Fred Chong Rutherford Makes Good Comedy To Make You Feel Good
By Matt Levy
Comedian Fred Chong Rutherford has lived a life full of adventure, intrigue and…puppets. However, nothing could prepare him for his opportunity to perform as one of the ‘amateur actors’ in Alia Shawkat’s Second Woman performance. For those who are not familiar, in November 2019, Shawkat of Arrested Development and Search Party fame put on a 24-hour event at the Brooklyn Academy of Music called ‘The Second Woman’ — where she performed the same scene, over and over. The only variable that changed was her scene partner.
Fred, a native of Washington State who has been in Brooklyn the past 16 years mused, “The strangest thing about that whole performance is I walked in meaning to play a character, this kind of jerky, marketing guy. But I’d been dealing with my mom and dad both devolving into dementia. I felt mentally tapped out. When I walked into the scene, she asked, ‘What’s going on?’ And before I knew it, I launched into a diatribe about my day. She made a face, and the audience laughed. And the extraordinary thing is, I just listed all these things from my real life. ‘My mom has dementia.’ Audience laughs. ‘My dad has Parkinson’s disease and we just put him into a home.’ Audience laughs.” Shawkat then looked at him in character and said, “Did all of that really happen?” Fred cooly replied, “Yeah, it did. All of it.”
And they stayed connected on a cosmic level to each other the whole scene. It was that very moment that made Fred realize that it’s possible to sometimes, “Just be myself, even in situations like being an amateur actor in an art piece.” Something about Fred, his real life and Shawkat made the audience feel right at home.
The Second Woman may have called for “amateur actors” but Fred certainly had his share of experience making audience members laugh before walking onstage with Shawkat. For the past four years, Fred made videos starring his puppets after studying at the Puppet School and the Puppet Kitchen. However, it turned out to be really hard for Fred to write short scripts and perform the parts. So, he took sketch writing classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, PIT and The Magnet. He fell in love with that kind of writing; the heightening, the game, the cleverness. Then, to bolster his performance muscle, he began taking improv classes, which he immediately felt a kinship with. These classes helped Fred move toward his dream of creating comedy about empathy. He noted, “I’m back to the realization that I learned all this awesome stuff, but haven’t quite gotten back to the reason I started doing this stuff in the first place.” He’s getting close and at a time that the world needs comedy about empathy more than ever before.
What separates Fred though? What makes him different? Well, after getting to the heart of it, Fred’s perspective is what makes his comedy unique. He pointed out, “I think life is pretty fragile, but worth living, and I think everything I do comes from that idea. So, my stuff tends to be emotional, silly, and on the warm side of things.” He just doesn’t buy that “All comedy is X.” He added, “There’s just so many reasons people laugh!” His artistic endeavors, inspired by likes as diverse as Amber Ruffin, Jim Henson and Fred Rogers (He also cites Wu Tang Clan as a big part of his creative process) aim for that “Special laughter of recognition, or absurdity, or sometimes when things feel bleak, knowing the right moment to flick on a light so that the tension breaks and people can smile. I love when people can laugh from a place of joy, when they don’t feel the need to laugh at someone else’s expense.”
He’s been hacking away at the comedy game for awhile too- much longer than just these past four years. So it should most certainly be noted that Fred, a Political Science Major at Western Washington University, was one of the first filmmakers to show short films at the very first San Diego Comic Con. He premiered two shorts; one, a mockumentary he made with friends called Safety Folder, was a glimpse into the life of a freelance custodian who invents a new kind of manila folder. In just a few minutes, the short featured dungeons, dragons, violence AND a demonstration of the Safety Folder. In addition to Safety Folder, he screened Machines, where a young man goes in for a job interview that he can’t escape.
Fred’s described his childhood as very rough and also sometimes really easy. He actually wrote a show about it called ‘friend’ that he live streamed on Twitch. ‘friend’ is a one-person tell-all about the time Fred drove home from Camp Magnet with some friends, all much younger than him. A friend of his, Aaron Gold looked like he was hurting pretty badly. His mom had passed away and he was grieving. ‘friend’ is about that drive, how Fred looked back at his own memories and childhood, and found some things to talk about, a story that he thought could help him.
Camp Magnet had stirred up memories of childhood trauma Fred went through the year before in 2018, so, in 2019, he made a decision to process all of it, and write down the story of what happened to his sister on his ninth birthday as well as an accident he witnessed a few months later.
Writing that out and sharing with friends at Camp Magnet gave Fred the courage to share it with Aaron and the folks in the car. And in turn, that story helped Aaron. When Fred decided to write ‘friend’ as a show and tell the story about that car ride from his point of view, the amateur performance he had just done with Alia Shawkat gave him the guts to do it. ‘friend’ is an amazing watch clocking in at just over an hour but feels like just a few minutes. Like a ‘friend’ telling you a story.
You can find Fred on Twitter.
Also! One last Fred fact. He likes to cook! He cooks dishes he likes like Korean food, salads, pizza, curry, soups and stocks. About stocks, he said, “Really, it’s like magic food chemistry.”
