedly free-ranged through a swinging conversation moderated by vaunted TV producer Dante Di Loreto (Fellow Travelers, American Horror Story, Glee).

We learned and laughed (a lot) at the upbeat event, not least because the focus of the event – dubbed Off the Record: Laughter Connects Us All – was on comedy, not crisis. CommUnify CEO Patricia Keelean spoke briefly about the organization, and a couple of short videos about CommUnify’s work were shown. The bulk of the time, though, was spent diving into the background of the three stars, who detailed both family and career highlights and challenges. The conversation launched by noting how the three came from very different backgrounds, though they all spent considerable time in Chicago. 

We learned that Lynch grew up watching TV “24-7, which is why I almost can’t watch it anymore,” and joining her parents in singing Broadway tunes and sipping cocktails at age 13, imbibing Ten High sour mash, which was “terrible – you had to go to a gas station to buy it.” (Ten High still costs less than $7 for a fifth.) On the other hand, Hall is the son of Rev. George Hall, the longtime rector at All Saints-By-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Montecito, so “the only liquor my father ever had was communion wine.” Manhattan and Washington, D.C.-raised Louis-Dreyfus mostly got drunk on very early theater experiences as a child, teaming up with other neighborhood kids to form a company eventually called “Julia and the Umbrella People.” The troupe of pint-sized, entrepreneurial thespians would produce shows in the family basement and charge Louis-Dreyfus’ parents a dollar to see the show. 

“You betcha,” she said. “We made a fortune.”

Maybe that wasn’t so strange: one of these diminutive Umbrella People was future playwright Margaret Edson, whose stage play Wit would be honored with the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Louis-Dreyfus and Hall met as theater majors at Northwestern, and were working in Hall’s Chicago-based Practical Theatre Company when they were both offered jobs in the cast of SNL in 1982. They almost didn’t go. But, Hall said, Second City’s head asked them incredulously, “Are you ******g kidding? This happens once in a lifetime!”

They almost wished they hadn’t. The early SNL experiences weren’t anything like theater, and it took quite a while to adjust to doing sketch comedy on TV versus under a proscenium. 

“I’d never been on television before, and it turns out it’s a lot different than being on stage,” Louis-Dreyfus shared. “I didn’t know anything. I had no idea what I was doing… We’d been doing ensemble work and improv, and everybody was…we were all linked arms! And it was very joyful and organic ensemble work. And that was simply not the culture at SNL.”

Not long after leaving, of course, Louis-Dreyfus landed the role as Elaine on Seinfeld.

We learned that performing her famous herky-jerky dance at a company party in an episode was as awkward and painful for the actress as it was to watch. 

“It’s not a pleasant look, but you have to fully embrace it as a character,” she explained. “It required an enormous amount of confidence. And I actually couldn’t do it with music because (the dance) couldn’t be rhythmic. When we would rehearse it, they would play music and it didn’t work. [The producers eventually had her perform it without music and added it in post.] I had to come at it feeling super good about myself and really enjoying my life. There is nothing quite like a confident fool.”

On the other hand, Lynch loves playing against type, from self-centered, obnoxious know-it-all Coach Sue on Glee, to hosting The Weakest Link game show. 

“I love awful people. I’m fascinated by ‘em,” she said. “I love the person who walks into the room like, ‘I’m the s**t, and they’re so not. I learned in therapy that when you scratch beneath the surface, there’s always some fear, some huge insecurity. [It’s] such fertile ground [to wonder] what it is that the character is scared to death of anyone finding out about them?”

The folks who will benefit from the funds raised at Off the Record are typically “scared to death” of something immediately and physically challenging, which offered an interesting juxtaposition. Toward the end of the evening, the trio of stars shared what they would be doing if they hadn’t made it in the entertainment world, Lynch in particular alluding to the baseline struggles with which they would likely have had to contend.  

The lively conversation was presented to raise awareness and funds for those who, for reasons beyond their immediate control, need a little help from society. Point being: There is just a week remaining in the calendar year – only seven days to make tax year 2025-deductible contributions to the cause.  

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