Sitting in the conference room of Upright Citizens Brigade’s plush and spacious new office space on West 35th Street, one thing is immediately apparent: The troupe’s come a long way since it arrived on the scene in 1990. Back then, when Matt Besser, Ian Roberts, Amy Poehler and Matt Walsh—former members of improv pioneer Del Close’s ImprovOlympic theater—relocated from Chicago to New York to further realize their comedic ambitions, there were no clear plans or aspirations beyond the next improv gig and the hope for a chance at TV.
“We just hit the ground running. We had two improv shows that we were running in Chicago, so we put them both up,” explains Roberts of UCB’s humble Big Apple beginnings. “All of the sudden, it was like, ‘Wow, these guys are everywhere!’ We were like rats or cockroaches. You couldn’t help but see us. We would be up somewhere in New York four days a week. We were very determined. We were here to get a sketch show on TV.”
The troupe opened Manhattan’s Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in a former strip club in 1999 where it performed and taught Close’s Chicago style of long-form improv.
“We provide a place where people can come and do whatever kind of sketch or improv show they want,” says Besser. Since opening seven years ago, the theater has gradually coalesced into the focal point for the New York City comedy scene over the past decade and is steadily becoming the major epicenter for humor on a national level.
A few years ago, UCB seemed content to be a source of name-checking in hipper-than-thou circles, but the oft-absurd comedic stylings of the Theatre’s graduates are becoming synonymous with mainstream American comedy.
UCB realized its television ambitions in 1998 with Comedy Central’s “Upright Citizens Brigage,” becoming one of an extremely small number of troupes since Monty Python that’s managed to translate its unwatered-down sketches to TV. Since then, the four core members have scattered across the world of American comedy: Poehler landing a gig as a full-time cast member on “Saturday Night Live,” Matt Walsh currently starring in the Comedy Central investigative news satire, “Dog Bites Man,” and Roberts popping up on television and in film with regular acting gigs in movies like Anchorman and TV shows like the critically acclaimed “Arrested Development” and with Besser on “Reno 911.”
In 2003, the UCB Theatre upgraded, moving four blocks uptown to a 150-seat theater located near the corner of West 26th Street and Eighth Avenue. There’s even talk about moving again to an even larger space in Manhattan, thanks in part to the around-the-block lines each and every Sunday for the weekly, long-form improv showcase, “Asssscat.” It’s the show that helped put the troupe on the map, with members of America’s comedy elite—such as Janeane Garofalo, Will Ferrell and David Cross—making the occasional appearance. The group also launched a Los Angeles branch this year and aims to sprinkle the country with venues, according to Anthony King, UCB’s creative director.
“You look at stuff like “The Daily Show”; Ed Helms and Rob Corddry are both from UCB, and now they’re moving on, and a guy who used to perform with them, Rob Riggle, who was on “SNL” for one season, is now on the show,” says King. “I watch Talladega Nights, and half the people are connected with the New York comedy scene, so it is starting to take over.”
Co-written and directed by Adam McKay, an early member of UCB, the Ferrell vehicle abounds with the brand of humor that would have seemed almost absurd as a candidate for national consumption a decade ago.
“It definitely speaks well of us,” says Matt Walsh of the film’s success. “It’s like we’re finally crossing over to the mainstream. I would take it as encouragement that people are finally interested in what we’ve been doing.”
Does this mean that comedy on a national level is finally coming around to the sensibilities of the four people whose under-promoted (according to Roberts) show was unceremoniously canceled by Comedy Central after three seasons? “God I hope so,” sighs Besser. “The more right [that is], the more employed I get.”
Selling NYC’s Comedy Scene
In its purest, undiluted form, New York’s comedy scene is still a hard sell. For proof that we still have quite a ways to go before mainstream America can ingest straight shots, one needs to look no further than “Stella.” The 2005 Comedy Central series met with a similar fate as “UCB” before it: The station pulled the plug after a single season. The program was born out of an absurdly silly night club act by Michael Showalter, David Wain and Michael Ian Black. All three are also former members of another prematurely canceled show, “The State,” which aired on MTV from 1993-1995, not long after various members of the 11-person troupe finished college (a majority from NYU) in the early ’90s.
“I find that for a lot of people, an important part of liking me is that other people don’t. It’s like, ‘I get it, but I apologize for my friend, who doesn’t,’” says Showalter, whose personal successes include writing and starring in the feature film Wet Hot American Summer—a major cult classic.
Four of Showalter, Wain & Black’s fellow “State” alums went on to star in the remarkably popular “Reno 911,” which is spawning a feature film due in theaters next February, featuring all 11 of the MTV sketch show’s cast members.
Comedy Takes Over the City
New Yorkers, on the other hand, are ready for the style in its purest form. The local success of group’s like Stella, and the massive scene that has grown around the UCB Theatre, have spawned all manner of new venues for teaching and performing.
“The UCB brought the Chicago style of theater to New York and has opened up the scene for all of these smaller theaters,” says Alex Zalben, a member of the hilariously off-kilter sketch troupe Elephant Larry and the creative director for the Chelsea-based comedy school/venue, The Pit. “People used to view Chicago as a place where you learned comedy and New York as a place where you performed comedy, but with the opening of these smaller clubs, New York has become much more of well-rounded comedy town.”
Clubs like Rififi’s, Mo Pitkin’s, Pianos and even the Public Theater’s upscale lounge, Joe’s Pub, regularly host comedy nights, featuring standup names like Todd Barry, Mike Birbiglia and Eugene Mirman, alongside folks like Wain and Showalter, gaining massive popularity in a scene dominated by the traditional, two-drink-minimum establishments.
“Comedy is coming back to where it used to be,” insists Showalter. “The whole idea of a comedy club is kind of an ’80s invention. For years, comedy was happening in theaters and in bars. Lenny Bruce was performing in a jazz club, and Woody Allen was in cafes, coffee shops, bars.”
Mirman, who helped create Rififi’s wildly popular weekly show, “Invite Them Up,” as well as the Sunday night comedy show at Brooklyn’s Union Hall, sees the venues as a focal point for the coming together of once segregated comedy forms like standup, sketch, improv and traditional comedy writing. “What there has been in the last five years is a real crossing over of different kinds of people doing different kinds of things at different shows, like writers trying standup,” says Mirman.
Mirman and comedians like Jon Benjamin and Jon Glaser can often be found toying around with characters and video sketches, which later gain a good deal of national exposure after the videos wind up on outlets like YouTube. These streaming video performances, that might otherwise have been seen by a few folks in darkened backrooms, are able to reach a potentially worldwide fan base, creating stars with niche audiences in a manner not seen since the early days of cable television.
“For a while, I would only perform in New York, but when I went to L.A., people knew me because they had seen my stuff online,” explains Aziz Ansari, a quarter of the UCB-affiliated group Human Giant. “People are going to know you wherever you’re on-tour, thanks to your stuff online.”
Thanks to the success of Human Giant sketches like “Other Music,” a loving piss-take at snooty East Village record store clerks, boosted by online video outreach and indie music blogs such as Stereogum, the troupe recently inked a deal with MTV for a sketch series of its own.
Keeping it Real in the NYC Scene
The impact of NY’s vibrant comedy scene can also be felt on those clubs that represent the standard concept of what a comedy club should be—the microphone and brick wall venues that dot the outskirts of Times Square, amongst T-shirt boutiques and adult video stores. While certain comic names like David Cross, Janeane Garofalo and Patton Oswalt are more than capable of performing in poorly lit basements or headling larger clubs, there’s traditionally been a divide between the two worlds. Comix, the meatpacking district’s latest nightclub and comedy venue, celebrated its grand opening the same weekend that Oswalt and a handful of his “fringe” peers, including Mirman and former “Mr. Show” cast member Brian Posehn, landed in town as part of their wildly popular “Comedians of Comedy” tour. The debut of Comix is perhaps the most tangible sign of the current quirky scene’s impact on the world of traditional standup.
The concerted effort that Comix is making to bridge the gap between divergent comic forms has seldom been seen outside the walls of the those “comedy night” friendly clubs that dot the L.E.S. It can also be seen as a method of bringing some of those underground sensibilities to those whose conceptions of standup have been formed almost exclusively by those comedians who have scored their own primetime sitcoms and whose idea of improv is limited to the late-’90s antics of Drew Carey and friends.
“Most of the comedy clubs in the city are all standup venues. You don’t have destinations presently where standup, sketch, improv and alternative are all mixed under one roof,” explains Harlan Halpan, a businessman turned part-time standup, turned full-time club owner. “The scene has expanded in the city to incorporate a lot of what we may have considered more fringe in the past; what you would have gone to the Village to see in some downstairs basement. And it’s huge.”
Slowly but surely it seems UCB is having an impact on audiences of the global comedy scene—from those that watch one-time member David Koechner on NBC’s “The Office” to the people who happen into the Chelsea theater on a whim and are lifelong converts.
“You have people going to ‘Asssscat’ on Sunday night who are seeing improv for the first time and are falling in love with it. If you see good stuff, it doesn’t matter who you are,” says Charlie Todd, a former UCB student, who’s a current teacher at the theater. His Improv Everywhere troupe has been bringing the art form to an unsuspecting public for five years, gaining fans in places like Australia and the Netherlands by staging large-scale pranks—such as having a fake U2 play to a crowd of 300 on a rooftop across from Madison Square Garden and confusing shoppers at the Chelsea Best Buy by dressing 80 “agents” in blue polo shirts and khakis.
Todd’s is yet another of countless UCB offshoots, but perhaps the most literal manifestation of the punchline of all of this: If you don’t start laughing soon, there’s a fairly good chance that the joke will eventually be on you.
