ITHAMAR & JETZO
- Aug 18, 2025
- 2 min read
During film school I fell in with a bunch of improv actors through a director I worked with that did sketch. These three men had an improv show at Second City. The premise of the show was that Ithamar - a self-obsessed improv genius - invites a Japanese father-son comedy-duo to LA to perform improv with him on stage at Second City, the duo is called Jetzo. So the show that one might buy tickets to was called Ithamar & Jetzo. The gag is that Jetzo is comprised of a Japanese man in his 50s playing the son, and the father is played by a younger white man in his 40s. They hired me to create an introduction video that would play at the top of the show to provide the context the audience needed before they took the stage. All three were incredible to work with, and their physical comedy was top notch. In order to get the BROLL used in the final edit, I setup an improv experiment where I had Ithamar - who actually teaches an improv class at Second City - invite his class and had him teach his class in the character that he plays for Ithamar & Jetzo, and gave the classmates the direction that they are getting fed up with this guy after a few weeks of his class, and not receiving the kind of instruction they paid for and then just let them all run free and filmed it. Occasionally, I would throw a note out there or have them do something again, but for the most part it was a 45 minute filmed improv thing. It was super fun to make. Below is the intro video we created, and then below that is a trimmed down version of that class - which I found to be a fun watch on it's own. All of this was very meta, and the type of thing that only works in LA, where you can gather an audience of people that are so familiar with the inner workings of improv for this to resonate.