Meet The Writers Behind ‘Gay Girl Straight Girl,’ Your New Fav Web Series
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For us girls, sometimes there’s just nothing funnier than the reality of our very own lives.
If you agree with that statement, you might enjoy Gay Girl Straight Girl, a hilarious new web series about all kinds of relationships, sexuality, and growing up, written in episodes that last no longer than a minute.
Ashley Gavin and Lee Hurst are the New-York based comedic duo behind the show, who met doing stand-up in the Lower East Side. They quickly realized how well they’d work together, which seems like a pretty good call, since the Kickstarter they created to fund their project has already surpassed its goal, with over 3 weeks left before they’ll reach their deadline.
Read our interview with Ashley and Lee below, to learn a little bit more about your soon-to-be favorite new show.
How long was it between the time you met and the time you wrote the show?
Lee: Hmm, we started working on jokes pretty shortly after we’d met. I’d written another web series, and I sent the pilot to Ashley, and we just kind of started working on it from there. That’s why I had a sense of how to get a show done beforehand.
Ashley: Lee is more of an actor and a writer, and I’m more a stand up comedian. As soon as I saw Lee — I keep a journal every day, and I wrote this down after meeting her — I could tell she was new, and I was like oh, these are really well-structured jokes for someone who’s only been doing this for a short period of time. I don’t know why she liked my jokes [laughing].
Lee: ‘Cause they’re funny, Ashley!
Ashley: Thank you [laughing]. So our skill sets are obviously different, and we found that they married really well; we have really different backgrounds, and we found that we have a whole spectrum of skills that covered everything we needed to.
Lee: I think when you write with someone, you catch a bug for just like, writing with a person. And everyone has lists and lists of jokes that never make it to the stage, but they’re all still great, and so it kind of made sense to put them all into a format like a web series. So after I sent the pilot of this other show to Ashley, she told me she liked it.
What was the hardest part of making the show?
Ashley: I have actually not found any part of it to be something I wouldn’t want to do again. I guess the thing that was the most difficult was that I — I don’t have much of a day job anymore, but at the time, I lost my biggest client, so I had all of this free time–
What was your day job?
Ashley: Computer science curriculum consultant. But so, after I quit, we both had this time, where I could pretty much do whatever I wanted, we were like, why don’t we make something, like now? And we had a deadline, because I had a meeting with IFC coming up, and we were like, why don’t we make something to bring to IFC, and in one week we found the whole cast, the whole crew, wrote and filmed the whole thing.
How’d the meeting go?
Ashley: They loved it, but their digital platform, Comedy Crib, wasn’t looking for 1 minute episodes, so it didn’t really make any sense.
Is that why you guys decided to do one minute episodes?
Lee: First of all, it’s a really fun challenge to write comedy that’s shorter, because everyone loves to watch comedy, but a lot of comedy videos — and especially YouTube videos — start to tip off at the 1:30 mark. And plus, everyone likes to watch short videos, and that’s how we consume comedy these days.
Ashley: You need to make people laugh every 15 seconds. So in stand-up comedy, you’re trying to cut out anything that isn’t a laugh. When you get someone laughing rhythmically, it amplifies the funniness of the whole thing.
Did you guys have a good experience with Kickstarter?
Ashley: Well, we have 25 days left, and we’ve already exceeded our goal, so I’d say it went pretty well [laughing].
So what’s the next step?
Lee: We’re doing all the fun stuff in August, like filming all of our episodes.
Is it about relationships?
Ashley: Lee rips her shirt off and confetti falls out of the sky. I mean, it’s not a rom-com. We continue that kind of voice throughout the entire series, but I think maybe what the most confusing part for people is that it’s not narrative. There’s no plot line. Every episode stands alone as its own vignette. Each episode touches on relationships, friendships, sexuality, and gender.
Who is the show for?
Ashley: I mean, obviously, we want everyone to love the show. We definitely play with masculinity a lot in the episodes. Maybe more women will watch, but hopefully dudes as well.
