Carrie Seim works with dark, wicked people.

With obvious affection, that is how she describes the characters she shares the stage with – a motley crew of outcasts with a laundry list of idiosyncrasies. Such a viewpoint isn’t often considered valuable outside their world of sketch comedy, but Seim, an ISU alumna, and her fellow Deviants – members of the Los Angeles-based comedy troupe – consider their peculiarities indispensable. To find a budding talent in their business, it helps to have a different set of priorities.

“She is a very sweet little girl, but she can have a very wicked sense of humor,” said Deviants co-founder Brian Clark. “She is the only woman I know who could take a car off of a flatbed truck when the city was trying to tow it.”

Seim, a 2001 graduate of Iowa State, has mastered how to handle herself as a performer and entertainer by living and thriving in the rough-and-tumble environment of Los Angeles. She has become an integral part of the Deviants, a splinter group of the famous Groundlings Sunday Company comedy group that produced Conan O’Brien, Will Ferrell and Phil Hartman. She landed a role on Entertainment Network’s “Seven Deadly Hollywood Sins,” but before she could conquer Hollywood, she had to conquer campus.

First there was the Maintenance Shop. As an undergraduate at Iowa State, Seim responded to the flier on campus that challenged, “So, you think you’re funny?” It was an open audition for one of the first incarnations of the ISU student improvisational and sketch comedy troupe Grandma Mojo’s Moonshine Revival. She remembers the time fondly, and still keeps close ties with several members of the group in which she created some of her first recurring roles including impersonating then-First Lady Hillary Clinton.

“There was such really brilliant work from those guys,” Seim said. “I was just the new kid and often the only girl in the group.”

Seim learned that being the lone woman isn’t a particularly unique situation in the somewhat male-dominated culture of sketch comedy.

Although women may be outnumbered, Seim said she has learned to set herself apart by establishing a persona with her own material.

“I am almost always honored to be cast in someone else’s sketch,” Seim said. “But, I always feel if you are not happy with what is written for you, you should write your own material instead of waiting around for somebody to write something for you.”

When she wrote for herself, Seim learned to take no prisoners. Through college and into her career with the Groundlings, she perfected the art of creating over-the-top characters with their own realities, a trait Clark recognized as important for the Deviants.

“She is a real master of finding the dysfunction in seemingly normal relationships and playing that out to expand it exponentially and make it funny,” Clark said. “She can take a normal situation of two people sitting at a restaurant and take an awkward moment and turn it into something a bit crazier.”

The Deviants began as a skit troupe of gay men focused on the most bizarre and deviant components of life. Soon the group was ready to expand its roster to include all flavors of comedic genius touched by a darker prospective on life.

“Carrie has that prospective despite a fairly normal upbringing . I don’t know what her problem was,” Clark said jokingly. “She was significantly warped and that is what worked for us.”

It didn’t work right away. Seim was cast in the Groundlings’ exclusive Sunday Company and the Deviants after four years of working day jobs to attend comedy writing and performing classes. There was no promise of payoff, but Seim had been advised to take her career at its own pace.

As a volunteer for the ISU Lectures Program, Seim had the chance to host Saturday Night Live cast member Ana Gasteyer during a visit to campus. Seim asked about the possibility of getting a job on the show, but the comedian told Seim to pay her dues.

“She said, ‘The job I could get you at SNL is basically getting coffee,'” Seim said. “‘You are better served somewhere else writing your own material and performing or going through the Groundlings and doing all of those things on your own.'”

When she graduated from Iowa State, Seim used her connection from Gasteyer to get a job with Sundance Films in Los Angeles. The placement was ideal to begin taking classes in the Groundlings program.

As a student and later a performer, Seim created a host of characters and skits that would culminate in a Groundlings showcase of her material “Midwestern Wisdom: Getting the Milk For Free.” Her scenes included “Pageant Pretty,” a parody of the obsessed mothers in the subculture of beauty pageants. They captured Clark’s attention and even earned Seim an audition in New York for Saturday Night Live.

To secure her spot in the Sunday Company, Seim wrote material obsessively, learning, she said, to develop her creativity beyond art and into a discipline.

“It’s sort of like that saying at universities, ‘Publish or perish,’ and it is kind of like that in the sketch comedy world,” Seim said. “If you don’t write, you’re not up on stage. So you have to write every single week and you don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘Oh, I don’t feel funny today.'”

After performing for the full allowed year-and-a-half with the Groundlings, Seim’s characters found a more permanent home with the Deviants. Although she began working with the group before being voted onto the Sunday Company, she said her sense of humor syncs more completely with the attitude of the Deviants.

“In some ways with the Deviants it is a more free experience than the Groundlings because there are fewer boundaries and a decidedly darker point of view – which I enjoy,” Seim said. “We push our characters a little bit further or find more unusual, more deviant characters to explore a little, but further than you can at the Groundlings.”

The Deviants’ audience is also beginning to expand. Their shows are produced for television by Madonna’s production company, Maverick Television, and members are developing several of the group’s skits for full series. The most immediate project for the Deviants as a group is developing material for their next all-new show. Seim said she is excited to introduce her West Coast friends to her alma mater for their one-stop tour of the Midwest.

“I think they are going to be blown away,” Seim said. “It’s a treat. Ames is very exotic from what we are used to.”