Brian Stack 3/13/06 Part 1
Brian Stack is an improviser and writer for “Late Night with Conan O’Brien.” He was a member of the celebrated improv groups Jazz Freddy and Blue Velveeta. To put it simply, he’s one of the funniest guys around.
J: Where were you born?
B: I was born in Park Ridge, Illinois. My dad was in the army on active duty up until I was about 5 years old, so we moved around a lot during those early years, but I spent most of my life before college in Palatine, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.
J: What were some early influences on your sense of humor?
B: The biggest influences on me when I was growing up were probably things like Monty Python, SCTV, Woody Allen, Peter Sellers, "The Muppet Show", early SNL, Nichols and May, etc. I remember loving Steve Martin and Richard Pryor back then too, but I'm not sure how much actual "influence" they had on my sense of humor since they seemed so completely different from me.
I've also always loved old movies like Billy Wilder's "The Apartment", dark "comedies" like Paddy Chayefsky's "Network" and "The Hospital", as well as old "screwball comedies" from the 30's like "The Awful Truth", "My Man Godfrey", "His Girl Friday", etc. I think they all hold up really well today, too.
James L. Brooks has always been another big hero of mine. He's been involved in a lot of my favorite stuff over the years, from movies like "Broadcast News" to the old "Mary Tyler Moore Show" to "The Simpsons".
J: How did you first get involved with improv?
B: When I was a freshman at Indiana University in Bloomington, Mick Napier lived on my dorm floor. I thought he was one of the funniest people I’d ever met in my life, and I still feel that way. If I hadn’t been lucky enough to meet Mick, I seriously doubt I would’ve ever ended up doing improv later on.
Mick started up a couple of improv groups at IU, which included people like Joe Bill, Faith Soloway, etc., and he encouraged me to audition, but I was a big chickenshit and never did. I used to go see the group perform sometimes, though, and they got me interested in improv, at least as a fan. Just for fun, I took an introductory acting class my senior year at IU, and one day the teacher had us do a 2-person improvised scene as an exercise. I had never had that much fun before in my life. It may sound really corny, but I was hooked from that very first scene.
Mick was a year or two older than me, so he moved to Chicago and started up with ImprovOlympic while I was still at IU. He’s the one who told me about ImprovOlympic and I took a class with Charna Halpern the summer after I graduated. I loved it there, but I had already committed to going to grad school at University of Wisconsin-Madison that fall. Luckily, there was a great little improv theatre in Madison called The Ark Theatre. I was so mad at myself for never auditioning for Mick’s group that I forced myself to audition for The Ark. That was where I did my first actual improv performing in front of an audience, and I had a great time there for a couple years before finishing school and moving back to Chicago.
J: It’s pretty incredible that so many influential people in the improv world knew each other in college, let alone were involved in the same college troupe. What do you think is responsible for that? Is it more than chance?
B: That’s a good question. I wish I had a good answer, but your guess is as good as mine.
J: Did Mick have any goals with improv at the time? Could you tell this is the kind of guy who’s going to do something major in theater?
B: I don’t really know what Mick’s improv goals were back at IU, other than to have a good time with his friends. I could definitely tell that he was hilarious, extremely smart, and very original, and I thought he was one of the most entertaining people I’d ever met, but since I knew nothing about the theatre world, I had no clue what his potential was as far as theatre was concerned. I’m not the least bit surprised that he became a brilliant teacher and director, though, now that I look back on it.
J: What about improv was so appealing to you, even from that first scene?
B: It’s a little hard to describe. Thinking back, I think it was the fun of creating something spontaneously with someone else without all the second-guessing and self-doubt that I’ve always tended to experience when planning something in advance. I loved that, by definition, nothing could be planned in improv, and that you were building something as you went, discovering what the scene was about as you did it.
J: What was the Ark like? How many people were involved? Did you continue to work with any of them after college?
B: I loved The Ark. It was started and run by a couple named Dennis and Elaine Kern. The original Ark group there which had started a few years before I got to Madison had performed improv in bars and rock clubs, but by the time I got there, they had a theatre of their own. It was pretty small, but it had a great feel, and it was a perfect place for me to start out.
My improv group at The Ark had, on average, about 8 people in it at any given time. I lost track of most of them, unfortunately, including Dennis and Elaine, but Todd Hanson, now a great “Onion” writer, is still a good friend of mine. I’m so glad he lives in New York now. Also, Chris Farley was in my very first Ark group before he moved to Chicago in ‘87 to start at ImprovOlympic. By the time I got back to Chicago in the Fall of ‘88, Chris was really on the fast-track. He was already in the Second City Touring Company, and Del Close put in him the Second City Mainstage about 5 months later, where he worked until the Fall of ‘90 when SNL hired him.
I never got much of a chance to “work” with Chris after he left Madison, but he did sit in a few times at some of our early Monday-night “Armando Diaz Theatrical Experience and Hootenanny” shows at ImprovOlympic in ‘95 or so when he passed through Chicago. It was so sad when Chris died. He was such a great talent, obviously. I just wish he got a chance to show more of what he could do. His movies don’t come anywhere close to doing justice to his talent, in my opinion. I still remember a scene he did in SC-Mainstage with Tim Meadows and Jill Talley that had some of the best natural acting I’ve seen onstage.
J: What was it like working with Chris Farley in that Ark troupe? Did he always have the same intensity, even in rehearsals?
B: I only had the privilege of working with Chris in Madison for a little less than a year, but he was always a great guy to perform with. I wish I could’ve worked with him longer, it was only about 10 months or so at the Ark, but like so many other people, I always loved watching him work later on, and I’m grateful that I knew him at all.
In addition to being incredibly hilarious onstage, Chris was often just as funny offstage. For example, if a pretty woman was walking by us in the street, he would sometimes drop down right in front of her and start doing push-ups, saying, “...a hundred and ninety-eight...a hundred and ninety-nine....” Most women found it hilarious, but some were just baffled or annoyed. When we handed out show flyers on State Street, he would often say something really confusing to the person he was handing the flyer to, like “See more of your family!” He would also sometimes stand in the lobby after one of our shows and enthusiastically shout, “Great job, folks!” to audience members as they were leaving the theatre. Maybe you had to be there to really appreciate all that stuff, but the effortless comic energy he had, and the total commitment he gave to everything were always amazing to see.
I remember one night when our Ark group went out for beers after rehearsal, and Chris was making a middle-aged couple in the bar laugh so hard that the husband was falling off of his barstool. I’ll never forget that the guy asked Chris, “What’s your name? I want to remember it.”
Chris obviously had some personal demons, but he was a wonderful, big-hearted person. I remember when they had a memorial service here in New York for Chris right after he died, I noticed a bunch of old people there. I assumed they were relatives of Chris’s, but it turned out that they were old people that Chris used to visit through the Church every week when he lived in New York. He would just go to lonely old people’s apartments every week to make them laugh, talk with them, bring them some lunch, whatever. He never told anyone about it or publicized it. He just did it because he was a great person. Unfortunately, they don’t put that kind of stuff in the newspapers.
J: What was it like when you first started taking improv classes in Chicago? What kind of impressions did Second City and Improv Olympic make on you?
B: I really liked my classes at Second City overall. I was lucky to have my beginning “Level One” class in the SC-Mainstage space with Michael Gellman. He was a great teacher, and it was so cool just to be on that stage. I got a little spoiled by that experience. Some of the spaces I had for later classes were hilariously crappy, like an empty apartment above the bar across the street from Second City. I lucked out with all my teachers, though. I had Norm Holly, Barb Wallace, and Martin de Maat. They were all very different, but I learned a lot from all of them.
This will undoubtedly sound very corny, but when I walked into Second City back then, I felt like a monk from some remote mountain village who had just walked into The Vatican. I’ve never lost my respect and admiration for the place, but back then as a student, it was particularly inspiring just to be in the building.
Regarding ImprovOlympic back then, as I mentioned before, I really enjoyed Charna Halpern’s class back in ‘86, and the performers I saw onstage that summer were very inspiring. I particularly loved watching Dave Pasquesi on the Barron’s Barracudas team, and I was happy to see him working at Second City when I got back to Chicago from Madison in ‘88. Dave is still one of my improv heroes, and it’s so cool that he’s working with T.J. Jagodowski now. Those guys obviously inspire everybody that watches them work.
When I started back at ImprovOlympic in ‘89, there was a whole bunch of amazing people that had come in during the previous two years, like Kevin Dorff, Susan Messing, Dave Koechner, Pete Gardner, Jimmy Carrane, Pat Finn, Jay Leggett, and lots of other great performers. I felt like a complete beginner in many ways for a while when I watched those people.
I ended up on a “Harold” team with people like Jenna Jolovitz, Pat Walsh (Matt’s brother), Beth Cahill, E.J. Peters, and others. We all got along really well, and it was a fun team to work with. Our first coach was Dave Koechner and he was great, and so was our next coach, Noah Gregoropoulos. I ended up working with Dave and Noah later on in several groups, and they became good friends of mine, but back then they were kind of mentors to a lot of us who were just starting to do The Harold onstage.
The classes at IO back then were basically 3 levels. First, you had Charna for Level 1, then Noah for Level 2, and then Del Close for Level 3. Unfortunately, I never got to study very long with Del. Shortly after I started taking his workshops, he decided to move to LA and pursue the acting thing for a while. When he came back, he got back into teaching again, and later began working with great groups like The Family.
J: What did you do after you moved to Chicago in ‘88 and before you started working with Jazz Freddy? Did you perform at Second City or the Annoyance?
B: I never actually studied or performed at The Annoyance. That’s kind of odd to me when I think back on it since Mick was so instrumental in getting me started in improv. I had a lot of friends who did stuff at The Annoyance and I always had a great time seeing shows there, but I never actually got involved over there in any way. I started Second City classes in the Fall of ‘88. I went through The Training Center and finished up our “Level 5” show, directed by Martin de Maat, in early ‘90. I didn’t actually get hired into The Second City Touring Company, however, until late ‘92.
When I started working at the ad agency in ‘89, first in the Research Department and later as a copywriter, I started taking classes and performing at IO. I performed on a few Harold teams there over the next year and a half, primarily on the one I mentioned earlier with Jenna Jolovitz, Pat Walsh, Beth Cahill, etc. I also sat in occasionally with “Blue Velveeta” and other teams.
In the Fall of ‘90, I was feeling kind of burned out at IO for some reason I no longer quite understand. I think I was depressed about some personal stuff at the time which probably bled over into improv. I still loved the people at IO, but I decided to take a break from improv, not knowing how long the break would be.
While I was on my “hiatus,” in late ‘90 or early ‘91, some members of Blue Velveeta, Kevin Dorff, Jay Leggett, Brian Blondell, Brendan Sullivan, Mitch Rouse, etc., split off from IO and took over the space that IO had been using called Papa Milano’s. I’m not sure if it was an ugly split at the time, but if it was, it’s all been forgotten, I think. I think Brian McCann had become a full-time member of Blue Velveeta back at IO shortly before the split but I’m not sure. McCann had been at IO since ‘87 or so. His first IO team, Fish Shtick, included Chris Farley, James Grace, etc. The Blue Velveeta guys, including McCann, brought in some other IO guys like Dave Koechner, Andy Richter, and Noah Gregoropoulos to do shows with them at Papa Milano’s. The shows were billed as “The Comedy Underground featuring Blue Velveeta.”
One night in early ‘91, the “Comedy Underground/Blue Velveeta” guys asked me to sit in with them as a guest just for the hell of it. We all had such a great time that night that they asked me to join the group. We mostly did short-form stuff with a lot of audience suggestions, but it tended to be scene-related stuff or character-driven things like “Experts Panel,” etc. Also, because we had an amazing piano player, Dave Adler, and some of the guys, especially Jay Leggett, could sing really well, there was usually a little music-related stuff in the show, too, like improvised songs or whatever. I must say, even though I lost interest in “short-form” stuff later on, and I found long-form stuff a lot more rewarding overall, I really enjoyed my time in “Comedy Underground.” I felt lucky to be working with so many great performers, and I think our shows there were really funny.
I never had a clue what was going on in terms of the “business” end of things at Comedy Underground. Jay Leggett seemed to handle all of that. Eventually, I think Jay had some kind of gripe with the Sopranos-like owners of Papa Milano’s, and “Comedy Underground” folded up shop in the summer of ‘91, I think. The people from Comedy Underground went in different directions at that point. Jay Leggett secured a deal at Chicago’s “Improvisation” comedy club down near Lou Malnatti’s on Wells Street for “Blue Velveeta” to do improv in their side-space next to the main “stand-up” room. For a while, I think that “BV” group ended up being Jay, Kevin Dorff, Brendan Sullivan, me, Mitch Rouse, Brian Blondell, and Brian McCann. For some reason I can’t remember, Kevin and Brendan left the new "Blue Velveeta" pretty early on, I think. I’m pretty sure that Mitch did, too, for some other reason. It’s all kind of a blur at this point. I do know that at one point the “Backstage at the Improv” incarnation of Blue Velveeta included just Leggett, McCann, Blondell, and me. Sometimes some other guests would sit in, but that was the core group for a short time anyway.
Some of my old IO friends, Dorff, Noah, Koechner, Pat Finn, Richter, Leo Ford, Rachel Dratch, began doing improv shows at a place called “At The Tracks.” ImprovOlympic teams used to do Harolds there up until the summer of ‘89 or so. The owner, Carl Berman, was a great guy and he had always loved the performers. He told the group they could do shows there every week if they wanted to, if they didn’t mind opening for bands now and then, etc. One night I sat in with them and I had such a great time that I decided to leave Blue Velveeta and join up with the “At the Tracks” group. I liked working with the “Blue Velveeta” guys but the atmosphere at the Improv comedy club never felt very comfortable to me. It was a big, slick-looking “stand-up” club, and I felt a lot more at home at Carl’s place. The Improv felt like a job and Carl’s was more like a party.
We named our “At The Tracks” group “Gambrinus, King of Beer” after a hilarious poster we saw in a bar featuring a Czech king from the Middle Ages who supposedly beat Attila The Hun in a drinking contest. The “Gambrinus” group was less like a legitimate improv group and more like a drunken, undisciplined softball team. I’m embarrassed to say we often had pitchers of beer backstage and the bar was about 9 inches from the stage. It was hard to take anything seriously since most of the crowds weren’t even there to see us. We had a lot of fun in that group, though, and we did some funny shows. I think we got a lot of stupid stuff out of our system.
When Pete Gardner started sitting in with our “drunken joke” of a group, it ironically led in some ways to the formation of the “Jazz Freddy” group later on. Pete got along with us really well, and I think that’s one of the reasons he later invited some of us into the workshops that led to Jazz Freddy. That’s funny to me since Jazz Freddy was the complete antithesis of Gambrinus in terms of discipline and focus. I did love the “Gambrinus” t-shirts, though.
J: Where were you born?
B: I was born in Park Ridge, Illinois. My dad was in the army on active duty up until I was about 5 years old, so we moved around a lot during those early years, but I spent most of my life before college in Palatine, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.
J: What were some early influences on your sense of humor?
B: The biggest influences on me when I was growing up were probably things like Monty Python, SCTV, Woody Allen, Peter Sellers, "The Muppet Show", early SNL, Nichols and May, etc. I remember loving Steve Martin and Richard Pryor back then too, but I'm not sure how much actual "influence" they had on my sense of humor since they seemed so completely different from me.
I've also always loved old movies like Billy Wilder's "The Apartment", dark "comedies" like Paddy Chayefsky's "Network" and "The Hospital", as well as old "screwball comedies" from the 30's like "The Awful Truth", "My Man Godfrey", "His Girl Friday", etc. I think they all hold up really well today, too.
James L. Brooks has always been another big hero of mine. He's been involved in a lot of my favorite stuff over the years, from movies like "Broadcast News" to the old "Mary Tyler Moore Show" to "The Simpsons".
J: How did you first get involved with improv?
B: When I was a freshman at Indiana University in Bloomington, Mick Napier lived on my dorm floor. I thought he was one of the funniest people I’d ever met in my life, and I still feel that way. If I hadn’t been lucky enough to meet Mick, I seriously doubt I would’ve ever ended up doing improv later on.
Mick started up a couple of improv groups at IU, which included people like Joe Bill, Faith Soloway, etc., and he encouraged me to audition, but I was a big chickenshit and never did. I used to go see the group perform sometimes, though, and they got me interested in improv, at least as a fan. Just for fun, I took an introductory acting class my senior year at IU, and one day the teacher had us do a 2-person improvised scene as an exercise. I had never had that much fun before in my life. It may sound really corny, but I was hooked from that very first scene.
Mick was a year or two older than me, so he moved to Chicago and started up with ImprovOlympic while I was still at IU. He’s the one who told me about ImprovOlympic and I took a class with Charna Halpern the summer after I graduated. I loved it there, but I had already committed to going to grad school at University of Wisconsin-Madison that fall. Luckily, there was a great little improv theatre in Madison called The Ark Theatre. I was so mad at myself for never auditioning for Mick’s group that I forced myself to audition for The Ark. That was where I did my first actual improv performing in front of an audience, and I had a great time there for a couple years before finishing school and moving back to Chicago.
J: It’s pretty incredible that so many influential people in the improv world knew each other in college, let alone were involved in the same college troupe. What do you think is responsible for that? Is it more than chance?
B: That’s a good question. I wish I had a good answer, but your guess is as good as mine.
J: Did Mick have any goals with improv at the time? Could you tell this is the kind of guy who’s going to do something major in theater?
B: I don’t really know what Mick’s improv goals were back at IU, other than to have a good time with his friends. I could definitely tell that he was hilarious, extremely smart, and very original, and I thought he was one of the most entertaining people I’d ever met, but since I knew nothing about the theatre world, I had no clue what his potential was as far as theatre was concerned. I’m not the least bit surprised that he became a brilliant teacher and director, though, now that I look back on it.
J: What about improv was so appealing to you, even from that first scene?
B: It’s a little hard to describe. Thinking back, I think it was the fun of creating something spontaneously with someone else without all the second-guessing and self-doubt that I’ve always tended to experience when planning something in advance. I loved that, by definition, nothing could be planned in improv, and that you were building something as you went, discovering what the scene was about as you did it.
J: What was the Ark like? How many people were involved? Did you continue to work with any of them after college?
B: I loved The Ark. It was started and run by a couple named Dennis and Elaine Kern. The original Ark group there which had started a few years before I got to Madison had performed improv in bars and rock clubs, but by the time I got there, they had a theatre of their own. It was pretty small, but it had a great feel, and it was a perfect place for me to start out.
My improv group at The Ark had, on average, about 8 people in it at any given time. I lost track of most of them, unfortunately, including Dennis and Elaine, but Todd Hanson, now a great “Onion” writer, is still a good friend of mine. I’m so glad he lives in New York now. Also, Chris Farley was in my very first Ark group before he moved to Chicago in ‘87 to start at ImprovOlympic. By the time I got back to Chicago in the Fall of ‘88, Chris was really on the fast-track. He was already in the Second City Touring Company, and Del Close put in him the Second City Mainstage about 5 months later, where he worked until the Fall of ‘90 when SNL hired him.
I never got much of a chance to “work” with Chris after he left Madison, but he did sit in a few times at some of our early Monday-night “Armando Diaz Theatrical Experience and Hootenanny” shows at ImprovOlympic in ‘95 or so when he passed through Chicago. It was so sad when Chris died. He was such a great talent, obviously. I just wish he got a chance to show more of what he could do. His movies don’t come anywhere close to doing justice to his talent, in my opinion. I still remember a scene he did in SC-Mainstage with Tim Meadows and Jill Talley that had some of the best natural acting I’ve seen onstage.
J: What was it like working with Chris Farley in that Ark troupe? Did he always have the same intensity, even in rehearsals?
B: I only had the privilege of working with Chris in Madison for a little less than a year, but he was always a great guy to perform with. I wish I could’ve worked with him longer, it was only about 10 months or so at the Ark, but like so many other people, I always loved watching him work later on, and I’m grateful that I knew him at all.
In addition to being incredibly hilarious onstage, Chris was often just as funny offstage. For example, if a pretty woman was walking by us in the street, he would sometimes drop down right in front of her and start doing push-ups, saying, “...a hundred and ninety-eight...a hundred and ninety-nine....” Most women found it hilarious, but some were just baffled or annoyed. When we handed out show flyers on State Street, he would often say something really confusing to the person he was handing the flyer to, like “See more of your family!” He would also sometimes stand in the lobby after one of our shows and enthusiastically shout, “Great job, folks!” to audience members as they were leaving the theatre. Maybe you had to be there to really appreciate all that stuff, but the effortless comic energy he had, and the total commitment he gave to everything were always amazing to see.
I remember one night when our Ark group went out for beers after rehearsal, and Chris was making a middle-aged couple in the bar laugh so hard that the husband was falling off of his barstool. I’ll never forget that the guy asked Chris, “What’s your name? I want to remember it.”
Chris obviously had some personal demons, but he was a wonderful, big-hearted person. I remember when they had a memorial service here in New York for Chris right after he died, I noticed a bunch of old people there. I assumed they were relatives of Chris’s, but it turned out that they were old people that Chris used to visit through the Church every week when he lived in New York. He would just go to lonely old people’s apartments every week to make them laugh, talk with them, bring them some lunch, whatever. He never told anyone about it or publicized it. He just did it because he was a great person. Unfortunately, they don’t put that kind of stuff in the newspapers.
J: What was it like when you first started taking improv classes in Chicago? What kind of impressions did Second City and Improv Olympic make on you?
B: I really liked my classes at Second City overall. I was lucky to have my beginning “Level One” class in the SC-Mainstage space with Michael Gellman. He was a great teacher, and it was so cool just to be on that stage. I got a little spoiled by that experience. Some of the spaces I had for later classes were hilariously crappy, like an empty apartment above the bar across the street from Second City. I lucked out with all my teachers, though. I had Norm Holly, Barb Wallace, and Martin de Maat. They were all very different, but I learned a lot from all of them.
This will undoubtedly sound very corny, but when I walked into Second City back then, I felt like a monk from some remote mountain village who had just walked into The Vatican. I’ve never lost my respect and admiration for the place, but back then as a student, it was particularly inspiring just to be in the building.
Regarding ImprovOlympic back then, as I mentioned before, I really enjoyed Charna Halpern’s class back in ‘86, and the performers I saw onstage that summer were very inspiring. I particularly loved watching Dave Pasquesi on the Barron’s Barracudas team, and I was happy to see him working at Second City when I got back to Chicago from Madison in ‘88. Dave is still one of my improv heroes, and it’s so cool that he’s working with T.J. Jagodowski now. Those guys obviously inspire everybody that watches them work.
When I started back at ImprovOlympic in ‘89, there was a whole bunch of amazing people that had come in during the previous two years, like Kevin Dorff, Susan Messing, Dave Koechner, Pete Gardner, Jimmy Carrane, Pat Finn, Jay Leggett, and lots of other great performers. I felt like a complete beginner in many ways for a while when I watched those people.
I ended up on a “Harold” team with people like Jenna Jolovitz, Pat Walsh (Matt’s brother), Beth Cahill, E.J. Peters, and others. We all got along really well, and it was a fun team to work with. Our first coach was Dave Koechner and he was great, and so was our next coach, Noah Gregoropoulos. I ended up working with Dave and Noah later on in several groups, and they became good friends of mine, but back then they were kind of mentors to a lot of us who were just starting to do The Harold onstage.
The classes at IO back then were basically 3 levels. First, you had Charna for Level 1, then Noah for Level 2, and then Del Close for Level 3. Unfortunately, I never got to study very long with Del. Shortly after I started taking his workshops, he decided to move to LA and pursue the acting thing for a while. When he came back, he got back into teaching again, and later began working with great groups like The Family.
J: What did you do after you moved to Chicago in ‘88 and before you started working with Jazz Freddy? Did you perform at Second City or the Annoyance?
B: I never actually studied or performed at The Annoyance. That’s kind of odd to me when I think back on it since Mick was so instrumental in getting me started in improv. I had a lot of friends who did stuff at The Annoyance and I always had a great time seeing shows there, but I never actually got involved over there in any way. I started Second City classes in the Fall of ‘88. I went through The Training Center and finished up our “Level 5” show, directed by Martin de Maat, in early ‘90. I didn’t actually get hired into The Second City Touring Company, however, until late ‘92.
When I started working at the ad agency in ‘89, first in the Research Department and later as a copywriter, I started taking classes and performing at IO. I performed on a few Harold teams there over the next year and a half, primarily on the one I mentioned earlier with Jenna Jolovitz, Pat Walsh, Beth Cahill, etc. I also sat in occasionally with “Blue Velveeta” and other teams.
In the Fall of ‘90, I was feeling kind of burned out at IO for some reason I no longer quite understand. I think I was depressed about some personal stuff at the time which probably bled over into improv. I still loved the people at IO, but I decided to take a break from improv, not knowing how long the break would be.
While I was on my “hiatus,” in late ‘90 or early ‘91, some members of Blue Velveeta, Kevin Dorff, Jay Leggett, Brian Blondell, Brendan Sullivan, Mitch Rouse, etc., split off from IO and took over the space that IO had been using called Papa Milano’s. I’m not sure if it was an ugly split at the time, but if it was, it’s all been forgotten, I think. I think Brian McCann had become a full-time member of Blue Velveeta back at IO shortly before the split but I’m not sure. McCann had been at IO since ‘87 or so. His first IO team, Fish Shtick, included Chris Farley, James Grace, etc. The Blue Velveeta guys, including McCann, brought in some other IO guys like Dave Koechner, Andy Richter, and Noah Gregoropoulos to do shows with them at Papa Milano’s. The shows were billed as “The Comedy Underground featuring Blue Velveeta.”
One night in early ‘91, the “Comedy Underground/Blue Velveeta” guys asked me to sit in with them as a guest just for the hell of it. We all had such a great time that night that they asked me to join the group. We mostly did short-form stuff with a lot of audience suggestions, but it tended to be scene-related stuff or character-driven things like “Experts Panel,” etc. Also, because we had an amazing piano player, Dave Adler, and some of the guys, especially Jay Leggett, could sing really well, there was usually a little music-related stuff in the show, too, like improvised songs or whatever. I must say, even though I lost interest in “short-form” stuff later on, and I found long-form stuff a lot more rewarding overall, I really enjoyed my time in “Comedy Underground.” I felt lucky to be working with so many great performers, and I think our shows there were really funny.
I never had a clue what was going on in terms of the “business” end of things at Comedy Underground. Jay Leggett seemed to handle all of that. Eventually, I think Jay had some kind of gripe with the Sopranos-like owners of Papa Milano’s, and “Comedy Underground” folded up shop in the summer of ‘91, I think. The people from Comedy Underground went in different directions at that point. Jay Leggett secured a deal at Chicago’s “Improvisation” comedy club down near Lou Malnatti’s on Wells Street for “Blue Velveeta” to do improv in their side-space next to the main “stand-up” room. For a while, I think that “BV” group ended up being Jay, Kevin Dorff, Brendan Sullivan, me, Mitch Rouse, Brian Blondell, and Brian McCann. For some reason I can’t remember, Kevin and Brendan left the new "Blue Velveeta" pretty early on, I think. I’m pretty sure that Mitch did, too, for some other reason. It’s all kind of a blur at this point. I do know that at one point the “Backstage at the Improv” incarnation of Blue Velveeta included just Leggett, McCann, Blondell, and me. Sometimes some other guests would sit in, but that was the core group for a short time anyway.
Some of my old IO friends, Dorff, Noah, Koechner, Pat Finn, Richter, Leo Ford, Rachel Dratch, began doing improv shows at a place called “At The Tracks.” ImprovOlympic teams used to do Harolds there up until the summer of ‘89 or so. The owner, Carl Berman, was a great guy and he had always loved the performers. He told the group they could do shows there every week if they wanted to, if they didn’t mind opening for bands now and then, etc. One night I sat in with them and I had such a great time that I decided to leave Blue Velveeta and join up with the “At the Tracks” group. I liked working with the “Blue Velveeta” guys but the atmosphere at the Improv comedy club never felt very comfortable to me. It was a big, slick-looking “stand-up” club, and I felt a lot more at home at Carl’s place. The Improv felt like a job and Carl’s was more like a party.
We named our “At The Tracks” group “Gambrinus, King of Beer” after a hilarious poster we saw in a bar featuring a Czech king from the Middle Ages who supposedly beat Attila The Hun in a drinking contest. The “Gambrinus” group was less like a legitimate improv group and more like a drunken, undisciplined softball team. I’m embarrassed to say we often had pitchers of beer backstage and the bar was about 9 inches from the stage. It was hard to take anything seriously since most of the crowds weren’t even there to see us. We had a lot of fun in that group, though, and we did some funny shows. I think we got a lot of stupid stuff out of our system.
When Pete Gardner started sitting in with our “drunken joke” of a group, it ironically led in some ways to the formation of the “Jazz Freddy” group later on. Pete got along with us really well, and I think that’s one of the reasons he later invited some of us into the workshops that led to Jazz Freddy. That’s funny to me since Jazz Freddy was the complete antithesis of Gambrinus in terms of discipline and focus. I did love the “Gambrinus” t-shirts, though.
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