Magic Buttons

At one point, I walked up 8th Avenue, and I saw the UCB awning. I’d always heard of the UCB and I went to film school, so there were kids who’d take classes. But I always felt like it was something that was too cool for me? I never had anything to do with comedy, or performing, or theatre. I didn’t understand: How do you get tickets to go there? When do you go there? Are you allowed to go there? Am I allowed to go there?

That night, because of all that stuff, I decided, you know what, I’m gonna buy a ticket for whatever’s there and just walk in. It must have been some midnight show. It wasn’t a full house—bunch of people scattered around seats and a bunch of people on stage. There were no microphones, no scripts, nothing. Coming from a film school world, I was used to more formal elements to storytelling. I always used to say, “I consider myself a storyteller, not a filmmaker!” But, then I saw this group of people gathered around in a circle. It felt like a weird tribe, almost. Gather around the fire and tell a story! I watched that and thought, “If I believe in any way that I am a storyteller, then I need to be doing this.”

That night I went home, I looked up the classes, and I signed up for a 101. There was one slot left, it started the next week. Immediately when I hit submit I was like, “what have I done, and why did I do this?! What is this?!” Then I got sucked into it.

EO: Who was your 101 teacher?

JD: I had 101 with Greg Tuculescu. That was a really fun class. That’s the class where I met Phil Jackson and Scott Holmes, and we ended up being in Jump On Three together.

I went into it not knowing UCB at all. And I remember that first thing, he explained Crazy Eights, and I remember Greg Tuculescu saying, “Yeah you count to eight and you shake your hand!” and I thought, “Shake your hand? Oh no. I made a mistake.”

I almost got up and was like, “Nope! I made a mistake! You can keep the money! Have a good one! See ya!”

LW: How quickly did you get sucked into it?

JD: Basically the first improv show I ever saw was TJ and Dave in Chicago. I saw that and I immediately thought, oh my gosh, this is magic. My roommate at NYU had done iO in Chicago, and was visiting Chicago while I was home for winter break, and invited me to a show. I went, and it was the first time I’d seen any improv, and it was some of the best that exists. So when I stumbled upon UCB that night months later, I already knew it could be this magical, interesting thing.

Coincidentally, our 101 also started the week before DCM. And so I went to DCM, sat in a seat for twelve hours, went home, slept for three hours, and went back. Because oh my gosh, seeing all of the best teams in a row, and feeling like, “This is amazing!” It was a perfect storm of things lining up, and I was completely sucked into it.

LW: You feel like you’ve uncovered a secret, almost.

JD: That’s how I felt. I went to all these shows at DCM, and I kept running into Phil Jackson and Scott Holmes, so we’d go to all these DCM shows together.

Then I went to Harold Night every week for like two years, back when it was five Harolds straight. So yeah, I got obsessed super quick.

LW: Who were your favorite teams and performers?

JD: Phil and I, after every rehearsal or anything, we’d pow-wow on the corner and talk about UCB stuff. We’d make stuff up—like, “Well what if you put this person on this team?” We’d make fake teams. We both had our favorites. Our teams.

My favorite team: Bastian. Bastian ended up being known a lot for their very game-based, premise comedy. But when I saw them—I didn’t realize until afterwards—was when Gethard started coaching them. So he was coaching them to try this thematic, big picture stuff.

I remember Bastian did a Harold where the suggestion they got was “drunk,” I think. Right away—I think it was Lydia—pointed to everyone on the back line in pairs of twos and said, “Sober, tipsy, drunk,” and immediately took that on, as a meta thing. They were doing a Harold where two of the members were “sober,” two were “tipsy,” and two were “drunk.”

The “sober” people tried to keep things on the rails. The “drunk” ones were Oscar and John Murray. Basically the set fell apart because the people that were “drunk” kept ruining it. They’d step up and fall over, and someone would run over and help them up...John Murray got super mad and started swinging punches, and he got out his actual phone and called his wife. And his wife thought he was actually drunk.

The team was like, “John, hang up, we have to do third beats!” and he was screaming, “I don’t care, I love her!” The audience didn’t know how to feel. They had to carry John offstage. He had his shirt off. The whole audience was uncomfortable because it felt like they were actually drunk, but it was just something they chose to do!

I remember seeing them and feeling like, “This is my team!” That was one of my favorite Harolds. They had a string of Harolds like that. I wanted to see people do stuff that was out there and made people uncomfortable. 

I loved Erik Tanouye, because during that period they’d be all over the place, and he’d be this assassin that would clean up all the loose ends of everything. He’d come in in the last thirty seconds and say some explanation of what had just happened. The whole audience would grab their heads in amazement, because he’d tie up every loose end in one little bow. There was a period of time where they were the team I was super excited about.

EO: When did Jump On Three form?

JD: After 201, because Phil met this guy Matt Dennie in 201, who he was telling me all about, and they wanted to create a team together. At that point, Phil, Scott Holmes, and I were doing Improdome, which was a show where you would get up the nerve to show up, and then inevitably do the worst improv you’ve done in your life. But we were, all three, all committed to this, and agreed to go full steam ahead regardless.

Around 301 we formed Jump On Three with Dennie, Phil, Scott Holmes—we met this girl Maelle at the UCB open house—who the world now knows as one of the most talented illustrators and creative minds. We found our crew.

LW: You guys did a lot of more experimental shows!

JD: Yeah! Very early on, before we were any good at improv, we wanted to do very physical improv. Very sound and movement kind of stuff. We started very simple from there, then wanted to create these big, thematic, organic, anything-can-happen kind of shows.

The big turning point for us, I think, was Tesla’s show, Tesla: Welcome to the Lab. It was one of the better indie shows going on. We asked them if we could be the new team for one of their shows, and they let us do their DCM show, which was DCM week at Player’s Theatre downstairs—a for real, big theatre.

It was a Monkeydick reunion, a fwand reunion, Tesla, and Jump On Three. That was maybe our fourth show we ever did. And we went out and had a good show for a new indie team! After the show, Don Fanelli, who had just gotten on Harold Night, came up to us. And he had taken like four pages of notes on our set, and said, “I want to coach you guys.” He had been brought up by Gethard and saw what we were doing and that we wanted to go that direction.

At that point, I don’t think he’d ever coached before, or hadn’t coached a team consistently. We said yes. This is what we want—someone who’s into it! With him, we started building toward the stuff we ended up getting to.

LW: When did you start to feel included around UCB?

JD: That’s a tough one.

EO: Nobody knows how to answer this. 

JD: Because there’s a part of you that never feels included. You feel included, but there are certain aspects that you never feel included in. I’ve been a house performer, I should feel very comfortable at the theatre, but I still feel very nervous. Like, “I’m not supposed to come to this show,” or, “I’m standing in the wrong place.”

It’s completely made up in your own head. You never look at anyone in the UCB world and think, “Well, what is this person doing here?”

I think being in my first 600 was when I felt like, “Oh, okay, I think I’m getting okay at this, I think I’m getting good at this. I think I have some control over this thing.” The more indie shows we started doing: you start feeling like part of a community, you start knowing people.

I think the first time I really started feeling included was when I could go to an indie show and know all the other teams there, and they’re all friends. Which sounds so goofy now, because so many of us are so ingrained in this community. But when you first start out, everyone’s a stranger. You only know people based on what they do on stage and stuff like that. So with the people you’re coming up with, you start to realize, “Oh hey, we did a bunch of shows together! I think you’re really funny!” Then you spend a couple hours talking about stuff, and all of a sudden you gain this friend that you’d never known before. 

Something fun about being at the point where your weekend nights could be you going to Under St. Marks and hanging out with a bunch of people doing improv. Suddenly, you’re a part of a community. You know a whole new group of friends and people.

I think that’s when you first start feeling included. Then you go to Harold Night and you see those people and you talk, and you talk about the Harolds afterwards, and then you talk about whether you’d get up the nerve to go to McManus or not, and you always decide not to go, not yet.

LW: You were also in Gethard’s ( ) class!

JD: ( ), yes. ( ) was a funny class. I like to think it came out of a dare, in a weird way. Gethard hadn’t taught for a long time before that class, and he was always a venerable improv teacher who everyone talked about—these infamous moments of him being brutally honest, or letting a team do something outside the box.

Around the time that Don Fanelli was coaching Jump On Three, me, Phil, and Matt Dennie got into the 3-on-3 tournament. And when we do 3-on-3, we come out to classical music, we hold up fake wine glasses, and we wear khakis and black shirts. We all match. So Fanelli had told Gethard, “You gotta check these guys out—if you were still teaching, these would be your guys.”

Chris had heard a bunch about us, and came out and saw us wearing those khakis, knew we were Fanelli’s guys, and started making fun of us. He was like, “Cute uniforms, guys! I like to do good improv, but you guys can do the uniforms!” Just completely making fun of us. And at that point, none of us really knew him personally, so we were just like, oh god, Gethard’s making fun of us.

We had a really good set, and Gethard said, “Jump in my car, we’ll go to McManus and talk.” The entire car ride Gethard was giving us shit, and as Chris remembers it, Phil was firing back, Dennie was laughing, and I was seething with anger. Eventually I remember Gethard said, “I dunno, guys like you make me wanna teach again! I got a lot of things I could tell ya.”

To which Phil responded, “You mean, like, ‘awesome scene’?” and Chris said, “I would destroy you. Fine. I’m gonna start teaching again and I’m gonna rip you apart.”

A couple months later, I did the RV tour with the Gethard Show. That’s when he and I became very close. On the trip he brought up the idea of teaching again. Soon after that, the applications for ( ) went out. ( ) was cool because he accepted all of Jump On Three together into the class, as a team. For us, we felt this weird pressure...that he felt that all of us had to be in this. So we’d have team meetings about how we needed to behave in the class.

We were among the youngest people there in terms of improv years. It was a lot of people we looked up to—people who were on Harold Night at the time. So we were like, “We need to go in there, do our thing, be the hardest working people there, and anything he says, we gotta do.”

That was super fun. Just the amount that that class pushed people to go from being good improvisers to really expanding their comfort zones and doing interesting stuff...

I think you can track a lot of the progress in a lot of those people’s improv based on before that class and after that class. There’s a shift, or an underlining of who they were as improvisers. Because the class was very much about who you are as a person and how you can bring that on stage.

First of all, it was a twenty-seven-person class. To get into it, you had to write an essay. And then he selected people to be in the class based on those essays. Then before it started, there were eight weeks of assignments you had to get done before class.

The assignments were anything from, “Send us a link to something you truly love and explain to us why you love this thing” to “Meet up with someone that you don’t know in this class and go on an adventure that’s outside of both your comfort zones.” Or, “Find something online that you disagree with and write an essay defending that thing, from the perspective of that thing.” Stuff like that. Then we had to all bring in an object that symbolized who we were as people, and spend the week with other people’s objects.

A lot of things that forced you to be very honest about who you were and also explore who you were and who these other people were. So when we got to the first day of class, we all felt like we knew everyone.

Because every night, there was maybe ten pages of stuff to read. The rule was, you can opt to not participate, but you have to read anything anyone writes. If you don’t feel comfortable doing something, fine (nobody ever did that), but if you don’t read everything: leave the class. So we all were very diligent and respectful, and went in day one with this extreme understanding of each other, and that began a process of rehearsing that was super interesting because you knew stuff about each other and you were pushed to use your own life in your improv. He would even call people up in groups based on who had things in common in their lives.

There were twenty-seven of us on stage, so the big lesson was that unless there was something you felt you needed to say, or do, or felt compelled to address: don’t force it. Because when there’s twenty-seven of us up there, one of us definitely has something in one of our brains that needs to get out.  So, we’d wait, and let whatever needed to take place, take place.

LW: So you got involved with the Gethard Show around the same time?

JD: A couple months after me, Matt Dennie, and Phil Jackson did the 3-on-3 tournament, Chris was asking people for help with the video stuff, but also someone that was willing to get in some trouble, and be out there on the road in the middle of it. A couple of people had told him, “I think you’re talking about J.D.!”

I was back home in Chicago and I got a text from him that was like, “Hey, it’s Gethard. I’m doing this RV trip. Do you want to come and make videos for it?” At that point I’d been to the Gethard Show and talked to Chris a lot, so I said absolutely. On that trip, Chris and I became very close. We like the same end result, but we get to it in different ways—in ways that balance each other, so we became a good duo for that.

I think a big moment was when through a series of events he ended up getting thrown out of the RV on the side of the road, and I jumped out with him. We spent a day and a half together wandering down the highway outside of Waco, Texas. Our joke was, “You’ve made a mistake when you’re trying to get to Waco, Texas, thinking then things will be good.”

That’s when we became good friends.

Then ( ) happened, then after ( ) I did one or two small things on the stage show, and Chris said, “I have this idea—do you want to do this with me?” and the idea was to bring the Gethard Show to public access. That was [three] years ago.

It was fun doing the Gethard Show on top of all the UCB stuff. It branched off at a certain point, and the very strange thing for us was that people started to know the Gethard Show first—then would find UCB through the Gethard Show. There was still a lot of overlap, but our audience was not just UCB. It became the Gethard Show audience.

EO: Let’s talk about Harold Night.

LW: In doing these interviews, a lot of people love it, but have mixed feelings.

JD: For so many of us, wherever you are in this process, it’s this goal that you want to achieve. And it’s a big deal. It’s a thing you work so hard for, and you obsess over, you spend every night talking about it for three hours and how you’re gonna get there, and what you’re gonna do.

Then you get on to it, and it’s fun, and it’s just more improv. It’s improv, except you’re given a team, and the team is controlled by the theatre. And it can be a fine thing, or it can be a thing that doesn’t work out sometimes.

You see the things that are good about Harold Night, and you see the things that can be bad, and then you realize, being on it, that even if you have a stellar show, a week later it’s sort of forgotten, because the next week another Harold Night happens. Suddenly, you’re like, “Oh, if I really want to make stuff, this isn’t it.”

Because with improv, when you’re on a team that’s created around you—what you’re doing on stage isn’t a direct, pure version of your creative voice. Not because that is a flaw of improv, but that’s how improv works. It’s about the collective consciousness, the group mind. Which is excellent, especially when you have a group mind that you’re very in-tune with. But if you want to create things—which is why a lot of people are here—improv is not the perfect outlet to get your creative voice out there.

It’s a very hard medium to say the things you want to say as a storyteller, or creator, or whatever. And so it’s fun. It’s a thing that’s really fun to do. But I think very quickly, you think, “I like this, but how am I going to say the things I need to say?”

There’s a version of that where you find ways with improv to speak more purely to what you have in your head. But something like Harold Night, it’s not always possible to do that, because you’re not always on a team that thinks the same way, or wants to say the same things. Which is why indie teams are so interesting: you can find those people, and know you all have this to say, or all these parts of us line up, so our creative voice comes out unified. But, even then, it’s very difficult.

Which is why I think you get the thing where people just say, “Eh, Harold Night’s fun!” Not because people are disappointed in it, or they don’t like it. Just because it’s more improv. It’s improv.

And improv is great and fun, but it’s like a tribal ritual. And at some point you have to go on your spirit walk through the forest alone. Or with your band of fellow warriors. Leave the tribe. And it’s still good to have the tribe, but the tribe isn’t everything. Unless you become a priest, which, in this case, is an improv teacher.

What was fun about Rocks, which was my last Harold Team: from the beginning, it was clear we were a team of “leftovers” from the mix-up. And very early on, we said that it doesn’t matter if we’re funny or charismatic, we’re just going to be the team that does the most out-there stuff. Let’s try to be the weirdest team. We do what we want to do, and we’ll crash and burn, we’ll probably be around for a very short time. But let’s all agree to be the team that tries to do whatever we want. So that was a super fun thing.

All those people had such different backgrounds, but we all agreed to this one contract of ideas. Always supported the weird stuff. Even the way we came on stage: someone would say, “I’ve always wanted to come on stage like this!” and then we did that. A lot of our shows would be weird things that the audience wouldn’t know how to take, but we just went headlong into this weird thing. Which was super fun. It was a bummer when we were broken up.

That was a team that definitely lined up with the things I liked in improv. It was funny because not everybody on that team was from that same school of thought, yet still agreed to it. The thing that made me happiest on that team is Steve Theiss—he’s one of the straight-up best improvisers to exist, but his comfort zone is not in attacking the audience and crossing the line. He is the person that has learned everything about improv and can make any scene work. He is such a good improviser. But, regardless, if there was ever a time I’d run screaming, diving into the audience to do some dumb thing, the first person off the back line to support it would be Steve Theiss, even though that’s not the thing he necessarily likes. He was right there.

It was a really fun thing that we all agreed and all went for it. Nobody was pouting, or holding back, or being scared. Everyone went forth, sails to the wind, to see what happened. Everyone. Which is not easy in any construct. Sometimes it would be a disaster, and sometimes it would be very fun. But we were all bummed out when the team was broken up and a bunch of us got cut.

At the end of the day, I was like...good. That was what I wanted to do on Harold Night.

That was the team I wanted. That was very much the kind of team I want to be on. I have no hard feelings about not being on Harold Night because it’s like, yeah, I got to do Rocks.

And I had a year with Creature, which was a very fun team that I really enjoyed. We had our rough spots and our weaknesses, but we still put on good shows. And the people who were on that team are people I’m still good friends with! It was a fun team.

LW: Would you stop hanging around UCB?

JD: I wouldn’t want to. I’d have to be forced out, I think. I really like UCB. As much as sometimes I do come off as extremist in my views, I do love UCB, and I love being around. I still go to Harold Night all the time because those are all my friends and I think they are all really funny and really talented.

Even if I’m not doing improv as much anymore, or even if there comes a time where I’m not putting shows up at UCB, being around a community of people that are all making really interesting stuff and working constantly makes you keep working, and creating interesting new takes on things.

Even if you’re not on stage, just being around people who think similarly and want to make stuff makes you walk home thinking, “Okay, what is the next thing I’m going to make?”

So I don’t wanna leave UCB. I still walk home from shows and times at McManus and conversations with friends at UCB—and I’ll probably walk home from hanging out with you guys right now—and think, “Okay, what’s the next thing I’m going to make? I loved their idea! Now what’s a thing I want to do?!” That’s what’s cool about UCB.

The only way I see myself not being a part of it is if I did something that really offended everyone and they just wouldn’t have me back. I’ve been toying with that! So I can see that happening, but hopefully not. Even if they kicked me out, I’d be at the fifty-yard limit, at the fence, trying to still be a part of things, going, “Hey! What are you guys doing? Wanna come over here? No? Okay! Cool!”

So many of my friends come from UCB. So many people I respect and love watching come from UCB. Even if someone kicked me out, I don’t think that would do it! I’d probably do whatever I could to stay around everybody.

Yeah, I really like UCB. 

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So I saw those shows in high school and I didn’t know that they had classes. I thought it was such a cool thing but I didn’t assume you could learn it. I went to college and I wanted to be a writer, and at my college they had a sketch show--their version of SNL. I was writing for that and I wanted to get better as a writer, so I thought I should take a class. I looked up and saw that UCB had classes.

You didn’t have to take Sketch 101 to take Sketch 201? So I jumped right into the advanced--I was like, why would I settle for less? I just didn’t know. I saw a Delaney class, and I knew nothing about him, but I thought, “this guys looks like he knows what he’s talking about!” I had no idea how right I was. He was this guru of a teacher.

This is probably 2006 or 2007? So I took a class with him and day one, we read everybody’s sketches and he said, “This isn’t a sketch,” to me. I was like, okay great, I will come back. I was determined that I would come back with a better thing.

Second week I came back and he said, “Okay, this is totally derivative of this SCTV sketch you’ve never seen.” And I thought, you’re right, so I came back and he said, “This feels more like a scene from a movie than a sketch.” And I said okay. Because he was so blunt and honest and really tells you exactly what he’s thinking, I think people dropped out. It started with sixteen and went down to maybe eight or nine. I was like, “Don’t drop out. Whatever you do, stick with it.”

Eventually by the end he was like, “Okay, good! This is good!” And I was like, “I did it!” I felt so good that my work had pleased him and knew my work was better. I knew I got better in that class. Afterwards--the last class--people were milling around wondering what to do now, and I was talking to him and he told me, “Just stick around the theatre!” I took that as like, okay, I’ll do this. He gave me permission to keep doing this. It meant everything to me.

I had to graduate college and I didn’t want to. I remember I got an email--because I’d taken Sketch 201--that I was eligible for the first Maude teams. I was in college at the time and I was like, I’m dropping out of college to do this! I have to! It was such a dumb, awful idea. I remember getting into a fight with my mom about it, and saying, “I’m going to apply for this and if I get it, I’m going to drop out!” and she said, “You absolutely cannot do that.” I’m glad I didn’t, but I would never have gotten it. I was nowhere near good enough when people like Chris Kelly were getting on. I didn’t end up applying because I didn’t want to risk getting heartbroken and not being able to drop out of college.

So I knew improv was a thing, but I didn’t know I could do it. I never considered myself a performer. I did improv in college--we did short form and then I wanted to do long form because I’d read about it, and realized they do it at UCB and I could take classes there. But I was like, no, I’m not a performer. Then I graduated and didn’t know what to do with my life for about a year--writing and not really going anywhere--so I decided I’d take an improv class just to take it.

I signed up for 101 with Ari Voukydis and I loved it immediately. I thought it was the greatest thing in the world and I never wanted to stop doing it, so I kept doing it.

LW: What shows were you seeing around that time?

MBC: In 101 I would go to everything. I went to Harold Night primarily because I was told to go to Harold Night. I took notes on my phone and for every team I’d try to break down what they did and what they were good at. Which is so ludicrous--but I analyzed it a lot. I got absorbed in the culture from afar--I never felt like a part of the community or anything. I wasn’t. But I was like, I’ll know everyone’s name, I’ll know what they do, the history of this. I read the IRC wiki at work all the time, I read old improv interviews with Besser and Ian and Thomas Middleditch and Zach Woods.

Saw mostly Harold Night and the New Team Harolds before, which I liked because it felt closer. It feels more attainable--they’re students. It’s cool seeing students being put on teams. I remember seeing Nate Dern in one of his advanced classes and thinking he was really good and then he was put on Harold Night a couple months later and I was like, “Yeah man, I knew that!” It felt like I had an eye for it, that I understood it. It felt like, “Oh, that’s my guy,” like I scouted him in some way.

LW: Were there teams and performers you were particularly drawn to?

MBC: Yeah! The first team I ever felt was really great was Ragnarock. I thought they were incredible as a team and really funny and smart and sharp.

Individual performers: Zach Woods definitely was incredible. Shannon, absolutely. Neil Casey, one hundred percent. Silvija. I really looked up to those people. I would see an ASSSSCAT or Stepfathers or Roo Roo and think, “Oh...these people are so good.” That was the measuring stick for me--this is what it means to be good.

After every show or class I’d think, “What are they doing that I’m not doing? What do they do?” I’d break apart their game in my head--how they’re reacting, what they’re doing that I’m not doing. I’d try to solve a puzzle.

LW: When did you start feeling included around UCB?

MBC: I don’t know. I’m a very neurotic person. I think everybody--even in reading your interviews--everybody feels like this. I never really felt like a part of the community-community until I was on a team. Then it felt like I gave myself permission to have...friends in some way?

Then it felt like, oh, I belong here. I would be intimidated. I wouldn’t go to McManus, because that’s a performer’s place. Also I was in a relationship at the time, and I lived in New Jersey. I’d commute in, and my girlfriend at the time lived in New Jersey. And she didn’t understand the community so that was “a thing.” I didn’t hang around. I saw shows or went to class, took a train back. I didn’t really hang out. So I think it wasn’t until that relationship ended that I was like, “Well, this is a world I want to be in.” Then I committed myself to that.

I think when I was first put on a team I felt like I gave myself permission. Like, no, you’re a part of the community now. You’re somebody who makes this theatre run.

LW: What was your first indie team?

MBC: It was called Secret Man Group. It was me, Peter Sherer, Connor Ratliff, Brian Polk, Adam Conover, first. And Opus Moreschi--who’s the head writer of Colbert. He was in our 401, did improv in LA, moved to New York for Colbert, wanted to take classes. We had no idea who he was. He was really nice and unassuming. And we thought, “That guy’s really good! Oh, he’s done improv forever! He’s a working comedy writer!” Then he got put on Harold Night and didn’t have time.

We did a show at Under St. Marks for a year. We hosted. Then we did another experimental thing at the Players Theatre. That ended at a time where we all got on teams. Connor was the first one to be put on Harold Night. We still practiced with him. Then he was put on the Stepfathers at the end of our Under St. Marks show. That felt really great because he’s amazing.

That’s someone else--I looked up to him at the time. Coming up in classes with him was like, this guy’s the funniest person here! Nobody knew who he was. He was an undiscovered gem. I was like, I get him. I know how good he is. So I learned a lot from practicing with him and performing with him. That taught me a lot. It was good to see people justly know how funny he was and see his meteoric rise to Harold Night then the veteran team. It’s even weird to think of because we would be like, “Oh man, we gotta take a class with Zach Woods!” then in a year he was on a team with Zach Woods and they’re absolutely equals.

So Secret Man Group performed when he was on the Stepfathers for a little bit, then me and Peter got on teams, then Adam got a job at CollegeHumor and became too busy, so that fell apart just because everybody was busy.

EO: What was your first house team?

MBC: Spooky Ghost.

Those guys were all my friends and it was great. When I got on, it was my fifth audition. It was at the point where I just felt like, Jesus Christ! When is this thing gonna happen? Because I felt confident and I knew it would happen eventually because I knew I felt confident and I could do it. It was just that I had no control over it, so it was frustrating. I didn’t know what else to do, other than keep getting better. Everyone has room to get better.

It was at the point when my my contemporaries and people that I was already working with were getting on teams. So did I just fall through the cracks? I think that was the big fear. And then I got on at my fifth audition. It was great.

I didn’t feel nervous! I think that’s what was so great about waiting for a while. I felt confident. And I was put on a team of people I loved working with, and knew, and was close friends with, so it was super easy.

That team was disbanded right before the spring of 2013 auditions. Because then Bloody Mary became a team because people get getting plucked onto Harold Night, so one by one, it was no longer Spooky Ghost. So we changed the name to Bloody Mary and then that was around for a month and auditions happened, so about six months.

LW: What was it like moving from Lloyd to Harold Night?

MBC: I think Lloyd Night to Harold Night the audience is similar. It’s all students. I didn’t feel nervous because, again, I think I was playing with friends and people that I knew, and the people I didn’t really know became friends fast. There was a little bit where I felt like I might be up-classed. It took a practice or two to realize no, I’m not, I belong here.

I think I was good at not letting myself feel intimidated. I knew that’s the death knell for anybody. As soon as you’re afraid of being cut, or you feel like you don’t belong here, you don’t. Because you have that attitude. You almost have to be overly cocky.

If you’re scared of getting cut, you’re already cut. You’re done. Because you’re not playing to your full ability, you’re playing to keep a spot, which nobody wants to see! It’s the most boring, godawful improv. You’re paralyzed by indecision. People hug the back line. What’s the point?

LW: I feel like then you’re doing the improv you think you’re supposed to be doing...

MBC: Yeah, which is--what is that? Nothing. It’s like--no, you’ll have game, you did all this training, your scenes will have game! You understand it! If you’ve gotten to this level, it’s in your bones and you know how to do it. They key to getting on a team is knowing what makes you funny and what you think is funny, and you’re able to verbalize and communicate, “this is my sense of humor, this is the scene I want to do, so let’s do that now.”

If you’re on a team, you’ve mastered the techniques, to a certain extent. That’s what’s so great about UCB: they demand excellence. Being “good enough” isn’t good enough. You have to be great. And if you’re not great, you’ll be cut and replaced by someone who’s up-and-coming who is great. So it forces you to be really great. That’s good for everybody. You get better. Even if you get cut, or get put on a team, it’s like, well, I need to get even better. That drive is so helpful.

LW: You’ve written stuff also!

MBC: Yeah! Why We Broke Up is a sketch show or play that Allie Kokesh and I did. We’re really proud of that. I think writing it was amazing. I’m glad we got to do it at UCB--I’d always wanted to do a show at UCB. And the fact that I got to do that feels really good. I’m really lucky.

I got to work with someone I really respect and admire in Allie. I think our sensibilities cross really nicely. We have similar style. We like things that aren’t funny sometimes. Things that are really sad--a real moment. We knew what we wanted the show to look like tonally. I remember a lot of our first meetings were just “what do we want out of this?” Then we talked about the feel of it...it was very vague and I think kinda hippy-dippy spiritual. Like, let’s talk about relationships, what’s the deal, what’s going on, what are these moments?

The jokes were the last thing we put in. Which I think is so helpful. I think the hardest thing for any show is the structure of it, and how it fits. Jokes are easy. If it’s all there, that’s the final step. You can always make it funnier. You can go back--we did it a bunch of times--line-by-line, asking, “can this line be funnier?” But what does this look like, what’s the tone, what’s the style, what’s the sensibility? We replaced so many sketches we wrote when we realized they just don’t fit anymore. And the jokes were the easy part.  We spent so much time structurally making it work and fit. That was such a great challenge.

One of my proudest things is that people legit teared up when we did our show. People came up and said, “I was crying, that was really touching.” And I felt like...that’s exactly what I wanted. Both of us wanted those moments, to have these real characters that you care about. We wanted to write a really good romantic comedy, like the ones we grew up watching. I don’t want to speak for Allie--but really good romantic comedies where it’s not always funny all the time, it’s funny because we understand it and relate to it, but also these are characters we care about, and there are moments where it isn’t a joke, it’s a real situation and a real person.

I like stuff that’s about real people, really from the heart, things that aren’t super joke-heavy or things that aren’t super-weird. I love the show Bob’s Burgers because it’s so good, but it’s about a real family that really likes each other! It feels like a family, and they do real things. And even when it gets crazy, it’s grounded in such a strong, human emotion. I love that stuff.

LW: Would you stop hanging around UCB?

MBC: Well I kind of am, because I’m moving. I’m not gonna be around. But I wouldn’t stop. I want to do stuff out there in LA. That’s the goal. I hope they have me. That’s what my fear is. It’s another place, you know? But I want to keep performing.

I told myself when I was taking classes that I’d just do this unless someone physically said, “you cannot be around here anymore, stop taking classes.” I took so many of those performance classes because I felt like it was my only chance to be on the stage and perform. If you’re not gonna put me on a team, but you’ll accept me in this performance class, I’ll do that. I’ll do that until you tell me I can’t.

All I wanted to do once I started taking classes at UCB was be at UCB and be on the UCB stage and perform and write and do improv. It’s all I wanted to do. I told myself that no matter what, no matter how shitty you feel, no matter how not-funny you feel, just don’t quit. Let them make that decision. Don’t give up on yourself. That’s very corny! I told myself: don’t give up on you.

So, no.

LW: Why do you think you felt like being around the theatre was so important?

MBC: Because I thought it was the best work. When I saw shows, I was like, this is the best stuff I’ve seen. And I think it’s cool. It’s a community of artists and people who support each other and they all make stuff together.

And it’s this dingy little theatre, you know? It’s underground. I liked that it had a cool vibe. You had to know it, you had to be cool enough to know what it is, really into comedy to know what it is.

I think yeah, it was such good work, and such a sense of community. I think people really push each other to do their best work. And because I fell in love with improv so much, and I never thought I would. I just loved doing this and felt like, yeah, I can’t stop doing this. I became really obsessed.

LW: I think that’s a cool thing to get into improv “by accident,” in a way. When you’re into it, you know you’re really into it.

MBC: And I learned so much about myself! It feels corny--I never thought I was a performer, and then when I started performing, it kind of worked! People would be like, you’re funny, you’re good at this, and I thought, what else am I good at that I didn’t ever do?

It feels dumb, but I liked myself a little bit more! I realized how often in life I wasn’t saying yes to other people’s ideas in general. I’d shut myself off of things. The quality of my life improved, relationships improved, I liked a lot of people who did improv. Everybody says this all the time, but the lessons in improv just make your life better.

I stress out less, I think, than I used to. I still get stressed and anxious, but it feels easier. I became a better person. I liked the version of myself that was doing improv better than the version of myself that didn’t do improv. So I knew I had to keep doing it.

I remember at the time, people were like, oh, don’t do so much, you’ll burn out. But all I wanted to do was do it! Now I couldn’t get so far into it as I was coming up--not a knock on that, but I couldn’t watch six Harolds in a row now! But man, coming up? Regularly. I needed more. I’d go home and look up sets on YouTube. I was figuring it out, and really obsessed.

I think it’s so important to get good. Do it a lot! There are different levels. I think this is an Anthony King thing he said in class: if you want to play pickup basketball, fine. Have fun, play pickup basketball. But if your goal is the NBA, you need to be training, and doing drills--you can’t just fuck around. You gotta practice all the time, you gotta have a dedicated group of people who maybe want this too, you gotta run drills. It’s not gonna be fun. It’s gonna be hard work. But you get really good, and getting really good is what’s fun. Or at least to me.

Being on Namaste, I think I can say this especially because I’m leaving: we’re a really great team. That’s the most fun I’ve ever had in improv! Being on a really good team and doing great shows. Much more fun than when I was like, “I dunno if I’m doing this right!” or being onstage and going, “I know this isn’t working but I don’t know how to fix this yet!” That’s the most frustrating feeling. You feel powerless.

But you’re not bad, you’re just in the process of learning. ‘Cause you have that taste--you know if you were watching it, you’d hate it, but you don’t have the technical skill yet to make it as good as you want it to be. You know what it looks like but you can’t manifest it yet. And that’s just doing reps.

But once you can do that, once you unlock that, it’s so much fun. Oh my god. So much fun. And then that’s the most fun--being on the NBA is more fun than pickup games.

LW: There’s something scary but cool about committing yourself to something!

MBC: Why do a thing half-assed? You’re paying too much money for classes to half-ass it!

If you’re doing it for a resume, just take a class or two: you don’t need to take ten. And that’s crazy because you’ll be so unhappy, and miserable, and get nothing out of it.

Same with people who show up late, people who bail on things last minute. I mean, that infuriated me to no end coming up, and even now. Even if I’m coaching a group, and someone’s late, it’s like, hey man, you’re paying me, it’s your time. You’re strolling in fifteen minutes late and you’re like, “Oh man, auditions are coming up, I hope I get on a team!” It’s like dude, let’s say there’s thirty spots? You think you’re the most committed, dedicated, funniest in this community of thousands of people? You stroll in here late? No, man. If you’re gonna be that late, you gotta be that funny. Fifteen minutes late funnier. That’s hard to do!

I sympathize with that because I don’t think I’m naturally funny, I don’t think I’m charismatic as a performer. I had to do the work. I had to do a lot of work. Learn it and get it in my bones.

I think some people--it’s a rare, rare gift--can go onstage and be funny and just do it. God bless you, man. You can’t teach that. There’s no methodology for that. But what I love about improv is that there is. The UCB was like no, there is a way to be funny, through improv. You can learn it. It’s a skill, like playing the piano. You can’t guarantee you’re gonna be a world class working musician, but you can be competent. Which I think is so great. I had to do that because I don’t have a lot of natural talent, but I worked really hard at learning that stuff.

I hate lateness, I don’t like people who don’t commit and don’t take themselves seriously.

LW: It’s a weird thing for the community--people who don’t commit, who do it because they know it “looks good.”

EO: And then indie teams form because they think it’s a way to get on the UCB stage...

MBC: It is a trap you could fall into thinking UCB is the be-all-end-all. The only thing it’s the be-all, end-all of is: do you want to perform at UCB? Great, then yeah. This is it! But if you want to be a working writer or actor, UCB is great and lovable and wonderful but it’s not even a step. You have to think of it as a thing you love to do and you’ll never make money doing it--which is why it’s amazing! It’s pure artistic expression. But this is a thing I can do until I hone my craft, and meet people who are also really talented and funny and that I like working with. Then I can go on and do other stuff. You make that lateral move.

I don’t have to be on Harold Night or be on a team to be successful. You don’t. So many people haven’t been. You don’t have to be a Maude writer to write for Saturday Night Live, you don’t have to be on Harold Night to be cast on a sitcom. It’s not a ladder like that. Some people do that, but there are plenty of others who don’t. Do it for its own sake.

It makes it easier too, being on Harold Night. Once I realized that and let it go, my work got better and my shows got better. Just enjoy this right now because this is it. You reached it. It’s still hard, but I have to be happy with it because this is as far as it goes. Do Harold Night, love it, but that’s it. What’s after it is more Harold Night.

LW: Since you’ve been around--do you feel like you’ve watched the community change?

MBC: In some ways, yeah. It’s tough to get a handle on it when you’re in it, but it’s grown so much. I think part of that is just time. You used to know everybody, then you don’t know everybody anymore. Just because there’s always new bodies, new young minds coming up. There’s always new 101s. Those people will be future teachers. That’s just how it works. Give it ten years and they’ll be teaching. You don’t know everyone anymore.

It moves on without you. Which I think is cool in a way. UCB, the community, the school, and the theatre are bigger than any one person. But it’s very humbling because you're so small. I’ve been thinking a lot about this because I’m moving: this is going to move on without me. New 101 classes will know a Harold Night without me. It’s like I was never there.

That’s really scary, and kind of cool in a big cosmic sense. It’s like, aw man, what did I really do? But that happens, time marches on. There are tons of students now who don’t know who Will Hines is because he’s not around. And they don’t know him and why would they? In ten more years, people will be like, “aw, I remember when Will Hines was here!” and we’ll say, “Oh man, you’re so old!” That’s just the nature of time, and that’s very scary and very cool at the same time.

But that’s just what happens. That’s life. Like it’s still weird to me that Connor is on the Stepfathers. He totally deserves it, and no one has earned his keep more than Connor. Talented, hardworking, nice. So funny. But we were just two guys in a 301 together, unsure about this, and trying, and like, “do we get this?” Part of that will always be there.

It’s just life. Everything needs to change. You cannot stay static. I thought about this--think about the most you could accomplish at UCB. You’re on a great weekend team, you’re teaching...right? That’s the pinnacle. If you’ve done that for ten years--what’s next? Things have to change. You can’t stay the same. And when the theatre can’t offer you any more, you move on.

You can still move on and still perform there. I may never be on Harold Night again--it’s a weird thing to realize. I’d like to be on Harold Night in LA because I like doing it. But it’s very possible that I won’t be on Harold Night again. But I’m not going to stop doing improv, which is what I love. I’m sure I can still perform, and I’m sure when I come back to New York, I can still do shows with friends.

And maybe I’m moving on past this thing. I did this, it’s so great, I loved it, it’s exactly what I wanted to do, and I did it, and now it’s time to move on to another thing. It’s kinda cool.

I was part of this thing that I came to, I saw, and thought, “All I want is to be a part of this thing.” And I did it! And that’s awesome. I’m so lucky.

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I had never done anything like improv before and was definitely scared of doing it, and did not think I would be good at it at all. So, I did sketch. This was 2009. I had 101 with Charlie Sanders, and 201 with Dominic Dierkes, who’s in Derrick.

Right after my 201 was DCM, and I remember going because I wanted to see Derrick perform. I didn’t realize what a big hit they were, and I mostly wanted to see Dom do improv because he was so funny in class. There was, of course, a line all the way down 26th Street, so I did not get into any shows that night. But I decided to give it a shot, so I went to shows the rest of the weekend. I was obsessed from that point on, and enrolled in Improv 101 right after that.

I can give you the rundown of all my teachers: Brandon Gardner for 101, and I remember I chose Brandon right after he had been moved to Reuben Williams. I remember choosing him just by virtue of the fact that he was on a weekend team. I didn’t know who any of the teachers were! It was also funny because Mike Still was in my Sketch 101 class and I remember him talking about being on Harold Night and I had no idea! I knew what it meant but I didn’t realize what a big deal that was.

I had Brandon Gardner for 101, Ben Rodgers for 201, Gavin Speiller for 301, Porter Mason for 401, and then my first advanced class was a Shannon O’Neill twelve-week class. Then I had Delaney, then the Movie class, then a Will Hines ASP called “Immediately Great,” which was like “Premise Keepers.” Then a Kevin Hines ASH and an Anthony Atamanuik ASH class earlier this year.

LW: What shows were you seeing at the time?

AF: When I was doing sketch--especially since I started with sketch--I used to go to Maude Night all the time. In a little notebook I used to write down the team and then try to summarize each sketch during the show. Or what the premise or game was. So I have a notebook full of  High Treason and Thunder Gulch shows at the time.

By Improv 201 I was going to Harold Night all the time. I was definitely one of those people who would get there an hour early and wait in line by myself. I thought it was easier to go to Maude Night alone because it wasn’t as crowded. At Harold Night it can be awkward sitting alone because you’re surrounded by people. It’s weird when you’re sitting there not saying anything and everyone is talking around you.

I went to Harold Night a ton. I never went to weekend shows because I think I was so cheap and knew I could see all these weekday shows for free. I didn’t need to pay ten dollars to see weekend teams, I’d wait till they showed up in Cage Match! I would go to Cage Match all the time too.

LW: What teams and performers did you look up to?

AF: My absolute favorite team was Law Firm. They are still such a nostalgic favorite. They were so funny. Back when there were five teams and the anchor team would be fourth: if Law Firm was fourth, you’d never--or at least I never--left.

Have you ever seen Nate Lang or Thomas Middleditch?! It’s incredible. Thomas Middleditch is probably the most charismatic performer. I remember seeing him in that first DCM in Baby Wants Candy. He can do anything. And then Nate Lang, I feel like, was so different from anyone else at the time. He would take huge silences in his scenes and deliver killer lines.

I loved Law Firm. They were easily the favorite. I can remember specific shows where I feel like I learned things! I remember a scene with Thomas Middleditch and Matt Fisher--I remember this was a scene where I realized how good Matt Fisher is. Thomas Middleditch was this douchey guy on a boat. I think his initiation was something like, “This boat can go two, three hundred miles an hour.” So silly! It killed.

Nate Lang came out for the next scene, and I was thinking, I would not want to follow  that scene. But he did his own thing and it also killed, but in a totally different way, and had a totally different tone: he was a paparazzi guy waiting outside someone’s house, and his son was with him, embarrassed by him. They are all funny in their own way, and confident about what they find funny.

I think in terms of overall favorite performers, it was probably everyone on Law Firm. Fran Gillespie is definitely my biggest all-time improv crush. I loved that team so much. Sue, too, is such a lesson in commitment. She would start with strange characters and wouldn’t get a laugh for the first few lines, or even the first minute. But Sue would know the voice of the character she was doing so well and stick with it. After a minute of everyone else realizing it was funny and what she was doing, it would start killing.

LW: When did you start to feel included around UCB?

AF: I think my first indie team started in 201, as a practice group. I didn’t realize how things worked at all. I didn’t realize it was until 301 that I essentially had my first indie team. Which sort of became a mashup of our 201 practice group and people from our 301 classes. Eventually that grouping of various 201 and 301 classes whittled down to six or seven people who wanted to regularly come to practice. That was my first indie team, called Fontana.

I still felt definitely outside of the scene. Also I think I was still so nervous about doing everything. First of all, I would be like, “Let’s keep practicing! We don’t need to do shows!” I knew the shows weren’t gonna be great--no one’s are in 301 I think! But you should be doing it. I just didn’t want to do bad shows.

I remember we were doing a show where Badman was one of the other teams. I was so nervous about it because I was like, “oh no, these people I admire are going to see us!” I think like three of them showed up to the show, did their set in the Triple Crown basement, and then left. Even if they had watched, none of them would have remembered. It’s so silly.

I think I especially felt included when, after I finished 301, I got a call about interning on Wednesday nights, but I couldn’t do it. Rachael Mason said it would be about six months or so, which I was very disappointed about. But a few weeks later she said there was an opening on Saturday night, which I was happy to do. Literally I think a couple days before I started my 401. Also, that was the last time I ever paid for a show.

I ended up interning for a little over a year. I felt like I couldn’t go back, so when the Beast opened, I started working at the box office. So there was a period when it was way too much. I have a day job, so I was working 9-5:30 every weekday, then I would intern. Saturday night for seven months, Friday night for three months. I got to see Stepfathers a ton. Then I did Thursday for a couple months. But there was a period where I was working through the day, then interning Thursday nights, then working the Beast box office Saturday, Sunday, and Monday night. Which is terrible. That’s when I stopped interning, but I tried to keep the box office going for as long as possible.

Back to the original question. When I started interning then, in 401, I started feeling more a part of the community. Just being around all the time. Because I got to see shows for free, I would go almost every night. Having more people recognize you makes you feel like you’re part of it. I remember Dave Bluvband coming up and introducing himself when I was an intern. He said, “Hey, you’re Alex, right?” and it was crazy! Someone who’s a performer knows me!

I also remember after my 301, I did a DCM workshop, and Bluvband, Katey Healy-Wurzburg, and Ellena--who had just been put on a Harold team--were all in that class. And I remember just walking into the class and seeing them in there made me so incredibly nervous! Because I knew they were seasoned people.

I think probably the biggest thing that made me feel part of the community besides interning was the Movie class. Part of the way the Movie works is someone is designated the hero. Twice, including the first show, I got made the hero. So I had to be a big part of the show. I felt like I had good shows, and after that, I started meeting more people. I remember Matt Mayer came up to me while I was interning and said he’d seen one of the shows and liked something that I’d done. That feels so nice! Around that time I felt like I was meeting a lot more people who were performers or who I had looked up to, which made me feel a lot more comfortable.

Also, that was around the time Fontana, my first indie team, broke up. Right around DCM that year. It was hard to get everyone to practice and stuff. A couple weeks later, the Movie class started. At that time, I didn’t have a team. In my first ASH class, with Shannon O’Neill, I remember thinking everyone was so much better than people were in 401, in an intimidating way, but also an awesome way. But then I remember thinking, going into the Movie class, oh my god, everyone is really good. I remember breaking so much in those first few classes, and I had never broken in class before. People are really funny!

But out of that formed Fun Fun Fun. We still perform and do stuff, and that also became my closest friends at the theatre. It also started because of Allie Kokesh. Allie was an intern with me on Saturday nights, along with Maggie Spellman and Katherine Maughn. The four of us were on Saturday nights for seven months together.

Fun Fun Fun formed out of that class. Allie was also not on any teams at the time. She asked if we wanted to keep performing together because we got along. Allie, me, Matt Cohen, Peter Sherer, Mike Lane, and Cory Palmer. Also Josh Sharp had been in my 301 and we had been talking around that time about getting together and doing something again, so we asked Josh to join the group. Also Allie had become friends with Natasha Vaynblat. Everyone got along well socially. Fontana had been great, but it was nice then to have this team.

Also we would do social stuff together, which is nice. For over a year or so we’d practice on Friday nights and all go out together most weeks. Which is really great!

Peter Sherer left Fun Fun Fun maybe six months later just because of other commitments, but we’ve all been together since then.

Not too long after that I joined Secret Man Group, which had already been together for a long time. But that group also had Peter Sherer, and Matt Cohen, and Connor Ratliff, and Bryan Polk. Jesse Lee and Shannon Taing joined along with me. I think we all sort of “sat in” for a practice or two, and since no one was a steamroller or a mess, we joined it.

For a long time, those two were going together along with Spooky Ghost.

LW: Let’s talk about Spooky Ghost!

AF: May  2011 was the first audition I could do, and that was Anthony King’s last audition. I remember my only goal was not to embarrass myself. I thought, it’s okay if I don’t kill or get laughs, as long as I don’t feel bad about what I did.

In that first audition I remember doing one okay scene and one that I thought did pretty well. It was nice. Just me and a guy who I had not met agreeing; it was not fight-y at all, and everyone responded to that. I got a callback that first audition, and I felt that my callback round was nothing special. Not very good, but not terrible.

Also, I remember when the email went out for that Anthony King audition round months ahead of time, I was at work. I got so nervous thinking about it that I could not work and I had to leave the building and walk around. I was so nervous about the prospect of auditioning. That moment was the most nervous I ever felt. So it got out of the way. When the actual audition came, I didn’t feel nearly that nervous. In retrospect, that was a pretty good sign that I was not ready to get on a team. I would have been a disaster!

Nate Dern took over, and did the fall invite-only audition. I got invited to that, and I remember that was probably my worst audition. Benjamin Apple, Alison Rich, and Murf were all in my group. Alison and I did our scenes together in that Harold and I feel okay saying this because she also said it: I think our scenes were not good. They were bad. Not like in a terrible way, but they were just not good.

That did not work out. That was the first time also that friends started getting on teams. Cory Palmer, at that point. We had just started Fun Fun Fun, or were in the process of starting it when he was put on Creature. Ryan Williams had just been in the Movie class, and was put on.

Out of that audition, because I was not put on, we started talking--Molly Gaebe, John Trowbridge, and Ben Warheit. I think they had all gotten invites as well. Ben was in my group, actually. None of us had gotten on, so we wanted to start working, be on a team together, put in the time, work harder. So we put together a Harold team. They asked if I wanted to join, because Molly had been in my Shannon class, and Ben had just been in my audition group and we’d gotten along well. So it was the four of us, plus Josh Sharp, Hunter Nelson, Joanna Bradley, and Matt Dennie.

So we got together, started practicing every week just on Harolds, with no knowledge of the fact that six months later they would say that teams could audition together. In February or March, Nate announced his first open auditions and said teams could audition together, which was exactly the ideal situation for us.

So we auditioned as a team and as a whole, got put on Lloyd Night.

During those first six months of Lloyd, I was not feeling so great. Personally, as a performer. Despite just getting on a team, it didn’t make anything feel better, necessarily. I think our shows were probably a lot better than I thought. I was so hard on myself and on us that I wasn’t even always having a lot of fun. I would leave almost every show disappointed. Which I know was just me, because other people on the team would be really happy, or were reasonable. I was super hard on myself, so I just did not have fun those first six months.

After the first six months Matt Dennie was moved up to Harold Night, to Guthrie. Matt Dennie was replaced by Matt Cohen. Which was great for me! Because he’s a good friend, and that was a period where we were practicing together on different teams three times a week. Fun Fun Fun, Secret Man Group, and Spooky Ghost. Then when Josh Sharp was pulled up a few months later, Erin Bartley took his place, then later when Hunter was pulled up, Morgan Miller took his place.

Especially toward the end there, I definitely felt a lot less worried. I think the team was a lot more social at that point. We had a good social vibe with each other, so I think things were better. Coming up on the year mark of being on Lloyd Night, I remember thinking very much that I was gonna get cut. I remember thinking, “If I get cut, I can’t really complain. I understand it.” Even though I’d gotten better, I had such high expectations, and was such a critic of myself. That’s when I got put onto Harold Night, of course.

That was Big Margaret. Big Margaret was a good experience, a good first team. I felt similarly very un-confident those first six months of Harold Night. And it took pretty much those first six months to feel comfortable.

Then going on: Higgins was really nice. It’s still great. I’m really happy with them.

You just can’t let it stress you out. You just have to do good shows and that’s it.

EO: How do you explain it to people outside of it?

AF: I guess I’ve settled on being okay with other people not understanding it. I don’t even wanna try to explain it because it’s lost in translation. You can’t get it without being there. It’s such a live medium so I don’t want to send people clips of shows because it doesn’t feel the same.

I think my parents have probably very little idea of what it is that I’m actually doing. And I think that’s probably the case with friends too. My ideal audience is all strangers. I don’t like having friends in the audience because with strangers, if I bomb, who cares? But with friends I feel like if I do terrible, they will remember. They’d be supportive, but they’d think, “He’s doing this and he’s not very good!”

But also I know that when outside friends have such little experience, I feel so responsible to make sure it’s a good show. I hate it. I remember doing a show, the Blender at the Beast, and it was midnight on a Friday and the first scene I did, I got pimped into doing a Regis Philbin impression and I remember thinking as I was doing it, “This is exactly what I think an outside person thinks improv is, and I am totally fulfilling it, and it feels terrible.” I felt so bad after that.

LW: Would you stop?

AF: No! The simple answer is no. Even if I moved, I’d go to the L.A. theatre. I’ve always felt that no matter what, I’ve always loved this. It’s nice being on a team, but the community is what’s really great.

I remember after the hurricane they had the Hurricane Harold Night. It was so nice! Even though I wasn’t affected by the hurricane at all, it was an uncertain time for many people. I remember going to the theatre, seeing everybody show up, seeing friends. It was like a second home.

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Miriam Tolan performed in that ASSSSCAT. I still remember something that she said during the set that stayed with me forever. It was set at a camp and she did a walk-on where she ran across the stage and yelled, “gimme back my panties or I’ll fucking fuck you!” and then ran offstage. I was like, “that’s amazing!” She’s great.

LW: When did you start taking classes?

ND: A year after graduating college. I moved back to New York, lived with my parents, and for a year was hemming and hawing about what I wanted to do. I kept talking about moving to Chicago, because I thought, if I’m serious about improv, I’m gonna go to Chicago. But for a year I hung out in my parents’ basement and read Harry Potter.

After that year, my friend Kylie came to New York during DCM and she was like, “We have to go!” So we went to DCM. The very end of DCM, that Sunday night, Matt Walsh asked if anybody in the audience was an improviser. And I spent the whole weekend loving improv again, thinking it was really amazing, and being surprised that it existed in New York on that level! So I raised my hand, and then thought, well, I should probably sign up for classes because I already lied to Matt Walsh.

So I started taking classes a month after that DCM--September 2007.

LW: Who was your 101 teacher?

ND: My 101 was an intensive, so every morning we had Lennon Parham, and in the afternoons we had a different dude. We had Will Hines, Charlie Sanders, Bobby Moynihan, and then the last day we had Lennon for the morning and the afternoon. I don’t remember if that was the order, but I remember Will didn’t talk to us. He just read a newspaper during the break. I want that in there. Sorry Will.

LW: When did you start regularly seeing shows? What were you seeing?

ND: Absolutely during that 101. I went to Harold Night a lot. Especially when I was in a class, I was the one that booked tickets for everyone to go every week. I don’t remember if I saw weekend teams as much, but I was always at Harold Night. Everybody else remembers shows, or has favorite shows. There’s like two shows I remember seeing out of all the shows I saw during that time. One of them was the fwand strike Harold that everybody remembers.

I got super nerdy really, really fast. I knew right away that I wanted to be a teacher, as soon as I did 101. I wanted two things right away from my 101 class: I wanted to be a teacher, and I wanted to be on an indie team that was all friends with each other. Those were the two things I really wanted: friends and respect.

LW: What was your first indie team?

ND: Not to brag, but right after 401--‘cause what’s when people used to start to form improv teams--my 401 started a team, and a few people from my 301 started a team. So I was on my first indie teams at the same time. One of them was called Bender, which was the friend group that I really wanted. It was super intense, and everyone was obsessed with each other, and we’d spend all our free time together, and we had really long email threads. We started June 2008, and broke up December 2008. So that’s a lesson about intense teams.

The other one was way more casual. It was me and a bunch of guys from my 301. Everyone was really laid back, and nobody was super intense about it. That one is still together, and we have a monthly show at Under St. Marks. So that’s an important lesson about how your team doesn’t have to be the most intense experience to necessarily last a long time.

LW: When did you start to feel like you were being included?

ND: During my first advanced study Harold class. I was one of the only first timers in that class, and the rest of the class was made up of at least two people from every indie team that was performing at that time. The indie scene was much smaller. So it was Thank You, Robot, Bad Data. There was nobody from Fat Penguin in the class, but there were at least two people from a few other indie teams.

That was the class that Daddy formed out of. That had Jeremy Bent, and Matt Mayer, and Paul Welsh, and Ashley Hale, and a lot of really amazing people. Shannon split us into two groups, and there was the Daddy group, which was all the super-aggressive, really funny players, and then there were the wall-huggers, and aggressive players were supposed to learn to share focus and the wall-huggers were supposed to learn to be brave. They did their thing, we did not do our thing.

But we all became really good friends. I met Matt Mayer in that class, who became one of my best friends. I met my boyfriend in that class, I met Brett White and Jeremy Bent. It was such a positive, wonderful class experience for two months. Then that team stayed together, and that became my connection to the rest of the community. That’s when I first felt really involved.

I started interning at the same time. I was a front desk intern, which meant I got to talk to everybody and they had to talk to me, which is a very good way to feel involved.

So it was probably a year after I started classes.

I think one of the big things I’ve learned is if you measure your inclusion in number of people you really like being around, and want to be around, and enjoy and appreciate, then you probably feel included quicker than you realize. If you measure inclusion in how quickly you feel secure and confident all of the time, I don’t know that you’ll ever feel fully included.

LW: Did you have a moment where you felt like this is a thing you want to do and have to do?

ND: I think because I moved to New York thinking I was serious about improv, as soon as I started I was like, well, I’m not stopping. So there was never a time.

There are times where I almost wish I’d found it later, ‘cause I wish I could be one of those people who lived in Portland for a little while, or farmed in New Zealand. But because I found it so quickly, and found people I cared about so quickly, sometimes I worry that I’ve been a less developed person.

Especially because I did storytelling for a little while, and I had so few stories! I was always really well-behaved, I was a cool RA in college, and then I moved to New York, lived at home for a year, and then started doing improv. So I feel like there was never a time where I was interesting to talk to. I had a friend who used to introduce me to people by saying, “This is Nicole, she did college radio!”

LW: Who did you look up to?

ND: When I went to ASSSSCAT my favorites were Miriam Tolan and Peter Gwinn. I really loved Lennon--she’s so committed and doesn’t need words to get her commitment across. She just fully embodies it. Chelsea Clarke was the first coach I had, and I really looked up to Chelsea. She coached both indie teams. I was really lucky, I had a lot of time with Chelsea in the beginning.

Also, Joe Wengert. Anybody who started taking classes when I started just worshipped Joe Wengert. I think that’s a universal thing.

I teach 101 now, and I genuinely can’t remember what was going through my mind when I was taking classes. I don’t remember what I was thinking, or what I was trying to do. I remember loving it and writing everything down, and thinking everything was brilliant. But I can’t remember what any of my brain process was during scenes. I’d love to go back and watch myself.

And I know, maybe I faked it, but I know with 100 percent confidence, I did not understand game until 401. 100 percent confidence. Because I remember the moment where I was like, “Oh! Game!”

LW: When did you first get on Harold Night?

ND: April 2009. So a year and a half after starting classes, which I feel bad about because that was my first audition. But I got cut! When people ask how many times I’ve auditioned, I say one time--but I got cut. So that makes it even.

EO: Soon after?

ND: Two years later. But still!

LW: What was your first team?

ND: Robber Baron. Our first show was May 12, 2009. I think our last show was early January, 2011. January, all of the teams but a few got broken up, and everybody got rearranged. So nobody was cut, but people were added. So then I was on another team for five months, then I got cut. That team was Dybbuk.

That was a team that, like a year later, people started feeling comfortable telling us that it was a bad team. At the time, nobody said it, but something happened and a year later, all of a sudden, everybody felt comfortable talking about it. We didn’t know until people started telling us. It was a great lineup. It was Dave Bluvband’s first team, and we were coached by Chris Gethard. It should have worked, but it did not.

It happens. Robber Baron was also a team that should have worked, but did not work. A lot of times it just doesn’t work no matter how much you want it to, and sometimes wanting it to work really bad prevents it from working. It’s eight weirdos putting pressure on it in different ways, and being super sensitive to other people’s pressure. The math really has to work out for a team to work.

LW: How long until you got back on Harold Night?

ND: About a year. Then I was on Very Good Kiss for a month and a half. Then there were shakeups, then Bucky. I think my first show with Very Good Kiss was February, and then in March Bucky started.

LW: Bucky’s been around.

ND: Two years, this month. Bucky’s been the same seven people since the start, with one rotating spot: Benjamin Apple, Nicole Byer, then Sasheer Zamata. I’d been on a team with Matt Cutler, Dybbuk, and I loved Matt Cutler. I love improvising with Matt. And I had just been on Very Good Kiss with Nate, and Jeremy, and Laura. Frank and I were in our first ever Harold audition callback group together.

Frank Hejl is the example of the person who, rather than dedicate his energy to worrying whether or not he’s included, dedicates his energy to making sure other people feel included. Right after that first callback, I got to the theatre, and Frank had gotten there before me. He had already been telling people I had a really great audition. He then made sure I knew that he thought I had a really good audition. He’s great. That’s just Frank.

Then Benjamin Apple--Benjamin was also in that first audition. The night before callbacks, Benjamin Apple pulled me aside and was like, “I figured it out, I figured out what they’re looking for!” And he told me the secret of what he thought they were looking for. Then I got on, and Benjamin did not get on that audition, but for years we wanted to be on a Harold team together--or at least I said it, and he didn’t disagree. Then we got on Bucky together.

Then we also had Christian, who I had never met before. That was Bucky’s lineup.

LW: It’s so cool to be on a team for so long!

ND: I guess I always felt included as a student on a number of indie teams, but if you want to talk about the years that I thought that I shouldn’t be on Harold Night...it was the whole time, up until the last year of Bucky. Oh yeah. The whole time on Robber Baron I felt like I shouldn’t be here, and I was going to get cut, and I don’t feel like myself...Dybbuk was carrying that baggage.

I got cut and I was sad for a morning. Then it was kind of hard when the new teams premiered, and I was like, “this is good, I don’t belong on Harold Night, I’m not confident, I don’t enjoy it.” I had a year of doing lots of indie stuff and playing with different people, then got back on with Very Good Kiss. I was starting to feel good, then something happened in the beginning of Bucky. I didn’t feel confident again. I held myself back, wall-hugging again for the first time.

It wasn’t until maybe the second year that I felt like I’m enjoying this. I still think at any point in time, I can get cut. Nate can call and say “I know we don’t usually cut people from the weekend but I thought about it and...”

I guess I never thought about that--that I was so happy as a student, taking classes, being on an indie team, and then the second I got on Harold Night it was years of feeling like I shouldn’t be there. Oh, and being so uncomfortable in the greenroom. I never felt like I could or should hang out in the greenroom. I don’t think I was comfortable in the greenroom until I was coaching other Harold teams. I felt like, “Oh, I have to be there to talk to them before and after the show! So I can be here.”

LW: When did you start teaching?

ND: I started teaching January 2012. So right before I got back on Harold Night. Those things coincided. That was also why I felt okay being on a team in the beginning. Because when I had started teaching I got really nostalgic about Harold Night, and house teams, and being a student.

Plus, my best friend was on Very Good Kiss. I think that’s why, even though I was on that team for a month and a half, I felt really good for the whole run of that team. Matt Mayer was on that team, and he’s my best friend, and it was literally constant validation. Anything I did. Anything! I feel like everybody should have one hype man on the team. There should actually be a person assigned to everybody specifically.

If you were a Frank Hejl, and you dedicated your energy to making other people feel better, and if everyone did that, then everyone would feel great.

LW: What levels do you teach?

ND: I teach 101 and 201, and I just taught my first 401. I love it. It’s weird that I have a job now that I like, because I hated my day jobs for so long. I don’t even know how to start unpacking what I love about it. I like being in a room with students, I like being in a room with people who are interested in it but it’s new to them so all their questions are new.

I loved taking classes, so when I teach, I get to always be in classes. I get to be in two to three classes a week! I really love it. Just talking about and doing improv, and laughing at improv, and laughing when things are bad for why they’re bad, and being really excited when things are good. There’s nothing like seeing a student who wasn’t totally confident nail a scene. Just getting to do that all the time, constantly, is so cool. I love it.

I never thought I was good at improv, but I always knew I was super serious about it. I never thought, even in class, “I’m really good at this.” It was more, “I’m really into this.” I guess when you’re 23 that’s all that matters, maybe.

I don’t think natural talent is a thing that matters very much. I think what matters is if you’re open to the things you need to do to get better at it.

I think part of why I felt so happy and so included right when I started UCB is because I’d had a year of not having any friends because all of my friends were still in school. And hanging out in my parents’ basement, and reading Harry Potter, and not doing anything. So when I started taking improv classes it was like my world went from black and white to color. There was no reason to bring insecurity with me because it was such a sudden change. There was a year of blind happiness, and not understanding game.

LW: It’s so unusual that your indie team is still together!

ND: Yup, Teenage Cop. We were For Richard Stands, and then I took a break for a little while because I was feeling improv overloaded, and they changed the name while I was gone. So now we’re Teenage Cop. And we host a monthly show at Under St. Marks.

Also, when I was coming up, I wanted to be on an indie team really badly, and all the indie teams had shows at Under St. Marks. That was almost a bigger deal to me than anything else I’d done. When we started having our own Under St. Marks show, we belong! I don’t know if anybody else on the team feels that way, but when we signed the contract, and made such a big deal out of it, I was so excited. I still feel really lucky whenever we get those shows.

I feel like indie teams should be like your first relationship. You should wait until after 401 so you’re old enough, you should be ready, it should be committed, it should be three hours a week...

This might be the real secret why I felt included early on: I had access to free space. So I would organize practice groups and so many people would come because it would be so cheap. Coaches were cheaper back then, and we didn’t have to pay for the space. I think that also made a difference because I was the practice group organizer.

Can I say something embarrassing about practice groups?

EO: Always.

ND: I used to pay coaches with a check. I remembered that a couple years ago, and I sat up in bed in a cold sweat. Oh my god, what a nightmare. What a nerd! Especially now that I coach, if someone would hand me a check, I would be like, are you kidding me? I used to write a check and put it in a little envelope with their name on it. So ridiculous.

LW: So professional.

ND: No, they were Disney checks, so they were not super professional. I’d write out a Little Mermaid check and give it to the coach.

I think I was just too dumb to know that I should feel like a loser! I was so happy and dumb that it didn’t occur to me to feel insecure! Then it hit me later.

LW: How do you explain improv and UCB to your parents or people who are outside of it?

ND: I don’t remember explaining improv to my parents. But I remember once we were at dinner with my great-grandmother, and someone asked what improv was, and my mom said, “I’ll explain it. It’s like this. One person is a priest, and the other is a nun. They just had sex. Go.” I have no idea where she got that, or where she heard about that from. But that is not it. But that’s how I will sometimes explain it. My poor mom’s gonna be so mad.

I don’t know. I think ‘cause I tend to just breeze past it. If it’s really a stranger, I tell them I teach acting and then I don’t explain what improv is. Like if I’m getting my hair cut and they ask what I do I say I teach acting. Or, one time I got my hair cut and I lied and said I was a TV writer. I feel fine about it. He doesn’t know, he’s not gonna see me again.

And if it’s other people, I just say, “I do stuff at UCB, it’s a comedy theatre in New York” and I leave it at that. I never get as far as improv.

I think when people ask me questions I tend to answer in a way that makes it clear that I don’t want follow-up questions, so it ends really quickly. But the one time I did, I went to my cousin’s wedding, and an old high school teacher who I loved was there, and I wanted to tell her how well I’m doing because I had just started teaching at UCB. I told her, “I teach! I’m teaching improv in the city!” and she’s like, “Okay.” I remember to a normal, that does not sound like you’re doing well.

Lesson learned. I think after that I was like, I gotta play this cooler.

EO: Is there anything that would cause you to stop hanging around UCB?

ND: I can’t think of anything. I have a joke answer: if everybody got bedbugs. I can’t go back if everybody got bedbugs. Honestly, that’s the only thing I can think of. But also because I can’t imagine my adult life without it. My boyfriend I met through UCB. Most of the roommates I’ve had I’ve met through UCB. My current job is through UCB--the only job I’ve ever liked. Every weeknight and weekend of my life for the last seven years that I’ve been in New York has had a UCB association or has deliberately not been because I had to take a break.

And I kinda feel like if I didn’t when I got cut, I probably won’t ever. I guess part of it is also that--I hate what I’m about to say--UCB is a thing you take with you. UCB is the relationship you have with other people. Yes it’s a place, yes it’s a theatre, yes it’s a position on the performers page, and yes I can say what I’m about to say because I come from a position of privilege because I’ve been on a house team for a really long time: but, UCB is other people. So as long as you have those relationships and that investment with other people, you can’t really go away. So yeah, my answer is only if everybody I know got bedbugs. Oh god, I hate that that’s gonna be the last answer.

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We got seats and I remember turning around in the back row, and Will Arnett and John Lutz were standing right there. I didn’t know who John Lutz was at the time, but I realized afterwards. John Krasinski did monologues! It was just like, “what is this place?!” I’d never seen improv, I didn’t know what longform improv was. I’d never heard of UCB. I just went to this basement of magic! It was so much fun.

LW: How soon after that did you start taking classes?

CM: I signed up for a 101 in August of ’07 with Bobby Moynihan and during those eight weeks he got his first SNL audition.  It was just a second wave of “what is this magical place?!” I randomly chose Bobby because he was the only instructor on the website I’d recognized from ASSSSCAT. And I remember it said “one slots left,” and so I was the “one slots” and I was so, so excited. He was such a good teacher. It was a blast.

LW: What shows were you seeing around that time?

CM: Only--almost exclusively--ASSSSCAT and Stepfathers. And you could bring coworkers and non-comedy friends and know that anybody would enjoy Stepfathers. I remember going to Harold Night once during my 101 and I was so confused and scared and just like, “this is not for me!”

And then I changed my work schedule at J.Crew so I’d have Friday nights free. I’d go to ASSSSCAT whenever I could--we closed in time so I’d always make ASSSSCAT--and then I’d get to the Stepfathers on Fridays and “splurge.” It was eight dollars back then. Splurge my eight dollars and then do the free ASSSSCAT.

‘Cause back then--I talk like I’m 79 years old--back then it was  Zach Woods, Gausas had just left, I think Shannon had just started. Billy Merritt had gone to LA that summer. Gethard was always playing. It was so good.

LW: Who were your other teachers?

CM: Bobby for 101, Joe Wengert for 201, 301 was Gavin, 401 was Neil, and then I didn’t even apply for 500s because I thought there was no way I’d get in.

But I’m glad I didn’t apply because I ended up taking a second 401 with Zach Woods, who was amazing. Because I thought, from Stepfathers, he’d be too nice, he’d be too soft on us. I distinctly remember there was a scene in class, and when it finished, he goes, “That scene was a disaster...and let’s talk about why.” So I was like, well, he is not easy. But it was so useful! That’s what I wanted to hear!

So Neil and Zach for 401. And my first 501 was Delaney, which was scary, and then Anthony King, which was also scary. And after my second 501, that’s when I was going to quit improv altogether because I felt like it was just the worst. I remember crying on the train home every Wednesday after class.

Gethard hadn’t taught for a while, but he posted a class, which was a big deal. I was sitting in the break of this Anthony King class registering on my iPhone. And that was the class that changed my improv identity. That was the formative one.

It was a “504,” and we met twice a week for four weeks. Condensed. And a bunch of other classes after that, but that was the one that really mattered.

LW: How so, do you think?

CM: He was the first teacher who was really supportive of what I did. I mean, this applies to dozens and dozens of improvisers over the years, I’m sure, but I think he’s the most gifted improv coach or teacher I’ve ever had. I think that’s something that other people would agree with. He’s very insightful, and can watch you for five minutes and do a diagnostic that is so accurate and so pierces your soul. He’s been on the scene forever and knows how to coach and how to teach really well.

It was also a killer class, which never hurts. The first indie team I was on that was serious about it was called Dreadnought. And so that was me, Don Fanelli, Jesse Lee, Michael Kayne, Noah Forman, and Dom Manzolillo. So that was formed from that class and Gethard coached us as a team for a while.

It was just all about not pressuring yourself to be clever. I remember Gethard saying, “When you’re onstage with Bobby Moynihan you learn really quickly you’re not going to be the funniest person in the room, so all you can bring to improv is the most true, honest version of yourself.” I remember writing that down in my improv journal!

It sounds so simple to say, but it’s so deeply liberating if you can reinforce good habits and be a really honest version of yourself. I remember Gethard also saying, “We are artists, but we don’t have paint, we don’t have musical instruments, we don’t have anything except our physical body and then our body of experience to make us who we are. That’s all that improv is.” Just these little gems! Nobody had said stuff like that in my improv career up until that point.

I remember one time he was like, “Cathryn, I don’t think you know how hardcore you throw down.” Being told that lights a fire! He gave me confidence that was definitely not there before.

EO: When did you start feeling involved around UCB?

CM: Dreadnought was the first time I felt like I was a a presence on the indie scene. And around that same time, Gethard was starting to do the Gethard Show at the theatre--not the MNN version, the stage one. I was involved with that, sporadically. I think that was the first time.

EO: What did you do with the Gethard Show?

CM: I did one called Lonely Cowards. This took over my life for a couple of weeks. The show was called Lonely Cowards, so I maintained this massive database where you would email me and Gethard and list who your crushes in the community were. It makes my palms sweat just remembering it.

So I would be like, you’re in love with this person and hopefully they would email and say they’re also in love with you and then the night of the show, we would announce what matches we’d come up with. And we had hundreds of names. I still have it on my computer. It makes me want to throw up. So terrifying. And so I was the keeper of the lonely hearts’ secrets. Thankfully, I have the worst memory ever, so after four years I no longer look at someone and remember.

I dunno, I was 26, and it was like, “Oooh, we’re all single! This is fun!” The morning of the show, I was so paralyzed. I was living with my sister and she asked what was wrong, and I said, “There are going to be so many people at the theatre tonight that are going to be so devastated and so disappointed.” I thought it would be fun, and we’d find all these matches but then it occurred to me that people were going to be so bummed! We ended up having four matches, so eight people, enough to build a show on.

Classic Gethard Show stuff: kind of painful, kind of amazing. That was my biggest contribution. And during that moment in time, the whole community knew what Lonely Cowards was.

Anyway that was my first involvement in the Gethard Show. I remember doing one show, and I was sitting onstage next to Will, and we were looking out at the crowd and Will said, “I’m too old for this” and I said, “Me too.” It was a Saturday at midnight, and Fanelli got his body waxed for March of Dimes.

EO: Fanelli told us a little bit about some of the experimental stuff you did with Dreadnought!

CM: The Gethard mantra that we all adhered to at that time was, “Go down in a blaze of glory.” If it’s gonna be a train wreck, let it be the most glorious, committed train wreck that anyone’s ever seen. You want to aim to do good work, but if not, have it be so big and so committed that it ends up being incredible to watch anyway.

I don’t know if it’s still in business, but there was a sushi restaurant run by a man named Elvis Newman. On his website, he called himself a “futurist.” He was so crazy. So Elvis Newman had told Gethard, “I want you guys to perform at my restaurant, I want you guys to do comedy!”

And he was like, “I’m not going to perform at your restaurant, but I have this team of people that I work with that might be into that.” The restaurant front is a giant window, and we ended up doing this improv show in the window of the sushi restaurant. Gethard brought his friends, and people in the community came. There were also people eating in the restaurant who had no idea that there would be an insane show going on while they were trying to eat dinner. It was probably the craziest event I’ve ever been a part of in the city.

It feels like we were there for three hours--I’m sure in reality, it was only forty-five minutes, but it felt like the longest set ever. It was nuts. Jesse Lee running around, interacting with different patrons. This one woman was getting involved, and she was so drunk. It was just nuts. I remember Zach was there, and I remember Zach walking up to us, and I didn’t know him very well, and I was like, “Oh my god, I can’t have Zach Woods see me do this total shit show.”

Gethard’s thing was to try to resist the urge to fix things. Because it’s a really easy habit to fall into, but you can shut down that instinct and just participate in the chaos of the scene. Gethard’s thing was, “You have eight brilliant people onstage, somebody’s gonna figure out a way to have it work.” So if you participate in the chaos, rather than putting the breaks on, then push that to the edge as far as it will go, and see what takes flight.

When you’re playing with good people it’s so easy to say yes to because they just make you feel really safe, so it’s easy to make big choices and support big moves.

And then we did this commemorative show on the anniversary of the sushi show! We walked around Union Square and tried to gather people and go from store to store. The clearest thing I remember was that we were in Union Square outside of where all the trains meet, and we got this giant group hug of strangers going, and we sang “group hug, group hug” to the tune of a Christmas carol. It grew from a little doughnut to all these strangers coming in for the group hug. It was so fun!

LW: When did you first get on a house team?

CM: Late. Like, yesterday. My first team was a Maude team called Everything Rabbits, and the summer after that I was placed on Graceland. They were pre-established.  From Graceland I went to a team called Guthrie, then to a team called Big Margaret, and now a team called Higgins. That’s three teams in less than two years, I think.

I auditioned for five years and never got a callback. That was...rough. But it’s good, it makes you stronger, and it makes you really introspective about what your goals are and what you really want. I don’t regret it now, but around year three or four I was like, “are you serious?!”

EO: At the time when you were not feeling great about improv, why do you think you kept moving forward?

CM: Well, I loved it. I really, really loved it. But you can satisfy that love without Harold Night or indie teams and classes. I think it’s partially that you don’t want to get left behind. You come up with all these people, and you’re getting good together and you’re getting serious about it together, and I guess you don’t want to get left behind, and you want to keep playing with your friends and the best people that you can. So you just have to make yourself work harder.

And I guess you also think, “This person’s getting on?! I know I’m as good as them!” You just have to tell them you mean business. If you’re really doing this. You fucking mean business, and you’re not going away. That was another Gethard thing. Refuse to go away. Stick your heels in the ground. You get better, you get smarter, you work harder, and you refuse to go away. And it worked out for me, in that sense.

But you also learn: Harold Night is not everything. Maude Night is not everything. There are so many other muscles you have to work. Especially if you’re an aspiring actor. I envy the people who are obsessed with improv but have normal careers and normal lives and don’t really want to be actors. That’s the best of both worlds.

But if you are an aspiring actor, it’s like okay, this is a small, small scale of the amount of work and amount of rejection that I theoretically am exposing myself to in this pursuit. This is good training.

EO: We didn’t talk much about Maude Night yet!

CM: Maude! I love it! Bellevue is the best. I feel so, so lucky. It’s the longest team I’ve ever been on and now that Onassis is gone, Bellevue and Beige are the longest running teams on the night. Which is crazy, we’ve only been together fifteen months maybe.

It’s such a dream. It’s like if the UCB gods were like, “choose a bunch of your friends, and we will make a team out of it!” When the email went out, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I get to be on a team with these people?! It blew my mind.

And it just works out really nicely. We have off shows, certainly. But we’re all pretty much on the same page with our comedic sensibilities. I think that’s what works about Bellevue. That’s the pretty lucky thing about Bellevue. I love ‘em. I love ‘em all.

Bellevue’s fun too because they’re open to making bigger choices and bigger moves. When it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, but when it does pay off, it’s really rewarding. It’s better to be trying that stuff than to never try.

Anyway, to bring this back to heroes: Lennon Parham, who is another hero of mine. When I was a student, she had just booked her first show, and she agreed to meet me for coffee so I can just pick her brain. I remember so many of the nuggets of wisdom she told me, one of which was “Always work with people better than you.” It’s good to always branch out. It’s easy to get stagnant.

Back to going five years with no callback--that sort of birthed I’m Too Fragile For This. I was good friends with Connor--we’d met in a 501 with Neil Casey, which was another class with a lot of amazing people. Tom Levin was in that class. Connor was such an advocate for me, and such an amazing friend. He would book Fanelli & Mudon shows! He was like, “People need to see how good you are! We need to get you out there!” I said I was thinking of doing this webseries and he said absolutely.

My place of work let us use the space and their equipment and saved us thousands of dollars. So we would come to the table with an improvised premise and then I can just laugh at all the amazing things Connor says, which is my contribution to the pieces!

LW: What was it like going from Lloyd to Harold Night?

CM: Easy enough. Maybe easier than it would have been just because my friends and my generation already were on Harold Night. So I hadn’t had classes with any of the Graceland people. I mean, the nicest, most talented people! But I hadn’t come up with any of them. Lots of Lloyd people at the time, I didn’t know their names or bodies of work. I hadn’t come up with those people, but it was fun!

Graceland, to this day, remains the least judgmental team--there was no show that I’ve done or ever observed them doing where anybody was kicking themselves after or beating each other up. They did a show, had fun, and left it. They don’t dissect it, don’t judge each other--so supportive. It was so lucky on my part to be placed on a team like that.

Transitioning to Harold Night just felt like, “hey guys, took me a while, sorry I’m late!”

LW: Is there anything that would make you stop hanging around UCB?

CM: I mean, getting a sitcom, moving to LA maybe. I don’t know. Harold Night and Maude Night aren’t the end all, be all. The dream would be being involved in the community. The community is so good for working with brilliant people, staying sharp, healthy competition.

Being in this creative space: I have my day job, but I feel so lucky to leave and be surrounded by people who are just doing something they love for no money, for the hope of payoff but for no guarantee of payoff. So many people don’t have that. UCB is basically what kept me in New York and what kept me sane.

Here’s something: Justin Purnell booked ASSSSCAT monologists for many, many years and then he had to go off to grad school. So for the past two years or so, I have booked the ASSSSCAT monologists. Which is awesome during the summers because Amy Poehler is in town.

The first summer I was doing it, I got to meet her and properly introduce myself and have a moment with Amy, which is mind-blowing. I got to give her this thank you card the next week. I was so scared! I wrote out this novella on a thank you card, basically telling her, “Thank you so much for creating an institution that has become a family and been this creative home for me and hundreds of other people. Something you’ve created on this planet means so much to other people.” And then the next week, she thanked me for the card.

It was 2012, and it was Fleet Week, the week I got to meet her. And remember, it was during Fleet Week that I first saw improv, and then five years later I got to meet Amy and tell her how much this place means to me.

Anyway, would I ever leave UCB? I don’t think so. We’ll all leave the performer page, we’ll all get cut or moved or whatever. But you can still work to be involved and work to be active. Even if you’re just coaching. Coaching is so rewarding. There’s always opportunities to get your work seen. I don’t think I’d ever leave it.

And that’s why ASSSSCAT’s awesome: you see the people who came up and then come back and pay it forward, in a way. A free show for 9:30 that you waited three hours for.

LW: How do  you explain the community to people outside of it?

CM: I guess an “artists collective,” maybe. People who are obsessed with the same thing. It’s a community of kindred spirits. People who “get it” on the same level. You go to a normal New York party with coworkers and stuff, and you’re lucky if you talk to one kindred spirit. But you go to an improv party, odds are, everyone on some level is going to be a kindred spirit. You’re committed to the same outlook on life, and the same values of what it is to be a human being.

And the people who don’t get it, or criticize, are so deeply jealous! So deeply afraid! They are. Not that you shouldn’t be. My friends will come to shows and be like, “I’d be so afraid to be up there!” It is so terrifying, what we do. I feel like a lot of people criticize it because they’re so afraid to commit to something without knowing, and to say yes to something without knowing. They’re right, there’s no common sense reason why we should do it.

My family’s never seen me do improv or sketch. My mom has only been to the theatre a couple times. When I was coming up, I took her to an ASSSSCAT and it was a really rated NC-17 one. I was there with my 14-year-old cousin and they said the c-word maybe thirty-five times. We’re from a really small, conservative, Christian town. So my mom got a bad taste in her mouth about the theatre.

So her go-to thing when I say I have to go to improv practice is, “How is that a practice?! It’s all made up! How do you get practice if it’s all made up?” She’s been asking me that for probably five years.

LW: I also am surprised when I tell people outside of this world that I do improv and sketch--they’re always like, “That’s so cool, that’s crazy!” And I’m like, nah, it’s fine. But yeah, it actually is weird and cool!

CM: People think it’s cool and you’re like, “No, I’m hideous, I’m a troll! Don’t talk to me! I haven’t done anything my whole life!” But the reality is, you do really cool shit!

LW: You forget how enchanting it is to other people.

CM: I wanna say one thing about my mom. After my fifth year of auditioning without any callbacks, she called me, and she told me, “Never feel embarrassed for trying, and never apologize for doing your best.”

LW: We always ask who you recommend we talk to next!

CM: Connor is wonderful. Give Connor an invitation to talk...and he will not turn it down. Put that in there. He’d love it.

Follow Cathryn on Twitter!

We wanted to do our own big, long sketch show--because we’d only done a little bit of sketch. We put that up at Donny’s Skybox, which was almost like their version of the Beast. It’s a smaller stage upstairs, and almost like a SPANK, you could put something up there. And we would sell out because we all had parents and aunts and uncles that loved us.

So we put up this really cute sketch show called “Everybody Hurts.” The opening scene though--this is crazy, how did they let a bunch of children do this? The opening scene: we were all miming jumping out of a window and killing ourselves in different ways, and we’re angry that there are other people there killing themselves. I know that the way I killed myself in the end was that I flew away on the back of my friend who was playing a pigeon. I don’t really know.

There were a lot of blackouts. Most of the sketches were blackouts. One of the sketches was called “Skinny Jeans” and it was a girl laying on her back--played by me--crying, and Dana Clinkman who does improv here in New York as well, was like, “Push!” and doing the Lamaze breathing. And then it’s like, “Zip! I got on my skinny jeans!” The joke was that they were jeans and not a baby she was having.

Another sketch that I’ve always wanted to co-opt into UCB: we wrote down all the talents that we had, which I think is a good skill for any sketch group, and we found out that two friends could do handstands. So they wrote this sketch where they were bats. They’d fly around then go into a handstand and be bats hanging in the attic. Then they had existential conversations. The blackout was an old man comes in with a broom and is like, “damn bats!” That was the sketch! These were sketches!

We also did improv, and we practiced in our friend’s apartment, and we got into DCM in 2006. We also got into Chicago Sketchfest right before that and we did Chicago Sketchfest, which is hilarious because that’s a really hard sketchfest to get into. I haven’t gotten into Sketchfest since I was sixteen or seventeen. Sketchfest that year--by the way--was sponsored by Red Bull. And you have a bunch of nervous teenagers who can’t drink but are being handed all these free Red Bulls, and then we did our sketch show all amped up.

So right after that we got into DCM and most of us had never been to New York before. Weirdly enough, at that point, I had gotten into NYU but had never visited New York City. Because I’d lived in Chicago, and I was like, “Oh, New York? That’s the same as Chicago.” It’s not. So we stayed at this really disgusting hotel on 34th street across from the giant post office and Penn Station. We stayed like eight to a room. By the way, we read the reviews of this hotel before going there, and one of the reviews was like, “it smells like a dirty Chinese wok,” and another review was like, “it smells like urine,” but we still went.

We performed at DCM, at a theatre that is no longer in the DCM circuit. It was right by the hotel. I saw shows at UCB. I waited in line and I remember feeling really sick because I ate an entire bag of cherries that I had bought at Gristedes.

I was amazed at just how many people were there. Everyone was so cool. I also had started taking classes at iO. And I loved iO. I just felt like UCB was cool. It was so different. It had a New York sheen on it.

I don’t even know what I saw, I just saw so much and I was so in awe of the whole thing that I don’t really remember any of the performances. Doug Benson was the first celebrity I recognized, which is funny. Horatio Sanz let me sit in front of him so that I could see.

I really wasn’t there to try to drink or anything, but the one time my friend and I got drinks, we each got a PBR and we bumped into this man who was in line for the bathroom. He was like, “You’re not old enough to drink--what are you doing here?” and I was like, “What are you doing here?” That was Ed Helms. But I was so high on life. Also I shouldn’t have been drinking!

Then I went to college at NYU and didn’t get onto the NYU improv team Dangerbox, although I was called back two years in a row. I was so close to getting on but never got on. All my friends were on Dangerbox. I did the theatre program at NYU, and I’m glad I did that because it was something different to do.

As soon as I graduated I knew I wanted to take UCB classes. I knew it was a priority.

LW: What shows were you seeing when you started?

CD: When I started taking sketch classes the show requirement was really hard for me because I was a professional babysitter so I worked six days a week, sometimes more. I was one of the people that was near the end of the class who hadn’t seen the show requirement. I did see Maude Night once, I think I saw a Gramps show.

Then I was like, “Oh shit, I need to make my sketch requirement! I know, I’ll go to Killgore!” Which is not a sketch show. And I sat there and got blood in my hair and went to class, so proud. My teacher Lee Rubenstein was like, “That doesn’t meet the show requirement. If you can do it by Friday, you can email me and tell me you did the show requirement.” I think I saw Love Can Suck A Dick.

Then I took a three month break, worked on some other theatre stuff, then came back to UCB to do Sketch 201. And then I was the person who was at Maude Night every Monday. If I could get front row, I would do it. Or sometimes I’d like to sit in the back and hear what the performers were saying and how they really felt about it--what they laughed at versus the audience.

LW: Were you on any teams?

CD: For sketch: my sketch career at UCB started two years before my improv one. I emailed Gotham City Improv on a random day and I asked them if I could have a run there.

Oh, and I submitted myself as an actor for Maude Night while I was in Sketch 101--not seeing shows--and didn’t get an audition. I was confused about that.

Because I was like, the only way I will ever get on Maude Night, the only way I will get good at this is by practicing. At the time, Liquid Courage was on hiatus and there was no BYOT--really no way you could put up a sketch. I didn’t have video equipment. So I asked Gotham City Improv if we could have a run of a sketch show.

What had happened was that the people I had done improv with in Chicago--almost all of them went to NYU, and the people who didn’t go to NYU ended up moving to New York. So we had five of us. We were all together again. So we formed a new group and started doing sketches again, for each other. Then I got this run at Gotham City Improv, and they said we could set our own ticket price.

We had a bunch of friends doing shows at the PIT, and at the time, the PIT was charging twelve dollars for their Saturday show. So we were like, all of them are going to come, so we’ll charge twelve-fifty. Which sounds shitty now that I think about it, but I was so worried about no one coming. We just thought the norm was the PIT prices. I mean even though UCB was five dollars, and I knew that, I was coming from a theatre background, knowing that renting your own space is expensive so everyone pays fifteen dollars for a ticket, even if it was their friend’s show.

So we charged a bunch and we also got a deal with Brooklyn Brewery where they gave us tons and tons of beers for thirty cents a bottle. The rule though with that is that you have to put Brooklyn Brewery signs everywhere in the theatre. Not bad. But you also have to pick up the beer yourself. My friend Evan and I went to Brooklyn Brewery and picked up all this beer in lots of suitcases. Then brought the beer in a car to NYU, because they wouldn’t let us store it in Gotham City Improv. We knew an NYU teacher from our studio and they let us store it in their offices. I don’t think they knew it was beer--I think one person knew it was beer.

So we did make a little profit off of each show. This was a monthly show we did for seven or eight months, maybe a year. We used the profit as a bank to buy props and costumes.

Then right after that, I got on Maude Night. Doing a sketch and putting on a monthly show where you have to write new stuff is how you get practice.

LW: When did you get on Maude Night?

CD: Nate called me December 2011, it started in January 2012. I was on Everything Rabbits. I had just gotten my appendix out a week prior, so it was great. I don’t know--that year, the Maude writer calls were supposed to happen on the sixth or seventh of December and it went until the twenty-second.

I was so stressed out about it--what if Nate does call me and I’m sleeping or in a hospital bed or I don’t get service in the hospital? So luckily it was a week after that and I was home for Christmas. I thought that it was all over. You don’t really know how anything works until you get on a team. There’s so much stuff that you wouldn’t know unless you did it. I assumed he’d called everyone on the day and told everyone, and he was waiting till January first to “release the information,” which is not how it works. It’s very public. Everyone knows the day of. But I assumed there was a secret thing.

EO: When did you start taking improv classes?

CD: In fall of 2012. I missed it so much. I was taking a hiatus. I guess I’d done improv in college--I’d go back to Chicago in the summer and take iO classes. I took up to Level 5, but two months later they added two more levels, so I’m not really a graduate of iO.

I loved it, but I was hearing from friends how expensive improv is, and also friends who had auditioned a bazillion times, and friends who had done improv in other venues like NYU not being able to take UCB classes. I had spent a bunch of money on iO classes. It was frustrating to me to have to start over in the scene, and in classes. So I emailed Susan Messing. I would go to all of her shows and watch in the front row as a teenager, and she was my teacher. I emailed her and asked if there’s any way I could pass out of at least 101 at UCB.

Also I’d taken 101 three times: at Second City, and at iO twice because there was too much time between them. I was like, I can’t do it, I can’t take another 101! I love improv, I love all of that, but I can’t. It was bothersome to me. So I got passed out of 101.

In hindsight, I would take 101. I came into 201 with people saying, “you guys know ba-da-da, right?!” and me being like, “...no!” I also assumed--this is a bad assumption--that everything would be derivative of iO, so it couldn’t be that different. Down to the warmups. Still, to this day, there are some warmups I’ll hear about and be like, “Oh! At iO it’s called this other thing!”

LW: When did you get on Bellevue?

CD: Everything Rabbits was around for seven months and they had a shakeup seven months after the first shakeup so we could get on a summer schedule. It was July of 2012. I was very scared. I worried it would be easy to kick off the person who is new and didn’t prove herself...In seven months, I only had five sketches in the show.

EO: Is that unusual?

CD: With Bellevue it is. There’s a Maude dynamic where not everybody gets a sketch in. We want the best material for the best show, and you’re still on the team if you don’t get a sketch in. However, I think sometimes doing that too much can cause a weird dynamic. It makes you insecure. It makes you be like, “Okay, well, next month I really have to step up my game!” Which is not how comedy works. Putting all that pressure on yourself won’t make you funnier.

It made me super insecure. With Bellevue, in a year and four months of being a team, I’ve only not had a sketch in once, and I think I’m the only writer who hasn’t. The reason is that I wasn’t going to be in town for the show. The sketch that was the best I’d written that month was prop-heavy and I pulled it out myself. I say prop-heavy, but it was a sketch that was supposed to have a live orchestra. I had gathered all the people in the community who were going to loan us instruments and I didn’t really feel comfortable putting all of that on Bellevue. What if somebody’s instrument gets broken and I’m not even there? I’d take responsibility for it, but I would feel bad that it happened.

But from Everything Rabbits, on Bellevue, we have Nathan Min, Dru Johnston, and Mike Antonucci. I was joking with Nathan that we don’t know a team without Dru Johnston so we hope he never gets a professional opportunity because we’d cease to exist! Not really though. And Nathan and Dru were also on a team before us.

I think that Bellevue is great because every one of us does improv, and every one of us has written and also has performed, no matter what role we have on the team.

LW: When did you start feeling included around UCB?

CD: I felt included as soon as I got on a Maude team. Before that though, it felt like a barren wasteland, as just a sketch student. This was before 301 was a class for sketch, and before advanced study was offered. It was something they always said would come back, but it was never offered before I got on Maude. It felt like a wasteland of “I don’t know how to use the skills you’ve given me. I don’t know how to put up sketches. There’s no more Liquid Courage, there’s no BYOT.”

I’m not going to go to a jam because I write sketches. I’m still terrified of jams. I do them, but it seems like a bunch of cavemen trying to fight over the one berry left. If that’s how it is, if I was a caveman, I would starve. Because I’d be the person who hung back and was like, “maybe there’s another berry!”

I also go through phases where even though I bartend at UCB and am around all the time, I feel like not a cool kid. I feel like everyone you talk to--everyone says that. I think it comes from the fact that everyone is so, so talented. So you go on Facebook and you see “Watch my new video! I’m in this new commercial! I’m one of the twenty funniest people in New York this year!” My feed, because it’s all UCB people, it’s a constant stream of accomplishments and talent, which is so deserved. Not just professional ones--SPANKS and teams and stuff. We are such a supportive community that that kind of stuff is always online.

I think I’ve been to things that are for the general public of UCB that are so inclusive. I’d say the Lady Jam is the best jam at the theatre. I’m not including BYOT in that. Not just because it’s for women, it’s more that everyone genuinely wants everyone else to succeed. No one does their great, hilarious set and then bounces. It’s once a month so you really look forward to it. Shannon, and Morgan, and Lydia, and tons of people do it. Kate Riley does it. They all make it very comfortable. It’s great. And it’s also a lot of performers you don’t usually get to jam with.

And BYOT is also, I think, an incredibly supportive thing. You are bringing your own improv team and your sketches. Everyone can do their own improv style and be supported by the group without having to fight for attention, or something like that. And everyone gets seven minutes, which is a long time to give every single group.

LW: Is there anything that would make you stop doing stuff at UCB?

CD: So I think that there are things that bother me, and I guess I will be up front and say that one of them I think is gender equality in the administration. I would like to see that change. I am a very tolerant person and I’m having a lot of fun at UCB. But if there isn’t some way that that can change, I feel like the women of the theatre need to take that back. I think it needs to happen throughout the theatre.

This is Amy Poehler’s theatre. And I think that Amy Poehler’s theatre is a place where the weird and the diverse, in an ideal world, prevail. Amy Poehler’s theatre where Aziz, and Reggie Watts, and the weirdest people came out of the woodwork and got their start, really. I just want to honor what she set out to do. I think a place that’s too concerned with industry and making a homogenized version of what comedy is will suffer. I don’t want to leave UCB. But I think that if there isn’t a dialogue, it will be hard for me to stick around. If there’s not at least positive changes going about that. It’s something that hurts even to talk about, because I love UCB so much and I’m so grateful for everything they have given me and all the opportunities.

But for the future of UCB, I don’t want it to be a place where people make comedy all the same, or comedy is thought of as some sort of very specific mold. If it’s all going to be people perfectly playing game without emotion or acting, or if it’s all going to be sketches that are all the same, that’s not positive for anybody in the theatre. There needs to be more diversity.

Follow Claire on Twitter!

I did improv classes for four years maybe before I took a sketch class. I ended up taking a sketch class out of frustration. I auditioned for Harold Night over and over again and couldn’t get on. I think after the fourth time I thought, well, I want to be involved in this theatre, I want to do stuff here, and I’m interested in comedy, so I took a writing class. After I took a couple of sketch classes I submitted for Maude and got on a Maude team. But that came after four or five years of constant improv.

LW: Did you have a moment in classes when you felt like you couldn’t stop?

BA: Yeah! I don’t know if I’d say a lot of moments, or just one extended moment. There was a long period where I would go to the theatre on Saturday and just see all the Saturday night shows. At that time it was Let’s Have A Ball, Reuben Williams, and something else. I don’t think Roo Roo was on Saturday nights yet. But I would see three hour-long improv shows in a row, and I’d also go to Harold Night and watch both halves.

I was also going to indie shows and performing with my teams. So there were probably weeks where I’d spend fifteen hours doing or watching improv. Which I think is a lot for something that doesn’t make money, and actually costs.

I took classes for a long time, and when I got to the advanced classes--501s they were called at the time--I just kept taking them, I just kept taking more 501s and advanced performance classes and workshops. I haven’t tried to count them in a long time, but off the top of my head, I’d say twenty-five classes and workshops. That might be ridiculous, but I think it’s accurate. It’s too much. It’s silly!

EO: What do you think caused your shift to sketch?

BA: In my head, I wasn’t shifting. I wasn’t like, I’m done with improv, now I’m a sketch person. It really was that for a long time I’d been going to so many shows and putting together indie shows outside of UCB, and I felt very involved in the community of the theatre, but I was not yet actually involved in the theatre itself in any way whatsoever. I’d never had a show go up, I’d never been put on a house team of any kind.

So there’s these concentric circles of involvement. Some people are just very casual, some people go to a lot of shows, some people go to a lot of shows but don’t take any classes at all--they just love coming to the theatre. And within that circle there’s people who take a lot of classes, and what you really want, if you’re super passionate about it, is to be a part of the theatre. And I was not a part of the theatre. I thought, well, if I start doing sketch, I’m maybe doubling my chances of being part of the theatre somehow.

I loved the sketch classes. I had Eric Scott for 101 and Caitlin Bitzegaio for 201. It was really fun, and I started thinking that this was something I could have just as much fun with as improv. So when I got on Onassis, I was super psyched about it. For a while, because I was having so much fun and I was so focused on Onassis, I didn’t forget about improv, but I didn’t mind as much that I wasn’t on a Harold team.

Onassis was a Maude team for I guess two and a half, almost three years. It was a team of six newish writers--none of us had been on Maude before--and six performers who were pretty veteran. All veteran performers of some kind, either Maude or Harold. I think almost all of them were on Harold Night or weekend teams. I’m saying six and six, but actually Frank Hejl was both a writer and performer.

I guess from the beginning we had a really easy time working with each other and getting along. And I think the writers felt a little nervous but also very complimented that we had been put on a team with these performers--people who’d been around for years! The theatre thought we were good enough to write for these performers. That was really cool.

So we tried our best to step up to the plate and work really hard. It just kept going, we just kept having a lot of fun together. We were really lucky to get Seth Reiss, who was a staff writer for the Onion at the time, and while he was directing us, he became the head writer of the Onion, which was really cool. He directed us for six months straight, which was a really formative period for us, and we got really close. I think we were able to find a voice as a team, which was cool.

We did the Friars Club Improv and Sketch Competition and we won. We did a short film. They give you five thousand dollars to make a short film, that’s what you have to do with it. So we made a short film that was actually more of a pilot a couple summers ago. That was really fun. And the team has continued to do web videos and festivals and stuff outside of the theatre. It’s still active.

LW: Was there a moment where you started to feel like you were included around UCB?

BA: Getting on Onassis was definitely big. I was a UCB writer. I could say that I was a member of a UCB house team, and that felt really good after so many years. And I could go to shows for free, which I was super excited about, though students could also go to shows for free too, so it’s not that big of a deal.

I guess that was it. There were others. I did feel like a part of the community because I co-hosted some shows that kind of had a good audience, and made a website, improvteams.com, that people were using a lot. So I felt like I was part of the community at a gradual level. But I guess getting on a Maude team felt like, now I am UCB. As opposed to just a crazy person who’s there all the time. Stalking an entire theatre.

LW: What was your first indie team?

BA: Technically I was on a short-lived team, but we only did one show so I don’t really count that. So my first team was We Can’t Live In A Cave with Dan Chamberlain, Brandon Scott Jones, and five other guys who are really cool and I like a lot, but they don’t do anything anymore.

We hosted our own show at The Creek in Long Island City and it was a lot of fun. It was all guys and it was all very raucous and loose. We didn’t always put on good shows, but we had fun. It was a good experience. We had John Frusciante as a coach for a long time, and we did shows pretty regularly for two years, which I think is a long time for an indie team to be active.

LW: This was the team Dan was telling us about--that didn’t perform for a year?

BA: Oh yeah, when we first started practicing--this was so stupid--we didn’t feel ready to perform for some reason. I guess some of us were at different levels of classes. Some of us had gone through the whole core curriculum, and some had only taken to 201 or 301 I guess. We had not done much performing.

Some of us were like, “When are we going to do our first show? When are we going to do a show?!” And I don’t know if this still happens or not, but it was insane that we were not performing as soon as we were practicing, I think. If you’re practicing in a room where nobody can see you, you’re practicing part of it, but you’re not practicing the whole thing, because once you get out onstage it’s going to be different. There’s a lot more going on than just what you’re doing in that room.

So we finally did a show--Thank You, Robot had asked us to do their first or second anniversary show. So they invited an older team, and a brand new team. We performed at Under St. Marks and it was great. Or at least we thought it was. I’m sure it was a good show, but in our minds it was like, “I can’t believe it! We did it and it was perfect! We did a perfect show, guys! We should have been doing this all along!” It wasn’t perfect. It was just a fun show and we realized we should have been doing this the whole time. It’s ridiculous.

LW: I understand that--not wanting to do shows.

BA: It’s terrifying! It’s really scary!

LW: I also feel like it’s maybe a little harder right now to break into the indie scene?

BA: Is it?

EO: I think so.

BA: The ratio of teams to stages is probably higher now than it was a few years ago, but there’s also always new stages, or new stages are being discovered by the community. A few years ago, nobody was doing shows at the Creek, then Derrick started doing shows there. It existed for who knows how long, then someone found it and everybody was like, “We can do shows here...for free? And you have a bar downstairs and a restaurant upstairs?! Okay, cool!”

Then everybody had a weekly or monthly show at the Creek. Then someone discovers the Broadway Theatre, or the Players Theatre. But I’m sure that a lot of those places are pretty saturated at this point.

There was a period where a lot of people were doing shows at the Creek and it became a shorthand or euphemism for a shitty show that you don’t care much about, and you’re just fucking around. People would say “You know, if you’re doing a Creek show...”

We would say that because it felt like it was so easy and people were not coming out. There would just be a few people in the audience, mostly just the teams. And so it kinda felt like, “Why are we even doing this? Well, if we are gonna do it, let’s just have fun.” And our teachers are not here, the artistic director’s not here. Nobody’s gonna know about this show except for us, so we can just do a bad show.

In a way, that was really frustrating because there were so many bad shows. But in another way, it was very liberating and rewarding to do bad improv. To not even worry about it. Nobody’s going to see it, nobody’s going to care. Your mentors, or the people you look up to who have been doing this a little longer than you--they’re not coming out either. It’s just the newbies doing a show for each other and you can start to feel really loose and feel less self-conscious. So I think actually, there’s a lot of value in those shows.

There were also a lot of teams that I felt very positively toward and thought, that’s a good team, they do good work. They’re coming into it with the intention of putting on a really good show for the people who are there. They’re appreciative. Also just manners and politeness are a big part of even hosting shows: introducing yourself to people you don’t know, thanking them for having you, staying for the whole show. If you don’t have time to get a drink afterwards, make sure you say bye. That sort of stuff--you start to get a feel for who you respect, I guess.

There’s a really frustrating period where everybody wants to perform, but nobody wants to watch other teams, because everybody thinks, “most improv teams are not very good, but I want to do a show and I need people to come to this show.” It’s a really weird space. Some people are very lucky because they have friends or family in the city who are not improv people but they’ll come to a lot of their shows. And other times, you’re like, “I don’t know who’s going to come to my show other than the teams that are performing in it.” So they’ll just book a lot of teams. Five teams will perform on the show--that’s enough people to watch each other, right?

My girlfriend and I hosted a show called “Dinner with Benjonica” (because my name is Benjamin and her name is Veronica), and we booked--I think--Dan Chamberlain and Sarah Claspell to sing a song together. We had someone else doing improv, and we were going to do improv. And what happened was literally no audience came at all. I think it was the winter and we had not promoted it very well. It was at The Creek. And nobody came at all. We just did the show anyway. Maybe there was one guy.

There’s really nothing worse than bad improv, because when it’s great there’s nothing better but when it’s bad it’s so disgustingly hard to watch.

I don’t know if this is true but, you can’t really be a bad pilot. Because you’ve spent so much time learning it and practicing it before you actually do it, that by the time you’re flying an airplane--it’s not like people crash airplanes on their first time. They’re doing it in a very controlled way, they’ve got a person there helping them do it. I feel the same way about anything that is very technical, like a doctor and stuff like that.

But then there’s stuff like improv and music. When you start doing it, you’re already doing it. When you first start playing the guitar, you’re playing the guitar. Technically speaking, you’re doing exactly what Jimi Hendrix did. It’s just you are very, very bad at it, and you will stay bad at it for a long time and you’re going to have to listen to yourself being bad at it, and endure your own lack of skill until you start very slowly recognizing that you’re getting better at it. That stuff is super hard because you’re pushing yourself through it constantly.

But you know exactly what great improv looks like, because you saw it. When you start playing the guitar, you’ll hear Jimi Hendrix and think, “he’s using what I’m using--same instrument, but I can only do this.” So, it’s aggravating for a long time.

LW: People make it look so simple, too! You’ll watch the Stepfathers and it’s like--ugh.

BA: It doesn’t look like they’re doing what you’re doing. ‘Cause in the moment you’re like, “Oh what’s wrong with this scene?” You’re stopping and thinking, you’re looking at the map. You’re constantly referencing a map and then looking back at the road.

You’ll watch the Stepfathers or Roo Roo or any of the weekend teams and they somehow seem to know where they’re going already. I know that they don’t, because I know they’ve never been there, I know they’re making it up just like I make it up, but they make it look like they’ve been there before. It’s super cool.

EO: When did you first get on Harold Night?

BA: It was the fall of 2011. It was closed auditions. I got put on Deckard. Deckard existed for six months and was dismantled in the next shakeup. Then I was on Bucky for three months, then I left because I got a writing job. So I was on for nine months. I had that job for a year, writing for Fallon, and when I found out my contract was up in September I was like, “maybe I can get back on Harold Night. I’m gonna try.” Fortunately, I was able to get back on. Super excited about it.

LW: Yeah! We saw your first show with the Regulars.

BA: I found out that day! I was so nervous. I had no time to process it, I had no time to think about it. I didn’t think that I was going to be going to Harold Night that night, much less performing in it. I found out at like three o’clock.

I did John and Will’s UCB podcast at three o’clock. I showed up and we were getting ready to record, and Nate came in and saw us, said hi. Then he was on his phone for a second, and he had showed me his phone, and he had written an iPhone note that said “do you want to be on the Regulars?”

I went, “...Oh yeah!” He said, “Okay, cool” and just started to walk away and I asked, “So is that like official?” and he said, “Yeah.” I was like, “...Thanks!”

John and Will both saw the whole thing, but didn’t know what happened. I told them he just put me on the Regulars. So we did the podcast, I had my phone away, and when we finished the podcast, I looked at my phone and the Regulars were like, “Welcome, Benjamin! We’re having practice right now! Come practice!” So I went and joined their practice--in progress--at Champions, then we went right from practice to the theatre to perform.

They’re a great team. We’re a great team!

EO: I can’t believe you found out at three o’clock. That’s so stressful.

BA: It was really quick. And people didn’t know. My friends were standing in the back of the theatre, and when we came out, they were like, “Benjamin, what’s going on?” Someone said, “That Benjamin, he really keeps secrets, doesn’t he?” No! I didn’t know! I hadn’t been hiding it!

LW: I know you’ve only been back for a little while, but how is it?

BA: It feels great. It feels weird! Because of the way the two teams I was on were formed, I’ve never been the new person on a team. I’ve just been part of a team that was completely new, or a shakeup. So this is my first experience replacing somebody else and joining a team that already has a dynamic in place. They’re used to each other, they’re familiar with each other, and you just have to jump into that dance and try to figure it out. So that’s an exciting challenge.

I already thought that the team was great, and I actually thought that if I was going to be on an existing Harold team, I’d be really happy if I got on the Regulars. So I felt super lucky about that. I’m nervous to perform because I feel a little rusty. I just haven’t had a lot of time to perform over the last year. So getting back at it is super exciting to me. I love being on that stage.

But there’s also that pressure of “Don’t fuck it up, this team is really good, they’re getting the bow slot pretty consistently, you’re replacing Phil Jackson who is amazing and a fantastic performer and everybody loves him, rightfully so. So like, be good.” On a brand new team you wonder how it’s going to be, but when you’re joining a team, the team is already good, so it better still be good with you. But when you’re onstage you don’t actually think about that, you just try to be in the moment and have fun, like any other show. And I’m having fun.

LW: And you do Sketch Cram!

BA: Yeah! Matt Klinman organized that. It existed already, Gethard and Charlie Sanders started it a few years ago and it went away. Somebody else started doing it in LA, and when Klinman spent a year in LA, he discovered it out there. So when he moved back to New York, he wanted to start it up here again. Klinman is not the inventor of it, but he is the proprietor of this incarnation.

He asked if I wanted to help out by doing a video, and then we kept doing it. The people we asked to do the first one just kept doing it, so we just became the Sketch Cram guys. We’ve been doing it for a little over two years now. It’s super fun.

The guys that do it have actually decided to do something else, we decided to shoot a video special, kind of a pilot but not actually a pilot-pilot. Kind of like the Onassis thing. So we decided, let’s have a name for ourselves and be a group of people instead of just “the five guys who do the Sketch Cram show.” So we named ourselves Whale Thief. I don’t think people even know that, because we haven’t done anything with that name yet. So we’re Whale Thief, and we like each other a lot.

LW: Is there anything that would make you stop hanging around UCB?

BA: No, I don’t think so. If anything drastic ever happened where UCB was now owned by some company and all these bad changes started coming down the chain of command. Something really drastic, Wayne’s World style--we’re changing everything!

The kind of steady progression of people coming up through the theatre and then eventually having so many opportunities that they don’t have enough time to be at the theatre, or they move to LA, or whatever the case may be: it’s pretty steady. The people right now that we consider the “heads” of the theatre--officially or unofficially--were not a few years ago. And a few years ago those people were not.

I feel like the UCB4 created a place with a great energy. They picked the right people to start off with, or maybe they didn’t pick them, maybe the right people found them. But they started a really good thing that feels self-sustaining to me. I know that the theatre is getting bigger, and the training center is getting bigger, but it doesn’t feel, to me, different than it does when I started.

I think throughout all of life, across the board, people tend to think things are changing a little more than they actually are changing because they themselves are moving through it. They are navigating and maneuvering through their own life. So UCB has changed in relation to them, because they changed in relation to UCB.

Shannon O’Neill just Instagrammed a picture of the ASSSSCAT line. It was raining or snowing, it was really shitty out, and they had duct-taped a plastic tarp to the wall and draped it over the divider so they could stay a little dry and get into the free show to see Shannon and Gethard and the greatest improvisers at the theatre perform. And seeing that really brought me back, because I would wait in that line in the dead of winter, until I couldn’t feel my feet, to see that show. Even though I knew that I could spend the ten dollars or whatever, it was like a ritual that I had with my friend--the same friend who told me about UCB at that hostel. We stayed friends, we were UCB buddies. And we would go to ASSSSCAT every Sunday, no matter what the weather was.

Seeing that picture reminded me that yeah, I’m not doing that now, but there’s still new people doing that. It still has that exciting “new crazy awesome thing in my life and I need more of it” effect on people. So I’m not concerned. I think that UCB is in a great place.

LW: How do you explain it to people outside the community?

BA: UCB I would just call a comedy theatre and if they don’t have any questions I wouldn’t explain. But improv, I did have to explain to my movers recently.

I said improv was like a play, or like an SNL “skit.” I used the word “skit” with them because even though we say “sketch,” I know that most people say “skit.” I was trying to use the common vernacular.

It’s like an SNL “skit” but it hasn’t been written, they’re making it up as they go along. They get a suggestion from the audience to inspire something. And then they just start talking to the other person as if it’s a written scene in a play--but it’s not! They’re actually making it up. It’s very hard to do well, and sometimes it’s not funny, but when you get really good at it, it’s funny.

LW: Do you feel like you can explain the obsession?

BA: I guess you can explain it as well as you can explain anything that you haven’t experienced on your own. Some people are all about their cats? And they just love it, and they love talking about that. Or some people are all about their babies! I imagine, yeah, if I had a baby I would probably be all about it. I don’t, so I’m not, but I get that there are people who like that thing a lot.

So I feel like if I explain, “yeah it’s really addictive, because when you see it and it’s great you want to do it but it’s really hard!” People are probably like, “yeah, that’s a thing that you’re into!” But nobody’s going to understand it unless you see a really good improv show. If you see a hilarious show, you will be--if you’re a normal person with a healthy mind--you will be fascinated by it. I think.

Just like anybody would be fascinated with seeing a virtuoso violin performer. You see it, and you realize what is going on is incredible. But without having seen that, it’s really hard to get across how cool it is.

LW: Who did you look up to when you started?

BA: Roo Roo was a big one as a team. Neil was probably my favorite performer for a long time. He kind of is still. There are a lot of people who, for a few weeks, you only think of that person and you want to see all their shows. And then you move onto someone else but that person is still on your list of favorites.

Anthony King, the previous artistic director, he was someone I really analyzed. I don’t think it was just because he was the artistic director, also because I felt like he had a really good understanding of the mechanics of improv. So I would watch him and analyze and think, “why did he make that move?”

And then Reuben Williams was a weekend team--they changed a lot, but the people who were still there are now the Curfew. Most of the people from Reuben Williams moved to LA. That was another favorite team. Joe Wengert was on that team! Some friends and I sort of had a little Joe Wengert cult. When anybody’s really good, everybody knows it and everybody likes it. But my friends and I talked about Joe Wengert a lot, and got him to coach us whenever we could, and that sort of thing.

It’s weird when you really look up to somebody and you kind of idolize them and then a couple years later you realize, “Oh wait, I’m on a Harold team now? I’m coaching an early group?” You realize that you are in the shoes of someone that you previously thought was awesome and could do no wrong. Then you realize, no, it’s still hard. Based on that new knowledge, I bet that the next level is also hard in its own way. At a certain point you break through and you realize you don’t need to idolize people, or feel different from the people who are ahead of you or behind you because it’s really the same exact thing.

But for a while, I didn’t want to talk to the people who were really good because I was afraid of talking to them because I thought I hadn’t earned the right. I didn’t go to McManus for a long time because I felt “I’m not UCB yet! I’m not that good at it yet!” It was like the inner sanctum, the holy of holies. And then after a while I got over that and I feel normal. A person who is surrounded by other people who are doing the same thing.

LW: What do you think got you over that?

BA: It’s just a long process. A long series of small discoveries and experiences and successes and failures. And when I was really eager and really wanted to be better--we were talking about Jimi Hendrix--you see it, it seems easy, you want to do it, but you can’t do it. I was very frustrated and I would ask teachers about it, almost like I was asking teachers, “What’s the secret, what am I missing? Why can’t I do what I see you guys doing?” And I was consistently told that it’s just reps. You just have to keep doing it. And I didn’t want to accept that answer! I was willing to put in the reps, but I was like, really? I have to do it for three years? Isn’t there something you could tell me so I’d be great at it right now?

Now looking back, it doesn’t seem like that long, because I’d spent so much time doing it that time flies. Then you realize, “I’ve been here for five years! When I first started, Will Hines had been here for five years!” Someone that you think has been around forever, you realize, wait, I’ve been around that long. So I guess they were not around forever--just a few years doing something. Over a long period of time you realize it’s getting easier and you’re getting better at it. And you’re having more fun too.

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So we went, and they didn’t have a website. One of the students was listing shows on his personal website, so I went to his website, and saw like, there’s a show, ASSSSCAT, that’s the only show the UCB themselves actually do, so I went to that. I wasn’t good enough friends with the people in my improv classes to go with them so I went by myself. I saw ASSSSCAT and it was really funny, and then I went to a Harold Night ‘cause it was just convenient for me to go.

Even though ASSSSCAT was way funnier, Harold Night was more intriguing to me. The students were really young, and it was more artsy and weird, and it just seemed cooler. I just kind of said, “this seems more fun than what’s happening at Chicago City Limits, I’m gonna maybe take a class here.”

Then I started going to shows at Solo Arts maybe once a month for fun. And what really happened was that I was dating a girl who lived in New Haven, so I would travel out and see her every weekend. Then we broke up and both to get over her emotionally and also because I had all this time, I took a class at UCB. At that time their classes were only on the weekends, Saturday and Sunday, so I couldn’t take a class while I was going to New Haven. But once this girl broke up with me, I was twenty-nine years old, I was like, well, I don’t really know anybody in New York, and I’m bored, so I’ll take this class. And then I really liked it.

I had trouble penetrating social circles in the city. I didn’t have an established group. So I had nothing but time when I took that improv class in November of ’99. And I had done just enough stuff that I wasn’t scared of it. I’d done a couple classes at Chicago City Limits, and I’d tried to do open mics for a while. I don’t know why I did that. I was in this place where I didn’t have ambitions to be a professional comedian but I just didn’t know how else to relate to people than to try to be funny. So I would just go to standup because I thought it would be fun. It was too scary to think about doing anything beyond an open mic. And I was not good at it, and I was terrified of the standups and didn’t like them.

But that meant when I took this class at UCB in November I was not scared of an improv class. I knew my way around an improv class. So I was more confident than a lot of the people and most of the rest of them were just early-20s kids just out of NYU, but we all hung out. I was really good friends with them.

Brian Berrebbi was in that class. Mitch Magee. Jake Fogelnest. Rob Lathan. John Gemberling--at the time, he was nineteen. We all became friends. It was really fun.

LW: What kind of shows were you seeing around that time?

WH: Harold Night every week, which was very much like it is now, just not as good. I watched every show at the UCB, which was not hard to do at that time. There were no shows Monday nights, Tuesday nights were student shows only, Sunday was ASSSSCAT. There were like, six shows running at UCB and you could watch them all, no problem.

There was a show called Immortal Kombat, in which two teams of Harold team people would dress up as superheroes and do improv where they were each given only one job to do. Like Judge Justify could only justify, and Doctor Who was in charge of the who, and there was the Master of Where. And then there was Editor, the only person who could edit. That was Owen Burke, who was on Respecto Montalban, but Respecto didn’t exist yet--he was on a team called Corndog Alright. He wore an all black latex suit with a Styrofoam X on his head and he would scream “editor!” and edit the scenes. I guess this was a famously bad show? But like, I went to see it and I thought it was great and I thought it was super fun and funny and kind of cool to have everybody broken up in that way.

That would happen, or Robot TV, which was improv by robots, for robots, in which a bunch of people would be dressed up as robots and they’d be super concerned with oil, and they worshipped Martin Landau very arbitrarily. Half of them would sit in the audience and clap and the other half would be on stage doing it. I hated Robot TV. I loved Immortal Kombat. Robot TV really annoyed me! I was like this is the biggest inside joke. It looks fun to do, but is not fun to watch. But some people loved it. Some people of that time defend Robot TV till this day. Which is dumb. I am here to say that Robot TV was a dumb show.

That’s on the record. It was Matt Walsh’s show. Matt Walsh is a genius, but that show was dumb. But till this day there are people who are mad that Robot TV is not in DCM. Which is ridiculous.

We were mostly concerned with Harold Night and ASSSSCAT, and I kind of loved Feature Feature also. Those were the shows we were watching. 

We’d also practice once a week. I was just so happy to have people that I liked talking to that I didn’t care where it was going. I definitely didn’t have the confidence in myself to think I’d ever be on a Harold team because I was very stiff, and I had no acting experience, and I felt very self-conscious. I was seven years older than most of the people I was hanging out with and I was very self-conscious about that. Plus I was just like, a corporate dude: tucked in button down shirts and khakis. And I was hanging out with people like Gemberling and Brett Gelman and Brian Berrebbi and they were younger, aggressively funny bohemians who had already accepted that they’d never work in an office. So I felt very “dad” around them and correspondingly not cool and not funny.

My ambitions were really just to not be so stiff. I was like, if I could just do improv and not feel boring, that would be an amazing life change for me. That was all I focused on.

What I didn’t know is that these people are just funnier than most humans. But they just happened to be in my level one and level two classes, so I just thought they were normal people.

So my goal was just, how can I loosen up more? How can I not plan ahead? How are they thinking of things in the moment? Definitely something I wasn’t able to do. So just the very fundamentals of standing onstage and feeling interesting and having an idea--those were my goals. Which were both way smaller than any career goals, but also way more fundamentally important.

I was looking to change the way I thought about things. I was open to a spiritual makeover via an improv stage. That’s what I was looking for. I took the notes very seriously, as indictments of my shortcomings as a person, but also as missions to improve. But it wasn’t about being funny. I just wanted to satisfy the “improv gods.” I felt like the audience would laugh at me if I was really being present.

So I focused on that for a year. Those nights doing improv with those guys in practice, I would talk about it with them! I would ask John, how are you doing it?! But those guys liked me. They told me I was funny. It was hugely validating that they wanted to do stuff. I took that as a sign that I was doing something right.

That was a really fun time though. It really filled up my head in a fun way. I was very grateful for it.

LW: Did you have a moment when you felt like you couldn’t stop being around the theatre and doing improv?

WH: Pretty soon after taking classes I felt like I was at least in a phase where I was at least gonna do it all the time for a while. I figured there would be an endpoint--which it turns out, there wasn’t. But I thought it would be like, three years down the road. But I’d at least do this for a couple of years.

Early though. I would say by the time I was in the middle of level two. I was like, I’m gonna do this all the time for the next couple years. I had nothing else going on, which was part of the reason. And I assumed it would lead to something? I didn’t know what. I figured the next thing will present itself.

But I do have a couple specific breakthroughs I remember in these early days. One was: John Bowie was coaching my practice group and had us do seven minute scenes and I just gave up in minute one and sat down and refused to talk for the rest of the scene because it was going so badly. Stubborn silence. And he made the scene continue the whole time...It was a weirdly petulant move.

Mitch Magee was--still is--one of my best friends. He was in that practice group with me and was like, “You’ve been doing that a lot lately. You quit. You quit on a scene.” And it really affected me. It made me very aware that my own fear of doing it was manifesting itself as characters who quit. I felt really embarrassed and made a conscious decision--I wrote it down in a note to myself--that I would never quit improv until they kicked me out, so that I would never entertain the notion of quitting at any level. They had to take the option away from me. Really, I was thinking short-term, that it would just help me learn better.

But it had a profound effect. In times when I’d be like, “I’m no good at this, I should stop, I’m holding up my Harold team, I’m the worst person on this team, I’m the worst person in this class, they would be having a better time if I didn’t show up,” I’d be like, “No, you’re not allowed. They have to tell you that. Till they kick you out, you can’t quit.”

And then I had another breakthrough was when I got put on Harold Night. I was put on a team that was the worst team at the theatre. And then my practice group called Monkeydick was made a Harold team. That team name really haunted us.

EO: How so?

WH: ‘Cause it’s an obscenity, and also it sounds like a real young dude’s joke. It’s got the word “dick” in it, and we were an all-guy team. The audience would hate us, always, right away.

And really the team was not so in-favor of the name. I thought that term was really funny. One of the members of our team, Mitch Magee, when we were a practice group, went through a phase of using the word “monkeydick” in his characters when he’d run out of things to say? And it was really juvenile and dumb and he meant it as a sign that he was lost in the scene. Even he didn’t think it was that funny. But it made me giggle so much. ‘Cause Mitch Magee is a real dandy, arty guy and for him to say such a crude term really made me laugh. So when our coach said, “I need a name for you guys,” I’m the one who said, “Monkeydick is our name!”

They all hated it, and then when we got made a team we wanted to change the name but we fought so much over what our name might be that we just stayed Monkeydick. When Curtis Gwinn and Matt DeCoster were added, they were like, we gotta change the name. We had a huge fight about it. We agreed on Call of the Wolf, the runner-up was Screaming for Screams, which was a Gemberling suggestion. But we settled on Call of the Wolf and I was like, fine. I think “The Finger” was another one we were talking about but I was like, I don’t want to go from “dick” to “The Finger.” Can we be a non-asshole name?!

Then when we announced we were Call of the Wolf, the audience hugely booed us. We asked for a suggestion, they yelled, “MONKEYDICK!” We did a show in which every female character was named Janice? The first scene had somebody named Janice, the second one had somebody named Janice, which was an accident and we all laughed. And the third scene, Gemberling initiated as the two-headed Roman god Janus. So we switched our name to Janice for like, a year. But no one called us Janice, everyone called us Monkeydick and after a while we started calling ourselves Monkeydick again.

We were sort of stuck with it. We couldn’t shake it. It was my fault initially, but I was willing to change it at any time. We just couldn’t agree on anything. Delaney eventually told us, “You guys are just Monkeydick, I don’t know why. That’s who you are. You should just accept it.” So we kept it.

We were a better team than that name would imply though, I think. We were not as assholes as it would imply. I mean, sometimes we were. We were an all-guy team. There was a certain aggressive, proud-of-dudeness dudeness that happens. But that wasn’t where we lived. We were more like what Roo Roo eventually was: obsessed with sci-fi and nerdom in a non-aggressive way. That was more true to our team’s spirit.

That team was bad at first. We were a great practice group and we had a great Cage Match run, but then we were a bad Harold team. We wouldn’t take notes, we weren’t good at openings, we were the worst team on Harold Night for the whole first year.

In the midst of that I felt very self-conscious and I had another breakthrough, which was because I took a monologue study class from a former improv teacher of mine who taught at Chicago City Limits. He was running his own workshops and I wanted to be a better actor. It was really terrifying for me to stand in front of a group of people and deliver a dramatic monologue. He was a really nice teacher and he gave me very practical notes. And I don’t know if I became a better actor so much, but I became more impressed with my own bravery just for doing this class. And that affected my Harold Night play.

Oh and I stopped going to the warmups. I was so mad at the team--nobody even noticed this--but I stopped showing up for warmups. I would show up two minutes before the show and do the show. I was like, “fuck these guys, I don’t even want to warm up with them!” I don’t remember why I was so mad at them.

But I started doing better. We won Cage Match for three or four weeks in a row.This was December of 2001. And we added a couple of people. I thought the team was going to get cut, and instead they changed our lineup and that made me feel like, “Oh my god, we’re saved! We were spared the scythe!” and it made me newly committed to the team, and I did get better.

And then a third breakthrough: Kevin Mullaney, the artistic director at the time, taught an advanced class, which was very inspired by Meisner. He had taken some sort of Meisner-ish class in Chicago and was trying to use Meisner-y exercises. He did an advanced class that was all repetition, and using blank dialogue acting stuff.

A lot of the class hated it, because we weren’t doing Harolds or scenes, we were doing real act-y bullshit, but I dug it, and it had a huge affect on me. After that I felt legit good on Harold Night. Not super powerful, but my goal of being able to stand and feel confident and have an idea was met. I felt like I could run with anybody. I didn’t feel like I could necessarily be funny, or have a good idea for a game, but I felt like I was in the show as it was happening. I felt really good. That took like, two years of being on Harold Night before that happened.

It was a real slow build for me to become a performer where I felt like I was any good. I think before anybody thought I was good. I was lucky to be put on a team. And it was only because I was on a team with really big personalities that I survived those first couple cuts. My main skill was being able to play with the weirdest people on Harold Night.

EO: Who would you consider “the weirdest people?”

WH: Everybody on my team. John Gemberling, although a super talented man, was very strange and broke every rule of improv every time he stepped into a scene.

Curtis Gwinn, also one of the most talented performers, would willfully deny you if he thought you were being boring. In a way, that made the show better, but it was really hard to play with, and at that time when he was younger--and he would admit this--he was crazy. We didn’t know if he would show up to practice or the shows. He would just get bored, but he was so charismatic and good that he invariably made the shows better.

Matt DeCoster was sort of a lawyer-slash-trapeze artist-slash a very stilted man who spoke in a very severe, monotone voice, and worked out like crazy, and walked like a robot, and people were scared of him. But he was a really good improviser. Ian Roberts had him in a class and loved him and said he should be on Harold Night, so he was put on Monkeydick even though he was a really weird guy that unnerved people. In one scene, his character injected testosterone into his own arm and started lifting and throwing us around the stage. And you had to just be cool with that.

Rob Lathan, who was a very funny southern guy who sounded really dumb every time he opened his mouth. Like, spoke really slowly. He would not be insulted by that description. His nickname in college was Forrest Gump because he sounded slow. Not like he had a speech impediment, more that there’d be a long pause and he’d be like, “uhh... yeah!” He was a hilarious man--a legit, super smart, funny guy. Everyone who’d worked with him really respected him. For real. But onstage, he functioned like a dumb guy a lot of times. Definitely the funniest, most gut-busting scenes on Monkeydick were Rob Lathan’s scenes.

And then Mitch Magee, still one of my best friends, he was this painter? Mitch was very strange and particular and would do weird rap songs in the middle of scenes. And name himself strangely particular names, talk about atonal music, do these really horrific sexual specifics.

I remember somebody initiated to him, “Hey, look at that, we’re on the corner of ‘Blow’ and ‘Job’ Streets.” And he’s like, “That doesn’t bother me. I live on ‘Ghastly Anal Sex Lane.’” That was the first two lines of one of our Harolds!

My ability was to survive in that environment. I wasn’t doing anything so striking, but I was the straight-man of the time. I was the Marilyn of the Munsters. I looked like the normal person--the only person trying to obey the improv rules on a team of insane people. That is true. I actually wasn’t that strong an improviser, but next to those guys I looked like the only guy who had taken a class. I think I got hired as a teacher mostly because it’s like, “well, if you’re obeying the rules on that team, you must be good at the improv rules.”

But it was really fun. They were infuriating. But it was a really good place to learn not to get caught up in the rules, just to follow the moment. It was a good learning experience.

LW: How long were you with Monkeydick?

WH: Five years.

EO: That’s unheard of.

WH: Maybe it was four. February 2001 we got made a team, and September 2005 we got broken up. So maybe more like four.

EO: What Harold teams were you on after that?

WH: Monkeydick got broken up and was replaced with Roo Roo, which was half of Monkeydick. So essentially half of us got cut. But that didn’t anger me so much because we had been together for so long, and Roo Roo, which was an established indie team, was so much better. I thought it was a natural evolution.

There was a little bit of a sting to have not been brought along to Roo Roo, but I got it. Like if you’re in a marriage and you’re getting divorced, you’re not psyched to get divorced but maybe you see that the marriage is bad, and you see that this is better.

And then the Harold team Arsenal asked for me. I was really excited. They had been one of the best teams on Harold Night, but by the time I was added they were no longer one of the best teams on Harold Night, and we were terrible. I was only on that for six months. We buried that team. I felt like I should be better, but I weirdly couldn’t function with normal people. I wasn’t used to being yes-anded, I didn’t know how to work when people listen. I didn’t have any actual ideas--my only way of playing on Monkeydick was completely from a defensive posture. You do something weird, and then I’ll react to it. But if nobody was doing anything weird, I had nothing to say and I wasn’t good on Arsenal.

I thought, well, this’ll probably be it, I’ve been on Harold Night for four years, this was a good run. It’s time for me to get a job! But instead, I got put on 1985, which was a Harold team that Anthony King, the artistic director, put together. I don’t know what he was thinking, but it seemed to be all these smarty-pants know-it-all improv nerds. It was really fun. Definitely the smartest team I’d ever been on. Everybody understood everything and had done so much improv that there was nothing you could do that people hadn’t tried. It was a really experienced team. And it was really fun. Probably the most joy I’ve ever had was being on ’85. It was a very giggly, fun team.

And I thought that would be it, but then the Stepfathers asked for me, so I was pulled off Harold Night in October of 2007. I’ve been on the Stepfathers ever since. I didn’t really think that would ever happen.

LW: What was it like making that switch from Harold Night to the weekend?

WH: It was really thrilling and exciting. It was harder than I’d expected. I think that took a year to get used to. It was easier than going from Monkeydick to Arsenal, because ’85 had been a very responsible and good team so I was now more accustomed to actually having to say things that would have an impact on the show.

But it was really intimidating because Michael Delaney was on the team, and he had been my teacher. I didn’t really know him too well, and he was probably my favorite improviser. Still is, really. So I was very nervous to be on a team with him. He’s also famously fussy and so I knew that I would let him down, that I wouldn’t be good in scenes with him and I had to kind of get over that. I’d already learned if you’re not bold it was worse. Better to fail boldly. You have to make moves--you’re hurting the team more if you’re not doing anything. I knew that even though I really looked up to Delaney, I couldn’t worry about pleasing him.

But Chris Gethard was on the team and I was friends with him, and Shannon O’Neill got placed at the same time as me, and Shannon and I had progressed at the same time. And Silvija Ozols was on the team, and she and I had been on the same indie team--I’d known her for years. So I had allies. Bobby Moynihan was on the team, and he was a very nice person. And Zach Woods was nice. But the hard part of that team was that they were so good. Like, Moynihan and Zach and Gethard, and Delaney were all such heavy-hitters that I was like what am I doing here?! I have nothing to add.

But I sort of did feel better. You know what I really thought? “I wouldn’t have picked me. I don’t know why Jon Gabrus isn’t on this team, or Gavin Speiller. But if you’re gonna pick me, I’ll do what I got.” And I felt more confident than I had previous times. I didn’t think that I was the best, but I thought I was good enough to play.

It was adjusting to two things: the Stepfathers were all teachers and very opinionated, so you had to deal with everybody’s opinion about what “good improv” was. And that the weekend audiences are different than Harold Night audiences. They want it to make more literal sense--there can’t be any big jumps. Everything needs to follow very obviously. And it’s got to pay off soon. They need a laugh very early, so they know why they’re watching.

Weekend audiences want it to make sense in a way. They’re also more happy with simple choices. Very simple relationship scenes make them laugh. A deadbeat dad or a grouchy housewife goes a long way with the weekend crowd. They don’t need it to be much more than that. But on Harold Night I think that would feel too boring. You’d have to go bigger.

So some of that was an adjustment. It was really fun though. I was glad that Shannon was added at the same time. We could kind of commiserate about the weirdness. She was on fwand, I was on ’85--they were sort of like the two kings of Harold Night--and we were both big parts of it, and to be removed from a comfortable warm bath into the icy judgment of the Stepfathers was difficult at first. But also exciting! We figured it out.

I do think the Stepfathers were bad there for a while. They had been the kings of the theatre and then when Shannon and I got added it was a big adjustment for that group mind. I think it definitely took a dip when we were adjusting. But we got better, in a different way.

LW: When did you first start feeling included in the community?

WH: I guess when Monkeydick wasn’t cut, and we got our lineup changed. When I became a teacher. That was the first time where I felt like, “well I guess I’m good.” That was fall of 2004, I got made a sub.

That was a big vote of confidence. I felt much more confident as a teacher than I did as a performer. I really loved the classes, and what I was taught, so I felt very impassioned about those early classes I taught. I was like, I remember how good level one was for me. I can make that happen.

I guess when people I thought were really good started asking me to do stuff--that made me feel included.

Then Kevin Mullaney, when he was artistic director, decided he wanted to try to take over Williamsburg. This was in the December of 2002 I think. And he grabbed anybody who was on a Harold team but also lived in Williamsburg. He made a team called Team Brooklyn and we did shows at Galapagos--which is a bar that is now Public Assembly. Tuesday nights. Three of the Harold teams would come out and the fourth would be Team Brooklyn. We had a blast! I thought, well, I guess I’m one of the good people now?

So I guess playing with good people and being asked to be a teacher. That was like four years after being on Harold Night that I felt like, oh, I guess I am part of this.

Also Rob Lathan and I started doing a show at Under St. Marks called The Osgood-Schlatter Show where either each one of us would do a sketch, or we’d write one together, and we’d invite people to do character bits and stuff, just enough to fill up the house. We did it a lot. That made me feel very confident. Like, outside of the UCB Theatre I’m stepping out and doing something that’s holding together. That made me feel like I was legit.

LW: Is this something you feel like you can explain to people outside of the UCB community?

WH: No. I’ve given up. I feel like people like it or they don’t. I saw Harold Night and I right away liked it. It definitely looked weird, and it wasn’t always funny, and it looked amateurish in a lot of ways? But there was something at its core that felt very cool and real to me right away. I didn’t know what a Harold structure was. It looked like a cool show. No one had to sell me on it. I feel like people are one way or the other like that right away.

I used to be really fussy, if people wanted to see UCB I used to recommend like ASSSSCAT or something that was more accessible, but nope, if you wanna see it, go to Harold Night and you’ll like it or you won’t right away. I wouldn't even say it’s the most reliably successful show in terms of being able to win people over, but you’ll either hear the calling, or you won’t.

LW: I find that it’s very hard to explain the culture of it. No one really understands that this is what you do all the time.

WH: Yeah, that part’s hard to explain. I think that for certain people it’s not just a way to be funny, it’s a way to think about the world. It is a spiritual philosophy and so it feels much deeper and more important than, “how funny was a show?” That’s part of it. So it’s a grander, more substantive thing for some people.

It’s more like a really particular university, I think, than a theatre. I think of it more as a school than a theatre.

EO: That makes a lot more sense.

WH: It is a school that we all went to. People of different ages and places in their life study together a very particular philosophy and it connects with them in a spiritual way. These are your fellow students more than fellow performers. The performing is incidental, I think. Or just one of the things you do.

I definitely made friendships just as strong with people I took classes with as much as I performed with. And really the practice sessions with coaches are the most affecting experiences I had. They changed me more than stuff I did onstage. The act of going to a weird practice space at an inhospitable time with a hungover coach and handing them money and doing a sound and movement exercise that feels weird is an act of humbleness and openness that changes you. Whatever it takes in you to be willing to do that means you have made a choice to become a different person. I think that was much more profound than getting onstage with the Stepfathers and trying to say something funny, for sure.

I believe that anybody who is on an improv team at a longform theatre--I know that at some point they were in a weird basement doing a sound and movement that felt dumb. And they did it anyway. And they came back. I think that about Seth Meyers, Tina Fey, people who I meet who are on the mainstage at Second City, or on a Harold team in LA. We are all bonded by that experience. We did that and we came back.

If you speak to somebody’s inner-improviser they will respond. I don’t know Amy Poehler that well, but when I met her, because I was running the school, she wanted to do a meeting with the teachers where she gave her advice. Everybody was excited. So in order to set that up I had to email with her to schedule. I felt like I shouldn’t bother her. There’s a million things I wanted to ask her to do or for advice on. But I was like, I don’t know her, she’s a famous person, I don’t want to bother her. I’m not gonna do it.

But then I had to go away for a wedding during a class, and I was emailing her anyway and I just asked, “Do you want to be an improv teacher again for a day?” It wasn’t meant to be manipulative. But I was like, I bet she does sometimes. I bet sometimes she misses being at iO, where she studied, and just doing improv. She’s really good at it, she’s a famously good teacher. And she sent back a one-word email: “Yes.”

So I didn’t tell anybody because I figured she would back out. I got another sub and I told him, “Amy said she’s gonna do it, don’t tell anybody. Just in case she bails, I want you to go there. If she does show up, just go home and you’ll get paid for subbing the class.”

EO: When was this?

WH: June of 2011. She did it. My class shit their pants. Everybody started tweeting like crazy. She was great! It was a really, really good class, so I asked them the next week to tell me how it really was. Between us, how good was she? She was definitely rusty and she admitted it, she took a couple exercises to find her way, but she was great.

She’s one of the best improvisers ever. All four of them are really good improvisers and really good teachers of it. And I knew she’d be great.

When I saw her in person after that she said, “I just really wanted to yes-and your request. So I just said yes to it!”

LW: How do you feel like the culture of the theatre has changed?

WH: Well, it’s gotten a lot bigger, so the people don’t all know each other as much. When I had my level one grad show, the classes were all synced up, so the classes would all start and end at the same time. So in the same week that I had my level one grad show, the other classes all had their grad shows. Me, and Brian Berrebbi, and Mitch Magee went and watched all of them. We wanted to see who else was taking classes with us. And that was not hard to do--there were five classes.

Now there’s no way to know who’s taking classes with you. It’s years before you’ll even meet the people who stick around. There aren’t generation-defining events that unite anybody anymore.

EO: We talk about this a lot--how we know we’ve been around for a certain amount of time. Stuff will go away, teams get broken up--

WH: You’ll measure yourself by Harold teams.

EO: Exactly. But you don’t think there are those kinds of markers anymore?

WH: I guess they do exist. But they’re far and few between. They used to happen on a regular basis. You could really mark yourself by like, when you took level three. There’s no way to do that now.

Things just moved a bit more slowly. I was on a team for four years. That’s a long time. And we weren’t good for half of that. We wouldn’t have survived six months in the current climate. There’d be too many people wanting to get on teams.

The effects of the size means that good, devoted people have less a chance of meeting each other. It’s harder to get the good people in a room together. That matters. Because I think you learn more from your classmates than you do your teachers. The people who are really good in class with you--you feel that more than what your teacher’s saying. I had great teachers, but I learned more from being in a scene with Gemberling. We’d get told to do a Harold in level three, and I’d think, “what’s John gonna do?” And I’d feel it, because I was in the scene with him. If he takes a long time before he says anything, I guess I should chill out at the top more. But I learned that by watching John.

So that’s less likely to happen. We would talk about that in the school: how do we get the good people together? How do we know who the good people are, and how do we get them together? That’s hard.

The system has to become more rigid in order to sustain a larger population. Like, we’re stricter about attendance policy, late policy, auditions are more unforgiving and more competitive. It’s harder to know which weirdos you should forgive. There’s two kinds of weirdos: the weirdos who are destructive and should not be encouraged, and there’s weirdos who actually are good, they’re just eccentric people. And you want those weirdos. But it’s hard to know the difference on the surface, until you spend some time. So it’s harder for a weirdo to be valued appropriately in the current model.

Some of that is false nostalgia. I mean, the other way the theatre’s changed is the mean level of ability is way higher. Harold Night overall is way better than it was. Way better. Anybody who’s on Harold Night now, you can take them and ask them to do a variety of openings--they would be at least competent at all of them, and probably really good at all of them. They’d be really good with initiating with a premise or starting from nothing. The basic skill set of a Harold Night improviser is way, way higher than when I was on. There were people who were straight-up bad at improv when I was on Harold Night. I might have been one of them.

I think as the system gets more regimented, it chops off the top and the bottom. There aren’t as many amazing, electric group minds that get formed, but there’s never a team as bad as there once was. The overall ability of the average improviser is higher, for sure. The newest person on Lloyd Night has more ability than most of Harold Night did in 2003.

But the other way it’s changed--this is what I was thinking about more. I think Anthony King had some quote: things that start as a movement become a system. So that’s happened. We came from a movement, became a system. So how can we keep some of the coolness of the movement while surviving?

There was also a concentration of very talented people from Chicago who infused the beginning of the UCB scene. The UCB4 were doing ASSSSCAT every Sunday. All their friends from Chicago who were writing for Conan and SNL were doing ASSSSCAT. Jack McBrayer moved from Chicago and was on Harold Night for like, two years. And Peter Gwinn moved from Chicago and was on Harold Night, Christina Gausas was on Harold Night for a little while. It was this Chicago bond that gave the UCB Theatre this core of legit stars.

Do we have that anymore? I don’t know if we have that. There were probably fifteen amazing people who I think the theatre was built on. The four of the UCB attracted the rest of them. Corddry, and Huebel, and Seth Morris. Those guys were just around all the time. They did tons of shows. It didn’t matter if the form was good, or improv was good. They were funny. Do we have that? I’m suspicious of my old man nostalgia. There must be good people now. That many good people though? And are they all around at once?

But I think what that means is just take the very best people and just get them to do something together before they leave. But I dunno, some of that happens. I mean, Two Man Movie did happen. It wasn’t that long ago that it was happening all the time. My brother and I replaced that show. We would sit there and think, “we’re not as good as Two Man Movie.”

My whole career at UCB has been that way. Blessed and feeling really good but also so aware of what was really better out of what was there. Shannon and I got on the Stepfathers, we replaced Billy Merritt. Billy Merritt was one of the best players ever at UCB. So I’m on the Stepfathers, I feel good about it, but I’m always haunted by the shadow of what was there. It’s hard to forget.

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Less the television show--my parents didn’t have cable. They still don’t have cable. But when you start to obsess over--in the late nineties and early aughts--Mr. Show cult fandom, and becoming aware of those sort of tribes of people. That it’s not just SNL, there’s a world of this stuff, and UCB was the closest one.

LW: What shows were you seeing when you started?

DC: When I first moved here, I would go to the free ones because I didn’t have any money. I would go to School Night. It took me a bit to actually discover Harold Night and that sort of thing, because I was weirdly intimidated by the fact that I wasn’t going to know anybody at those. The Showgirls show was amazing--Julie Klausner, Jackie Clarke, and John Flynn. I loved that show.

I think my first performer crush--in the way that you’re like, “oh my god, you’re the coolest, funniest fucking person ever!”--was Charlie Sanders. He was also the first teacher I’d ever had, which was part of the “crush” I guess. Before I started the improv track I took Sketch 101 with him. That was my first class. His first show, called You’re Welcome For What You’re About To See, was just characters, and he’d cycle through them. One of the characters he spun off into that Big Dog thing he did for Funny or Die.

He said the character came from when he was in college, and worked at Papa John’s, and had this manager who was like, “Don’t waste your time with college, you could own this Papa John’s man!”

It was that character--he was called The Big Dog. And Papa John’s was having a contest to design your own pizza and if you submitted and corporate liked it, your pizza would end up on the menu. This guy invented one called “The Big Dog.” There wasn’t anybody else onstage with him--just this guy. But he’d be like, “It’s got two times hamburger, two times pepperoni...what? No, it’s not like meat lover’s! Shut up!”

His other two characters were--I guess this was before Pineapple Express--the weed dealer who traps you there and makes you listen to his music, hang out with him, and be his friend. He had bad Garage Band beats and was rapping over them. One of the songs was like, “Open your eyes, so you can hear me. Open your ears so you can see me!” It was really great.

Frankly, another first show I saw was Liquid Courage. I would go all the time. I think I had just enrolled in my first class, and I didn’t really know anybody. I was a play kid, I always did musicals in school, I was always a theatre nerd, so I was like, “I know how to do this!” It was free, and it was stage time at the cool place!

I did that a lot. Even more so than classes, that was where I met people--comedy people! I met Brett White, and Dave Bluvband, and Andy Rocco: the people I’ve known the longest at UCB, I met doing that show.

I would go up at Liquid Courage with solo character monologues. I would do--and I guess this was a blatant ripoff of that Will Ferrell Robert Goulet thing--I would do Iron Man. I would do Tony Stark. I had red socks and yellow tights and red underpants and no shirt and a fake moustache and just a 40 oz, and bluster my way through a late night monologue but filled with boozy talk. I would do one every week, write a new one, keep it “topical.”

The free ones and the things that would give you stage time. Again, you get to do it at the place where the cool things happen! And you don’t have to show anybody beforehand, you could just do it! It was good.

LW: How far into classes were you at that point?

DC: My first class was in 2006, Sketch 101 with Charlie Sanders. And then I think after that because I met people through Liquid Courage, I realized you meet people doing improv classes. So that started seriously in 2007.

Somewhere in there I took Sketch 201, again with Charlie Sanders. But improv: 101 was Charlie Todd, 201 was Joe Wengert, 301 was Charlie Todd again, 401 was Joe Wengert again. 501 was Anthony King, then I went back and did 401 again because Curtis Gwinn was moving to Los Angeles and I wanted to work with him because I admired him a lot and wanted to have him as a teacher. Then I did an advanced performance, a 600, with Neil Casey and Ryan Karels. That was my last improv class. Summer 2010.

So I did all the improv and was very serious about that for a long time! My first real indie team came out of that Joe Wengert 401. We were together for a long time. We were called We Can’t Live In A Cave. John Frusciante directed us, and we rehearsed for a year every Friday night before we ever did a show, because we were so nervous about being good!

LW: How long were you guys around?

DC: We would have started in 2008, so a good two or three years. We hosted one of the first regular shows at The Creek, back when The Creek first became a thing. The Creek became a thing because the Derrick guys started hosting a sketch show there. There’s not very much improv anymore there.

We hosted a show there for two years called Felt and Foam. It was a variety show--we would be the very end. We would have either a sketch or a standup person up first, we would do hosting bits. Then there would be someone to do musical comedy or we’d have punk bands. Just like three songs! But fast, loud bands, and then we would do improv.

And then Brandon Scott Jones got on Harold Night. He was the first friend I had who got on Harold Night. It was so cool! He did that, and Ben Apple started doing his own show, which was great. He got more into writing videos. So it dissolved, as it does. You don’t know that it does, till it does. And when it first does...oh man. It hurts. In a way you’ll be like, “teams break up,” and you say, “yeah but not me.” It’s like saying, “well people get divorced...” and you’re like, “No way! Not me!” You snicker about it a little bit, but boy oh boy does your heart get mixed up in this stuff.

Even back to Liquid Courage. I remember there was one time I burned a CD of my music cues. And I hadn’t given it to the tech. When he said, “you’re up next” I said, “oh, here’s my CD!” I wrote the date and “Liquid Courage” on it. That sort of thing. And I remember him being like, “What the fuck man, you gotta give this to me at the start of the show! Goddamnit!”

I remember being like, “...well...there goes the big UCB experiment. It’s all over now. It was a noble effort, but it’s all fucked and broken now because you didn’t give the guy the CD!”

Or just the times you say dumb things in front of someone cool and then walk away and you’re like “why did I say that?!”

Besides embarrassing yourself, your heart gets mixed up in this stuff. One of my big realizations that I should probably refocus my energy away from improv came from trying out for teams so many times. You worry that you’re on the No List. You’re on this secret blacklist that says no and never! That this list is real, and you’re at the top of it, and probably more than once in case they forget halfway through. You think like that!

And then you get a callback once, and you’re like, “Oh, good, I really made strides, you know?!” And the next year you don’t get a callback and you’re like, “Did I get worse in a year?!” That happened to me twice.

I do feel like the truth of it is: there’s no list. Just like there’s no “I know he kinda shit the bed, but we like him!” That doesn’t happen either. I really do believe it’s a merit-based system. Just as there’s not a no list, I don’t think there’s a “well, we like you,” list either.

EO: Do you think that auditions were the biggest reason you refocused to sketch?

DC: A little bit. In a backwards way, sketch is how I started anyway. I guess I’d always started to lean toward it. I can improvise, and I think I am a competent improviser. But I like putting up a show. I like wigs and costumes and makeup--I like that shit, I really do. I like rehearsing with a direct thing in mind. It’s not a better or worse thing, it’s just I’ve always liked doing that.

So much of pursuing comedy stuff in the first place was, you know, you do plays and musicals and stuff when you’re young. You go through high school and most theatre departments in public school attracts a certain type of person, and certain types of people gravitate toward “the plays,” whatever your function may be--tech, backstage. Certain people gravitate towards that, but when the jump comes to be like, “Okay, what are you going to do for the rest of your career?” because that’s what everyone in the country has to decide at seventeen, eighteen years old...pursuing comedy was for me, and I wanted to do voices and dress up!

EO: Let’s talk about Maude Night then!

DC: So my last improv class I took was summer 2010. I did a 600 with Neil Casey and Ryan Karels, who I can really, confidently point to as being a big reason that I stuck with comedy stuff at all at that point. I’d done all the classes, I did the writing classes and I had Harold Night callbacks, and I hosted a show, and had indie teams break up, and then you hit a threshold where it does not make you feel good. You think everyone gets it in a way you don’t get it, or everyone enjoys it in a way you don’t.

That’s just in the context of UCB, but that extends to when people get jobs, get work. It’s never, “why them?!” There are very few people who succeed within the context of UCB or broadly professionally, that I look at and say, “how come them?!” It’s usually pretty much, “yes, of course them!”

But you do say, “Well, why not me?! Did I fill out the form wrong? Is there some critical step that I’m missing, am I not on the right newsletter?” I think of Amy Poehler as Hillary Clinton saying, “Or maybe I just didn’t want it enough!” And she does that deranged laugh.

That 600 class was great, and it meant a lot. I hadn’t felt good at doing this stuff in a year because of, you know, the bad feeling that happens when you don’t feel like you’re succeeding. It was a very good class. It was The Gator class. It was the Krompf form. That poster in the greenroom--I drew that alligator! Ryan and Neil both taught improv classes at Williamstown Theatre Festival apprenticeship program. They lived there during the week, but came back to do shows on the weekends here. They taught up there over the summer, and in the final weeks of the program, they created like a Cage Match show where teams would fight and there would be a winner. They’d get one of the famous people at the festival to judge the last thing. It was a cool thing. After that class Neil had invited a group of us to do a show up there with them, so a handful of us drove up there and did a show.

Everybody was driving back that night, and they were like, “Oh man, this really stinks, you guys gotta drive back down!” But John Zachary Townsend and I were like, “We don’t have to go back tonight.”

We stayed up there for like, a week. We bought the cheapest t-shirts at the campus store and lived in the dorms for a week, ate for free, did weird, loud, fast improv in this converted church theatre. It was great! There were like, tree forts, a village built in the trees. We just hung out with Ryan and Neil every night. As a button to that summer, it was like vacation, and we didn’t have to do any work, and it was great.

I mean, we helped facilitate the improv workshops, but that class and then a week of doing that kind of stuff was like...oh right. Doing this stuff feels good.

That fall I resolved to make stuff, do stuff, start doing things again. Because you forget to do things sometimes when you get down. So in October of that year, 2010, I’d become friends with Taylor Moore, because he came and saw all the Gator shows and we became quick McManus friends, and we started hanging out outside of the bar. We started writing sketches together. Adam Bozarth and Matt Little had a video sketch group fall apart. One day in October, we were all hanging out at my place. That’s when we came up with the idea to do Left Handed Radio: a sketch podcast. Because you don’t have to get off-book, there’s no production value limits--you want to set a thing in dinosaur times, it’s in dinosaur times. We said, well, let’s do one episode.

It was nice to start thinking about sketch again. That was in October, November were Maude auditions. So I wrote good material and I got put on Maude Night a month later. They told us the week of Thanksgiving. And we had our first show in January, which was nice. It was really good.

Maude Night was great. My first team, Fambly, meant a lot to me. A lot of people had been through the boggle of shakeups, had been on fifteen Harold teams. I’m on my second Maude team now. It’s different. Not bad. Three years is a long fucking time. So yeah, it was time for Fambly to end, I guess. But there’s a melancholy a little bit.

I’d thank Anthony King for putting me on that team. That first lineup was really special. We had the same actors for two years--we didn’t get that changed around too much.

That was a wonderful experience. There’s also a nice thing about obligation, in a creative sense. You don’t have a choice, you have to do it if you’re not in a good mood. It’s time to learn your lines, it’s time to do the show, it’s time to do this. You get off-book for new pieces every month, you come up with dumb new voices, figure out new costumes. It’s the muscle memory of doing that, and it’s nice. I think as many videos as you make, you do have to keep your sea legs by doing live shows.

LW: Is there anything that would make you stop doing stuff at UCB?

DC: I mean, besides pride and shame, which are the only things that have ever kept me away from my friends, or doing things. I’ve gone through pretty powerful patches of those, and even that hasn’t really derailed things too bad. I dunno. I’m hitting a place now though where it’s home--it’s home base forever--but you can’t live with your parents forever. There’s a little bit of that.

I guess because the higher-ups at the theatre wouldn’t trust me to be on the sales team or anything, the options for me to practically and tangibly make money through UCB are pretty limited. I want to have a career.

Particularly in the final days of Fambly, watching Nicole Byer and Mamrie Hart up close. It was like how Brandon Scott Jones was the first person I knew to get on Harold Night--watching what Mamrie and Nicole did to kick their own asses all the time to have a career and then say, “Bye!” Not in a “fuck you” way. Mamrie had missed, for months, every other show. Or she’d go through the whole rehearsal process for one, and then before the show was like, “I got hired to write for the MTV Movie Awards, I gotta go to Los Angeles tomorrow.” It was like--get out of here! No bad feelings! You don’t need this shit, just go!

Watching the two of them up close and working alongside them and being like, “oh, this is what work is.” It was a neat thing to witness. Even watching a guy like Arthur Meyer leave as our director for the Fallon gig, it’s like, well, but you’re already a grown up. You’re already further along so it doesn’t feel on the same level.

The time to not be around all the time is when you get a job. But even then, I was in LA this summer for a job and I had only one night off. I was like, “what am I going to do tonight?” I said, well, I’ll go to the theatre. Cool! It’s nice to see some familiar faces.

LW: How do you explain UCB to your parents?

DC: My mother finally told me, for the first time this time last year, that when I was like, “Well, mother, I am moving to New York City to go to the Upright Citizens Brigade!” she thought it was like People’s Temple, or some sort of weird cult--because of the name! She was like, “Well, we knew we couldn’t stop you! You always did what you want anyway, despite our best intentions.”

I love my folks, and I have a good relationship with them. And my brothers get it, which goes a long way. My older brother will call me and be like, “you have to call dad, he keeps asking me if you’re okay!” My dad will do the same thing and ask if my little brother is okay.

I think having brothers that get it goes a long way because they’ll tell him, “Yes. Dan is okay. Yes, what he is doing is a real thing. It’s cool.”

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LW: When did you start taking classes?

LK: I started taking classes in the year 2008. My 101 teacher was Erik Tanouye. I had an intensive that no longer exists--so it was every Saturday for four weeks. We’d meet all day. I had just moved to New York and I was so lonely and all I wanted to do was ask people to be my friend Saturday night after the class, but I was too scared. It was a very sad but exciting time.

LW: What shows were you seeing?

LK: I don’t think I even saw Harold Night in my 101 class--not until later, when one of my teachers was like, “You guys should be going to Harold Night!” and I was like, oh, okay. I think I saw ASSSSCAT a lot in the beginning because, you know, it was free and exciting. I started seeing Harold Night and was very confused at first as to what was happening--I didn’t understand. I would see Cage Match a lot, and when I got into that I would go every week. In terms of on the weekends, Roo Roo and the Stepfathers. I would watch them a lot.

LW: Did you have a moment when you started to feel more included in the community?

LK: I was friends with Katherine Maughan and we were on an indie team together. The Company--they organize the picnic--had a pitchers night at McManus for Halloween. I had never been to McManus before because I felt like I wasn’t good enough to go, or something. Katherine was like, “you should come to this!” I insisted that I couldn’t, and she ended up forcing me to go. I was like, oh, this is just hanging out with people. John Timothy was there, James Dwyer--that was maybe the first time I met him.

EO: What was your first Harold team?

LK: My first Harold Team was CAPTCHA. I was on it for like, a month and then it got broken up. It was one of the ones formed in the first big shakeup. That usually didn’t happen that much between auditions--it was unheard of for people to be moved around or cut pre-auditions. The last year Anthony King was AD, everyone came back from Christmas in January and it was like, “You’re all on new teams now!”

LW: And then after CAPTCHA you were on...?

LK: Dance Break. And then that was the last Anthony King formed team I was on. Then The Pox, then Salmon Diane, and now I’m on What I Did For Love.

LW: When did you get on Maude Night?

LK: I got on Maude Night two years ago. 2011. I auditioned for a Harold team, did not get called back, did not get on a team. I submitted for Maude, did not get an audition, and then I got put on a Harold team. It was a long time between Maude auditions--whenever the next one was, I got on.

I’ve only been on Beige. It’s crazy, it’s almost two years. We’re the oldest team around now.

EO: We’ve talked a lot about generational changes--the moment you first realize you’ve been around for a while.

LK: It’s weird, it feels very weird. Everything does. A lot of my friends--the indie team I was on the longest, Get Paid--all of us ended up on house teams. It’s crazy to think that back then we were like, “We’ll never make it!” But we made it all the way to Harold Night.

LW: What was the indie scene like when you were coming up?

LK: There were a lot of good big time teams. Tesla had their show, and I don’t know if there’s a show like that anymore? Maybe I’m just disconnected from it. I think at that point Dreamboat started hosting a show at Under St. Marks, it was the last gasps of Rogue Elephant’s Under St. Marks show. And it was way more Creek-focused. I don’t know if people go to the Creek was much anymore, it seems like Triple Crown has replaced that.

It was a lot of Creek shows. I’ve never done a good show at the Creek, ever. I don’t feel bad saying that. They were sometimes fun! And Kaleidoscope is a great, fun show. That was the first indie show I ever did. I had just finished 301, I thought I was terrible.

EO: Who was your 301 teacher?

LK: Gavin Speiller! Who is the nicest guy in the world, which just shows you my mental state where I felt like I was the worst and not getting it! But he was very nice and very encouraging of me. They did a Kaleidoscope where the captains were Shannon O’Neill, Curtis Gwinn, Gavin, and Krompf.

That was my first show outside of a class show. Gavin picked me for his team. The other people on the team were Will Hines, Charlie Sanders, and then Shannon picked all of her students. Neil Casey and Joe Wengert were there--and then you had to perform for all these people!

It was so hot, it was like ninety degrees in the middle of summer in that horrible room, and I felt like it was the biggest thing ever! And the improv was so bad. Of course because I’m me, I blamed myself, I felt like it was all my fault, which is crazy.

There was a scene where Charlie Sanders goes, “I literally feel like I’m in a nightmare right now. I actually feel like I’m in a nightmare!” Onstage! Because it was so hot, and meta, and terrible.

So I was like, that’s it. My career is over.

EO: But being included in that sort of high-stakes situation: was there anything that came out of that that was good?

LK: I mean I think I did it. That was good. I think one thing I’ve grown at that is necessary for improv--being nice on yourself when you make mistakes. Or you realize that everyone is insecure and socially awkward and that they don’t hate you, they’re as awkward as you are. I think growing to be okay with yourself and realizing that there’s a longevity to the people you know, and getting to that point where there’s trust and safety is nice, but it definitely takes a while.

It goes through iterations. It’s hard too, because you see people who are in the community and then they leave and go on and do other things and find other stuff besides improv. And people stay around and maybe not do as much improv but they hang out a lot, or whatever it is. It’s a weird thing.

For a long time, I would go to Harold Night and read in line by myself. The first time I met Aaron Jackson is because we would go to Harold Night alone, separately. And one time I just talked to him because he smiles so much.

I think it takes people reaching out too. It’s really important when you have coaches or teachers or whatever who give you encouragement. I’m sure there have been times when people have said something that maybe they didn’t think was that important to me, and it just propels you a little further.

There’s definitely weird jealousy and in-fighting and all those issues too, and I think it’s hard because you have so many people trying for the same thing. It becomes really seductive to be like, “I’m better than them--why are they getting that?!”

Then you get on Harold Night or whatever and you’re like...okay, that was it. Now I still have to do stuff. You still have to make things. What are you doing outside of this? It doesn’t answer those questions, in fact, sometimes it makes it harder. It’ll feel like you’re doing things, but you’re just improvising one night a week.

LW: You were talking about people you look up to giving encouragement. Do you have any specific people you looked up to?

LK: As an improv team: Death by Roo Roo is awesome in terms of performance. D’Arcy Carden was wonderful when she was around. There still aren’t that many female performers on weekend teams or even on Harold Night. It’s a weird, awkward thing. I didn’t have any female teachers except for Shannon O’Neill, who’s obviously great.

Will Hines is obviously the best. He was one of the best teachers I ever had. Neil Casey was a great teacher, and was very encouraging. One time after a Creek show I felt really good because I took 201 with him, and he was with Ryan Karels, and he said, “Langan was one of my few students in that class who gave me hope!” It wasn’t super complimentary but it was just enough for me to be like, “yes!”

Gethard, obviously. He coached Dance Break for a long time and is a very great, encouraging person and really fosters other people and looks out for other people, I think. I dunno! Everyone’s great for the most part!

LW: Is there anything that would make you stop hanging around UCB?

LK: I don’t know. I hope not! I think if it got to a point where I felt like it was holding me back from other stuff, I would. But I’ve been pretty conscious of that lately, and I think that’s just finding some balance in your life.

I don’t see it as something I want to step away from. I hope to have a career doing comedy and it seems like the people from it who are successful at that certainly don’t step away from it--if anything, it draws them to it more because it’s definitely a grounding thing and an amazing place. It’s a very forgiving place to perform, in a lot of ways, because everyone’s a comedy nerd. That’s also great too because people are hypercritical--or they just appreciate when things are funny. So with all the crap that exists in the world, it’s nice that there’s a place where there’s a lot of not-crap. I mean, there’s some crap at UCB too, but that’s anywhere.

LW: What was it like being moved from Harold Night to the weekend?

LK: It was strange. I was on Salmon Diane, my Harold team at the time, which was the most fun I’ve ever had on Harold Night. Because we all had been on it, so it was all people who were really experienced and very good at it. And it was extremely fun to be on that team. I never felt bad after a Salmon Diane show.

Don and Jordan sent an email and they were like, “here’s the thing, we’re moving to the Stepfathers.” And Jamison had taken a break for work stuff, and Aaron was like, “What I Did For Love is becoming a weekend team, so I’m not doing Harold Night anymore.” So I was kind of like, aw darn it! This is so fun!

I’m sure I would have had fun with other people, but after being moved around a lot I was kind of like...well, I don’t know what is going to happen next and it could be good, and it could be bad. Because Harold Night can be hard sometimes, especially adjusting to playing with new people.

Anyway, I ended up playing in with What I Did For Love a few times, and Tracy was moving. Aaron Jackson called me and was like, “This is a formal invitation!” I was like, yeah, sure, okay!

I’d been on teams with a lot of them. Jamison and Aaron. Everyone else is very nice and normal so it was a very seamless transition. Maybe they don’t think so? But I think so.

LW: How is it different playing on the weekend?

LK: Performing on the Beast stage is different. It’s smaller. It kind of challenges you in terms of what you can do with the space and it can be a little constricting in that way, but in a way that makes you adapt to it and do stuff differently.

It’s a different audience. It’s not Harold Night. It’s not people who are improv nerds. We’ve made moves before--I think Michael Kayne had this one initiation that was a perfect analogous initiation to what the interview was. And it was just like, dead silence from the audience. But then you do some stupid celebrity impression and everyone loses their shit.

EO: Harold Night is definitely a different audience.

LK: I think I’ll never do improv as good as I did on Harold Night, just because people are so appreciative, and are such nerds about it that you can really do such amazing things that on the weekend people would not know what was happening.

If you did a sound and movement on the weekend, the audience would be like, “...what?” The only team that gets away with really cool stuff--and not “gets away,” they just do it--is the Stepfathers. That’s because they just don’t give a fuck, they just do their show. Maybe that’s a point you get to as a team, or just being around long enough, where you’re not dependent on doing a show for these people.

But we’re a great team. I love everyone.

LW: How do you feel the culture has changed since you started?

LK: I’ve been thinking about this because I was just in Chicago, and I went to see Second City when I was there. I was very interested, I hadn’t seen it before. I’d seen iO. Second City is great--but it’s a whole operation. Huge! There are escalators up to the theatres--it just has a very big, corporate feeling to it. The tickets are like twenty-five dollars, and it’s equity, and it’s a lot of tourists. But, great performers and great shows.

Seeing it, and with UCB getting so much bigger, and the community getting bigger--when I started was when Aubrey Plaza got on Parks and Recreation, Zach Woods moved right after my 501 with him and got on The Office, Adam Pally was here and then moved out. It was when all these people were starting to take off. I think there were a lot of New York Times articles about it, and trend pieces, and people started taking more improv classes.

I am sure it won’t be that way, because so many people care so much about it, but I just don’t want this corporate thing. It won’t be. People care too much. But as it gets bigger, that’s your worry. I just liked the fact when I started that it was just a place you could do weirder stuff.

Like when I started it was pretty easy to get on School Night, and you can go and see the worst thing in the world and then Louis CK doing standup. And some extremely stupid bit show on Saturday night that was raucous and nasty. Or people just doing really weird, strange things. So that’s what I’ve noticed, a shift towards an eye to industry, which is good--I would love to have a job--but it’s a balance. You don’t want to lose the creativity and the things that seem really special. That’s something that I don’t know if it’s changed, but I hope it doesn’t lose this.

When Gethard was doing his live show at the theatre--he’d do so much stuff there that was so fucking wacky. Magic Box of Stories and all that. There are still people doing that, but I just worry that people are thinking about industry. Even Besser talked about this when he was here for DCM, about New York being the place to really hone your creative voice and we shouldn’t have the stakes be so high here. I worry that people worry about what people want to see, or selling things.

Even webseries and videos. I made a webseries with my friends James and Kent that will hopefully come out one day when it’s edited. We spent a lot of money on it, and wrote it and everyone was kind of like, “cool, cool, so are you going to try to sell it somewhere?” And I guess, if someone wanted it? But that really wasn’t what we were going into it with. That type of attitude is good I guess. You have to have it at a certain point, and if you want a career, you have to be proactive about it. But I don’t know. Take more risks.

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I saw one show: Film Noir and Improv Vérité: a film noir show and the documentary show. It was funny, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. But our friend was like, “You can take a class and in eight weeks get up onstage,” so I said, well, I’ll try.

LW: Who were your teachers?

DF: Betsy Stover for 101, Charlie Sanders for 201, Charlie Todd for 301, then Will Hines for my 401, Will Hines for my first 501 which was the first twelve week 501 that they did for a short period of time. And Zach Woods, Chris Gethard--I took a good amount of classes. I spread everything out a little bit. My 101 and 201 and maybe the start of my 301 were all in one year, and then I took 401 and 501 the next year.

I always felt like an outsider, I was coming from a different background. I felt like it was a little cliquish--people dedicated their lives to this and I felt like I was doing it for fun. I didn’t love it until after my 401 with Will. That’s when I started getting real serious about it. I think that was in 2008.

So I was like, in 2009, I’m gonna go crazy with this shit. I’m gonna do practice groups, join a team. I formed a team. Started doing three shows a weekend. Started going crazy with it.

LW: What do you think caused that switch?

DF: I have no fucking idea. I really don’t! I don’t know what happened. I think maybe I just had a connection with Will and I broke out of my shell in 401. I think I was holding back a little bit, or trying to improvise like I should improvise. And I think in 401 Will relaxed me a little bit to start finding my voice and then I got hooked.

LW: When did you start feeling included around UCB?

DF: It started after my first 501, I started feeling included. A girl in my class had this team called Taco Knight and someone left, and she was in my 501 and she was like, “Do you want to join us?” I said definitely. My 501 was stacked with good people. Performers that were on Harold Night--it was crazy. It was a little overwhelming, but I got asked to join a team. I think I just started performing a lot, and taking more classes and because of just being around more and being a little bit more of myself. This all happened at the same time--I started coming into my own of who I was as a person and improviser in the same way. I think that combination of being around more and doing my own thing still started making me stand out.

And then I was going to a lot of jams. Again, in 2009 I made a goal that no one was gonna work harder than me. I was gonna go crazy with it. I don’t have anything to measure that on, but I felt like no one was working harder than me. I was taking classes, I was practicing every Monday, and I was performing at least two or three times a weekend with a group that formed and a group that I was in. And working in New Jersey in the day. It was a fucking insane thing. That was my life. And then I would jam as much as I could.

EO: What were jams like?

DF: I went to the Magnet jam--that was very loose and silly and fun as all of them are. I did the PIT Improdome where I would go by myself and be put in a group or go with two people I was in class with and we’d be a team of three. And then I did Jammin’ with Ralph, UCB’s jam. That happened once a month. fwand ran that, then The Law Firm, then Badman. But I went when The Law Firm was running it once a month.

That was intense. As a student, you’re like, playing with The Law Firm--when they were a Harold team, a completely different team than they are now. It was just once a month so a lot of people went and it was packed. And you felt a lot of pressure to do something if you were a student. Make a name for yourself.

It was good. I remember one time sitting in my car right before to try to get pumped up. I was sitting in my Buick LeSabre being like, “I’m not gonna go in yet! I’m gonna really focus!”

LW: What was Harold Night like when you were a student?

DF: I would go to weekend shows more because I lived in New Jersey. I was a big Reuben Williams fan. I think Mother was around then. I’m sure I went to a Stepfathers show, I’m sure I went to a Roo Roo show.

Harold Night...I saw the tail end of fwand and 1985 and I remember not realizing how great those shows were. When I was there I was in 101 and 201 and my mind was blown but I was watching like, Ellie Kemper and all those great people on fwand. I think I saw Will Hines’ last 1985 show. That was this big thing. But Harold Night, from what I remember? I remember the ten team Harold Night. I don’t think it was that good. I remember there being ten teams and there was maybe one or two teams that really stood out. It was a lot of turnover and weird energies going at that time.

I think Harold Night, for me, was always magical. There was always something good to see, even when I was in the later classes. There was always a good show that I saw, or things I saw up there that I’d think, “I could never do that. I don’t think I could ever do that.” It was still pretty cool. Looking back now, there were a lot of teams and no one really was kicking ass. It was a weird time at the theatre on Harold Night, but when you were there you didn’t give a shit--it was just, “this team is awesome.”

LW: What was your first indie team?

DF: Taco Knight was my first indie team, and then I formed two teams a couple months after that. Dreadnought--I did not form Dreadnought, Michael Kayne did. We were all in Gethard’s 504.

Then I put together a group called Rafael around the same time that didn’t really last but was with a lot of fun people. So yeah, Taco Knight, Rafael, and Dreadnought, and Dreadnought kind of took over ‘cause Gethard would coach us and we’d do a lot of experimental shows and push boundaries with different things.

Gethard is the best coach and that’s a wide-known thing for multiple reasons, and he became kind of a mentor to me. We clicked and became friends. He really pushed me out of my shell and pushed limits of what I could do and how I could think about things. His influence totally changed me as a player. And then playing with Dreadnought was like playing with the best version of the people you want to play with. Everyone’s on the same page and everyone’s bringing something different to the table but the end result is always insane and fun. It’s challenging, working with them straight for eight, nine, ten months practicing every week and then doing these insane shows. Some were disasters--some were the worst shows I’ve ever been a part of. We would just shake our heads after and say, “What the fuck was that? Well, we tried something and it didn’t work out, so...”

It was good to fail with those people. Everyone dealt with it differently. I was never afraid to fail or look like an asshole onstage. I think that helped me out. If you’re afraid to do that, your progress is going to be a little slower. You’ll look at someone and think, “I’ll never be as good as that.” Well, if you don’t take chances onstage, your progress to get to their level will be slower than if you do take chances onstage.

LW: What was the indie scene like around that time?

DF: Great! The indie scene was really, really cool. There was a bunch of teams performing, it seemed like everybody who was pretty good in classes were on teams. It was a great community. It was great to have. A bunch of us were hungry to get on Harold Night and I think the talent was there. Most of the people on Harold Night now were all on the indie scene when I was going through it. But most of the people who got on Harold Night were really hardworking on the indie scene. Doing a lot of shows during the week, hanging out with each other, getting to know each other.

It was a good positive community with great competition. At least that’s how I saw it. I just wanted to be the best at what we were doing.

And there were long standing teams that were leading the charge at the point. Fat Penguin, Sherpa, Rogue Elephant, Thank You Robot. We were the new indie teams coming up after that. There were a lot of us. There were a lot of places to perform. I guess that’s how it is now? But there was an active twenty teams that were playing with each other. Now there’s much more.

It was fun. It was a good camaraderie and competition in a healthy way.

LW: And then when did you first get on Harold Night?

DF: March 24th, 2010. I got on The Opera. I loved everyone on the team. We couldn’t translate some of the stuff we did in practice on the stage. That happened in The Opera and Dybbuk, we had a lot of fun off the stage but on the stage it just didn’t click for one reason or another.

That was only nine months. You used to be on a Harold team for like, a year. Then that changed once I got on a Harold team. Nine months, then I was on Dybbuk for four months.

After Dybbuk was Standard Oil. I was only on that team for again, a couple months because then they changed the teams up. Then Nate Dern took over and they did another audition in the fall. So in a year I was in three or four teams. That’s when I was put on Still Mike. And then I was only on Still Mike for like three months and I was put on Sandino.

LW: Can you tell us about Sandino?

DF: I was a fan of them before I got on. I always liked their style. Everyone picked each other up so anybody’s faults became a gift to the team. That’s why it was so special: you couldn’t really fuck up. Someone would look at that and laugh at it, and then make it something. Watching them, it looked like these guys could take any chance they want and it’s fine, they have each other’s backs.

So when I got on there--it was weird, they were dipping a little bit before I got on. They were anchor team for a while, but their shows started slipping a little bit in the sense of maybe being uninspired, or whatever was going on on the team. And I think they were ready for a change, so the stars aligned. I was on a crazy amount of teams so I felt prepared to be on the team. It was the right kind of marriage when I joined. They were ready for a change.

Then our first show--instant. I always wanted to push limits, and I like playing organically and thematically and I felt really at home on that team in pushing limits and taking chances and even when we weren’t supposed to. So it felt like a team where you could take any chance you want and they’ll make it look good. I think that’s how it came off when you watched the team. We worked very hard, our goals were very clear and everyone was on the same page about that. It felt like a family.

I did some of the most fun shows I’ve ever done with them. Cool stuff. Took chances. All the things I wanted to do personally were fulfilled on that team. Doing thematic shows, doing really dumb games, really committing hard, really playing from the gut, not overthinking everything but knowing I can just be in the moment because there’s so much trust onstage. It was a really cool experience. I can only think of the positives of that team.

It was hard getting broken up. It was much easier for me because I’d been on so many teams but that was some people’s first teams--and they’d been with those people for three years, which is unheard of now. It was hard for some of those people. Even being on multiple teams, it was really hard for me. That was some of the best times of my life, improv-wise.

They’re all ridiculously talented improvisers too. Everyone brought the best out in each other. That’s amazing. That doesn’t happen a lot. Stars aligned.

I think a lot of us grew up watching ’85 and fwand and some of us even The Shoves who were doing those really thematic shows. Takes a specific type of discipline to pull that shit off. It’s good to try it, but you have to be really disciplined to stick with it and be willing to fall on your face a bunch.

EO: Let’s talk about Gramps!

DF: I lucked out. I auditioned for a Maude team in 2010. Jim Santangeli was leaving and they put me on Gramps. I was so overwhelmed. This was a well-oiled machine. That was some of the best people I’ve ever worked with. Kind, easy to work with.

Kate McKinnon, I always say, was the best person. She would pick up a script and just immediately have a character. Didn’t even fucking read the thing! Boom--she’d have a character then just read it through this character. Talk about making specific choices. So good.

I was living in Jersey so I would drive in. I would drive her home up in Harlem after our late night techs. And those were some of the most fun conversations. We’d just be riffing and we’d make up characters and do characters on the ride home. She was sweet as hell. She’s great.

Yeah. Gramps was good.

EO: What was it like getting on the Stepfathers?

DF: I sat in with them a year before I got on the team, when Gethard was still regularly playing with them. I sat in with them twice, had fun shows, and then was asked to sit in one more time and I couldn’t--and then I wasn’t asked to sit in with them. They also didn’t add anyone.

I kind of took it for what it was. I wasn’t putting too much pressure on myself. I was just like, well, I get to play with all my teachers and people that I fucking love! This is cool! I didn’t put too much pressure on myself then. I started putting pressure on myself when I got put on the team.

Then almost a year after that I got asked to sit in again. We had a really fun show, and the next morning Connor Ratliff called me. Which was cool. He was like, “Hey, uh, you know, uh, what do you think about being on the Stepfathers? Do you think that would be cool?”

I was like, yes! Jesus Christ! I’m happy that awkward, funny phone conversation was from Connor. And then he told me Jordan Klepper was on too. And that was great because Jordan and I were on Salmon Diane together.

Salmon Diane was another fun, great team that was just a lot of people who were fun, had been on Harold Night for a bit, and just knew the deal and went for it.

I was very overwhelmed. I remember my first show, I got very emotional before I went on. It was like a dream! You dream about those things! It was a goal of mine to be on a weekend team. It was a specific goal of mine.

But then I put all this pressure on myself to be great and keep up with all these great people. Only recently have I started feeling comfortable. It took me a little while to acclimate myself to performing on a Friday every week and performing with those great people. I over-thought a lot of things, big time. I wasn’t really playing like myself, but I think I’m starting to feel a little more comfortable with that.

It’s been cool. I’m lucky because I’m forced to up my game, I’m forced to be better and I love that. The first couple months when I was in it, I was like, I fucking hate this, I’m not doing what I need to do. But looking back, I needed to go through that because it was a learning period and I learned from it.

When you’re in those learning periods, it’s hell on earth. But you have to keep pushing through it--there’s light at the end of the tunnel. You’re always going to hit peaks and valleys or be in your head about certain things. There will always be a couple shows that don’t go well, in your mind. You start freaking out but people will be like, “That was great!” and you’ll be like, “No! I wasn’t!”

I think that’s always gonna happen. As long as you learn from it, or push through it, things work out.

LW: How did Fuck That Shit come to be?

DF: Fuck That Shit I started right after I got on Harold Night. I dunno, I was really bold--a fucking idiot I guess. I think when a bunch of us got on Harold Night, Dreadnought slowed down a little bit ‘cause some people didn’t get on Harold Night from that team. I think three of us did and three of us didn’t. There was this weird thing that happens with your indie teams where some people get on. You’re gonna hang out a little less unless you make a really hard effort.

I think it was three months into Harold Night and I was not really performing much outside of Harold Night anymore. I was like, you know what, I’m gonna put a team together and do that.

So I asked Dru, who I didn’t really know too well at that point. And I asked Kate, and Patten and I were in a 600 together called Cops and Robbers and we just really had great chemistry. It’s hard not to have great chemistry with Josh Patten. I felt in particular, he and I had good chemistry and then he and I got put on The Bishop when we were in that class. I always wanted to play with him again, so I asked him. And then Terry, who was a fucking maniac onstage--I was like, I gotta play with this guy. We had been in a class a while ago together.

I just formed a team of people I really liked watching and that I’d never played with before onstage. The goal was to do four square stuff: very organic, being in the middle of the scene and editing within that middle, and starting a new scene mid conversation.

Those shows are the most unpredictable, insane shows I’ve ever been a part of. Even more than Sandino because we always knew the Harold was there. With Fuck That Shit it feels like everyone’s playing on spring break. If that makes sense? Like everyone’s like “Woohoo, spring break!” No one’s like “I’m tired.”

I always have a sports mentality going through this. I did a lot of sports as a kid and in college I played baseball, so I love playing as a team. A team is always most important for me, and making everyone look good. So that naturally fit with improv. I want everyone to be cohesive and bring the best out in each other. I think that should be the goal for every team. How do we bring the best out in each other? Because then you don’t have to worry about being funny, you don’t have to worry about being the best ‘cause you’re going to bring the best out in each other. So you’re gonna use everyone else to make you look great, instead of putting pressure on yourself. It’s not, “I need to be great tonight,” it’s, “Your team needs to be great tonight.”

So I like to put myself in play with people who just make each other look good and are able to take those chances. I know I can do anything because these people around me have my back. That’s why it was mind blowing to play with Sandino, and it’s even more mind blowing for a team like Fuck That Shit--it doesn’t matter what happens, no one will be thrown.

Again: very lucky to play with those guys. I think we’re good for a Cage Match scenario. Our regular shows have been great too! But Cage Match has always been even more like “let’s attack.” We’re an attacking team.

Cage Match has that sort of “attack this show, do whatever you fucking want” feel. So it’s kind of primed for us. I would like to win. I would like to make the tournament. I would like to win the tournament. I still love that stuff, that healthy competition. As long as I’m not an asshole about it, I think competition and confidence is healthy with that stuff. Attacking it from a sports mentality--if you’re just a dick no one wants to play with you, and if you’re just a cocky asshole, you only last for so long. But if you’re humble, and passionate, and kind, and wanna be the best--I think that’s very very healthy. But I think, to be the best, especially in improv, you need to surround yourself with people who bring out the best in each other. It’s too hard to do by yourself.

LW: You were pretty involved with the Gethard Show for a while.

DF: Yeah, I was involved mostly when it was a stage show, which was once a month on Saturdays at midnight and then every show would have a theme. It was basically just me, Shannon, and Will, and then Gethard. I was kind of the lackey. If Chris said, “Do this dumb thing!” I would do it. It was a lot of fun.

We did the stage show for about a year and a half. I think Gethard was like, it’s just too hard to top this Diddy thing. Diddy--he worked for over a year to get Diddy on the show! And then it happened. We did one show after that, to start this cross-country tour, and I don’t think anyone knew where to go from there.

Once a month I’d put my body through hell for that show. I was doing that show before I was on Harold Night, which was cool. Besides 600 classes, this was the only show I was in.

I was still trying to find myself in the theatre, I still felt like an outsider. Which was fine with me, I’m like that anyway, I don’t like to be too much in the crowd. I like to stand and watch a little bit.

The stage show, I loved it so much. Those were some great memories.

Getting Diddy was insane. At one point it was just me and him in the greenroom, everyone had left. I was a permanent substitute teacher at the time in Jersey City, and I told my kids, “I’m doing a show with Diddy!” and they were like, “Yeah right!” I remember it was just me and Diddy and oh man it was so weird. So I said, “Hey man, I gotta say, I’m a teacher, and my kids love you. And they think it’s so cool you’re doing this.” And he was like, “My pleasure man, really happy to be here.” I was like that’s it! That’s all I need! Bye!”

He was so good onstage. He’s got this presence that is insane. But he was very humble backstage, very chill.

The road trip was really fun and crazy. Everyone sleeping in that fucking van was gross--everyone was sick, there were twelve of us. You’d wake up every morning in a fucking Wal-Mart parking lot. You feel like you’re going crazy. But it was awesome.

That was the first time I was ever in LA. We finally got to LA at night and we went to JD’s relative’s guest house on the water. That night we get there, I couldn’t believe I was on the West Coast. It was pitch black. I could hear the ocean but I couldn’t see. I couldn’t wait for the morning, so I decided to sleep outside on this chaise lounge--it was beautiful, sleeping outside listening to the ocean.

Then other people came and started sleeping around me and Shannon. Six of us, outside, sleeping on chaise lounges. We just passed out. But we wake up at 4am because the sprinklers are just dousing all of us.

I like to say yes to a lot of things. I’m happy I did when Gethard asked me that first time and it just snowballed from there. I owe a lot to him. I definitely wouldn’t be where I am without Chris Gethard.

I was lucky to have a mentor. Other people aren’t as lucky as me. I see this as a combination of hard work and love. I think I was working very, very hard. I did a lot of things. I took classes, I saved up specifically for classes and sacrificed certain things. I didn’t see my folks as much as I wanted to, friends as much as I wanted to. I found something I loved and I dedicated myself to it.

I think that work ethic and passion, plus luck--however you define it--got me where I am today. I got lucky to play with people I play with, I got lucky to stay on Harold Night, I got lucky for the people I asked to play on a team with me say yes, I got lucky to get coached by Chris Gethard, I got lucky to be on a team with him, I got lucky to be on The Chris Gethard Show. So, you know. I don’t think I was like, “This is great!” I think I was just actively working and constantly wanting to be better.

And I still do. I don’t think that’s changed. I don’t think I’m the best improviser I can be, I’m definitely not the best actor I can be, sketch actor, I’m just not there yet. Which is exciting! You should feel like that--you should feel good. It should be like, oh my god, I can grow! You hit a ceiling but that’s okay but if you push through that ceiling one time, it can happen again. Push through that shit. And it’s good to feel pretty good but keep working. There’s more to learn.

And when you hit your goal, and you get it, you don’t know what the fuck to do. You have to create more goals, you have to create a path. It gets scarier because more possibilities open up and there’s many more doubts. The doubts feel like the stakes are higher.

LW: Is there anything that would make you stop hanging around UCB?

DF: I don’t think so. I don’t really ever think about that. Those thoughts never come to into my head. Any time that happens, I move on.

I owe everything to UCB. I feel like I’m a UCB-grown comedian. I don’t think I was a comedian before I did UCB stuff. My full journey has been from UCB. It’s a weird journey. I think it helped that I had a “past life?” I lived in the real world, I knew what I didn’t like, I played sports, I knew what it was like to work hard for something. I knew how much you needed to rely on a team and it’s not all about you. Those helped keep me going through classes as a happily ignorant kind of place. If I’m not the worst person in class, I’ll keep going. I like this, this is fun, so I’ll keep doing that.

I wasn’t putting that much pressure on myself, so when I got to 401 and was really loving it, I was ready to put the work in. But if you’re too early to put pressure on yourself, you’re going to totally burn out and quit, or not realize your full potential. You’re going to put ceilings on your progress.

People can say, “UCB saved my life,” but I’m sure it saved my life in a way. I owe everything-- just to it being there. Because really, it’s just there. You have to do everything. But it’s there and you have to feel very lucky that at least that institution is there that you can like, do what you want. And it’s all in your own merit, how much effort you want to put in. It’s all right there. And it’s just how well can you use it? It’s there for you to meet people, like-minded people.

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So I signed up for level one in 2003 with Rob Huebel as my teacher, not knowing what I was really signing up for. I don’t think I’d ever seen a show, I wasn’t sure if I was aware UCB actually had a theatre or house teams. I don’t think I even knew that it wasn’t like Whose Line is it Anyway, I just thought this would be a fun weird thing.

I just stumbled in with no goal or long-term plan beyond just doing something weird and interesting.

I took that class, then I took level two for three weeks and quit mainly because during level one was over the summer and level two I went back to college in Westchester and it ended up being a hassle to get to it. I think if I had really been a committed, die-hard, improv-for-life type of person I’d have committed to getting to class, but at the time, I wasn’t.

But then I finished college and I moved to the city in 2005, and I started taking classes again. I had still gone to shows in the interim. Every time I went to a show I felt a little twinge of “I walked away from this! I kinda want to go back!” So I started over again in 101--which is why I think of that as sort of my beginning, because I’ve been doing it consistently since summer of 2005.

LW: Did you have a moment where you felt like you had to keep doing stuff at UCB?

HP: I feel like I didn’t have a moment, just a long series of mini-moments. Even when I went back--101, 201, 301--it took me a long time to get to a point where I wanted to do this fully. In that gap between 2003 to 2005, in addition to still going to shows, I had some friends who took classes so I felt like I was kind of familiar a little bit. I knew there was a whole UCB scene, and I knew it was something that people got sucked into. I went in with this attitude like, “that won’t be me.” I was a little detached by choice. I was fully on board--go to the classes, go to the shows--but I felt like, I’m not gonna let it take over my life.

Early on, in my head I imagined this weird detachment: there are the UCB people, where that’s their whole life, and then there’s me, with this thing I’m doing. It’s funny in hindsight because I think I got this reputation really early on as being the guy who was the most obsessed with the UCB. Which is not how I saw myself at all! I think it’s because I was there a lot. I think in the entirety of 2006, I missed only three Harold Nights.

The way I thought of it at the time was that’s just what you do. Part of taking classes is that you go to shows and you watch and learn. I thought as long as I’m doing it, I’m gonna do it right. I didn’t get why anybody who was taking classes wouldn’t be at Harold Night every week. That was how I thought of it, but I think other people thought, “oh my god, this kid’s obsessed with improv.”

One mini-moment might have been when my first indie team got together, which started towards the end of 401. Up till then, I’d taken the attitude of I’m never gonna be the guy who takes the reigns. I’m fully along for the ride and wherever it goes, I’ll go. If I’m really good then people will ask me to be in things, and if I’m not good, people won’t ask me, and I shouldn’t be in things. I was just gonna let it be what it was. But my early practice group was less of a group and more open to all comers. So it wasn’t somebody inviting some people from their class, it was everybody inviting everybody from their class. By the time I was in 401, it had gotten huge. So me and a few other people started our own group, a smaller number of people, all people who wanted to be in a group with each other.

I ended up as one of the ringleaders of getting that together. So I think that might have been a point where I was like, oh fine, I care enough about this to take some sort of action! Once I was on my first indie team and I was doing shows, I think at that point it was hard not to get on board with it. It was a thing I’m doing, and it’s a big part of my life.

I think pretty early on, I promised myself I’d never quit. But I meant that less in a sense of like, I’m gonna be a star of improv, and more of a sense that I won’t be insecure and run away. The more I suck, the more I’m gonna try to not suck.

EO: What was your first indie team?

HP: We were called Big Tobacco. That was through the bulk of 2006. And a lot of people on that are still around! Something like half the team ended up on Harold teams.

There were so few indie teams at the time! So in 2006 they had the first Indie Cage Match tournament. It was over Fourth of July weekend, people were out of town, so I guess they tied it into independence? It consisted of six teams. People were like “Man! Six teams! Indie teams are exploding!”

Even beyond the six teams in the tournament--thinking of our peers, who didn’t get into the tournament--I think there were two other teams. And then a couple of indie teams who were established and doing their own thing: Rogue Elephant was already hosting their show and had people on Harold teams.

After Indie Cage Match, we went to McManus and Gethard was telling us about the indie teams back in his day and how things had changed. He was like, “Man, there are so many indie teams now! A dozen!”

We were a fun team. We quickly became a well-known indie team and did a bunch of shows.

LW: When did you start feeling included around UCB?

HP: That’s a hard question to answer, because to an extent, I’ve never felt included. Even when I was on a Harold team I still felt like an outsider. I don’t I’ve ever totally felt like I’m in and I have the run of the place or anything.

Actually--that Indie Cage Match tournament was a thing that made me feel like part of it. I think up till then--even with Big Tobacco we’d done shows at the UCB itself before, we had done Cage Match--this was all indie teams, all of our peers, all having a show to ourselves. It was even on the weekend! It felt a little bit like our generation of students had taken over for a night. Also when you’re that early on, you know how it feels cool just to be in the greenroom? Or just to walk around the theatre freely like you’re a hotshot performer? I remember walking around the theatre and the people I was running into weren’t normal performers. They were our peers, other indie teams. It just felt like the indie teams had taken over. I remember thinking, “This is what it would be like if all of us were on Harold teams.’”

EO: Can you tell us about being on Harold Night?

HP: The Harold team I got on was Scootch. I got on in the 2009 audition. The original lineup was me, John Frusciante, Nick Ross, Brian Faas, Jon Gutierrez, Jen Bartels, Kate Riley, and D’Arcy Carden. And then Nick left and we got Nate Dern, D’Arcy moved to another team and we got Lauren Hunter.

I got on that team at my fifth audition and was fucking terrified. I never thought of myself as someone who might get on a Harold team. Of course I wanted to, but of course I wanted it in almost an abstract way, like the way you want to be a billionaire? It was something that would be awesome but I didn’t think was really gonna happen.

My team was mostly people who’d been on Harold teams for a while. So I felt like that made me that much more like a nervous rookie. So I totally tanked Harold Night. I tanked Harold Night and got deservedly cut. I got real insecure about being the weak link. The more you think it, the more it becomes true, and the more it becomes true, the more you think it.

By the end of it, I was like, quitting law school, questioning every choice I ever made, I don’t know what’s next. I was not in a good place. So I saw getting cut coming. I definitely was not up to par at that point. The thing that bothers me about it: I feel like if I had been cut from Harold Night and I’d given it my best shot, and my best wasn’t good enough, it would be easier to stomach. But the thing that gets to me, is ‘cause I don’t feel like I gave it my best. I feel like I was better than that then, and I am better than that now. I never got to do it the right way--I almost had a Harold Night that didn’t count.

Just before I got cut, I signed up for a Will Hines advanced study class. I signed up before I got cut because I figured if I got cut it would be a good place to land. We did our first class show at the theatre, on a Tuesday night right before Harold Night. It was my first time doing a Harold on the UCB stage after getting cut from Harold Night.

In a good way, I had a chip on my shoulder. That show, I think, was the best received improv show I think I’ve ever done. I had people complimenting me--not the standard “good show.” I had people coming up and being like, “you were really good!”

That I think is the best I ever felt, personally, after a show. The best I felt in a larger sense, about my team and my situation was when Sherpa won Cage Match. The best I felt individually was after that class show in that Will Hines class. Because I was in a shitty frame of mind, I had completely choked at Harold Night and I felt like I knew I had it in me and I hadn’t lived up to that. There’s a certain fire that only gets lit under you in certain situations when it has to be. It wasn’t “I have to go be good.” It was more like, “Fuck it. I’m gonna go be good!”

In a way, I almost don’t feel like I was on a Harold team. It was like, I didn’t do it right.

LW: You were on early Maude Night!

HP: I kind of fell into sketch--I was never pursuing it. When Maude Night started, nobody was sure how it was gonna go. I knew so many people who didn’t submit because they were like, “well, let’s see if this thing is still around in 2008.” Obviously, with hindsight, they’ve modeled it differently. But when it started they used the model of everybody’s a writer, everybody’s a performer, and you’d get outside performers. I was really more interested in performing than writing. I was more into performing. I think some people including me, thought that this whole thing about getting outside performers wouldn’t happen because it was so logistically difficult. I think what we thought would end up happening is that each team would predominantly end up doing their own performing. And that's actually what happened for the first month. There were four teams, and three teams fully performed themselves. The other team had one additional performer. So that first month of Maude Night, it was just the writers performing. And then Anthony emailed us his initial thoughts on Maude Night, and the first one was, “You’re not all great actors, so ask other people.” So that was what Maude Night became, which for me was kind of a letdown because I was really hoping for more of what you think of as a sketch group. I didn’t get to perform as much as I wanted, and I didn’t like writing as much as I wanted. Now that writing had gone from “I gotta go do this” to “I’m doing this every single week,” it was a lot of work. I think you have to like writing a lot more than I did, or be more inspired to have a career in it than I ever did.

For me, I always felt like my main thing with comedy was improv, and writing was a thing I was doing off to the side. And all of a sudden, writing kind of ate improv. I got involved with comedy because I wanted to get out of the house and do something active and collaborative, but instead I was missing things because I was staying home to write. It became the opposite of why I started doing comedy.

I think probably about once a month I would email my teammate and say, “I think I’m quitting.” But pretty early on I was like--I don’t know how I feel about this. I think a thing I realized on that team is that if a sketch that I wrote but wasn’t in got a good repsonse, I didn’t get any joy from that. I realized if I’m performing and it goes well, and there’s laughter, that makes me happy. But if I write a sketch and someone else is in it, and there’s laughter, I don’t feel like my sketch went well, it was more like--I feel bad that I’m not doing it. For me, I think writing sketches is like planning a party for someone else to go to.

I loved doing Sketch Cram--that felt more like an activity. It has its own weird energy to it. But staying home and writing sketches was too much. It wasn’t my thing. And at the end of the year, I submitted, and emailed Anthony King and said, “disregard my submission” because I decided not to do it.

I didn’t write a sketch for seven years. I realized that that’s just wasn’t what I was at the UCB for. At the time, this sounds so silly, I was worried I would hurt my chances of ever getting on a Harold team by quitting Maude Night. I was worried that would look bad or something? So I was nervous about quitting. I thought maybe I should stick it out, maybe it will get better, maybe I’d really like my next team. But I ended up thinking it wasn’t really for me.

It’s one of those things where, periodically, I think I should go back to it, but I kinda realized I liked the idea of it, but when I’m sitting down and writing a sketch, I realized I don’t want to be. I figured out that I kind of wanted to perform and not write--and that caught me by surprise.

Maude Night was so weird back then! Nobody knew what it was! If you’re coming up now, you know Harold Night is a thing there, and Maude Night is a thing. There weren’t big crowds, nobody would know if Maude Night would still be there in a year. Nobody was sure what it was.

It was interesting to be part of that while everybody figured out what it was. A conversation with a Maude team now is more like, “how’s your team going?” whereas at the time it was, “how’s Maude Night going? What’s that thing? What’s the state of that?”

Here’s a funny thing: for our final show I wrote a monologue I was going to perform, but then I decided to quit and I did it so abruptly. I was so tortured on that decision that I didn’t want to have my grand finale show, I just wanted to be done. It was a first draft, and I was supposedly going to rewrite it, and obviously rehearse it. I was like, guys, I’m really done, use this draft, cast whoever, I don’t care. They end up casting Donald Glover. And there’s a video of it! But the thing is, this is a monologue I was going to do a rewrite of, so it’s not good. The performing is great--it’s Donald Glover! But the writing isn’t--I wouldn’t want to show that to somebody and say, “I wrote that, that’s me.” I have a video of Donald Glover performing a monologue I wrote. He does a great job with what he has. But I can’t be like, “here’s Donald Glover performing my shit,” because I’m not proud of what I wrote.

That whole thing was so weird. Maude Night is a much better thing now. Sometimes I wonder if I’d even stick around if I’d gotten into it with expectations of it being what it is now.

We had some good directors! One time we were going to have Will Hines directing for a month. It was his first time directing a Maude team. And then that show got canceled, when the Writers’ Strike was going on and we had live benefit shows at UCB. So that got canceled and Will was only on board to direct us for a month--so he ended up directing a show that never happened. Then he directed another team and that was when all the teams were going to be shuffled. I remember Will saying, “First time I directed a Maude team, they canceled the night. Second time I directed a Maude team, they canceled every team.”

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LW: Was there a moment where you felt you had to do comedy and be around UCB?

DB: I think a couple of different things happened over a period of time. I was a senior when I was taking my 101 and 201 classes, and I found out towards the end of my 201 that I didn’t get into the college I wanted to, and I was devastated. I was crushed. And then my 301 class--I had just finished high school or was about to finish high school--and I was still trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life, so I just decided as a fallback that UCB would be my “other school.” I don’t know if it was a definitive choice that I’d been a part of the community, but I just knew I liked it better than anything else that was going on in my life. So I decided to chase that and figure stuff out while I was there.

It was less of a choice of “I have to be part of this” and more of “this is what I should be doing right now:” being in this community and watching it grow and trying to figure out what my artistic voice was going to be and what I was to do with my life.

LW: What shows were you seeing? What kind of stuff were you doing?

DB: I was seeing Harold Night.

EO: What was Harold Night like?

DB: This makes me feel like an old man, but Harold Night used to be really different. I remember a time where Harold Night never sold out. If it was snowing, you could get a seat at Harold Night. If it was raining, you could get a seat at Harold Night. There were five slots, five teams during the night. When I first took classes, it was four teams, similar to how it is now, but with an 8 o’clock show and a 9 o’clock show.

It was great. Or rather, there were a lot of great teams but everybody always wanted to stay for 1985 and fwand. Those were the teams to see when I was coming up. 1985 was just--hands down--they played game, they were funny, they were hilarious. They were just a great team.

And fwand was something different. They had a lot of great shows, sometimes not strong scenes, but they would commit so hard to whatever they were doing. If they just decided that all the second beats were a monoscene in a baseball stadium--that was something that hadn’t been done before. Or they’d do they amazing organic transitions, like it would be “the anatomy of the human body” and they would try to make scenes based on that. All this crazy organic stuff that was really new and cool and interesting at the time. If you were a hip student, if you saw all the shows, you knew that fwand and ’85 were the teams to see. Everyone was talking about them.

I saw the SPANKs that were around at the time. All the sketch shows because I wanted to be a better writer. Ellie Kemper’s one-person show Dumb Girls was really good. I really liked that show a lot. That was the first written show I ever saw at the theatre. Anthony King directed, it was just Ellie Kemper doing characters. And this show called The Nightmare by The Brighter Side which was Curtis Gwinn, John Gemberling, Brett Gelman, and Jon Daly. It was a very bizarre, weird--I can’t remember if it was really funny, I just remember really loving it.

I think when you’re younger you just want to absorb everything. I was like, this is amazing, I don’t really know what it is! Then I had Curtis as a teacher and he showed me Jam, which is a sketch show from England. It was so wild to see that in remembering that show. I loved stuff like that. It’s like if David Lynch wrote a sketch show. That’s what I loved about it. It was funny in a way you don’t expect and it’s entertaining in a way that is-- I don’t wanna say “challenging” because that sounds pretentious but--it’s different! It’s a kind of comedy you don’t see all the time, and I really dig that stuff.

EO: When was the first time you felt like you were part of this? Included within the theatre, within the community...

DB: I dunno, I think feeling included feels like more of a mindset than a thing that happens. I honestly don’t feel like I felt really included at the theatre until I got on a team. I guess that’s a weird thing to say, but I think it’s kind of true. I think feeling included, for me, was a mindset I had to prepare myself for.

I think one thing UCB has done for me--I think when anybody comes into it at such a young age, they’re really learning things about life at a different pace than a lot of other people. Not to say faster or slower, just different. I think when you spend most of your adult life at the theatre--or any artsy community that’s as parallel to “the real world” as UCB is--when you immerse yourself in that before you learn things like how to talk to girls, how to be an adult, take care of yourself, you know? I was going through a lot of things at the time, really trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life, then feeling included at the theatre was a gradual thing for me. It happened in little bursts over a long period of time.

I think between the first time I got on an indie team, Fat Penguin, that was the first time I’d ever been asked to be part of a group before. So that was really fun. And then like, trying to start other side projects and practice groups, I wrote a SPANK that went up twice, and writing a show made me feel really included.

EO: How old were you when you got on a Harold team?

DB: Twenty-one. My first team was Dybbuk, and we were a lot of fun, and I really liked us a lot. But then I think even that--and maybe this is because I’m a very insecure person--but even after that it was like well, I’m on this...now what? There’s always going to be those moments where I don’t really feel like I’m a part of something.

Whenever I get too in my head about feeling included in things, I’m like, well, I’m just one story in this greater, bigger picture. I’m gonna do what I can, but I can ultimately only do so much about feeling included. I think it mostly comes from you.

EO: Can you talk about indie teams?

DB: When I was coming up in classes and performing with my first indie team Fat Penguin there weren’t that many groups so we all always saw each other. We all performed with each other. There would be a lot of groups known for being booked together on the same nights. There were just a couple games in town. There was Gotham City Improv which was not a great venue but a fun place to perform sometimes for nobody. There was a standup club called Broadway Comedy Club on 53rd and 9th Avenue and it was a really bad venue for improv but Fat Penguin had one of our best shows there. We did a monoscene in a backyard where like, every so often the smoothie machine inside would explode and we had to deal with it? I still remember that show. It was really fun but it was a bad venue for improv.

There were always groups that hung out together. Fat Penguin always hung out with Thank You, Robot and Stamp and Coin Club and Bad Data and those teams. It feels like a band, it feels like CBGBs of the 90s. All of us had classes together and we were all friends outside of our own teams and we all worked with each other a lot. There were also groups like Cape, which was four girls, two of which were on Fat Penguin.

But we were all friends. There was not that sense of competition yet. Joe Wengert once told me that there was a big culture change that the accepted fact was you used to form your indie teams early on in classes and a few people would get plucked from that team and put onto Harold Night or onto shows at the theatre, and then that team dissolves. But I think the generation that I came up in was the first to stick around. People would fall of the face of the earth sometimes but we all really stayed and were dedicated.

I remember the first time I auditioned, almost none of the people I knew from my indie team or from the teams around us got picked for Harold Night and we just stuck around, performing for years. Five years is a really good time, but that’s almost too much to ask for most teams. Even six months, at this point, is a miracle. But Fat Penguin was around and performed regularly for four years, then half of us got on a team at once. That was the year most of my friends had gotten on a team, and that was the big diverge when the indie teams I was on don’t really perform anymore.

I go to indie shows as often as I can now because I really like watching them. I like coaching a lot. I like watching young students figure it out and perform their shows because I like to see that. I do enjoy it. It does seem a little less social now. I kinda wish it wasn’t that way.

I think the biggest mistake someone can make when they come into the community is thinking that being on a Harold Team is their “in.” Because I did think that for a long time, and it’s not. It’s putting the work in and doing things on your own. Improv is great, and I love it, and I’m obsessed with it but at the end of the day it’s not a tangible thing you can show someone. It’s more of a skill. It’s almost a selfish art form. You do it, and you get satisfaction from it when it goes well and only a handful of people can really see it at a time when it goes really well. It should give you the confidence to get up and do other things.

I hope that’s not what most indie teams think of when they perform. Just farm themselves out. The stupidest thing, I think, a team could do is form the way they do Harold Night. Because no--you should perform with the people you want to perform with.

There’s always going to be that competition, but there was that period when a lot of the indie teams were really rallied together. I was part of something called the “indie team alliance,” which was basically the five indie teams that always performed--I’m not gonna say we were the best, just the ones that performed the most. We were always around each other and we all were teams that booked shows like three or four times a week. Our job was just to go to each other’s shows as the “indie team alliance.” If one of these teams was at Cage Match we all voted for them in solidarity.

EO: Who did you look up to when you first started?

DB: Oh, I always looked up to Neil Casey. He was one of the first people I really latched onto and thought “I love the way this person improvises, I really dig this guy’s sense of humor.” And then I got to know him and we have a lot of the same sensibilities and he’s really cool! Still today I think that it’s important to embody your role models and inspirations in the work that you do. Maybe it’s a selfish thing, something you do to keep going forward, but I think you’re able to channel that and it can produce the work. If you can trick yourself to think like another person, you can trick yourself into being more confident than you really are.

I remember as a student when I’d think, “what would Neil or Joe Wengert do in this scene?” then I’d stop thinking about that and I’d just do it. Sometimes I still, before a show, I’d think “well, I gotta act as hard as Neil would or Anthony Atamanuik would in this scene,” or “I’ll listen as hard as Joe would in this scene,” and sometimes that’s when I have my best shows.

I often compare improv thoughts to movies. There was a kung-fu movie I saw recently where the kung-fu master wrote on a stone and threw it into the woods and told the young student to find the stone. The student asked why and he said “because anyone can throw it. It takes a calm mind to find the stone.” I often think about that with improv because anybody can be funny, but it takes a really calm, clear mind to actually find game and play it, and to actually do a good scene that’s unique and not just going for laughs. And doing a scene that’s truly wonderful, where you’re actually listening to everything the other person’s saying. I remember Neil not using that analogy, but teaching me that sort of mindset. Because if you’re thinking about the rules, you’re not doing it.

LW: Can you speak to your involvement with the Gethard Show at all?

DB: I play the Human Fish on the Gethard Show. When the show started it was a stage show at the theatre and I was not part of it at the time. I had participated in a couple of bits and weird things on the show, like, I was in the Telethon of Shame, where I had to drink milk until I puked--which I ended up not doing onstage, I did that backstage later. I had to drink milk and whiskey and every time I did it someone would donate money, but it was for a good cause. And then I was in a couple other things for the show, and then Gethard coached Dybbuk for a while and he coached my second Harold team, Dance Break.

Gethard was probably the best coach I ever had. He was super passionate and thought what he was doing was right, and I’ve always been interested in those types of mindsets, so I was like whatever you’re doing, I’ll fucking do it.

He asked me if I wanted to do something for the first episode of the public access Gethard Show, because he’d canceled the stage show and moved it to MNN. We were on Phil Jackson’s roof, he was having a party and we were on the roof just talking about it. He was like, “when you think of an idea, just come up with it.” I honestly can’t remember who said “Human Fish” first. I think he did. He said, “yo, you can just be Human Fish, and take that to be whatever you want it to be.”

I think like two weeks before the show was to happen I bought a pair of swim trunks and flippers from K-Mart and I took a picture of myself and sent it to Gethard with the text “Can I do this?” and he was like, yeah, fuck yeah, come over, do that. Whatever it is, be that!

I think the “versus” thing came from something else I pitched to Gethard on the show. I had pitched a bunch of different things of something I’d wanna see on the show. I had no thought that I’d ever be on the show, or that the show would be what it is now. Just that I’d help Gethard. I’d always loved his sense of humor and we’d always bonded over Andy Kaufman stuff. So I knew what he wanted from this show.

That first show was a mess. It was a huge disaster. I think we all accepted that the show had to start from zero as opposed to picking up where it left off on the stage show. Nobody ever watches public access television except like, shut-ins in Manhattan. Then once we got the streaming thing going on, we built this huge audience and it became this amazing thing. It’s really weird! Super interesting but so bizarre how popular and how the show just got around. The weirdest thing was people finding UCB through the show. That to me, is the strangest but also I feel weirdly honored to be a part of that.

That also speaks to what I was saying before about being one small part of something. When I was a kid I felt like I had to be this big filmmaker, I had these big aspirations. Then when I didn’t get into the college I wanted I thought everything was over and I could never do this again. I think a big thing UCB taught me, and being a part of the community, and maybe it’s just something about life, is that you’re just one part of something much bigger.

So being the Human Fish--I take it very seriously--but it’s not that much work on my end. I come up with all of the “versus” things. I write them down every Wednesday morning. Especially after the last couple of episodes. The first time I did it, they were for something else, so I just had a huge list of them. After a while I started making them up on the spot and I started realizing that that was less fun for me. It’s more fun when I get to prepare more for it, like if I can make a pattern of it throughout the show. It’s also fun to change it on the fly. I used to make short films with the Human Fish and I’m trying to do that again now. But other than that, it’s not that much work for me, it’s mostly a lot of Gethard, and a lot of the crew. The Human Fish can’t survive on his own. He needs this show. And that’s what I like most about it. I like being a part of something much bigger. I have that selfish satisfaction of being in that “crowd,” and saying I’m glad I got to be a part of this.

I think the show is different to a lot of people. It’s the type of comedy I really like because it’s the type of comedy that’s both tragic and conventionally funny, but it doesn’t go great lengths to please people. It just is what it is.

I read this book about the Mary Tyler Moore Show, and it’s amazing. One chapter I remember specifically because it hit me so hard. Ted Knight often asked for his character to be written more sympathetic in all the episodes. And all the writers were like, “No, what are you crazy? The whole point is that you’re like this!” I think the thing I love most about the Gethard Show right now is they’re like, this is what the show is, and if you don’t like it, you can watch something else, but we hope you do. And the people that do love it.

And I think that’s what all TV used to be like. If you go back to like--All in the Family, all that stuff. I feel like television’s biggest crutch is that they feel like they have to go on forever and they have to do everything to make everyone happy and they have to tie everything up in a nice bow. Like The Office going on for as long as it did. It’s really dumb, it doesn’t make sense. Because once Pam and Jim get together, the show is over. That’s why the British Office ended. It’s like a movie. It’s one story you can only handle for so long. That’s why I don’t like a lot of television now.

But that’s more of a grandiose thing about what I think of the Gethard Show. The Gethard Show, what I like about it, is that it is what it is, and it doesn’t go at great lengths to please people. It’s just there, and it’s true to itself. That’s very pretentious to say, and I probably sound like an asshole right now, but it’s fun to be a part of that.

That’s also what I remember about that show I mentioned earlier, the Nightmare show. I don’t think that got a run at the theatre, come to think of it now. I think they just had the two SPANKs. And I saw them both. Maybe it just had one! But still to this day, it’s still one of my favorite shows I ever saw at the theatre.

I think there are compromises when it comes to art. But you can’t compromise in a way where the artist doesn’t like it anymore. If you see it in front of you and you think, “This isn’t what I wanted,” then that’s what I don’t like.

What I do with the Human Fish is still me figuring out what I want to do with myself. But I think everybody's in that phase all the time. I think if you’re in that phase when you find “it,” then it’s over, and that’s sad.

That was a huge moment for me, in improv, that Gethard taught me. Sure, everybody’s seen the scene where the popular girl dumps the nerdy guy in the school. It can be funny. But Gethard told me, “I wanna see how Dave Bluvband would play that scene.” Because that’s gonna be different than how anybody else would play that scene. I remember it was in this scene with Ellena Chmielewski in a Dance Break practice. I wish I could remember what it was I said...Ellena initiated with something like “Oh, I can’t date you, I’m the popular girl, you’re the nerd.” Something super blunt like that, naming our status. And I was just like...I said something super sad, but it got a huge laugh and Gethard loved it. Something like, “That’s okay, I still gotta work my way up the ranks.”

I was like, oh, this is actually what it means to do improv you actually like doing. I could have done a funny voice or whatever--it would have been funny, but it wouldn’t have been what I wanted to do, how Dave Bluvband would do it. I watch class shows a lot, and there’s a lot of “I think this is what I’m supposed to do because this is the game move,” or “I know this will get a laugh.” There’s less risks being taken with people actually doing something that they would do.

Something Shannon O’Neill always does is she always improvises like Shannon O’Neill would improvise. A lot of people would misinterpret that like, “she’s just a funny person who’s super dirty or calls people retards and assholes,” but no, Shannon can do that. You don’t do what Shannon does. I think that’s a huge part of it.

I think there’s also a thing where people just don’t use their own life in improv, which I’m not saying you should do all the time, but there are things that I hear in improv scenes, like what would I really do, or it’s improv, what would I really want to do!

James McCarthy, on my team, is really good at that. He’s a super-strong yes-and-er. He really “ands” the fuck out of scenes, and he’s so funny. I remember James McCarthy was in a scene, and he was a guy at a lunch counter in a high school. And Jackie Jennings was a student and was like, “Oh my god, you’re shirtless?” in the scene, and he was like, “Yeah me and my bros just came back from the water park.” He just kept bringing out like, a fun noodle and saying, “Yeah we got lasagna today.” And to me, that was just a funny thing that only James McCarthy could say. Stuff like that--that’s so funny and that can only come from him.

That’s the type of improv I love seeing, and that’s why Neil Casey and Krompf as an indie team--holy shit, they were the best at that. Only Krompf can do Krompf shows.

LW: Is there something that would make you stop hanging around UCB or doing improv?

DB: Wow. I guess if I became some sort of social pariah. You know what I mean? If I did something to really anger someone or I wrote one wrongly worded email to somebody and then suddenly became outcast from the community.

I guess that would probably be the only thing I could think of that would make me stop. Or if--I mean--and this is also weird, I never think about “being famous,” quote-unquote. Who wants to think about that? That’s whatever. But if I did, I would hope it wouldn’t take me away.

I would hope that I get to do enough things at the theatre that I’d have a reason to be around. Because I think there’s also this weird thing where I don’t want to just hang around and not keep creating stuff. I would love to still see shows and be a part of the community but I would much rather be a creator than an audience member again.

If I suddenly fell on hard times and couldn’t afford to live in the city anymore or whatever, that would drive me away from UCB. But I think honestly it would take a lot for me to get driven away by the community.

LW: How do you explain UCB to your parents?

DB: It’s funny, my mom comes to most of my shows. She’s come to almost every single one of my Harold Night shows. She’s a very artsy person--she’s a designer. I don’t know if I get this from her, or I’ve learned this from her--I don’t know if it’s genetic or just a learned thing--but she’s always just accepting of the unknown. That’s what she loves about improv. The first time she saw me on Harold Night she was like, this is really cool. She saw my class shows coming up too. She’s my favorite audience member because she’s an audience member who’s not confused by the technique of it or the fact that she’s never seen it before. She’s really interested in absorbing it because she hasn’t seen it before. Just goes into the unknown. That’s the best type of audience--the kind that’s ready to do with you.

I remember my mom watching Death by Roo Roo at Cage Match when one of my teams was up against them, and my mom said, “You both were great, but that other team was...they were so good.” And they had a really dirty show! My mom is not like--she’s an open person but she’s a very proper lady. I was like, “Really, you enjoyed that?!” And she was like, “I really love how they just didn’t feel like they needed to wink at us. They were just committed to everything. It was wonderful.” That’s the bar for most audiences for me. If their attitude is anything lower than that, then they’re not worth my time.

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I was religiously--it was a ritual for me--watching all the videos on Channel 101, all the videos on Olde English. I was also really into College Humor when they started making their own content. It’s just so cool to see them as writers, as performers, just having the time of their life in this office they’d built for themselves. It looked like every late 90s, early 2000s internet company where they had their ping-pong table, and they had their Guitar Hero in their office and they all had toys on their desks, and they’re making these really well-done sketch comedy videos. Eventually, Derrick Comedy was a huge deal. They were like, the pioneers of YouTube comedy!

At the summer camp I worked at, I would do characters for the kids, and I would walk around--I would not break character--and the kids would make a game out of trying to make me break character. They’d be like, “who are you again?” and I’d go, “I’m Robot Riley, I’m not Riley! I’m Robot Riley!” or, “I’m Vacation Jason, I’m always on Vacation.”

So I got a Macbook Pro when I graduated high school and one of the only things I did with it is I would use the camera and iMovie and I would set up a little studio in my room where I could just talk straight to the camera as a character and edit it all, put some music behind it. That’s when I started making those videos. I would watch College Humor videos from noon when I would wake up till three o’clock when I would get picked up to go to work, take care of these after school kids, get home, watch more College Humor, watch more Derrick, watch more Olde English. Whatever was out there. Just absorbing sketch comedy.

I started making those videos, and they kind of caught on. Not in a huge way, but I got a thousand subscribers. Which is not necessarily easy to do on YouTube. I’m still kinda proud of that! Because it was just me. It was just the characters I was coming up with, and just the costumes I would buy at the thrift store. Every video felt very personal and a project I was very invested in because I was trying to do something with my time because I hated this job that I had so much.

But I knew that I hated my job, I knew that I wanted to visit New York to visit all my friends that were going to school there, and I wanted to see a show at UCB. My friends had already been a couple times, and said, “there’s this great free show that we can take you to, you’re gonna love it."

So you have this weird sketch comedy that I remember from when I was kid but didn’t quite understand, but I knew that I liked it and there was something to it, you had improv--I definitely didn’t know what longform improv was but I was excited to find out--and you had New York City, where I was excited to spend time, you had all these friends that I really wanted to see, you had this life in California that I was fine with, but I also need something else ‘cause I’m trying very hard to be creative but I don’t really have the resources or the know-how. So I went to New York.

I saw ASSSSCAT and it immediately blew my mind open. It was the best comedy show I’d ever seen. And I remember thinking, “this looks fun in a way that standup is not.” ‘Cause I had tried standup, and it was very lonely to write. It was lonely, and scary, and such a drag. And now I’m seeing everyone working together--and all the hippy-dippy things that everyone loves about improv. It’s communal, it’s not any one person’s thing, it’s not just who’s the smartest guy in the room, it looked fun. It looked like nothing else. And it was the character thing I was already kind of doing, it was kind of standup, which I already wanted to be, it was sketch which I had loved for years. It was New York, which I was just immediately enamored with like everybody is.

That was in April 2008. I finished out the year doing the after school thing, I went to the summer camp I’d always gone to for years, and in October I moved to New York with the specific goal just to take improv classes and figure it out. And I’d have the safety net of these friends who are in college who can help me out, I can call them when I get lost trying to navigate the West Village.

EO: When did you feel included or like you belonged at UCB?

RS: I feel like I felt very confident going into classes. Even in improv 101. Didn’t know anybody, but I was confident because you immediately realize that for some people, this is the first opportunity they’ve ever had to express themselves in either a comedic or creative way. For some people, they’re taking these classes as an exercise in public speaking, or being social. By the way, that’s incredibly admirable.

I felt confident early on in classes because--and this is corny--but I was a fucking class clown! I was trying, I was making these videos, and I had some success. I was known in high school, or at my summer camp, or online as a funny guy. And there was a genuine fear in like, “oh god, I really hope I’m not just ‘the funny guy at the office.’ I’m not the guy always cracking jokes with the delivery man. I wanna be legitimately funny.” And I felt like when I was taking an improv class and they explain game, or heightening, I felt like those things came naturally to me, because those are things that I was experimenting with, without having a name for them.

And I feel like in improv classes, especially in improv 101, everybody has to come out of their shell. It did take time, but I wasn’t afraid to come out of my shell. And it took time but it was a thing I was looking forward to doing, not a thing I shied away from. I want my teacher to go, not “that was funny,” but “he gets this, he’s not just getting lucky or being charismatic. He’s going to shows, he’s paying attention, he’s paying attention to my notes, he’s not just funny because he’s coasting on this voice that he can do, or this line that he keeps saying.”

When I felt included: I was very gung-ho about seeing shows. You see two shows as a requirement. Every week in 101 they’d ask who saw shows, and I’d raise my hand and say, “I went to Cage Match, then I went to Death by Roo Roo, I saw--oh, before that I saw Reuben Williams--I went to ASSSSCAT, but that doesn’t count, don’t count that one, and then you know, I went to Gravid Water, and I went to Harold Night. Oh, and then I saw an improv set at School Night, but that doesn’t count because that’s one improv set, and they were just kinda fucking around.”

Ari Voukydis would point at me and he would go, “pay attention to this guy, this is how you do it. If you wanna get better at this, you have to keep watching it. Watch as much improv, and take it in.” And it’s such a luxury that it’s so entertaining! Imagine if it was boring and you didn’t wanna watch it!

When I started feeling included: definitely Ari Voukydis pointing me out and saying “you see a lot of shows.” Definitely when--I remember the scene. There was a scene in class where I was playing a high school bully being confronted by the principal for just being unruly. And instead of just like, talking it out, I made a big character choice. I made a silly voice and I strutted around the stage. It was the first time in a class where anyone was making a big decision to play a larger-than-life character. And the whole room just kind of opened up and watched me do it. And it felt very good. I was playing more from my gut as a character than analyzing a scene and making a move. It just felt right. I think it also helped that I was the youngest guy in the class, I had just turned 21. It felt very good to show people that this can be fun. This isn’t a thing where we have to put our nose to the grindstone--that was what 201 was for. But 101, after that scene, it was like...guys, we can do anything! It felt very cool to be on the younger side of the room and to have the most fun. I dunno.

Maybe I wasn’t as influential as I’m thinking I was in that class, but I know I had fun in that class, and I was able to have a kind of fun where I started feeling included when I started including people. It’s a two-way street. Improv 101 felt so much more fun after that scene, or having a scene where we’re both the crazy guy. And people say hey, this guy is fun to play with. Gain a reputation as being a fun guy to play with and people will want to include you.

Improv 301. I’m gonna jump to another moment where I felt included. The Creek and the Cave would have a show called Wednesdays with Harold, where they would do Harold Night on Wednesdays. Two indie teams would go up, and then a bucket would be passed around and you put your name in it, the raffle is drawn, and those people who are drawn get up and do a Harold. My name was drawn. And I may have done one or two Harolds in the past, but I was now doing a Harold with Will Hines. He’s my favorite improviser. He’s one of my favorite people in--not just in the improv community, but in New York. He’s one of my favorite New York people. He is a New York institution and he’s leaving and it kills me.

But this was the first time I really interacted with him. And we did a Harold.

Will Hines came up to me afterwards, and he said, “good callback.” And it paralyzed me. It was the first time someone I really looked up to said that. I mean, I looked up to Ari Voukydis, I looked up to my improv teachers. I took their good notes to heart--I took their bad notes to heart too. But my encouraging notes, I held onto those, and those kept me going. But this was the first time that Will Hines, of the Stepfathers, is saying, “good job, I’m Will Hines, nice to meet you.” And he holds his hand out and says, “I’m Will.”

I scoffed and said, “I know.” I was so nervous, I didn’t know what to do!

Another moment where I felt included was when they started acknowledging my presence at Cage Match. Not just ‘cause I was there every week but because I would act insane.

EO: Fesh tells us.

RS: In the front row at Cage Match! Because they were parodying pro-wrestling, and pro-wrestling was a thing I’d watch on television in middle school and it was my favorite thing in the world. And then you get a little bit older and your friends start moving onto things, and you guess you should move on too, and you’re like, “that’s dumb, I can’t believe ever liked that!” But now I’m watching it--and as dumb as it is--there are smart people doing it. And I love smart people telling dumb jokes. It doesn’t get better than Cage Match for that.

It was like, for me, watching the intermission of Cage Match where they do a jokey wrestling match, I was able to ironically cheer on this stupid thing that I “hated” now because I was becoming a “New York intellectual,” but I was also allowing myself to sincerely cheer on this thing that I only ever watched on television but as a kid really desperately wanted to see live. So I kind of had my cake and ate it too, saying, “this thing is so dumb, but this thing is so fun.”

I was not officially a part of Cage Match, but I was able to play a part as an audience member at the “UCBW Arena event.” Which is what they wanted! When the bad guy comes out they want you to boo him. When a good guy comes out, they want to be cheered. So I think they enjoyed that I got it, and I understood what they wanted and that I wanted it too, for the show. It was fun to get chants started or get the rest of the audience into it. It was mostly about me, but it was fun to say, “I can get the rest of the audience into it!”

So I started being a fixture, being known as a guy who loves Cage Match. So I liked feeling included in that way. That led to Frank Hejl, who was the referee, when he needed a break, or needed a night off, or was busy, I was asked to substitute as the referee one time. And then again and again. Eventually when Frank got on Maude Night as a writer and an actor, he was too busy for Cage Match and I took over for him, officially, in January 2011.

Another moment that I felt very included also stemmed from me being around all the time. That was The Chris Gethard Show, which was my favorite show at UCB and it was just a talk show. I had been around long enough to see a ton of improv and still love it, and put all my energy into it. But the Gethard Show was just a release. I was like, yeah, I’m definitely gonna be at every one of these shows. It was this thing where I had to. It didn’t matter if I was working at 6 a.m. the next day, I would stay up till 2 a.m. at The Chris Gethard Show.

Gethard invited me to host the one year anniversary of The Chris Gethard Show, and I really hosted it. I wrote a State of the Union Address for the show--big long speech about how much the show meant to me. I wrote notes to the entire cast, criticizing their performance and how they can do better. And then I wrote the questions and answers to a game show about The Chris Gethard Show for the cast members. So the questions had to be hard enough to stump the members of The Chris Gethard Show. And man, did that make me feel included. That was huge. It’s still my favorite show. And it wasn’t just, “Riley did his thing, let’s get back to the show.” I really hosted the whole show.

And of course, at the end of that show I was invited along to the Chris Gethard Show Cross-Country Adventure. Which again: to have my head in the clouds, I’m on this trip with the people I admire the most, I’m part of it! But it’s also...of course I’m being included! I’m the only one of the fans of this incredibly popular show who’s being included in this way! And still I have to wonder--the feeling always lingers--am I being included? Of course, of course I’m being included! I was the only one being included in that way! But it’s still: am I doing a good job? Am I as funny as I want them to think I am?

Being included--I’m on Harold Night, but are we the best team? Am I a standout player on the best team? Am I a standout player but am I also good at making the other members of my team look good? There’s so many different ways that you want to feel included. I have my own show at UCB, but was it the better of the two shows in this time block? I have a show at UCB, but did the people that I admire come see it, or did they like it? You know? Is it known as one of the best-written shows of the year? All these ridiculous qualifiers, but it’s like, yes! I’m improvising on this stage. I’m performing a sketch show I have written on this stage. I have been included. Just the opportunity to audition for Harold Night: I’m being included. Just the opportunity to take these classes and make friends and connect over this art form that we’re both incredibly passionate about. Yes! We’re being included.

I feel like if you include someone else, you’re probably already being included.

EO: What was the culture like when you started? Who did you look up to?

RS: My favorite thing about Harold Night back then was how diverse the teams were. Back then you’d have the buddy you stand in line with and together you’d either both know, or each know, part of the Harold Night roster and you had the names in your heads like they were trading cards. You would play fantasy Harold Night in your head! It’s just so fun to look up to all these people and how they were all different but all so great.

When I really first started going to Harold Night, DeCoster was a team. People would always tell me that DeCoster was one of the oldest, longest-running teams on Harold Night and for years and years and years, they sucked. The point is I never saw a DeCoster show I didn’t like! I loved them.

DeCoster. The Scam. Bastian. Bangs. Badman got formed. They were my favorite team for a while. God, Badman was such a team.

One of the most interesting things that I remember happening in Harold Night was there was kind of an arms race between Badman and Bastian to be the new “it” team on Harold Night. Where Bastian was very buttoned-down, cerebral, orderly, but still incredibly funny. And Badman was just how weird and wild and absurd can you get. And just when you thought, “Badman--I love Badman’s style,” Bastian would have this show, the smartest comedy I’ve ever seen, and it was written right then and there.

Instead of turning it into a competitive thing, they turned it into a “let’s embrace how good we both are,” type thing. And they had a show where halfway through Bastian’s show they left the stage and Badman got onstage and finished the show. Then for Badman’s show, they left the stage halfway throughout and Bastian finished Badman’s show. It was incredible! It was so cool!

DeCoster was doing the best sound and movement opening. Nobody else was even coming close to being that watchable. They had a show where--this was not predetermined--where every two person scene, one of the people in the scene would be silent. They just decided that somewhere in the first scene. It was amazing. My god, what a team.

Then because you’re moving up in the classes and maybe you’re one of the better people in your classes, you get so fucking high and mighty about improv even though you don’t know shit and you tanked your first Harold audition and you’re afraid to talk to Kevin Hines, or you’re afraid to look Neil Casey in the eye. You’re afraid to step in McManus, you know? But in that line, waiting for Harold Night, you’ll go, “Oh that team? They fucking suck. My god, they’re the worst team, they should cut everyone on that team!” And you don’t know who you become all of a sudden! You couldn’t do what they do! And when you get the chance to do what they do, you fucking fail!

And I tell you, and I say this all the time, that if I had a time machine and I went back to my younger self and said, “hey focus on writing half as much as you focus on improv and you’ll thank me.” My younger self would say, “logically I understand, and if I wanted to write, I would, but all I wanna do is focus on improv until I’m on Harold Night.”

LW: Do your parents get it? How do you explain it to them?

RS: I feel like my family has always gotten it from a young age. I mean, the summer camp that I grew up at--it’s run by my extended family--is a performing arts summer camp. That’s where I came out of my shell at age thirteen.

So my family has always gotten it. They’ve always been 100 percent supportive of every creative endeavor I’ve ever pursued. It’s insane. You go to my dad’s house and he has every art project I’ve ever made from kindergarten on. All the watercolors, all the sculptures, all the drawings. My mom loves every single one of my videos. She watches every episode of the Gethard Show, just in case I’m on it. My dad watches every episode of the Gethard Show.

They’ve always gotten it. And they’re always confident in my abilities. And sometimes, it’s hard to deal with. Because it’s like, “guys, mom, dad, you don’t get it, that was not good improv! What you saw was a disaster onstage!” But they say, “well, we just like seeing you up there!” And it’s frustrating! Because I’m going “No, no, no, no, no, don’t tell me that! I have to get better at this thing! And I’m worried that I won’t get better if all you’re doing is telling me how great I am.” But then I hear about the families of my friends who just do not get it. And I wouldn’t change it for a second.

And they’re not only okay with it, they’re fans. They love it that I have friends who are just as creative. They love checking in with this world that I’ve jumped into.

My mom flew out to see my very first improv grad show. Improv 101. Thank god, that was one of the best improv shows I’ve ever done.

They knew how much the Gethard Show meant to me, how much hosting that episode of the Gethard Show meant to me. They knew how much it meant to me to go on the road with them, and they knew about Vacation Jason long before Chris Gethard did. So for them to see me bring Vacation Jason to The Chris Gethard Show and to win that argument--yes I can do this on the show--to be accepted for that. And then to do the show in LA, which both my mom and my dad drove down to see the finale of the Chris Gethard Show Cross-Country Adventure. My mom and dad were in the audience when Chris Gethard said, “we don’t know much about this guy, he has this character, we don’t think it’s funny, we’ll let you decide.” And for me to do that character and get the applause that I got in a Los Angeles audience?

To do that for my parents was huge. But it’s never been about proving them wrong. It’s about proving them right.

LW: Would you stop? Not improvising necessarily, but would you ever stop hanging around UCB?

RS: It would be very, very difficult for me to decide that I have no time for the UCB Theatre, or for comedy. ‘Cause that’s what I came here to do. I have a job that takes up a lot more of my time now, but it just makes me want to value the time I spend at the UCB Theatre that much more when I have it.

Whether that’s making friends that I deeply care about, or it’s a show that took me a year and a half to write, and I auditioned it at that theatre and I didn’t compromise and I put up my vision at this theatre, and I put up this show that meant more than anything to me than anything before it. Or whether it’s studying improv for two and a half years and having the confidence to walk into a room and audition for the improv teams that are statistically impossible to be accepted onto.

You get obsessed with the wrong things sometimes, when it comes to UCB. Like making a mark on the theatre. It’s very selfish. “I wanna be the funniest guy there,” or, “I wanna be funny enough so people know who I am and they wanna see me perform, and I want them to remember my name.” That’s not necessarily going to get you anywhere with that mentality.

But I will say that it made me work hard. It made me work very, very hard. And I wanna keep working hard at this thing, because if I don’t I’m gonna be stuck at this job--and I may still be stuck at this job--but at least I have this life that I care about outside of this job. I have these close friends that know that I care about this thing, and that I care about them, and they care about me, and they care about what they do, and I care about what they do. And we all just care so much about each other and what we do. That something positive that has come from this.

Whether or not it’s being a Nick Kroll or a Jason Mantzoukas, I have this circle that I will not let go of. And it’s rooted in me taking these sketch and improv classes but it’s become so much more than that. It’s not something that I can just drop because it’s such a big part of my life now. It may be the biggest part of my life. It trumps my family back in California, that I don’t see very much anymore, which is very unfortunate. But I have to do this. And luckily enough I have a family that supports this and they know that this is an important thing to me. I have to keep doing it.

And you do walk away from it. And sometimes it’s my choice, and sometimes it’s not. This sketch show that I did, it had a finite run at the theatre. I knew that going in. It’s over now. I don’t get to do that show twice a month anymore. And that’s fine. I knew that going in. So I did it as best I could every time I did it.

I was on a Harold team, and you either move on from Harold Night, or you get cut from Harold Night, or you walk away from Harold Night. I was cut. And it’s fine because I’m proud of the work that I did there. I think the most unfortunate thing about not being on an improv team represented by UCB that gets to go up at UCB anymore, is the distance that I immediately felt from all of my closest friends that were improvising with me on Harold Night. ‘Cause you spend a mandatory practice with them at least three hours a week. And then you get on gchat and you discuss what you did and who you are and why you did what you did. And as soon as I’m not on Harold Night, it’s like cool, I know we are friends, I know that we’re close and nothing’s gonna take away the time that we spent together, but we had a mandatory family time for three hours every Thursday. And then we would perform together every Tuesday. And that was an extremely special bonding experience that I don’t get with those people right now.

So yes. Whether by choice or whether the powers that be decide that I am not around the theatre as much as I want to be--I’m not! And I’m saving money and I’m not stressing out about how good my improv is. But yes, I’m not around the theatre as much as I was, and maybe that’s for the better. But I don’t think there’s gonna come a time any time soon. It’s too woven into the fabric of my life. I can’t step away from the theatre even if I wanted to. My best friends are at the theatre. My girlfriend’s at the theatre. It’s kind of remarkable that I don’t have a job in any way connected to the theatre. It’s still something that does not pay me.

I need it for me, just to satisfy me. Not to ensure that I can still live in New York. It’s still why I live in New York. It’s part of the bigger thing that’s keeping me in New York. Honestly, I don’t know where I’d be if it weren’t for New York just because of how deep I am in this thing. I’m in a good place in the theatre where it’s a social thing, and it’s my creative thing. I feel like I can’t step away from it for all the right reasons.

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My family was already planning a trip like a week later to New York City--I’m from Ohio--and so I asked “can we go to this?” and they said sure. So I went to the show Crash Test, which is now Whiplash, which is a standup show. Aziz was there, and then the next night I went to Harold Night, so I got like, not THE spectrum but like, standup, improv...I was already a big sketch guy, but these were two worlds I hadn’t really been a part of, so immediately I was like, I’m bored. And so any time we came through the city, I’d try to see at least one show at the UCB.

LW: When was that?

MSF: I think 2006? Maybe? 2005, maybe? I can’t remember what was the first...I turned 16 inside the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. In 2007 I came out and went to an ASSSSCAT. Like, one show a year up until 2010, and that’s when the Gethard Show stuff happened.

EO: Can you talk about that?

MSF: 2010 was when it all happened. The wheels were in motion in 2009. I’d been seeing a bunch of ASSSSCATs and I, immediately, was like, “Gethard’s my favorite one.” I didn’t know his name, but I figured it out, and then started watching whatever I could of his online. And there was more to it--which I think is a thing that’s common now with the Chris Gethard Show--there was more to it than a just immediate connection. And so he started doing this show The Magic Box of Stories, which was just him, and you’d pick a number and they’d pull that number and he’d tell a story. Then that heightened to the Magic Bus Ride of Stories, which was he went to Jersey with an audience and showed them the places of the stories, which got heightened to the Magic Nissan Sentra of Stories, which was a contest where one person would drive around with him as he ran errands one day.

Yeah, so he was at one point complaining that only five people entered the contest for the Magic Nissan Sentra of Stories, so I said “I’m in Ohio, otherwise I’d enter,” and he said “dare to dream.” So I did! And what it was was a 500-word essay or equivalent, on why you wanna do it, and I found out later that I was the only one who actually wrote an essay! Everybody else took pictures of weird stuff, or sculpted his head or something, I don’t know what they were. But I didn’t win that one.

I feel like I wrote him a very honest “this is why I would like to do that” thing and so I think that stuck with him, and so when it led to the whole “I wanna help a kid out thing,” which happened around February. I think it was he hoped that I would enter? So I did, immediately, and I was one of the first, if not the first person to enter that.

Basically the whole concept of the show was he wanted to help someone not in New York or Jersey that isn’t around anything like this to introduce them to it and make them feel like a rockstar for one night. My thing was just, I wanted to be at the UCB, and that’s enough for me. But then to have it about me--that’s very cool. That same day he Facebook chatted me and was like, “if your parent’s are cool with this, let’s do it!” And it was one of those things where my parents were like, “...yeah, that’s gonna happen.” And then he Facebook chats and they’re like “okay, fine. Yeah, okay, this is happening!” And it was pretty cool.

EO: So what did they bring you here to do?

MSF: It was sort of a weekend event. The show was Saturday at midnight, and I came out Thursday night, so all day Friday I hung out with him and Shannon O’Neill, and we went to this big party at Shaun Diston’s place and then Saturday basically we just watched Spaceballs. Rob Heubel had paid for my hotel. And so Gethard just came over to my hotel and watched Spaceballs. And then he fell asleep during it. It was cool!

But my whole attitude was that this was more than enough. I’m not going to complain. And so the show was at midnight and there were a bunch of videos from a bunch of people. Donald Glover, the writers and cast of SNL, Jack McBrayer, crazy stuff. Dave Hill, who’s one of my favorite standups, came in and did standup and did very specific standup for me because we’re both from Ohio. It was amazing. MC Chris wrote a song about me. It was great. And then Lennon Parham--this is a very important thing--took me aside at one point afterwards and grabbed my hand and said, “you have a place here now,” and I was like, this is too much. So that was great.

And then three days later my grandpa died. It was a very mixed week. But the cool thing--well, the “cool thing” about it was that the last conversation I had with him was filling him in on everything. And I was a very quiet...I would just sit there and not say a word at a family function because I didn’t know my place in the world. And so we barely talked in general after a certain age after my teen years. So my last and first real conversation was just the best. We were both really, really happy.

So that combined with Lennon telling me that was like, I gotta get there as soon as possible. I can’t waste any more time. So I spent the summer here. I crashed and couch surfed for a while...And I went home and worked until I had enough money to move here. I still came in and out just for the stupidest things. One was Diddy Gethard--I was like, I have to do this. One was just a UCBW show. So I covered enough shifts at work that just the extra shifts I picked up paid for my trip here. Because I was like, I need to be here for this moment! And it was worth it. And it always is. And maybe that week I got to play with Sandino at School Night. It was crazy! It was all before I’d taken any classes or anything. It was the best. So August I was like, I’m coming in and staying. August 10th, 2011 I moved here, and August 19th was my 101. And that was it!

EO: What was the moment when you were like, “oh, I have to do this?”

MSF: I always think Lennon was the reason to moved New York and needed to be around UCB. Why I needed to take classes was Sandino. I wrote a big thing about it like a year ago. There’s a very specific throwaway moment--Dru and Kate are in a scene about this chubby kid whose friends are going to see Iron Man 2 and he’s waiting for them to call to say “you should come with us!” And the mom is just like...trying not to say it’s not gonna happen but “if it doesn’t we have this,” or whatever. So the third hit of that, she pulls out this Xbox 360, which we know is really for next week. And that specific line, his birthday's next week, she feels so bad for him right now so she’s giving him the Xbox. This is all understated! She just said it like it was nothing.

And there’s video of me watching it and I’m just like...whoa. And that one moment tapped so deeply into something inside me that I didn’t even directly experience! That’s just an idea I can totally empathize with. That I was like wait--this is what we can do with this art form? This is different than just jokes or whatever? I wanna do this. And that’s--if I had to boil it down to one moment? It was those three months of watching Sandino be one of the younger teams and just destroy every week. That these guys made me wanna do this.

LW: I think a lot of people tend to associate you with UCBW--

MSF: You want me to talk about UCBW? Please!

I was a senior in high school in Ohio when I discovered it, because I’d been coming in and out and I hadn’t been to a Cage Match yet. I’m a big fan of professional wrestling, I have video of me opening wrestling toys before I was one year old. I feel like there’s kind of a natural thing around thirteen, you take kind of a rumspringa? You’re like, nah, I’m quitting wrestling, it’s lame and I’m gonna try not to watch it. And like rumspringa, you either never come back, or you come back and stay forever.

So I’d discovered UCB in the time I wasn’t watching wresting. And I’d heard of this Cage Match show, and the description, which is still on the website to this day, is like “and a real wrestling match! Hosted by Chuck McMahon!” It was a weird mixture of “I don’t wanna do that ‘cause I’m over wrestling,” but also I still have “you guys don’t know what wrestling is!” That’s just an attitude I just have. “These guys don’t know what wrestling is!” So I never went, but when I was in high school, I had a multimedia class where I would just look on the internet for hours and that was it. So UCB Comedy had recently launched, and there was some UCBW stuff on it, and I was like, this is great. I love this! And they were just thirty second videos of each wrestler talking, and I was like, I’m on board with this!

So in 2010 when I came out for that summer I went to Cage Match for the first time. My big worry with the show was just, would they be direct parodies of wrestlers all the time, is it gonna be Celebrity Death Match? I couldn’t figure out what level of parody it was going to be. The first thing I heard about the whole thing was that we were in the New Mega Star Initiative, which is a direct parody of something that was happening in current wrestling. I’d just gotten back into wrestling myself. And I was like, oh, these guys know what they’re talking about! ‘Cause I was worried. It’s UCB so I was like, I dunno, it’s probably them remembering what they thought as kids, like Hulk Hogan, Sgt. Slaughter, whatever. But no--they’re currently watching. They know what’s up. And the first match I saw was Wall Street versus Little Brother in a stepladder match. If Little Brother loses, he retires. I was like “there’s a storyline?!” I thought every episode was a non-canon, one-off thing. But no, there are storylines. And I saw Wall Street cut a promo, and I was like, this the best thing. Immediately, I was on board.

Thankfully, that summer I got to see a pay-per-view as well, which was Revengence! I went with Riley, JZT, Brentt, and we all just sat together...Riley, at this time, was the huge UCBW superfan. He would sit in the front row and would unabashedly just jeer at everybody. I’d be sitting next to him wishing I could be as vocal about it.

There was the moment where I was like, “I wanna do this thing!” And I think immediately everybody agreed. I met Sean Hart, I met Charlie eventually. My first video for the Gethard Show thing, I’m wearing a Cactus Jack shirt? Who is a wrestler we all love. And so immediately, they’re like, let’s get Fesh involved in some capacity!

So for the end of that summer they did a thing where I was a celebrity guest? I was the guy from the Gethard Show from five months ago. So Uncle Eddie brought me up and the bad guys attacked me. So they’re like, next week, Fesh is gonna tag team with his childhood hero, Uncle Eddie, and face these bad guys. The next week I come in and turn on Uncle Eddie and during the shoot promo I kind of just voiced the vague frustrations I had about the culture even though I was only really involved for so long! I was like, “this is some stuff about this thing that kind of does bug me” that I tapped into in order to do this promo. I said some stupid nonsense. I was just trying to get a reaction, and feeling weird, so I said some things like, “you cheer for me but you’re really cheering for some other sad person that you’re trying to live through, so instead of doing anything with your lives or helping out starving people in Africa, you threw a party for me, thinking that would pay your debt.”

So that’s what led to--okay--Riley, again, was a superfan, and we’d become very close over that summer. This was my second-to-last week. I was leaving next Thursday, so this was my goodbye to the UCB. It was a big fuck you to it. Which is fun! And not everyone was there, not everyone cares and whatever. So Riley’s sitting in the front row, and as I said, his big thing was that he jeers. So he was ready for me to come out so he yells, “hairy Michael Cera!” and I was like, well, all right, fair. So I just turn to him--and again, he had not been involved yet, he had not been referenced on the microphone at all. I turned to him and said “Tilda Swinton.”

EO: That was you?!

MSF: Yeah! That is a joke that is still said to this day, and still gets a response. I said it August 12th, 2010. So, yeah. That’s just how me and Riley are, he knows it’s good, but he wants to hate it, but he also knows that I put him in his place in this universe, so he just shut up! And that’s what actually kind of led to two weeks later, they needed a ref, and they’re like “what about that Tilda Swinton guy?” So they didn’t know who he was at the time.

Riley was just in 401, or had just gotten into advanced. But “let’s get the Tilda Swinton guy!” It’s a joke I always say to him--“you’re welcome, by the way--” and stuff like that. So...then I was leaving. I felt really weird about it. It was a weird thing to do. I told them that’s what I planned to do. They told me to do a kind of generic heel wrestling promo, but I was like no, I’m going to be real about this. I was talking to Charlie afterwards and he was like, “well, you made ‘em think, man!” And he goes, “You’re free to come back whenever you have an idea for a character. The door’s always open once you’re here. Just make sure you have a good costume.” Because they didn’t want me to be Fesh again. Understood.

So I finally move here, start taking classes, go to Cage Match every single week. And I think since I’ve moved here I’ve probably missed a total of eight Cage Matches. I just love the show, ‘cause it’s just usually two great teams, and UCBW. But then it got to a point where I was like, I gotta be doing this, and JZT was feeling the same way. And we are best friends, and we gotta be a tag team. And so we sat down and were like “what do we both know a lot about...?” Immediately we sat down and wrote all of our moves.

So then Riley had been telling Charlie and everybody that we were coming up with this cool idea. And again: door was already open. But I took it very seriously and I sent this huge submission at 3 o’clock in the morning. At 3:10 in the morning he was like, “yup! you got it!” I was like, wow, great!

It was really at a weird point. I’d just gotten told I had to take another 401, probably girl stuff was happening, just another...I can’t hit the button submit anymore! It’s the worst--the word “submit” means “to give up.” I can’t click that button anymore, if I’m turned away from this thing. And immediately he said, “you’re up in a month.” It was great.

Then recently I’ve been brought in to help on a larger scale. Storylines, and booking, and writing matches with people, and tweeting for them. And then even further, there’s a wrestling promotion that I love called Chikara, they’re from Philadelphia. And one of their media guys fell in love with the Bang Bros! So one morning I wake up to my phone vibrating, and it’s a direct message from this guy who asks “hey do the Bang Bros wanna come be a part of this show?” It was a wrestling show called Kaiju Big Battle, it’s a bunch of monster wrestlers, a bunch of Godzilla like creatures, and I was like... yeah! We do!

And so the night before WrestleSlamMania this year, me and JZT went to Jersey, and were in a real wrestling show through UCBW. And then a week later he direct messaged me again and was like “hey, can you guys come to Philly and do another show in June?” Yeah! We can! And us and Matt Little went to Chikara’s last show actually, and we were all dressed up as characters who destroyed the company. So I have the DVD, you can see Matt Little kidnap a camera man, you see me unplug a camera, JZT tears down the stage. So that’s my relationship with UCBW. It’s the best!

‘Cause like, the whole UCB’s magic thing: Nicole Byer wants to be in GIRLS, or do something with Lena Dunham, and then five months later Lena Dunham does ASSSSCAT and Nicole got to be in it. That’s just what happens around this place. It’s the “be kind, work hard” thing. Do that.

We got two of the Chikara guys to show up at a UCBW thing recently, and they loved it! When they were just hanging out backstage, they were like, “yeah we were just here for an ASSSSCAT just a few weeks ago, so it’s cool to be backstage here!” and they’re talking to Atamanuik, and are like, “wow, one of the 30 Rock guys!” I’m there like “these are the guys!” and they’re watching us, thinking this is cool.

So thanks to UCBW and UCB in general, it helped me get into this other world I love as well. Which I think is kind of the whole point! It’s something a lot of people forget. Because it is such a good culture, it is a culture built around learning a skill to help to use elsewhere and that’s kind of in mission statement. Be successful so you can come back and have fun. And while their goal is not “maybe if you do this, you’ll get to help out in the world of professional wrestling!” But, I still like doing that, and we’ll see.

I’m obnoxious about it, I’m always posting a million things about UCBW, but you gotta know, I’m going from high school watching clips on the internet, to doing real wrestling shows because of UCBW. That’s why I never shut up about it.

LW: What would cause you to stop doing stuff around UCB? Would you? Is there an end?

MSF: I’ll be honest right now I’m in a slump. Specifically improv slump, not UCB, but improv in general. I had a show last night that was the first good one in a pretty long time. But I’ve also not taken a class in a while and my last two were not...I wasn’t feeling it. And a lot of it has to do with like--as shitty as it is--everyone I know is doing well. They’re on teams, or house teams, or whatever. Or even on cool indie teams that I’ve never got to be a part of.

Weirdly, for me personally, when Sandino got broken up--and that’s whatever--I’ll keep going to Harold Night, and it’s like...no, I wanna see Sandino but I know that I can’t cling to that! And teams that are happening now are still cool and good. From what I’ve seen of Namaste, they’re awesome! It’s just like my grace period--my time of being innocent and thinking every team’s the best is gone.

Shaun Diston, before I even moved here, was like, “Just warning you, Fesh, the magic is gonna be gone at some point. And it’s gonna be cooler once it is. You think improv is magic, but once you learn the tricks or the rules of it, it’s no longer magic. It’s very much a process. But that, to me, is cooler.”

MSF: Can I say this real quick? Matt Little is the best.

EO: I agree--as an improviser and--

MSF: As a dude! He’s so good. You guys are interviewing Matt Little right? You gotta do it.

He has this veteran air about him not only because he simply is, he’s been doing it for so long, but I think there’s something to him that’s so supremely and inherently supportive and confident at the same time. Also, in life! When we went to this wrestling show we’re backstage and there’s this security guy who’s kind of weird, talking about beating up a fan! Matt just yes-ands it, and there’s this distinct moment where Matt’s like “oh shit, this guy’s not doing a bit!” But he keeps going with it! And I dunno if Matt really did worry that way but he instantly agrees with everybody in a way that doesn’t feel like sarcastic support.

EO: Who did you look up to when you first started?

MSF: As an improviser? Well first, obviously, it was Gethard. A big note that I’m given is that I don’t play characters in scenes. Which is a negative way of putting it. The positive way of putting it is that you play very realistically. I’m just myself up there a lot.

Gethard, even when he’s playing a character who has a silly voice or whatever, it’s still a person you’re watching up there. That’s important to me. It makes the other shit pop more, it becomes a more realistic thing. Gethard, immediately, I was like this guy’s the best. And that’s what led to everything.

But then I went through my rose-colored glasses phase of just like, everybody’s great! Couldn’t see a problem with anybody! But Sandino was like...everybody’s great, but these guys are the best. I think on some level it was one of those TV shows that you don’t think are bad because you saw them at this time in your development? Not saying Sandino was bad--obviously, they weren’t, but they were the first team I saw go meta!

And so yeah, I liked everybody. And when I started going to Stepfathers I was like, Will Hines is the greatest improviser of all time! He’s the best. And Shannon O’Neill is fearless. Silvija Ozols is a good mixture of fearless and the best in the world! And I think might honestly be one of the most underrated improvisers. She’s so good. It’s insane. I wish there was a thing higher than the weekend that we can put Silvija on! She’s...so good!

Maybe on some level I’m spoiled because I’m comparing everybody to Sandino and the Stepfathers. It wasn’t just like every scene and every show is hilarious, they all were meaningful on some level, even if it was just for the half hour.

They were definitely a huge inspiration. They made me want to do it! Even though I don’t play anything like any of them!

And it is one of those things that Hal Phillips told me: you never forget your first Harold team that you fucking loved. And his wasn’t Sandino! I forgot what his was. But Sandino had that as well: they don’t think they were the best in the world. The might think, “Arsenal was great!” and that’s what’s so tricky about it. But by being in that developmental stage...we could be like “yeah, Namaste’s great!” but they could be blowing somebody’s mind right now.

LW: How do you explain UCB and improv to your parents?

MSF: My parents get it, because they went to those shows with me because I was fifteen turning sixteen, so they went to my first Harold Night with me. And they don’t know any of the lingo, but my dad’s like “oh! They’re doing that scene again!”

My dad, at least, totally gets it. My mom’s like, fine, but doesn’t get why anyone would dedicate their life to it. But there again, I did Cage Match on Thursday as the ref-slash-wrestler, and the pictures were posted online. And my mom, on Facebook, shared it and she said, “He’s living the dream...Well, his dream.” It’s totally fair.

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