It was an interesting time to be doing comedy. Stand-ups had ruled the eighties, with some of them, like Roseanne Barr and Jerry Seinfeld, parlaying their success into eponymous television shows. The nineties were still a time when comedy could make you big bucks if a network wanted to give you a “development deal.” But that was for the select few. For the rest of us, there was a movement happening in New York and Los Angeles, a wave some were calling “alternative comedy.” To some, we seemed like a bunch of green-apple performers reading half-baked ideas out of notebooks. But we knew it was something else. People were trying things out onstage and mixing everything together in an exciting soup. Stand-ups were incorporating music, performance artists told jokes, musicians wrote sketches. Small theaters were offering “alternative” nights, and audiences were treated to performers who were totally different yet tonally compatible. Anything seemed possible. Michael Portnoy (aka Soy Bomb) would contort his body to music and then Sarah Vowell would read a story and then Dave Chappelle would tell jokes. It felt like a language I understood and comedy I could participate in. My improvisational training had prepared me for this. I met Janeane Garofalo at a book club with Andy Richter’s wife, Sarah Thyre. I loved Janeane’s stand-up and her work on The Ben Stiller Show and in Reality Bites. We would walk all over New York and talk about life and art and politics. I would fight the urge to call her my idol and slowly we became close friends. Being in New York felt alive and weird and new.
“The show is not over!” I shouted into the microphone to the young and buzzed Luna Lounge crowd. We announced that we were all going to head across the street for the finale. Once again, the UCB was taking the audience outside. Cynthia True, our good friend and a comedy writer for Time Out New York, was going to stage an event. She would be walking down the street naked in an attempt to raise money and protest her rent increase. What had started as a gentle dare was now going to be a Lower East Side happening. We spilled out onto the sidewalk and I raced around the corner to help Cynthia prepare for her bold strut.
In those first few years in New York we had been lucky. Our second year in the city we found a small dance studio called Solo Arts and made it our de-facto home. It was a five-story walk-up with a wonky floor, and my brother, Greg, served as our bartender. We programmed shows five nights a week and taught classes to pay the rent. At night we drew crowds with our free show, Asssscat, a completely improvised show where we would get an audience suggestion that would inspire a monologist to tell a story, and we would improvise off of those stories. The title Asssscat came from a scene where Horatio and Besser and McKay and others were bombing so badly that they started loudly saying “ass cat” in a singsongy voice. The word represented a giant fuck-around; a night where anything goes. We did two shows every Sunday. It was the closest thing I had to church.
We supported ourselves with odd jobs and writing gigs. Conan O’Brien’s show was speaking to a massive and young audience, and he would put us in weekly bits on Late Night. If you said more than six lines on air you made six hundred dollars, and comedy pieces like “Staring Contest” helped pay my rent. I once spent hours running around a hot track wearing the giant “Foam Rubber Andy” costume. Nipsey Russell was there that day and told me, “Hollywood has one typewriter and one thousand copy machines.” I nodded my sweaty head as if I understood what he meant. Brian Stack, a former Chicago improviser and writer for Conan, wrote a character for me called Andy’s Little Sister. Her name was Stacey and she wore headgear and was obsessed with Conan. I would sit in my tiny dressing room and memorize long monologues that often ended with my tackling Conan at his desk. It was another character to add to my repertoire of adolescent, lisping maniacs. Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider saw the bit when they were visiting and cast me in the film Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo. I was paid the basic daily rate the day I showed up on set in the summer of 1998. My first shot was with thousands of extras in Anaheim Stadium. It was my first big Hollywood movie but not the first time I had been on film. My film debut was Tomorrow Night, a 1998 New York indie from an up-and-coming auteur named Louis CK. I played “Woman Sprayed with Hose.” Soon after, The State’s Michael Showalter and David Wain would cast me in their cult classic Wet Hot American Summer, a film whose behind-the-scenes stories would make for a steamy beach read.
For a while we worked on a new Broadway Video online show called This Is Not a Test. We were all confused when the tech guys explained how in the future, everyone was going to eventually read articles on their computers. I scoffed at the idea. We spent our afternoons writing comedy and shaking our heads at white supremacist message boards. After weeks of writing, we watched the first demo and the slow flashing graphics looked like an old Lite-Brite. I was happy when we were eventually fired, because I was convinced this Internet thing was a passing fad.
This lack of technological foresight is why I am an actor.
Comedy Central took notice of us in 1998, due to our manager Dave Becky’s persistence and network executive Kent Alterman’s vision. We were offered a sketch show, and Upright Citizens Brigade aired on Wednesday nights after another brand-new show: South Park. One of us got great ratings. Besser and I broke up, and much to our mutual credit, we handled it smoothly. Matt met and fell in love with his now wife, Danielle Schneider, and UCB went to work writing, producing, and starring in our sketch show. It was all-consuming and totally exhilarating. Under the directorial genius of Phil Morrison, we were allowed to sit in an office (an office!) and think of sketch ideas (they would pay us!) and we would go to set (we had a set!) and it would get on television (my parents could watch it!). When UCB premiered on Comedy Central, my parents threw a huge viewing party in their basement. My father got a UCB license plate soon after. The show was based on a long-form improvisational format our mentor Del Close had invented called “The Harold.” Scenes were connected, characters lived in different worlds, and most shows were built around a theme. The premise was that a group called the Upright Citizens Brigade worked out of an underground bunker. We rarely used pop culture or parody, except for the always popular Unabomber, Harry Truman, Albert Einstein, and Jesus. RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan once played a neighbor who lived underground next to us and lent the UCB some sugar. The show ran for three seasons, and in those few short years I learned how to be in front of a camera, how to manage an incredibly long workday, and how truly awful it is to wear prosthetics.
We asked Del to record the voice-over for our opening titles.
“From the dawn of civilization, they have existed in order to undermine it. Our only enemy is the status quo. Our only friend is chaos. They have no government ties and unlimited resources. If something goes wrong, we are the cause. Every corner of the earth is under their surveillance. If you do it, we see it. Always. We believe the powerful should be made less powerful. We have heard the voice of society, begging us to destabilize it. Antoine. Colby. Trotter. Adair. We are the Upright Citizens Brigade.”
Hardly anyone watched. I wonder why, with that incredibly accessible opening. But it gave us a place to be seen. The show fed the theater and the theater fed the show. We outgrew Solo Arts. We needed our own space. We found it at the old Harmony Theater on Twenty-Second Street in Chelsea. The space had been a burlesque house, and after taking it over we spent days dismantling stages and smashing mirrors. The greenroom was lined with lockers, and those lockers were filled with old bikinis and Prince mix tapes. I stupidly volunteered to clean the bathrooms, and I pulled at least a dozen condoms out of the horrible toilets. Even years after we opened in 1999 as a comedy theater, we would get confused men entering in the middle of the day. Well-dressed businessmen and Hasidic shopkeepers would saunter into the lobby, feign interest in the comedy flyers, and then quickly leave. The Twenty-Second Street space became a clubhouse for talented youngsters who are now your favorites. I celebrated the end of the millennium at that theater, saw amazing shows at that theater, fought, cried, and made out at that theater. After 9/11, we all gathered there, gratefu
l that our lives in comedy meant we didn’t work in a big building downtown. In 2002, our landlord was cited for a violation and the space was closed down. We panicked and then regrouped, and in the process learned that the theater was not the space, it was the people.
We opened our new 150-seat theater a year later and a few blocks away on Twenty-Sixth Street. It was a little fancier, but it was under a Gristedes supermarket and we had to contend with the sound of shopping carts being dragged and the threat of garbage water bursting through the floor and onto our heads. I continued to write and perform there while I was at SNL. During the big New York blackout in 2003, many of us spent the night sleeping onstage because our generator was working. During the writers’ strike in 2007, we put on our own SNL episode there with old sketches. Michael Cera hosted, our musical guest was Yo La Tengo, and we gave Lorne a birthday cake as he sat in the audience. When I enter the theater and there is a show onstage, it makes me feel safe in the knowledge that the world keeps turning. It also feels like I have died and I am attending my own funeral, so it’s good and bad.
Things have steadily moved along since. We opened our first theater in Los Angeles in 2005, the same year we shot a one-hour special for Bravo called Asssscat. It was an attempt to prove improvisation could work on TV, and it featured Tina and Dratch and Andy Richter, among others. In 2006 we opened our Training Center facility in New York, which finally gave us a proper office and classrooms. In 2008 we launched the comedy website UCBComedy.com. In 2010 we became an accredited theater school. In 2014 we opened a new UCB Training Center in New York with fourteen classrooms and a picnic table, and a big new theater space in Los Angeles. At each theater we produce an average of four shows a night and twenty-five shows a week, all under ten dollars.
I will keep bragging.
Last year we sold over 400,000 tickets, produced over 4,000 shows, taught over 11,000 students, and employed 216 people. Del had died in 1999 after a long battle with emphysema. The day before he died, there was a Wiccan ceremony in his hospital room attended by Bill Murray and Harold Ramis (rest in peace). Del had drunk a chocolate martini and was gone the next day. Del always knew when to edit. His famous last words to Charna were “I’m tired of being the funniest person in the room.” He donated his skull to be used in productions of Hamlet at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. Del filmed a message to the UCB with specific instructions on how to carry on. It was brilliant and touching and not especially lucid. He gave us our motto, “Don’t think.” In his honor we started the Del Close Marathon, an annual fifty-two-hour marathon of improvisation, which welcomes groups from all across the country. Fifteen years later, it now has fifty-six straight hours of improvisation on seven stages performed by over four hundred different groups. Our free improv show Asssscat has now been running for eighteen years.
My twenty years with the Upright Citizens Brigade could fill a book. Hopefully someone else will write it, because writing a book is awful and because most of my memories are drug fueled and rose colored. All I know is I will be quick to give photo approval, since I am very young and skinny in most of the pictures. But I will say this: New York can be a lonely place. I think we stuck together during hard times and provided a home for people to feel less alone. The UCB community is a collaborative and loving group, and it is filled with the funniest people I know. I am proud of the fact that Ian and Besser and Walsh and I never made money our motivating factor. We never took a salary, we never charged artists to perform, we never had a two-drink minimum. Artists could rehearse and perform and know they would be in front of an audience who spoke their language. This audience could pay very little to see great comedy, never knowing what famous people would show up, but always knowing that some of the people they were watching would one day be famous.
UCB’s motto is “Don’t think.” It started as a directive from Del, transformed into a comment on corporate doublespeak, and now serves as the guiding principle for our school and theater. Don’t think. Get out of your head. Stop planning and just go. The theater belongs to the people. It belongs to Alex Sidtis and Susan Hale, who run the spaces and keep the company strong. It belongs to the hundreds of people who have stood on the stage and the many more who have watched shows performed on the stage. It belongs to the students who are waiting to get time onstage, and the employees and interns who helped build the stage. Don’t think. Just do. We did.
Cynthia took off her trench coat and slipped her naked and beautiful body into some sturdy rain boots. Janeane reminded her that she didn’t need to go through with it if she didn’t want to. We all laughed as I produced sparklers I had brought along for the occasion. A man approached us to ask for a light and didn’t even react to the naked woman in front of him. New York had already seen it all, but I was just getting started. Everyone lined up to watch and cheer. We were all young and free and wide open. Cynthia walked the city block, and the camera in my mind panned to all the faces of people I loved and respected. It traveled over their heads up above the trees, dancing on rooftops and tilting up toward the moon. I had found my tribe. I had helped build a home for us to live in, by improvising. Making it up as I went along.
parents just do understand
EILEEN FRANCES MILMORE WAS BORN FEBRUARY 7, 1947, IN WATERTOWN, MASSACHUSETTS. She was the oldest of three children. Her mother, Helen, worked as a secretary at St. Patrick’s High School and her father, Stephen, was a firefighter and World War II veteran. She went to Boston State College and was an excellent student. She met my dad on a school bus on the way to a basketball game. She was head cheerleader and he was the best player on the team. She tapped him on the head and asked to sit with him. She was twenty-three when she got married, twenty-four when I was born, and forty-one when she got her master’s degree in special education. She taught for thirty-one years, starting in elementary and ending in high school special ed. One of her most exciting moments was sharing an elevator with Sally Field. During a recent trip to Amsterdam, she sent me a picture of her smoking marijuana for the first time just because I asked her to. She is kind, she is chatty, and she writes beautiful poetry.
WILLIAM GRINSTEAD POEHLER WAS BORN SEPTEMBER 21, 1946, IN WAYNESBORO, VIRGINIA. His mother, Anna, was first married to William, his father, who left right after he was born. For the first five years of his life, my father lived in a foster home. Anna remarried and her new husband, Carl Poehler, adopted my father and his sister and moved them all to Massachusetts. Anna and Carl had two more sons. The first day my father met my mother he came home and told my grandmother, “I have met the girl I am going to marry.” He was an elementary school teacher and also a financial planner. One of his most exciting moments was sharing an elevator with Boston Celtics Robert Parish and Kevin McHale. For my wedding, my father, his friends, and my uncles performed a surprise tap-dance number with top hats and canes. He is generous, nosy, and good at arm wrestling.
They have been married almost forty-five years. Here are some things they have taught me.
MOM
•Make sure he’s grateful to be with you.
•Your boobs won’t be as big as mine but you will be happy about that as you get older.
•Always tell people when they do a good job.
•Always have a messy purse.
•Guilt works.
•You are the smartest and best.
•Monty Python is funny.
•Be nice to your brother.
•Be a light sleeper, and every time your kid wakes you up, scream like you are being attacked.
•Have fun dancing.
•Have male friends.
•Have more female friends.
•Your female friends will outlast every man in your life.
•Love your husband and don’t belittle him.
•Love your kids and hope they do better than you did.
•You don’t want to be the sexy mom.
•Dye your hair constantly.
•There’s not much we can do about our Irish eyebrows. r />
•Postpartum depression, anxiety, and skin cancer run in our family.
•Ask your kids how they are doing but sometimes ignore them when they say, “Not great.”
•Love your work.
•Study hard and know how to write and read well.
•Memorize poems.
•Be nice to teachers. Teachers don’t like kids who don’t like teachers.
•Always bring wine.
•A home-cooked meal isn’t so important.
•TV in your bedroom is okay.
•Follow sports and leave the room if you’re a jinx.
•Be careful.
DAD
•Ask for what you want.
•Know how to shoot a free throw and field a ground ball.
•There are ways around things that aren’t always legal.
•Hide cash in your house.
•Always overtip but make a big deal out of paying the check.
•Eat whatever you want.
•Keep trying.
•Never remember anyone’s name.
•Girls can do anything boys can do.
•Street smarts are as important as book smarts.
•“Your mother is smarter than me and I am fine with it.”
•Don’t work too hard.
•You can have a chaotic childhood and still provide a stable home.
•Ask everyone how much money they make.
•Keep the TV loud and all the lights on in the house.
•You don’t want to be the creepy dad.
•It’s okay to cry.