Matt Besser 11/16/06 Part 2

JF: What was it like working with Del Close in those rehearsals?


MB: Like I said, we were greatly complimented and intimidated working with him. The first time we worked with him I was scared shitless and I'm sure the other guys were, because he was such a cranky teacher, and so honest about everything. If you fucked up, he was going to let you know. That gets you in you in your head. That makes it so you're not going to be a good improviser. The first rehearsal we had with him was abyssmal. We did terribly. It rained that night. That was the same night that Rick got in the car accident and died. It was one of the worst nights of my life. Yeah, it was very intimidating. Once again, he offered so much it was worth the punishment of truth and honest notes that he was giving us.

And we really did discover the Movie together. He didn't just give it to us. He didn't completely understand it until he started workshopping it with us. It was a process that we went through with him. That's pretty neat too, being with a guru and actually helping him. He's not just telling us to do the Invocation or something like that. He's workshopping with us, and discovering with us. It's really neat to work with a genius like that. We had a lot of funny times. He was befuddled by our immaturity sometimes. I think he liked us. I mean, I know he liked us.



JF: How has the Movie changed over time? And what are some things that make a good Movie?


MB: I don't think I've seen it performed by anybody but my group and the group I happen to be coaching at the time, so I'm not sure I would be able to tell you. But I know the biggest lesson we learned with the Movie, the big discovery was you don't parody the movie, that's not where the laughs are coming from. You don't go on stage and parody a movie genre. You pay tribute to it. You put it up on a pedastal, as Del would say. You try to do that movie's genre to the best of your ability. You recreate it on stage. By doing that, you find a more organic and honest way into the scene, rather than making fun of the movie like a parody does. The scenes seem to be predictable. When the movie's done that way, the Movie's bad obviously.

Also, there's a lot of tricks to the Movie, like recreating camera angles: above head shot in a helicopter. Everybody becomes the helicopter, and the audience is very entertained by that. But if all you're doing is the tricks, and just referencing the genre and not looking for the game [it will be superficial]. If you don't look for the game in the Movie, the Movie's just going to be a silly story. You still have to stay true to finding the game in every scene. The game doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the story or the movie genre. The genius of it is that all the movie archetypes we know, all the genres we know, are the structures we build our scenes on where we play the game. If you don't play the game, it sucks.



JF: Is that kind of where the importance of 'the game' was cemented for you?


MB: I was talking with Ian the other day. I'm not even sure when we started using the word 'the game' the way we use it now. I really can't even remember. It wasn't taught in IO the way we teach it. Every one of our classes is about teaching the game at the UCB. At IO it didn't feel like that. It wasn't as big as a focus as the UCB has made it. So, I can't really remember when I started thinking of scenes in terms of finding the game. It's almost like we discovered what we had to do before we had a way of talking about it. Everyone says the word the game and they often mean different things. So, different schools say the game and mean different things. It's kind of a weird word.



JF: What is the game to you?


MB: Well, you're going to have to take my class. [laughs] It's focusing on a funny thing, and heightening and exploring it, rather than focusing on narrative.



JF: Did you have a preference to the forms The Family did?


MB: Um.



JF: Like the Horror?


MB: Yeah, I don't know what Ed Herbstman was talking about in his interview when he said I didn't like The Horror. Ed, you need to fact check or I'm going to sue you. No, I think it was Neil Flynn who didn't like The Horror, but you'll have to ask him. I actually did like The Horror, because it made people walk out just about every time we did it, and that was funny to me. Adam liked it the most. I think I liked it the second most. I can't remember what Ian's feeling was on it. I think Neil and Miles did not like it, I think. Because it did anger people, and they're like 'why are we making people walk out?' But it's not comedy, and we're all there to do comedy. It's more like a fun experiment for one show, and it's something that Del wanted to do so we were definitely on board to try it out.

I liked the Movie the best, that's what we were best at. I liked the Spineless Harold. We kind of started getting known for doing these really fast tag-outs that went on forever out of Harold scenes. We started calling it the Spineless Harold I guess. The Deconstruction was fun. The Check-in is basically the Deconstruction is fun. I liked all of them. The Harold is the hardest form. I don't know that I'd do a Harold today without rehearsing. The Movie was the most fun. I'm sure all The Family agrees.



JF: How did the UCB form? And what was the motivation for forming it?


MB: Well, I was always more interested in doing sketch comedy, that's pretty much why I moved to Chicago. So, we started doing the UCB almost immediately. It really didn't have much to do with Improv Olympic. I had met Matt Walsh outside Improv Olympic at a stand-up venue called The Roxy. There was another place called theater of the bizarre that we both did. We would do bits together, then we met Adam [McKay] and Horatio [Sanz]. We had a show called Cerebral Stripmine, and I invited them to do that. Meanwhile, the Annoyance was starting to happen more, and involve more people. Walsh started doing that more. Ian came around and joined the UCB. Our first UCB show [where we were] called Upright Citizens Brigade was a show called Virtual Reality. The three main people were me, Ian, and Adam McKay, pretty much. There were a lot of other people who were involved, including Horatio Sanz. We did that show for at least a year and a half. Somehow it became critically acclaimed. We were really lucky, that gave us a lot of confidence. It got pick of the week in The Reader, which was a big deal especially at that point in our young careers. That just inspired us [to be like] 'Hey, we've got a good thing going here. Let's do more stuff like this.' That was a pretty crazy show. It just inspired every show to be more crazy and complex.


JF: How did the UCB develop over the years and when did it become your main focus?

MB: It was always my main focus.


JF: Even when you were on The Family?

MB: Yeah, that's a good point. Probably then it was about equal focus, but the UCB never stopped. There was always a show going on. Like I said, it was basically the same people, so it's hard to separate one rehearsal from the other.

You always have an ultimate goal. With the UCB, the ultimate goal was to have it be a tv show. With The Family, television wasn't in our mind at all. It was just about the stage work. I was acheiving the dream with The Family. With the UCB, we were always still working on it. I knew I would never make my living doing improv, and you're always in some way working towards making your living at doing what you love. Eventually, I realized I had to focus just on the UCB and didn't have time for improv. That was about the time that the other guys started joining Second City. I knew that it was time for us to go to a bigger city and really pitch ourselves. That's when I started flying back and forth to New York and started discovering that world.



JF: What was it like moving to New York? What was the climate like just in general and with art and improv?


MB: Well, moving to New York we were all extremely focused. We were putting all our chips on the table for UCB. We had one goal and that was to get a show on Comedy Central, that was the whole reason to come here. We came with two separate different sketch shows. We put them up at two different theaters. We ran both of those a week. That's pretty crazy in retrospect. [laughs] And ASSSSCAT came from wanting to have a night of just wanting to have, where you just improvised. There were other sketch groups when we got here, but not many, maybe one or two others. There was other improv, I guess. To be fair, I didn't really see it. Whatever improv there was, it wasn't like the improv we were doing. They might have called it long-form, but it wasn't like Chicago long-form. We were lucky enough to be the first ones to really do it. People noticed it. People wanted to learn how to do it, and that's where the school started. We were very lucky to have something people hadn't seen before. We obviously didn't invent it, but we were lucky enough to import it into New York.



JF: So, what was it like starting the school? And when did it come into your mind to start a theater?


MB: It was never planned to have a theater. It just came from us spending so much money at this other theater, renting their space, doing shows there every night week. Soon it became obvious we were being stupid with our money. We might as well have our own space. Pretty much everything we've done has come from the need to grow to next level, not from a long-term goal to get to that point. We're not so much theater owners. We're all performers first and theater owners second. We don't really think like theater owners. We never came to New York thinking like that. It came out of necessity. We wanted a place where we wouldn't get hassled by whoever seemed to own the place, which always seemed to happened, especially with sketch. We were always a pain in the ass with the venue, our guns, our blood, our bottles, our chairs, our costumes. Whatever it was we were a big pain in their ass. We were sick of that. That's a good reason to open up your own theater.



JF: What are your goals with the UCB theater now? Where would you like to see it go?


MB: Well, I'd like to get rid of that pillar in the middle of the stage. ...I like where it's at. If you look at the UCB not as a theater, but as a large label, we are starting to produce more projects with the four of us, but also with our people. That's the next level. The internet makes that more affordable and more realistic. That's the next step that we're at right now. Everybody wants to get to the point where they can make their own stuff, and make stuff with people they like. That's our goal too.



JF: Do you think that long-form improv will ever be on tv? And do you think that it translates well to tv?


MB: Dude, we've already been on tv.



JF: I mean like a permanent thing.


MB: [laughs] Yes, I definitely think long-form translates to tv. When people video tape their improv show and say 'Oh, it doesn't translate to video,' that means their show wasn't very good, to me. If you have a scene that you improvise and it's truly funny from beginning to end, on it's own merits, not just because it's being improvised, that scene should be able to be written up. That's our philosophy at our school. You should be improvising at the end of the show that you want to write up as a scene. It's not going to be perfect. You're going to have to rewrite it and make it better, but it should be good enough that it can be a real scene. Otherwise, it's not good enough to be seen on tv. People say 'Improv won't work because you have to be there.' That's only the improv where you're going 'Oh, it's neat to watch them fail.' That's improv that's still not good enough. That teams to get better so they don't fail a lot, and they start to improvise more scenes that they'd be proud to have written up as a sketch.

So, if you are improvising scenes that are good enough to be written up as a sketch, the only differences between that scene and a sketch are costumes, sets and props. I think there is a segment of our society that's willing to suspend disbelief and imagine the sets, the props, and costumes, and just enjoy the sketch, improvised or written.