Ed Herbstman 5/5/06 Part 2
JF: But, actually he wouldn’t have gotten all the money she paid for the class. He would have split it with Charna, right? So, some of that would have come out of his own pocket.
EH: I think he settled it with Charna later. It’s not like Del had a 401k at Improv Olympic. He was living pillar to post, hand to mouth, and really was a mess when Charna found him. She cleaned him up and together they built the Improv Olympic. He turned into a guru and now a legend, and effected American comedy and the art of improvisational theater permanently and indefinitely. The repercussions are still being felt and gathering steam over time, long after his death, so he had a huge effect. And he helped build the Improv Olympic empire. Charna did all the nuts and bolts work, and he did the teaching.
JF: So when did you start performing at the Improv Olympic?
EH: Probably 3 or 4 weeks after I started taking classes. That’s what was so great about it.
JF: Did you feel prepared for it?
EH: Yeah, because there was no stagehand to pull the curtain aside, and no one knocking on your dressing room door, saying ‘you have five minutes Mr. Herbstman.’ It was the back of a bar that we had to get the hell out of by a certain time. I think the shows were free or five bucks or something, and the only audience were the improvisers who were performing right after you. So you would watch them. They would watch you. You’d get the hell out. A band would perform, then real people would come in and sit down and watch the band. You’d go downstairs and drink. So the pressure was not high. [laughs] The real pressure was wanting to impress the other people you were performing with, to show that you were a good improvisers and that you belonged.
JF: Did Improv Olympic have their own space at the time?
EH: No, they were at the Wrigleyside bar at the time, then they moved to the Belmont space, a tiny little space. That was a lot of fun. We all started to feel like ‘hey, wait a second. There’s carpeting, and these are chairs. There’s a scrim. What’s a scrim? And there’s a backstage area. Holy cow. And a place for people to hang their coats. I might invite my family to this.’
That was around the time that Del directed 3 Mad Rituals and Dynamite Fun Nest with the early members of the UCB, Ian and Matt and Ali and Neil Flynn and Adam McKay. Dratch played with them but not really in those shows. They were known as ‘The Victim’s Family’ until one of their members was tragically killed in a car accident, then they became ‘The Family.’
‘The Family’ was kind of like a nuclear level explosion for Improv Olympic. They were so good and so consistent that it started to really build houses, and it started to get people to want to take classes there. Eventually, they all became the teachers.
JF: How did they influence you?
EH: They were awesome. They went faster than anybody else, but still the same exact things that Del was teaching, like organic scenework and developing a game in a scene, and interconnecting ideas, and holding a narrative over multiple scenes, and interweaving storylines, and creating rich characters, and creating meaningful work. They did all that, but on top of that they went 10 times faster than anybody else, were 100% consistent and they were extremely funny. It was sort of like the marriage of the fast, short-form style that gives you instant gratification and this slower long-form style that is more akin to a theater piece and holds your attention for a longer period. The payoff is bigger, but the risk is greater. They melded those two things, and created something that was extremely fast, extremely funny, but still held true to the principles of organic scenework. I just wanted to do that kind of work.
They created the Movie. They created several forms. They did this crazy thing called ‘The Impressionistic Horror,’ which I know The Family, especially Besser, hated doing, from what I understand. But it was quite good to watch, and totally different from anything else going on. I think what they ended up doing was taking that style and speeding it up to a degree where they got so good at being fast that a lot of the other principles became muted, because they became irrelevant. They developed their own style. They went out there. They found the game instantly and played it really hard. The only residue of long-form left on their style was call-backs. They would use call-backs differently. They wouldn’t just make a reference to a person. They would bring that person back, and continue those narratives, or the game. It was able to be a long-form, but really it became more of a comedy show than an improv show. They just happened to be improvising it. All of this being said under the umbrella that they were so good they were capable of doing this.
JF: So what were your first teams like at the Improv Olympic? And when did you start getting on teams, or a team that you were really proud of?
EH: I was on a couple of teams that got transformed really early on. There was a lot of shuffling and a lot of growth going on when I came in. One week there would be 3 teams. The next week there would be 7. The next week there would be 18. It seemed that way. I think the first real team that I was on was Mr. Blonde, that was a great experience. Rich Talarico and Craig Cackowski were on that team. I’m still friends with them. Even Tina Fey sat in with that team and eventually joined it. I left because I was busy with college and I couldn’t really commit to rehearsals and shows. That became a problem because I would show up for a show but hadn’t been to a rehearsal in 3 weeks. I’d be like ‘how come everybody’s pissed at me? Let’s do a show! Woohoo.’ Jon Rosenfeld was on that team, Andrew Moskos, Doreen Calderon, Gwyn Ashley, Rob Mello, Jeff Voukis I think might have been on that team.
I think for a while it was us and the Plum Dumplings that were the two house teams. The Plum Dumplings was Jon Glaser and Rich Fulcher. I’m still friends with Rich. He’s a hilarious, strange, wonderful person who has a TV show on the BBC. Glaser was a Conan writer for a long time. I never really knew him personally, but I always felt like we were somehow in competition with his team to become the house team, to get this coveted spot of ‘house team.’ Looking back on it, it all seems very silly, but when you’re in it, it just seems like the most important thing in the world.
JF: How was that a learning experience for you? What did you learn from your time on Mr. Blonde?
EH: I learned a lot. All improv aside. Of course, you learn from performing. One thing you learn is that it’s very easy to repeat things. If you end up doing a scene with the same person every week and that scene has the same character or tone to it, that’s such a disappointing feeling, like you wasted that time, because you only get one show a week and here you did the same goddamn seduction scene with Gywn and in the 3rd beat you’re dancing again. It’s like ‘what the fuck? How did this happen?’ It’s very easy to fall into that, so you have to constantly try new things. Talarico was really good at that. He was like water. He somehow worked in every scenario. It was really great to play with him and watch him.
But what I really learned is that no matter how good you are onstage, if you’re not a good person to other people offstage it doesn’t matter. Being a team player doesn’t mean being a team player while you’re onstage. It means being a team player when you’re onstage and offstage. I think I was pretty arrogant as a 17 year old improviser who was doing it on the weekends while I was in college. Everyone else was in their late 20’s. I felt like I had less responsibility as a friend. Like I had only leg in it, not two legs, because I had this whole other life in college. So, I would show up, do my thing and have a blast, but meanwhile everybody was really forming great relationships with each other and bonding. I wasn’t doing that bonding and forming those relationships and drinking until 4 am, because I was busy drinking until 4 am back at college. I think the biggest lesson I learn was that if you’re going to do something, do that thing and don’t do it half way. Or do it halfway, but don’t you dare expect to get the same results.
JF: Were you actually 17 at the time?
EH: Yeah.
JF: That’s early to be in college.
EH: Yeah, well my birthday is in late September. I started Improv Olympic right after High School. I was 17, so 17, 18, then all through college and beyond I was still doing IO, up until when I left to go to California. When they hired me in the Second City Touring Company, Charna hired me to be a teacher at Improv Olympic, then I went out to California. I think I was 22 or 23. I spent 5 years Improv Olympic performing at least once a week.
JF: When did you become involved with Bitter Noah?
EH: That was my college improv group at Northwestern. We did sketch comedy and short-form games, similar to what the Second City Revue was back then. That group was one of those kind of magical groups that ended up sticking together. It’s very rare for a group to survive graduation. We ended up working together because I kind of grabbed everybody after graduation and brought them to Improv Olympic, and asked Charna if we could be a team and she said yes, so we became a team called ‘The Tribe.’ We started working with Miles and Noah on different forms.
We in that kind of over-achieving college mode of ‘oh my gosh, we’ve got to put together a new show every 3 to 4 weeks,’ because in college we were all in different plays at the same time as being in the improv group. We continued doing that and we were pretty prolific at Improv Olympic. Besser directed a show called ‘Sue Your Ex.’ Miles directed one called ‘Think Loud in the Idiot Box.’ Noah started to direct us. We did a couple of sketch shows. We were just annoyingly prolific, then everybody but me moved out to California one day, because I wanted to stay and do Second City. Then they did a show and called themselves ‘Bitter Noah,’ and they got an opportunity to audition for Aspen. Either they came back to Chicago or I went to L.A. I think I went to L.A., and we did the Movie. We did The Family’s form, and we took it to the Aspen Comedy Festival. I went out to L.A. for what I thought would be a few months to rehearse with them to get ready for Aspen. This was 97. I got an apartment and stuff, and L.A. has a different escape velocity to leave it than any other city in the world. You need more thrust to get out of L.A. I didn’t know that, and it’s gravity sucked me in. I ended up living there and being an actor in L.A.
Luckily, Improv Olympic West was on Charna’s mind and she contacted Paul Vallaincourt and me and the other Bitter Noah guys to start it, primarily Paul. He taught all the Level 1’s. I taught the Level 2’s, then was eventually teaching various Levels there as it got off the ground. It took a couple years, but now it’s really quite something there.
JF: What forms were you guys doing? Had you been rehearsing the Movie before that?
EH: We had been doing it in Chicago for at least 2 years. We doing bits and pieces of the Movie while we were still in college. I actually hired Besser to coach our group at Northwestern. He gave us notes and helped us develop what eventually became Sue Your Ex, which transformed into another show that we sold to MTV called the Blame Game. I think Bitter Noah had broken up right before the Blame Game was sold, then Bitter Noah got back together because there was a little bit of money and a show to work on. The show went on with Paul Vallaincourt and Jason Weiner and Kara MacNamara, and not me, because I was a bad boy working on the pilot, making a lot of noise about how I didn’t like the direction that we were going. It was my first experience in television. I learned a lot.
JF: What would you have done differently? And what do you try to do differently now?
EH: What I would have done differently is I would have come up with solutions rather than just be resistant to things I didn’t like. I think that’s pretty obvious when you in any situation, have an alternative. Instead of disengaging, which is what I did, I probably should have just worked harder. Ultimately, if I was really wise about it, I wouldn’t have done that job. I would have just tried to create another show and let other people run that show, because there was no way as a newcomer, who had just moved to L.A. basically, had never done tv, there was no way I was going to outplay or outwit the experienced producers who knew what they were doing and had deeper relationships with the network. But you can’t know that stuff when you first start out. And the show ran for like 5 years.
JF: Yeah?
EH: Yeah, but I only got about $3200.
JF: What?
EH: Well, that doesn’t include… I worked for about 6 weeks. I think I got about $8000 from the whole thing.
JF: How long did you work on it?
EH: Well, I sold the show then worked on it for 6 weeks, just the pilot. The producer pretty much either fired me or I quit. I can’t really recall. I think it was like ‘hey, do you want to quit or do you want me to fire you?’ And I was like ‘hmmm, let me think about it,’ then we never spoke again.
JF: How did you get hired for the Second City Touring company?
EH: That was an audition. They have a big open audition.
JF: What was your experience like in TourCo?
EH: I loved it, although I hate touring. I hate being in a van on long van rides. I hate 12 people having to decide where to eat. And I really don’t like smoking, and everybody smoked but me, almost all the time. I always felt like an asshole and a baby for wanting my seat in the van, because it was the one where smoke wasn’t blown at me. I was very grumpy touring, but I loved doing the shows. I loved working on scenes in the van, driving to Kansas City or whatever. I got to tour with great people Elliot Carrell, John Farley, Craig Cackowski. There were a lot of people in and out, but it was fun. Shulie Cowen. I really liked it and I never thought I would leave. I thought I would be one of those guys who’s at Second City forever, who lives down the street and just stays there. I don’t fault anybody who does that. I just didn’t end up doing it.
JF: What were some of your most memorable experiences from being in TourCo?
EH: Right before I was about to do a scene with John Farley that I had to start out really serious in, he grabbed me as I was stepping onstage. He pulled me back stage, turned me around and was like ‘Herbstman! The windmill!’ Then he pulled his pants down and yanked his penis out and started swirling it around like a windmill.
JF: [laughs]
EH: And it went really far. I mean, it was thin but boy was it long. He spun it around like a windmill, looking at me with these huge eyes and a face where you would expect drool to come out of the mouth. Then he pulled his pants up, and we walked out to do the scene.
JF: How was the scene?
EH: Oh it was good. He’s always really funny. He’s always really good.
JF: When did you meet your wife, Melanie Hoopes?
EH: In L.A., in 99.
JF: Was she doing improv at the time?
EH: She was not doing improv. She was doing one woman shows on the Holocaust and on immigration for middle school students in the California public school system in order to teach diversity and tolerance.
JF: She was in [the improv group] ‘Ed’ wasn’t she?
EH: She was in Ed, but I was in college then and I had never seen them. I had heard of them, because people would ask me about it: ‘are you affiliated with Ed? Because your name is Ed?’ And I would say ‘No.’
JF: That’s a pretty dumb question.
EH: This was also around the time of Jazz Freddy, and Dawn Toti and a bunch of offshoot improv shows that involved Noah Gregoropoulos and other IO people, and Del also. Jazz Freddy was a show a lot like Ed in that it was trying to do something different and elevate the status of improv comedy, so people might pay to go see it like they paid to see a theater show. You would have the confidence doing a show like that in that you could put on a good show for people, charge them money. And not charge them money in terms of ‘oh, we can make a buck,’ but charge them money in the terms of this has all the trappings of real theater. Actually rent a nice space with real seats and real lights and have real programs and advertise. It was successful in that way. Melanie actually went to college [at Northwestern] and we had the same major, which was Performance Studies. So, we had a lot of the same professors and the same experiences, and she was in the Mee-Ow Show, but she graduated in like 88. She’s 6 and a half years older than me.
JF: Have you guys ever improvised together?
EH: Yes, our first date. We were doing the Movie at this theater at La Cienega, and in the Movie we used to do a trailer of a coming attraction at the beginning of the Movie, and we would ask a guest star to be the start of the trailer. We would basically put them in the center of the stage, and improvise around them, and set them up, set the scene, make them the hero of the movie. Whoever was supposed to do it that night couldn’t do it. I happened to see her earlier in the day with a group of people and said ‘hey Melanie, would you like to do it?’ So, that night, our first date, we did a scene together, then went to a party later and made-out until 4 in the morning. Then I went home to my dingy, little creepy apartment that I shared with Derrick Miller who’s an improviser in L.A., who’s a fantastic and funny person, and I said ‘Derrick, I met the woman who I’m going to marry.’ And he was like ‘holy shit, for some reason I totally believe you.’ And I said ‘Holy shit, that’s because I’m telling the truth, you son of a bitch.’ Then we beat each other silly.
JF: I thought that was going to be a nice story, but then it went somewhere else.
EH: Yeah, well, this is L.A. Things are different there. Nice stories always end with someone being beaten. For something even to grow even a little bit out there, a lot of things need to be killed violently. It’s the cycle of birth and death, but there’s more focus on death. Like the death of dreams.
JF: That’s grim.
EH: I’m trying to sell it to Hollywood, but no one’s biting yet.
JF: Call MTV.
EH: Yeah.
EH: I think he settled it with Charna later. It’s not like Del had a 401k at Improv Olympic. He was living pillar to post, hand to mouth, and really was a mess when Charna found him. She cleaned him up and together they built the Improv Olympic. He turned into a guru and now a legend, and effected American comedy and the art of improvisational theater permanently and indefinitely. The repercussions are still being felt and gathering steam over time, long after his death, so he had a huge effect. And he helped build the Improv Olympic empire. Charna did all the nuts and bolts work, and he did the teaching.
JF: So when did you start performing at the Improv Olympic?
EH: Probably 3 or 4 weeks after I started taking classes. That’s what was so great about it.
JF: Did you feel prepared for it?
EH: Yeah, because there was no stagehand to pull the curtain aside, and no one knocking on your dressing room door, saying ‘you have five minutes Mr. Herbstman.’ It was the back of a bar that we had to get the hell out of by a certain time. I think the shows were free or five bucks or something, and the only audience were the improvisers who were performing right after you. So you would watch them. They would watch you. You’d get the hell out. A band would perform, then real people would come in and sit down and watch the band. You’d go downstairs and drink. So the pressure was not high. [laughs] The real pressure was wanting to impress the other people you were performing with, to show that you were a good improvisers and that you belonged.
JF: Did Improv Olympic have their own space at the time?
EH: No, they were at the Wrigleyside bar at the time, then they moved to the Belmont space, a tiny little space. That was a lot of fun. We all started to feel like ‘hey, wait a second. There’s carpeting, and these are chairs. There’s a scrim. What’s a scrim? And there’s a backstage area. Holy cow. And a place for people to hang their coats. I might invite my family to this.’
That was around the time that Del directed 3 Mad Rituals and Dynamite Fun Nest with the early members of the UCB, Ian and Matt and Ali and Neil Flynn and Adam McKay. Dratch played with them but not really in those shows. They were known as ‘The Victim’s Family’ until one of their members was tragically killed in a car accident, then they became ‘The Family.’
‘The Family’ was kind of like a nuclear level explosion for Improv Olympic. They were so good and so consistent that it started to really build houses, and it started to get people to want to take classes there. Eventually, they all became the teachers.
JF: How did they influence you?
EH: They were awesome. They went faster than anybody else, but still the same exact things that Del was teaching, like organic scenework and developing a game in a scene, and interconnecting ideas, and holding a narrative over multiple scenes, and interweaving storylines, and creating rich characters, and creating meaningful work. They did all that, but on top of that they went 10 times faster than anybody else, were 100% consistent and they were extremely funny. It was sort of like the marriage of the fast, short-form style that gives you instant gratification and this slower long-form style that is more akin to a theater piece and holds your attention for a longer period. The payoff is bigger, but the risk is greater. They melded those two things, and created something that was extremely fast, extremely funny, but still held true to the principles of organic scenework. I just wanted to do that kind of work.
They created the Movie. They created several forms. They did this crazy thing called ‘The Impressionistic Horror,’ which I know The Family, especially Besser, hated doing, from what I understand. But it was quite good to watch, and totally different from anything else going on. I think what they ended up doing was taking that style and speeding it up to a degree where they got so good at being fast that a lot of the other principles became muted, because they became irrelevant. They developed their own style. They went out there. They found the game instantly and played it really hard. The only residue of long-form left on their style was call-backs. They would use call-backs differently. They wouldn’t just make a reference to a person. They would bring that person back, and continue those narratives, or the game. It was able to be a long-form, but really it became more of a comedy show than an improv show. They just happened to be improvising it. All of this being said under the umbrella that they were so good they were capable of doing this.
JF: So what were your first teams like at the Improv Olympic? And when did you start getting on teams, or a team that you were really proud of?
EH: I was on a couple of teams that got transformed really early on. There was a lot of shuffling and a lot of growth going on when I came in. One week there would be 3 teams. The next week there would be 7. The next week there would be 18. It seemed that way. I think the first real team that I was on was Mr. Blonde, that was a great experience. Rich Talarico and Craig Cackowski were on that team. I’m still friends with them. Even Tina Fey sat in with that team and eventually joined it. I left because I was busy with college and I couldn’t really commit to rehearsals and shows. That became a problem because I would show up for a show but hadn’t been to a rehearsal in 3 weeks. I’d be like ‘how come everybody’s pissed at me? Let’s do a show! Woohoo.’ Jon Rosenfeld was on that team, Andrew Moskos, Doreen Calderon, Gwyn Ashley, Rob Mello, Jeff Voukis I think might have been on that team.
I think for a while it was us and the Plum Dumplings that were the two house teams. The Plum Dumplings was Jon Glaser and Rich Fulcher. I’m still friends with Rich. He’s a hilarious, strange, wonderful person who has a TV show on the BBC. Glaser was a Conan writer for a long time. I never really knew him personally, but I always felt like we were somehow in competition with his team to become the house team, to get this coveted spot of ‘house team.’ Looking back on it, it all seems very silly, but when you’re in it, it just seems like the most important thing in the world.
JF: How was that a learning experience for you? What did you learn from your time on Mr. Blonde?
EH: I learned a lot. All improv aside. Of course, you learn from performing. One thing you learn is that it’s very easy to repeat things. If you end up doing a scene with the same person every week and that scene has the same character or tone to it, that’s such a disappointing feeling, like you wasted that time, because you only get one show a week and here you did the same goddamn seduction scene with Gywn and in the 3rd beat you’re dancing again. It’s like ‘what the fuck? How did this happen?’ It’s very easy to fall into that, so you have to constantly try new things. Talarico was really good at that. He was like water. He somehow worked in every scenario. It was really great to play with him and watch him.
But what I really learned is that no matter how good you are onstage, if you’re not a good person to other people offstage it doesn’t matter. Being a team player doesn’t mean being a team player while you’re onstage. It means being a team player when you’re onstage and offstage. I think I was pretty arrogant as a 17 year old improviser who was doing it on the weekends while I was in college. Everyone else was in their late 20’s. I felt like I had less responsibility as a friend. Like I had only leg in it, not two legs, because I had this whole other life in college. So, I would show up, do my thing and have a blast, but meanwhile everybody was really forming great relationships with each other and bonding. I wasn’t doing that bonding and forming those relationships and drinking until 4 am, because I was busy drinking until 4 am back at college. I think the biggest lesson I learn was that if you’re going to do something, do that thing and don’t do it half way. Or do it halfway, but don’t you dare expect to get the same results.
JF: Were you actually 17 at the time?
EH: Yeah.
JF: That’s early to be in college.
EH: Yeah, well my birthday is in late September. I started Improv Olympic right after High School. I was 17, so 17, 18, then all through college and beyond I was still doing IO, up until when I left to go to California. When they hired me in the Second City Touring Company, Charna hired me to be a teacher at Improv Olympic, then I went out to California. I think I was 22 or 23. I spent 5 years Improv Olympic performing at least once a week.
JF: When did you become involved with Bitter Noah?
EH: That was my college improv group at Northwestern. We did sketch comedy and short-form games, similar to what the Second City Revue was back then. That group was one of those kind of magical groups that ended up sticking together. It’s very rare for a group to survive graduation. We ended up working together because I kind of grabbed everybody after graduation and brought them to Improv Olympic, and asked Charna if we could be a team and she said yes, so we became a team called ‘The Tribe.’ We started working with Miles and Noah on different forms.
We in that kind of over-achieving college mode of ‘oh my gosh, we’ve got to put together a new show every 3 to 4 weeks,’ because in college we were all in different plays at the same time as being in the improv group. We continued doing that and we were pretty prolific at Improv Olympic. Besser directed a show called ‘Sue Your Ex.’ Miles directed one called ‘Think Loud in the Idiot Box.’ Noah started to direct us. We did a couple of sketch shows. We were just annoyingly prolific, then everybody but me moved out to California one day, because I wanted to stay and do Second City. Then they did a show and called themselves ‘Bitter Noah,’ and they got an opportunity to audition for Aspen. Either they came back to Chicago or I went to L.A. I think I went to L.A., and we did the Movie. We did The Family’s form, and we took it to the Aspen Comedy Festival. I went out to L.A. for what I thought would be a few months to rehearse with them to get ready for Aspen. This was 97. I got an apartment and stuff, and L.A. has a different escape velocity to leave it than any other city in the world. You need more thrust to get out of L.A. I didn’t know that, and it’s gravity sucked me in. I ended up living there and being an actor in L.A.
Luckily, Improv Olympic West was on Charna’s mind and she contacted Paul Vallaincourt and me and the other Bitter Noah guys to start it, primarily Paul. He taught all the Level 1’s. I taught the Level 2’s, then was eventually teaching various Levels there as it got off the ground. It took a couple years, but now it’s really quite something there.
JF: What forms were you guys doing? Had you been rehearsing the Movie before that?
EH: We had been doing it in Chicago for at least 2 years. We doing bits and pieces of the Movie while we were still in college. I actually hired Besser to coach our group at Northwestern. He gave us notes and helped us develop what eventually became Sue Your Ex, which transformed into another show that we sold to MTV called the Blame Game. I think Bitter Noah had broken up right before the Blame Game was sold, then Bitter Noah got back together because there was a little bit of money and a show to work on. The show went on with Paul Vallaincourt and Jason Weiner and Kara MacNamara, and not me, because I was a bad boy working on the pilot, making a lot of noise about how I didn’t like the direction that we were going. It was my first experience in television. I learned a lot.
JF: What would you have done differently? And what do you try to do differently now?
EH: What I would have done differently is I would have come up with solutions rather than just be resistant to things I didn’t like. I think that’s pretty obvious when you in any situation, have an alternative. Instead of disengaging, which is what I did, I probably should have just worked harder. Ultimately, if I was really wise about it, I wouldn’t have done that job. I would have just tried to create another show and let other people run that show, because there was no way as a newcomer, who had just moved to L.A. basically, had never done tv, there was no way I was going to outplay or outwit the experienced producers who knew what they were doing and had deeper relationships with the network. But you can’t know that stuff when you first start out. And the show ran for like 5 years.
JF: Yeah?
EH: Yeah, but I only got about $3200.
JF: What?
EH: Well, that doesn’t include… I worked for about 6 weeks. I think I got about $8000 from the whole thing.
JF: How long did you work on it?
EH: Well, I sold the show then worked on it for 6 weeks, just the pilot. The producer pretty much either fired me or I quit. I can’t really recall. I think it was like ‘hey, do you want to quit or do you want me to fire you?’ And I was like ‘hmmm, let me think about it,’ then we never spoke again.
JF: How did you get hired for the Second City Touring company?
EH: That was an audition. They have a big open audition.
JF: What was your experience like in TourCo?
EH: I loved it, although I hate touring. I hate being in a van on long van rides. I hate 12 people having to decide where to eat. And I really don’t like smoking, and everybody smoked but me, almost all the time. I always felt like an asshole and a baby for wanting my seat in the van, because it was the one where smoke wasn’t blown at me. I was very grumpy touring, but I loved doing the shows. I loved working on scenes in the van, driving to Kansas City or whatever. I got to tour with great people Elliot Carrell, John Farley, Craig Cackowski. There were a lot of people in and out, but it was fun. Shulie Cowen. I really liked it and I never thought I would leave. I thought I would be one of those guys who’s at Second City forever, who lives down the street and just stays there. I don’t fault anybody who does that. I just didn’t end up doing it.
JF: What were some of your most memorable experiences from being in TourCo?
EH: Right before I was about to do a scene with John Farley that I had to start out really serious in, he grabbed me as I was stepping onstage. He pulled me back stage, turned me around and was like ‘Herbstman! The windmill!’ Then he pulled his pants down and yanked his penis out and started swirling it around like a windmill.
JF: [laughs]
EH: And it went really far. I mean, it was thin but boy was it long. He spun it around like a windmill, looking at me with these huge eyes and a face where you would expect drool to come out of the mouth. Then he pulled his pants up, and we walked out to do the scene.
JF: How was the scene?
EH: Oh it was good. He’s always really funny. He’s always really good.
JF: When did you meet your wife, Melanie Hoopes?
EH: In L.A., in 99.
JF: Was she doing improv at the time?
EH: She was not doing improv. She was doing one woman shows on the Holocaust and on immigration for middle school students in the California public school system in order to teach diversity and tolerance.
JF: She was in [the improv group] ‘Ed’ wasn’t she?
EH: She was in Ed, but I was in college then and I had never seen them. I had heard of them, because people would ask me about it: ‘are you affiliated with Ed? Because your name is Ed?’ And I would say ‘No.’
JF: That’s a pretty dumb question.
EH: This was also around the time of Jazz Freddy, and Dawn Toti and a bunch of offshoot improv shows that involved Noah Gregoropoulos and other IO people, and Del also. Jazz Freddy was a show a lot like Ed in that it was trying to do something different and elevate the status of improv comedy, so people might pay to go see it like they paid to see a theater show. You would have the confidence doing a show like that in that you could put on a good show for people, charge them money. And not charge them money in terms of ‘oh, we can make a buck,’ but charge them money in the terms of this has all the trappings of real theater. Actually rent a nice space with real seats and real lights and have real programs and advertise. It was successful in that way. Melanie actually went to college [at Northwestern] and we had the same major, which was Performance Studies. So, we had a lot of the same professors and the same experiences, and she was in the Mee-Ow Show, but she graduated in like 88. She’s 6 and a half years older than me.
JF: Have you guys ever improvised together?
EH: Yes, our first date. We were doing the Movie at this theater at La Cienega, and in the Movie we used to do a trailer of a coming attraction at the beginning of the Movie, and we would ask a guest star to be the start of the trailer. We would basically put them in the center of the stage, and improvise around them, and set them up, set the scene, make them the hero of the movie. Whoever was supposed to do it that night couldn’t do it. I happened to see her earlier in the day with a group of people and said ‘hey Melanie, would you like to do it?’ So, that night, our first date, we did a scene together, then went to a party later and made-out until 4 in the morning. Then I went home to my dingy, little creepy apartment that I shared with Derrick Miller who’s an improviser in L.A., who’s a fantastic and funny person, and I said ‘Derrick, I met the woman who I’m going to marry.’ And he was like ‘holy shit, for some reason I totally believe you.’ And I said ‘Holy shit, that’s because I’m telling the truth, you son of a bitch.’ Then we beat each other silly.
JF: I thought that was going to be a nice story, but then it went somewhere else.
EH: Yeah, well, this is L.A. Things are different there. Nice stories always end with someone being beaten. For something even to grow even a little bit out there, a lot of things need to be killed violently. It’s the cycle of birth and death, but there’s more focus on death. Like the death of dreams.
JF: That’s grim.
EH: I’m trying to sell it to Hollywood, but no one’s biting yet.
JF: Call MTV.
EH: Yeah.
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