Exploration Live!

Interview by Nia Blankson and Aayusha Duwadi

In pixelated boxes scattered across New York, Montréal, and California, we meet Charlie Bardey and Natalie Rotter-Laitman, the comedy duo behind Exploration: Live! We’re used to hearing them in our headphones or seeing them on stage at the Bell House. But here, in the geometry of the Zoom grid, they appear side by side on screen, though anchored on opposite coasts.

Natalie wears oversized glasses that catch the afternoon sun as she sits outside; her fingers rework strands of her ponytail as she listens. Charlie arrives after running errands, lightly flushed from the humid Sunday we’ve gathered. His headphones dull the hum of a passing train, which we only half-hear as the two fall into their rhythm of affectionate riffing, their thoughts completing mid-air before landing.

Their shows are built on slips of paper—ideas each writes down and hands off to the other on the podcast, or to audience members during live performances. Through short prompts about the minutiae of daily life, they explore the unexamined ordinary, things you don’t notice until Natalie and Charlie say them out loud.

When asked where their attention goes as they navigate their daily routine, what sparks their noticing, Charlie swivels in his chair, pen in hand, explaining his approach of constantly noting things down: “It's good to have an imagined audience, I’m seeing stuff all the time and I’m like, ‘Natalie would think that's funny.’” Natalie nods, chewing gum.

Their ideas live in their Notes apps. Natalie describes hers as random; Charlie clarifies—against type—that his is organized. “I have subfolders and specific notes: Exploration: Live! ideas, stand-up ideas, Twitter drafts ^[1] , movies I wanna see, songs for karaoke.” It’s a practice of collecting the mundane, attuned to what might make the other laugh, what might spiral into a shared riff, an anecdote, or a moment of mutual recognition.

Though writing and performing have different audiences, their imagined audience is always triangulated between each other and whoever’s listening. On stage, the presence of a room that laughs becomes the guide. “There’s more of an impetus toward a laugh when we’re performing live,” Charlie says. “We’re really trying to be funny on stage.” The podcast, on the other hand, is looser and less beholden to punchlines. “We’re trying to be funny there too,” he continues, “but I don’t think that’s the primary aim.”

“Yeah,” Natalie adds, “if we’re getting into something interesting, even if it's not funny, we’ll stay with it.” Part of what makes listening to them feel like being the third person in the room is the space they leave for confusion. “Not to reveal too many of our secrets,” Charlie says, “but we really do react honestly. If something the other person is saying doesn’t make sense, or isn’t resonating, we say it.” Natalie agrees.

“And that allows us to explicate and work it out,” Charlie continues. “It makes the whole thing feel like—we’ll find the thing. We actually have the time.” This dissonance becomes a part of their rhythm, a willingness to lose each other momentarily, trusting they’ll be found again. “When we lose each other,” Natalie says, “it’s like, okay, what happened? Do people experience this thing about this thing? Or who—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Charlie jumps in. “It’s like there are three people: me, Natalie, and the audience. Sometimes it's two against one.”

“We were talking about eating beans, and I brought up this enzyme that helps me digest them. And I was like, it’s called… Beano. And I’m saying that like it’s this big discovery. And everyone—including Natalie—is like, ‘We know about Beano, sweetie.’”

“We know Beano,” Natalie deadpans.

“Stand-up is a bit of a house of cards,” Charlie says. “The audience can be like, ‘Why are you talking to us as if you haven’t said all of this before?’ You’re talking as if this is extemporaneous, but it’s not. You have to do all of this subtle theatrical work on the outside to reify the experience.”

They treat their shows like a set piece, a controlled spontaneity of scripted looseness. Their background in theatre is evident in their attention to detail: “There are all these elements where you would think that, because it’s comedy, you should be able to do it anywhere, in any context,” Charlie explains. “But no, this is theatre, you have to think about all the presentational elements about being on stage.” Lighting, rhythm, and even what they’re wearing all become controlled variables. If the audience is too well-lit, they clam up. “It calls into question the entire structure of the performance,” he says. “It’s not about dressing nice,” Natalie clarifies, “it’s about wearing something deliberate.” “Even when I’m playing myself, I’m still going to costume and light myself properly,” Charlie adds.

This scaffolding fades into the background as the conversation goes live: “We don’t tell each other what we want to talk about on stage. We used to go over things before, but it always felt stale when we would try to redo it on stage. So there is a lot of freshness in our reactions towards what the other person is saying.”

When we ask how their voices have changed in becoming the duo we know them as, Natalie says, “We were really young when we were starting these shows, so I don’t exactly know what the voice was, but I know that a lot of the time it didn’t come out like I wanted it to. It probably sounded a lot more like a bunch of people I was admiring.”

Charlie nods, laughing with recognition. “We really built up mutual trust, patience, and faith in the process. If I said something that didn’t work, I know Natalie would pick it up, or if we both weren’t finding it, just trust that we would get there.”

Time on stage, on the podcast, and as friends has tuned them to each other’s frequencies. Each riff and pause carries the trace of the other. “I’m going out in the world and I’m bringing Natalie everywhere because I’m talking like her,” Charlie says. Natalie nudges for an example, and he points to a shared intonation when storytelling at parties. They share a complementary cadence that’s seeped into how they speak to each other.

This distinctive voice is partially a result of them having worked non-industry jobs while simultaneously building careers as comedians. Until recently, Natalie worked as a nanny, and Charlie still works as a tutor, predominantly for the SAT, with a soft spot for mathematics. “It can be such a comedic thing to see kids put things together that don't necessarily seem like they should,” Natalie says, “but then they find a way to do so—it’s exactly what we’re trying to do as well. I also think it's good to be around people so young who don’t have multiple layers of how they’re trying to come across.”

This isn’t to say their joint act would crumble without other jobs, but it adds a refreshing perspective. It’s given them a wider range of topics to pick apart and dynamics to analyze. “A concern I sometimes have is something that a lot of comics and writers think and worry about,” Charlie adds. “As your career shifts, you become inherently more myopic when you’re writing. The people who make movies are the ones making the movies, so there ends up being a lot of movies that are a love letter to movies.”

Perhaps it's easy to tune into the pulse of each other’s voices because the honesty in their dialogue doesn’t come from confession—it comes from observation. They carry this sensibility into a recurring Patreon segment where they retell the plots of books and movies to one another from memory.

“Natalie’s really good at it.”

“Thank you.”

The two trade off, telling us the origin story of the segment.

“A few years ago, we were in LIC—”

“What happened?”

“—and you just fully told the entirety of—”

“—No no, I heard it—”

Charlie grins, now remembering, and re-tells it properly. “Someone had told Natalie the entire plot of Cruella. And Natalie was like, ‘I’m going to tell you what I just learned the plot of Cruella was,’ and we were riveted.”

It’s the same impulse behind recounting your day at dinner with friends, the urge to perform a condensed story through a monologue, warped by the memory of what resonates. A personalized delivery from a familiar voice. “We all watch and take in so much stuff,” Charlie says, “but there’s this other fun way to hear stories that we actually don’t get to do that much: retelling them.”

Natalie jumps in: “No, just really quickly—first of all, I don't have time to see Cruella, but second of all, like we’re at this dinner right now and there’s nothing to talk about, so like let's do this now. We actually need something now. We have our stories.”

Charlie continues, “And now there are all these movies that I really know because you told them to me. I’d be interested to see them—it wouldn’t ruin it. Like, what’s that movie, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days? I should and I will, and it's going to be really interesting to watch, like, oh my god, right, I love this story. It's funny, the idea—I like the idea of a story, like the Iliad, that's told throughout generations, and putting these stories, 10 Things I Hate About You, in the pantheon of stories told.”

We ask them what kind of circus performer they’d be. Charlie considers thoughtfully. “I’ve always dreamed of doing gymnastics, I want to be doing flips and stuff. I don’t think it's my natural skill set.”

“I think you should reach for the stars because it’s fake,” Natalie reassures him.

Charlie laughs. “Yeah, why count myself out? That’s my answer.”

Natalie smiles. “I think I would want to do trapeze, to fly—that would be fun to do together,” she says, gesturing an aerial swing and adding, “and you’re flipping me.”

Charlie’s all in, without missing a beat: “I can be the one who catches.”

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