#ucbt

Nicole Byer is an actor, writer, and comedian originally from New Jersey. She is perhaps best known to audiences for her work on Nailed It! (Netflix), MTV’s Girl Code, and Loosely Exactly Nicole (Facebook). While I am no biographer I am a huge Nicole Byer fan and look to her as a source of inspiration. The following is pieced together based off of what I’ve learned about Nicole from her podcast Why Won’t You Date Me? If any of the following sounds inaccurate please let me know in the comments.

Nicole first trained at AMDA, which she lovingly refers to as SCAMDA (lol lol lol) in acting. She then moved to New York City and studied and performed at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade (UCB) before moving to Los Angeles, where you can watch her perform Tuesdays at UCB Franklin in Search History. 

As a student at the UCB in LA I always looked up to Nicole. She’s not only a dynamic powerhouse of a performer, she’s kind and thoughtful. And a hustler. Nothing stopped her from going for her goals and as a result of her hard work she’s a homeowner in LA (um, yeah, props to that) and makes a very good living doing comedy. Let’s take a closer look to learn how she got to where she is.

Nicole’s journey to where she is now is an untraditional one for stand up comics. Most stand up comics believe the only way to get noticed in the entertainment industry is through the open mic route. Now don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of benefit to doing open mics, but let’s be honest ladies: open mic settings can be daunting because you will be outnumbered by the men. It’s even more isolating when you’re a woman of color because of the lack of diversity, inclusion, and support. 

What I love about Nicole’s story is that she found a way to bypass the open mic route and go straight to becoming a PAID stand up comic who regularly travels to perform. And the way she did this was by being willing to learn a new skillset. Her improv and acting training, along with her hard work, is what helped Nicole get her first big break on MTV’s Girl Code. This exposure to new audiences is what got her in the door as a comic and it’s because she won audiences over on Girl Code. Up until this point she was just an improvisor and never considered herself a stand up comic. At her agent’s request, she taught herself how to write and tell jokes so that her agent could get her more work, thus bypassing the open mic route that many people think is the only one available to them. Her web series Loosely Exactly Nicole, which can be viewed on Facebook, also helped her reach new audiences. What this means is that regular ol’ folks got to know her first through her work on TV, and because she did such a great job of winning audiences over she created a demand for her own live shows. In this day and age, and thanks to the awful reputation of many male comics (have you read the New York Times lately?), it is more difficult to convince regular audience members to go see a live stand up show these days when the comics performing are people they’ve never heard of. But a recognizable face that has already proven to make you laugh in the comfort of your own home is a powerful way to motivate real fans to buy a ticket to see you live. 

There is so much we can all take away from Nicole’s story. For one, all comedy training is valuable but it’s what you as an individual put into it that will get you ahead. To be a working comic you have to approach this as a business. No one is gonna come pluck you up from an open mic, give you your own show, and make you a star. YOU make yourself a star. YOU put the work into yourself in developing the product you are trying to sell (your comedic self). At the end of the day, this is a business. An agent’s job is to get you work because that’s how they make their livelihoods, and you should want an agent that works for you like their rent depends on it because that’s the kind of ally you need in this business. Nicole admits to being hesitant about starting stand up comedy because she never considered herself a stand up comic. I think a lot of us, myself included, think of stand up comedy as its own thing and maybe this stems from the fact that women of color simply don’t see themselves in mainstream stand up comedy. The ones we do see only made it because they are the exception. But when you have an agent who wants to get you more work, you need to do what Nicole did: learn a new skill set. A lot of people give up on learning after they graduate high school and/or college, but the reality is you need to be a life long learner NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO WITH YOUR LIFE. But especially so in comedy, you need to be willing to learn so that you can grow. Comedians are artists, too, and artists evolve. 

The other significant take away from Nicole’s story is the role of social media and the internet in her success. If we didn’t have the internet we’d probably have no idea who Nicole even is. The reality is online streaming platforms and podcasting are providing opportunities to under represented voices in a way that traditional television and comedy clubs are incapable of doing unless there is a radical overhaul in leadership. Internet platforms are more inclusive, diverse, and accessible to both content creators and audiences. Who doesn’t have a smartphone these days? And who doesn’t consume a great deal of content on these tiny little computers? 

What I’m urging anyone to do, but especially women of color pursuing comedy, is to create your own content. Don’t wait for someone to choose you, choose yourself. Make a web series where you star in it and involve the people you want to work with. Start a podcast. Start a blog. Find creative and inventive ways to share your comedic point of view. But most importantly, invest in your product. Be willing to invest in yourself by taking classes, by outworking everyone around you, by taking care of yourself. If you approach this as a business and you think of yourself as a product (but not in an objectifying way) you will attract like-minded people to help you sell your product because everyone stands to make some money that way. We live in a capitalist society and everything revolves around the Benjamin’s, so be a business woman/person. That’s what will set you apart from the rest who merely spend their time day dreaming about the glamour and fame but never take meaningful action to manifest the life of their dreams. Be bold, be different, be you.

In closing, I’d like to quote the wise words of Jerry Springer, the talk show host: take care of yourself and each other. 

To learn more about Nicole Byer and her work visit her website:

On a recent Saturday afternoon, Pop Radar LA had an opportunity to listen to an entertaining hour-long conversation between comedian David Wain and Matt Walsh (Veep) at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre’s Sunset Boulevard training center.

The event was the latest installment of a new UCBTLA Q&A series that features in-depth discussions between successful UCB alumni and its co-founders Walsh, Matt Besser and Ian Roberts. 

Wain is best known for creating the Wet Hot American Summer franchise, as well as for directing Role Models (2008) with Seann William Scott and Paul Rudd, and Wanderlust (2012) with Rudd and Jennifer Aniston. As if the UCBTLA students and comedy fans didn’t know his work already, he screened his director’s reel for the audience, just in case.

To start the Q&A, Walsh asked Wain to talk about his editing process, and how he learned how to edit films. Luckily for the audience, Wain dug through his laptop files and screened this gem to answer the question:

The video — a “Tour of Shaker Heights (Ohio)” — is a home movie created and edited by a young Wain in 1978, using two VCRs. His father served as the cinematographer. [Watch it. Trust us. It’s amazing.] 

While a student at NYU — and way before the advent of Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro — Wain said that he learned to edit film, using a flatbed, and became intimately aware of physically cutting, splicing and taping film together. “I carried around my trims (the individual sections of film) in a giant trashbag all summer,” he said of editing his NYU thesis film. “It took 14 months to edit a 20-minute film.”

On Wet Hot American Summer

The 2001 film is an indie cult classic. It’s set in 1981 on the last day of summer camp, and on this hot day, the counselors try to complete their business before the day ends. The cast features a who’s who of comedy: Janeane Garofalo, David Hyde Pierce, Michael Showalter, Paul Rudd, Molly Shannon, Joe Lo Truglio, Ken Marino, Michael Ian Black, Elizabeth Banks, Amy Poehler and Bradley Cooper.  

Wain, who directed the film and co-write the script with Showalter, surprised the UCBTLA audience when he said that the shoot was his first time ever on a feature film set. He’d only previously directed comedy shorts for the comedy troupe The State for their MTV show in the early 1990s.

Walsh then asked Wain what he learned from directing Wet Hot American Summer. “The limitations force you to think about what is really important to your story,” he responded.

Wain said it rained nearly every day of the 28-day film shoot. And it was freezing. The inclement weather forced many scenes indoors, and they had to change many shots on the fly. “You let go of what’s out of your control,” he said.

Working in the Studio System

Wain’s first foray into the studio system was the 2008 film Role Models. The original director had dropped out, and he had six weeks to prepare for the shoot. 

There was a problem: The script was terrible, and had about 30 writers on it already. When he boarded the project, Wain, Rudd and Ken Marino punched up the script and rewrote it, while Wain prepped for production. “I didn’t think it was going to work,” he said.

The film did work, and opened to mostly favorable reviews, adding to Wain’s growing rep as a deft comedy director.

The afternoon wrapped with Walsh and Wain chatting about two more films in his portfolio: They Came Together, a spoof of the rom-com, and  A Futile and Stupid Gesture, a biopic about comedy writer Douglas Kenney, during the rise and fall of National Lampoon (2018).

Wain said that he and Showalter wrote They Came Together after Wet Hot, circa 2003. But it wasn’t until Poehler and Rudd did a live read of the script at the SF Sketchfest in 2012 that Wain realized that the audience responded really well to the jokes and trademark absurd humor. Two years later, it made it to the big screen, starring, naturally, Poehler and Rudd.

The UCBTLA’s Q&A series takes place three times per month (and a bargain at $10 per installment). 

—Christine N. Ziemba 

The monthly show Dramedy, from the Some Kinda Monster improv team, returns to UCB Sunset on Thursday night (April 4). 

They invite other teams and celebs to the stage to watch a video clip from a dramatic TV show or movie, and then the teams must improvise from the (usually out-of-context) clip. As a bonus, each show includes an improvised episode of the venerated procedural Law and Order.

This week’s guest is Chris Meloni, star of SYFY’s Happy! and the former Det. Eliott Stabler from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. He’ll be performing in an improvised episode of Law and Order with the host team, Some Kinda Monster. 

The show also includes two musical improv sets.

15 years ago, Neo-Tokyo Girl Crush! 2040 brought live-action anime to the UCB Theatre stage. (That’s a long time ago.)

The show that boldly said "Yes, you CAN put thousands of $$ into a show that you're not making any money off;" setting bad precedents.

IKEA Fighting Dept.

Thought I’d make my new @ucbtheatre​ Maude team, Archnemesis, fight during our first show last month just get it out of the way. They killed it -- and almost each other!

Starring Moujan Zolfaghari, Tim Dunn, Amadeo Fusca, Lauren Brickman, Jack Frederick, and Lisa Kleinman Featuring Julie Harrison-Harney, Max Ash, Eli Yudin, Joanna Tillman, and Nikki Palumbo

#tbt this sketch I wrote for Charles’ August Maude Show at @ucbtheatre.

Behind the scenes: July -- when I was writing this -- was a garbage month. My uncle was diagnosed with leukemia and lymphoma and within six weeks, he quickly lost his battle. His funeral was the morning of this show.

He was nothing but supportive of my comedy pursuits. He and my aunt paid for the bulk of my UCB classes. And while they weren’t able to make a show during my Maude tenure, they constantly kept themselves in my loop.

My uncle was the anti-asshole. But it’s in his honor that I present Assholes of New York.

Starring Caitlin Brodnick, Jack Frederick, Shawtane Bowen, Dara Katz, Erica Hernandez, and Tim Dunn

with a cameo by a Donald Trump zinger

Wrote this for Charles’ June @maudenight. You win some, you lose some.