JCS:  I want to talk about the new record, Please Be Seated. Not only is the record a collection of funny songs, but it's a collaboration with comic Micah Sherman, a collaboration that was, apparently, based on quite a bit of improvisation. You're taking on two very different kinds of comedy in one space there. How do you work in those two different molds and maintain your voice?

MK: That is a nice question. There are a lot of kind words in it. Like a front-handed compliment. I actually started as a musician. My parents were music teachers. I started comedy as a musical comedian. I do have a CD of comedy and music that I recorded one year after I started doing comedy. I was a comedian one year into comedy, so maybe not even a comedian, depending on your terms. But the point is, music has been a part of my life since I was four.

Micah and I both love music. Micah is also one of the main inspirations for me to become more improvisational in my process. He doesn’t do stand up anymore. Improv is where he thrives. The process is slightly different: come up with an idea, bring it to an audience, make some tweaks, keep doing that over and over again. So when we write a song, we have the bonus step that when we write it, we’re bouncing ideas off each other; we’re our own audience. And that’s the point, we love making each other laugh. To the point where we’ve been like, “This is hilarious,” and the audience says, “We don’t understand.”

You can get great at music without ever being in front of an audience, but you can’t get great at comedy without ever being in front of an audience. We’re perfecting the music at home, but then we bring it to the audience and that’s where it becomes comedy. Most of the improvisation we do in the live shows, up until now, has not been within the songs. There are some parts in some songs where there is room for that. But for the most part, once a song clicks into place, we’re like, “Oh, that’s how that song goes;” sort of like a joke, like a bit.