Combining both prepared video and live skits, 2006 graduate Paul Santo’s puppet troupe, Felt Show, perverts the warm, fuzzy childhood associations most people have with puppets with dark adult themes. Over the past four years, Felt Show has grown to cast of twenty puppets. After performing at local venues such as Hashinger Hall, Jackpot Music Hall and the Granada, Santos and crew are looking toward a more ambitious platform: television.

How did you get involved with felt puppets?

Mostly by accident. I found out that a friend of mine made puppets and we started to do shows after we got an ensemble cast to be able to do it.

How long have you been working with puppets and what drew you to them as medium for live comedy?

Puppets are really dynamic in the way that they allow you to have a different experience with an audience. They get used to music and bands and such but with a puppet they get something they haven’t really been accustomed to.

What were your inspirations and influences in building your puppet ensemble?

I would say the work from the Jim Henson studio and most of that stuff. Not really into a lot of the puppet stuff that’s been going on right now, like Wonder Shozen and Crank Yankers.

Your shows combining live puppet work with video. What have been some challenges you’ve faced by mixing formats? Which excites you more as a performer/artist?

The video has its problems because you always have to wonder if the venue’s going to have a projector or how the audience is going to react. Sometimes the audience reacts differently to the video than they do to some of the live stuff. Sometimes vice versa. But the thing that excites me is that to be able to something video that incorporates something live. To be able to have a video tape segment bleed into a live segment.

How does scripting work for you and your crew? Is the process more democratic or is there one person guiding sessions along?

It’s democratic in that I let if anybody has an idea they want to write I give them credence to be able to do that. But usually its me pushing it forward because I have to total vision to combine everything together.

Have there been times when you felt like maybe you crossed a line with a skit that was too offensive?

Uhhh … a couple times. We had a skit that a Christian person labeled anti-Semitic, but then a Jewish person found it really, really funny. It was something a person was being overly sensitive about for someone else.

How do you deal with feeling out what is funny and what is not funny? What’s funny in you and your crews eyes, as to opposed to how people react?

We try to tailor our shows after what an audience reacts to. So we’re really a rough draft kind of thing in that we go do a show and after that show we evaluate what people laughed at and what didn’t get laughs and then we change the show accordingly. We want to give the audience a singular experience, we do try to tailor things depending on how each show goes.

What’s the local response been like?

It’s been really well. If we perform if in front of 200 people we get at lot of laughs. If we perform in front of five people we always get a lot of laughs. It’s one of those things that brings me back to it. That if we had crickets to every joke that we were doing, eventually I’d just give up.

How is the pilot coming along?

It’s coming along well. We just have to shoot two more skits that we have and then I’ll ship it off to a couple screeners and see what they think. And I think that we’ll—hopefully—be able to do something in the upcoming year.