On the set of his popular
YouTube sitcom Gayle, Chris
Fleming plays a housewife who might have been sane three mid-life
crises ago, but that's over now. Gayle Waters-Waters is, among other
things, the mother of sensible Terry Gross Waters-Waters, the
secretary of Mothers Against Road Head, a partner and owner of Meet
Me in Hell Croutons, and a devout stalker of Dr. Bruce,
orthodontist-slash-sex-symbol. Gayle snorts a line of Total cereal in
the morning and wouldn't be able to stand the public humiliation of
taking two trips into the house with her groceries. She hates her
husband's legs so much that the camera has never seen his face,
focusing on his khaki-clad "milky whites".
However,
off the set, Chris is a soft-spoken tutor who has done stand-up
comedy in his spare time since high school. His comedy took off when
a friend posted a video on popular news and sharing site Reddit.
Chris gave us some time in between filming Episode 22 to tell us about himself and
his tramp-stamped, couscous-loving alter ego.
We
had to know: how on earth does one come up with a character like
Gayle? According to Chris, all you have to do is observe people. He
tells us that Gayle was inspired by women in his Massachusetts
hometown, especially one particular specimen he observed at a Crate and
Barrel four years ago.
Chris
walked us through a day on the set of Gayle,
which is filmed at his childhood home. "By
the end of each day I’ve acquired some kind of injury, 'cause I
insist on doing stunts," he says, and viewers can vouch for
this. Gayle is known for emotional outbursts involving theft, broken
glass, and ham. "In one episode I dropkicked a mailbox twice and
could barely walk after 'cause I landed so hard on my hip," he
adds. However, with a lot of ice kept on set, Chris says shooting is
"super fun". "[By this point] we all have a really
good foundation of who our characters are, so people just flow right
into the scenes."
To
add to the hilarity, Gayle's best friend/worst enemy Bonnie is played
by Chris's real-life mother. When Chris asked her to be part of the
show, "she said okay, but that her name couldn’t be Bonnie,
because she has a friend named Bonnie and felt that she would be
insulted." Chris adds that his mother's friend is nothing at all
like Gayle's Bonnie, but that he insisted on naming the character
after her because he wanted to say "You calling me a liar,
Bonnie?!"
The
fast-paced show is almost Monty Python-esque in its cross-dressing,
flagrantly outrageous humour. Gayle's husband is timid and
soft-voiced, preferring bird-watching to Gayle's fearless,
stop-at-nothing attitude. Dave is the perfect "straight man"
foil to Gayle's antics, and yet he has his own flavour of neurosis,
stealing his wife's November fleece to watch her go ballistic. The
two are at loggerheads for much of the series, but we see a certain
affection between them at the end of the Christmas special, when
Gayle steals every pair of khakis in Talbots for her husband's gift.
Gayle
has already been the subject of critical acclaim. Forbes Magazine
decrees that "no major studio has created a stranger, more
adeptly archetypal and consistently funnier character than Gayle
Waters-Waters." The Huffington Post is confident that the weird
among us will "fall in mad, deep love with Gayle".
This
June 28 and 29, Chris will take his act to the stage for the very
first time in Boston at the Davis Square Theatre. Tickets are selling
for $15 each and can be purchased from a link on Chris's Facebook page. I'm already entering my credit card information. As Gayle would
ask, what would you have done?!
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