EMAIL PRO
written by Miranda Allegar - September 7, 2020
The ongoing live performance piece, Email Pro, long predates the pandemic, though it feels completely at home in the strange landscape in which we now find ourselves. The project itself, hosted by Ivan Anderson and his recurring guest star, Jeff Manian, has consistently been performed as live shows at the Tank in New York City. However, the piece has now become a weekly fixture of the Tank’s online presence, hosted over Twitch each Sunday. The show exists at the intersection of stand-up comedy, talk show or podcast, and performance art, seeing Ivan write emails to strangers, both with and without the aid of the audience members, who remain a vital piece of the show through the chat feature. The piece borders on self-reflection, absurdity, and spam. Perhaps the most apt description comes from Anderson himself on the show’s website: “I send you emails, then it’s your problem.”
I attended Anderson’s show on August 23, 2020, featuring guest star and professional comedian, Zahid Dewji, and, in a quarantine rarity, found myself actually laughing consistently throughout a piece. The show started with a sucker-punch of a question from the chat box: “what did god ever do to you such that you need to attack and dethrone them?” The answer? “Chubby phase in middle school.”
The conversational back-and-forth of the structure, the self-amusement present in the three hosts, and the almost surrealist addition of the chat feature made for an experience I haven’t yet had at home. The crowd was small, consistently under fifteen people, but this added to the charm (an additional 100 or so viewers watched on Facebook Live). Some commenters were clearly long-term viewers. Others, like user KL3_NEX, quite literally stumbled across the stream while it was on air and were mistaken for spammers, asking “Sending a E-mail? Hello. I’m real.”
The piece was unpredictable and weirdly intimate, even with the purposefully strange emails generated throughout the course of the show. In the hour-long run, Anderson composed and sent two emails, one to a friend of Zahid’s covering the pros and cons of former pro boxers and another, requested by a viewer, to friends stuck on an island vacation, inquiring about their well-being.
Email Pro streams each week on Sundays at 1pm EST through the Tank. More information can be found here on the show’s site and on the Tank’s website.
