Matt Walsh 7/19/06 Part 1
JF: Where were you born?
MW: I was born in Chicago on the South Side.
JF: What were some early influences on your sense of humor?
MW: I’d say my father was pretty silly. He had a good sense of humor. He liked jokes. He liked when you had jokes. We’d always eat dinner at 6 or 7 at night, when he came home from work. We’d all kind of gain his attention, so perhaps I learned humor at an early age to get some attention at the table. There were 7 kids.
JF: Who had a brother who became involved in improv too right?
MW: Yeah, my brother Pat has done improv over the years.
JF: When did you know you wanted to be a performer?
MW: Maybe High School. I did like a variety show. Senior year in High School we had a variety show and me and several of my friends wrote a bunch of sketches. We were pretty much the big hit at Hindsdale South High School in 1982. A big deal. That was pretty much my first inkling of an ability to make a large audience laugh, and the sort of high that you get from that.
JF: When did you become involved with improv?
MW: A friend of mine saw Second City and they announced that they taught classes in improv, and he told me ‘you should do that. You’d be really good at that.’ So, I enlisted …this is my second Senior year [laughs] at Northern Illinois. I enlisted in improv classes and I would drive in from Dekalb Illinois, an hour and a half in, an hour and a half out once a week to study improv once a week at the Players’ Workshop at the Second City.
JF: What were you majoring in in college?
MW: I was a Psych major with an English minor. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I spent my Junior year in college abroad in Europe. I think in the beginning I may have had some boring idea, I don’t even remember, but then I decided Psychology, because I thought I might try to be a Psychologist to try and help people. Then I realized that was a lot of responsibility. So, then I got into improv and it was really the only thing that I really cared for.
JF: So, what was your experience like at the Players’ Workshop?
MW: It was good. I always say the biggest thing that I got out of that experience is the funny people that you meet, the good writers and smart people, or like-minded people, then you realize that ‘oh, you could do this for a living,’ or ‘there is a whole lifestyle that you could pursue in this.’ That was pretty [helpful], because I literally had no theatrical training or no theater background. I took one acting class in college.
JF: Were there any people in those classes who you continued working with later?
MW: When I got out of the Players’ Workshop, I moved into a comedy ghetto with 4 people from my class, and we did a sketch show for like a year, a year and a half. That group was called ‘Department of Works.’ The people who were in it were Ed Furman, a guy named Kevin Burbick, Keith Zukowski, and Tony Boswald and myself. We did shows at Players’ Workshop and we did shows at a place called the Roxy, which is where I met Besser.
JF: What were some things from the Players’ Workshop that were emphasized? What were some lessons that stuck with you?
MW: The memorable lessons were with a teacher named Judy Morgan who was a Main Stage performer at Second City. She performed with Belushi, et cetra, Joe Flahtery, those guys, from that era. She was very much a hippie in a good way. Her whole thing was to shake up people’s space, like go out there and shake things up, that was her big push. The other thing was just to create a space where you could pursue any kind of idea, just engendering this kind of creative bubble, which was really valuable I think for me because it was my first venture into theater or performance. Those were kind of the main things I took away. There were other things that I don’t even remember, like object work, which isn’t really significant, but I guess I remember it.
JF: How did you apply that lesson or philosophy of trying to shake things up from Judy Morgan later on in your career?
MW: I don’t know that… I guess that’s a personality that I already had, but to know that you could do it in theater or that you’re suppose to do it kind of justified the trajectory that I was already heading, because I was always sort of an anxious, trouble-making kid, so it fit perfectly with what I wanted to do. It probably emboldened me, made me more aggressive with what I was doing.
For me, [one of the most important things was] just to allow yourself to pursue it as a career really. A lot of what I took from the early classes, aside from my amazing object work, was that you could do this. This is a career. This is a woman who worked on the Second City Main Stage with some of the greats, and she was making a living at it through this thing called improvisation. Now she’s teaching it, continuing the legacy. It was like ‘oh yeah, you can do this. It’s about listening to your partner, and shaking things up in the world, taking in what’s going on in the world and shaking things up.’
JF: So, you graduated from college then you moved into Chicago with those 4 guys?
MW: Yeah, we moved up to Addison and Halstead in a little comedy ghetto apartment. We lived together, put in $50 each for a bag of groceries and lived off those groceries for a month. In the mean time, I was working in a Psych Ward. I was like a camp counselor basically. I didn’t really like that. It was pretty depressing, occasionally violent. The population was really …screwed up kids came through there. It was pretty heartbreaking at times.
I quit doing that after a year and a half. I went to Europe for like 4 months, just backpacked around and tried to figure out what I wanted to do next. When I came back, I started doing stand-up. I didn’t want to do sketch anymore.
JF: How was your experience in stand-up?
MW: My simple observation from stand-up is that it’s really difficult, because there’s no one to commiserate with. The highs and lows are as extreme or more extreme as with improv, but you’re not with anyone to kind of break the fall.
In improv, you’re less focused on honing a specific piece of material or a specific joke, obviously, or a story. And just running that over and over, that part I didn’t want to do. I found that part boring. Once I had a joke work, I felt ‘ok, I can do this. Now I’ll try a different joke.’ But that’s what stand-up is, honing it and honing it, trying to make it perfect. I got more of a kick from trying something new.
JF: When did you become involved with the Improv Olympic?
MW: My brother was taking classes at Improv Olympic in 1989, maybe, 1989 or 90. He pulled me in. He had started taking classes with Del and Charna. While I was doing stand-up at the Roxy, that’s where I met Besser who had just moved to Chicago. I told him about it, so we started taking classes down there.
JF: So, that’s when Matt Besser started taking classes at Improv Olympic too?
MW: Yeah, I had been there for a few months, and we had been hanging out together at the Roxy, doing weird things. I think I just brought him to a show. My first team there was Armando [Diaz], a guy named Rick Roman, who passed away, Frances Collier. I forget some of the other people.
JF: How was your experience at Improv Olympic different from your experience at Players’ Workshop?
MW: I think Players’ Workshop was pretty rudimentary stuff. It was sort of Early Access or Learning Annex-y. Improv Olympic, obviously because of Del and Noah Gregoropoulos, who I think is probably the best teacher I’ve ever had, teaching you that all the experience that you’ve had in life can be used to execute, essentially, a one act play, during a Harold or other forms, that was mind-shattering.
Players’ Workshop to me was discovering that you could go on stage with someone without a script and be funny to an audience. Improv Olympic was like you can have 6 people working as a team, chasing the group-mind, and make something with a much higher meaning and a more satisfying journey for the audience, while still making them laugh. So, it had a bigger goal.
JF: When you were on those first teams, were you guys shuffled around a lot? When were you on the first team that stayed together for a while?
MW: I think I was on a couple teams. I was on one called Stop it Gracy, which was my first team, that was named after Charna’s dog Gracy. If you would do these high activity scenes and Gracy would come up and try and bite your ankles. So Charna would always say ‘Stop it Gracy,’ so that the name of our team. Then I was on a team called Mario’s Formalwear, that had Jon Faverau and EJ Peters. Then I was on another team called Johnny Tractor, which was Andy Ritcher, Scot Robinson, I think a girl named Morgan Persnep, Pete Hulne. I think I traveled through maybe 3 teams, then they broke that one up and I just got tired of that and I started doing things at the Annoyance.
JF: What was it like working with Jon Faverau and Pete Hulne, people who are well-known in the comedy community now? Could you immediately tell these guys would become successful later on?
MW: Well, Faverau was a really hard worker. I didn’t know if he’d be successful, but in retrospect he was a hard worker. Hulne was pretty goofy. I mean, he’s a good friend of mine. …So …sure. I knew it from the second I met them. [laughs]
JF: You could immediately sense it.
MW: [laughs] That’s one of those questions. I feel like an old comedian at the Friars’ Club saying ‘they had that thing. That thing that you’re born with or you’re not born with.’
JF: Yeah. I interviewed Joe Bill and I think he mentioned you as a person who was locked inside the Annoyance for a week and then you guys did a show afterwards.
MW: That’s true.
JF: So, what was like?
MW: It was called the Lock-in. It was the height of the Annoyance’s middle class cultism, basically a cult of middle class values. I think it was the heyday. It was right when the Brady’s were going to New York.
I think Mick was trying to get back to what he thought the theater should be about, because they had garnered a lot of attention for the Brady’s and things that weren’t necessarily that he started out creating. So, he wanted to kind of a guerilla week long [experience], lock ourselves in the theater and come up with a show together. We took 8 or 9 people. It was almost like a reality show. Some girl filmed it. She made a documentary of it, so that footage exists somewhere. She filmed us doing that and we put together a show that turned into a show called We’ll Keep Looking. It had people like Ed Furman, Scot Robinson, Kate Flannery, Gary Ruderman, a guy named Dave McNerland, Jodi Lennon. I forget who else.
JF: Did you guys improvise at the end of the week?
MW: What I learned at the Annoyance was that you can start with no idea, and the director kind of leads you through, especially improv excersizes to see where characters can find relationships, character traits, then eventually you discover a scene, then you discover a plot, then you track the plot. Normally, by the end of 6 months you have a show that you developed through improv, but we did that at an excellerated pace. We did that in a week. We were challenging ourselves.
So, basically, we probably drank until 3 in the morning, and got up at like 11, then 11 to 3 doing scenes or trying characters. It was a lot of fun. It was a tremendous amount of fun. We’d go off and write a song, then we’d try the song. We had a piano player with us. It was Dave Adler. We’d try that song. If it didn’t work, we’d go back. The clock started clicking down. I think the show was going up on Saturday night. We literally had to block it, get costumes, rehearse dance numbers. It was […] Judy Garland putting on a show.
JF: Do you ever miss being involved in things as unusual as that?
MW: It was pretty idyllic. There was a definite belief that if we just commit to the process over product that will make this magical. There was no judgment. No critical analysis. It was more like support the person you’re with, to be fearless on stage, to aggressively chase what you think is funny, and not judge it or over-think it basically. That’s kind of what the Annoyance was all about. It was amazing, yeah. It was of the most fun weeks I’ve ever had. It was like camp. We had a chilli cookoff on one night, or we would play games at 2 in the morning and just be obnoxious with Trivial Pursuit competitions.
JF: How did you become involved with the UCB?
MW: The UCB was originally a show called Cerebral Stripmine, which was me, Armando, Horatio Sanz, Adam McKay, Besser and Rick Roman. We just started hanging out, causing trouble, and putting up shows. UCB proper, the name, I think was first thrown out at a show at Café Volaire on Clarke and Belmont …and the Roxy. We would do shows at the Roxy. The Roxy shows were Adam, Horatio, Besser, and Armando a bit. We would just do bits inside of variety shows at the Roxy, or we would do improv scenes where we would be like ‘for our suggestion, we need a reason to eject a homeless person.’ ‘I need a tuber. Please give me a tuber.’ Our improv would just be someone getting raped, someone chugging a beer, just nonsense, then we had another improvised thing called ‘Machine Gun Blackout.’ In Machine Gun Blackout we’d get a suggestion really fast, then after we got a suggestion we’d see how fast the scene could decay into a fight then black out. We’d do 7 or 8 suggestions right in a row. …Is that clear?
JF: Yeah, it sounds like it was almost an outlet for you guys to goof off, a little bit.
MW: Exactly, that’s exactly it. Then we would do these scenes at the Roxy and say things like ‘thank you, we’ve been Assassins for Social Justice,’ and at some point the Upright Citizens Brigade stuck.
JF: So, was it in New York that you guys got popular?
MW: No, we did a virtual reality show at Café Voltaire. That’s where Besser, I think he was part of an evil organization that was funding our virtual reality show, then it morphed into we were the Upright Citizens Brigade. After that show, I pretty much focused on the Annoyance. I would occasionally do shows where Besser and Ian would join in. Amy came years after that.
JF: When did the UCB become your main focus?
MW: I really met Ian when I started touring with Second City. Ian Roberts and I wound up on the same touring company, then Amy Poehler when we were auditioning for something. My whole focus become that. At the time, I was occasionally doing UCB then I think Adam McKay was going to do a UCB show and he couldn’t do it, so Besser and Ian asked me to step back in full-time.
JF: What made you guys move to New York?
MW: We wanted a TV show. We wanted to get a special. So, we basically said it would be either LA or New York. We sat down in the Salt and Pepper diner right outside of Charna’s place after a rehearsal, and said we can go to L.A. or New York. We were going to give it 6 months and see how it went. After that we’ll see. We decided New York because it’d probably be easier to get an audience to follow us. So, we had a fund raiser at Charna’s place. Matt and Amy drove a truck out, then I drove my van out with Horatio. My van kept breaking down, literally running out of antifreeze in the freezing cold, but we got there and I sold my van.
We spent 8 years in New York. I guess since 94 we had been doing shows in Chicago like ‘Bucket of Truth,’ ‘Punch Your Friend in the Face,’ more late night or midnight shows at Charna’s place. When we got to New York in March of 96, we basically took all the shows we had been doing and started doing shows that were new, then we opened up ASSSSCAT.
JF: So, what was your impression of New York when you moved there? Both the city and the improv going on there?
MW: There wasn’t a lot going on. There was Chicago City Limits, then there was another one, I forget what it was, but it was almost like a cult more than an improv theater.
MW: I was born in Chicago on the South Side.
JF: What were some early influences on your sense of humor?
MW: I’d say my father was pretty silly. He had a good sense of humor. He liked jokes. He liked when you had jokes. We’d always eat dinner at 6 or 7 at night, when he came home from work. We’d all kind of gain his attention, so perhaps I learned humor at an early age to get some attention at the table. There were 7 kids.
JF: Who had a brother who became involved in improv too right?
MW: Yeah, my brother Pat has done improv over the years.
JF: When did you know you wanted to be a performer?
MW: Maybe High School. I did like a variety show. Senior year in High School we had a variety show and me and several of my friends wrote a bunch of sketches. We were pretty much the big hit at Hindsdale South High School in 1982. A big deal. That was pretty much my first inkling of an ability to make a large audience laugh, and the sort of high that you get from that.
JF: When did you become involved with improv?
MW: A friend of mine saw Second City and they announced that they taught classes in improv, and he told me ‘you should do that. You’d be really good at that.’ So, I enlisted …this is my second Senior year [laughs] at Northern Illinois. I enlisted in improv classes and I would drive in from Dekalb Illinois, an hour and a half in, an hour and a half out once a week to study improv once a week at the Players’ Workshop at the Second City.
JF: What were you majoring in in college?
MW: I was a Psych major with an English minor. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I spent my Junior year in college abroad in Europe. I think in the beginning I may have had some boring idea, I don’t even remember, but then I decided Psychology, because I thought I might try to be a Psychologist to try and help people. Then I realized that was a lot of responsibility. So, then I got into improv and it was really the only thing that I really cared for.
JF: So, what was your experience like at the Players’ Workshop?
MW: It was good. I always say the biggest thing that I got out of that experience is the funny people that you meet, the good writers and smart people, or like-minded people, then you realize that ‘oh, you could do this for a living,’ or ‘there is a whole lifestyle that you could pursue in this.’ That was pretty [helpful], because I literally had no theatrical training or no theater background. I took one acting class in college.
JF: Were there any people in those classes who you continued working with later?
MW: When I got out of the Players’ Workshop, I moved into a comedy ghetto with 4 people from my class, and we did a sketch show for like a year, a year and a half. That group was called ‘Department of Works.’ The people who were in it were Ed Furman, a guy named Kevin Burbick, Keith Zukowski, and Tony Boswald and myself. We did shows at Players’ Workshop and we did shows at a place called the Roxy, which is where I met Besser.
JF: What were some things from the Players’ Workshop that were emphasized? What were some lessons that stuck with you?
MW: The memorable lessons were with a teacher named Judy Morgan who was a Main Stage performer at Second City. She performed with Belushi, et cetra, Joe Flahtery, those guys, from that era. She was very much a hippie in a good way. Her whole thing was to shake up people’s space, like go out there and shake things up, that was her big push. The other thing was just to create a space where you could pursue any kind of idea, just engendering this kind of creative bubble, which was really valuable I think for me because it was my first venture into theater or performance. Those were kind of the main things I took away. There were other things that I don’t even remember, like object work, which isn’t really significant, but I guess I remember it.
JF: How did you apply that lesson or philosophy of trying to shake things up from Judy Morgan later on in your career?
MW: I don’t know that… I guess that’s a personality that I already had, but to know that you could do it in theater or that you’re suppose to do it kind of justified the trajectory that I was already heading, because I was always sort of an anxious, trouble-making kid, so it fit perfectly with what I wanted to do. It probably emboldened me, made me more aggressive with what I was doing.
For me, [one of the most important things was] just to allow yourself to pursue it as a career really. A lot of what I took from the early classes, aside from my amazing object work, was that you could do this. This is a career. This is a woman who worked on the Second City Main Stage with some of the greats, and she was making a living at it through this thing called improvisation. Now she’s teaching it, continuing the legacy. It was like ‘oh yeah, you can do this. It’s about listening to your partner, and shaking things up in the world, taking in what’s going on in the world and shaking things up.’
JF: So, you graduated from college then you moved into Chicago with those 4 guys?
MW: Yeah, we moved up to Addison and Halstead in a little comedy ghetto apartment. We lived together, put in $50 each for a bag of groceries and lived off those groceries for a month. In the mean time, I was working in a Psych Ward. I was like a camp counselor basically. I didn’t really like that. It was pretty depressing, occasionally violent. The population was really …screwed up kids came through there. It was pretty heartbreaking at times.
I quit doing that after a year and a half. I went to Europe for like 4 months, just backpacked around and tried to figure out what I wanted to do next. When I came back, I started doing stand-up. I didn’t want to do sketch anymore.
JF: How was your experience in stand-up?
MW: My simple observation from stand-up is that it’s really difficult, because there’s no one to commiserate with. The highs and lows are as extreme or more extreme as with improv, but you’re not with anyone to kind of break the fall.
In improv, you’re less focused on honing a specific piece of material or a specific joke, obviously, or a story. And just running that over and over, that part I didn’t want to do. I found that part boring. Once I had a joke work, I felt ‘ok, I can do this. Now I’ll try a different joke.’ But that’s what stand-up is, honing it and honing it, trying to make it perfect. I got more of a kick from trying something new.
JF: When did you become involved with the Improv Olympic?
MW: My brother was taking classes at Improv Olympic in 1989, maybe, 1989 or 90. He pulled me in. He had started taking classes with Del and Charna. While I was doing stand-up at the Roxy, that’s where I met Besser who had just moved to Chicago. I told him about it, so we started taking classes down there.
JF: So, that’s when Matt Besser started taking classes at Improv Olympic too?
MW: Yeah, I had been there for a few months, and we had been hanging out together at the Roxy, doing weird things. I think I just brought him to a show. My first team there was Armando [Diaz], a guy named Rick Roman, who passed away, Frances Collier. I forget some of the other people.
JF: How was your experience at Improv Olympic different from your experience at Players’ Workshop?
MW: I think Players’ Workshop was pretty rudimentary stuff. It was sort of Early Access or Learning Annex-y. Improv Olympic, obviously because of Del and Noah Gregoropoulos, who I think is probably the best teacher I’ve ever had, teaching you that all the experience that you’ve had in life can be used to execute, essentially, a one act play, during a Harold or other forms, that was mind-shattering.
Players’ Workshop to me was discovering that you could go on stage with someone without a script and be funny to an audience. Improv Olympic was like you can have 6 people working as a team, chasing the group-mind, and make something with a much higher meaning and a more satisfying journey for the audience, while still making them laugh. So, it had a bigger goal.
JF: When you were on those first teams, were you guys shuffled around a lot? When were you on the first team that stayed together for a while?
MW: I think I was on a couple teams. I was on one called Stop it Gracy, which was my first team, that was named after Charna’s dog Gracy. If you would do these high activity scenes and Gracy would come up and try and bite your ankles. So Charna would always say ‘Stop it Gracy,’ so that the name of our team. Then I was on a team called Mario’s Formalwear, that had Jon Faverau and EJ Peters. Then I was on another team called Johnny Tractor, which was Andy Ritcher, Scot Robinson, I think a girl named Morgan Persnep, Pete Hulne. I think I traveled through maybe 3 teams, then they broke that one up and I just got tired of that and I started doing things at the Annoyance.
JF: What was it like working with Jon Faverau and Pete Hulne, people who are well-known in the comedy community now? Could you immediately tell these guys would become successful later on?
MW: Well, Faverau was a really hard worker. I didn’t know if he’d be successful, but in retrospect he was a hard worker. Hulne was pretty goofy. I mean, he’s a good friend of mine. …So …sure. I knew it from the second I met them. [laughs]
JF: You could immediately sense it.
MW: [laughs] That’s one of those questions. I feel like an old comedian at the Friars’ Club saying ‘they had that thing. That thing that you’re born with or you’re not born with.’
JF: Yeah. I interviewed Joe Bill and I think he mentioned you as a person who was locked inside the Annoyance for a week and then you guys did a show afterwards.
MW: That’s true.
JF: So, what was like?
MW: It was called the Lock-in. It was the height of the Annoyance’s middle class cultism, basically a cult of middle class values. I think it was the heyday. It was right when the Brady’s were going to New York.
I think Mick was trying to get back to what he thought the theater should be about, because they had garnered a lot of attention for the Brady’s and things that weren’t necessarily that he started out creating. So, he wanted to kind of a guerilla week long [experience], lock ourselves in the theater and come up with a show together. We took 8 or 9 people. It was almost like a reality show. Some girl filmed it. She made a documentary of it, so that footage exists somewhere. She filmed us doing that and we put together a show that turned into a show called We’ll Keep Looking. It had people like Ed Furman, Scot Robinson, Kate Flannery, Gary Ruderman, a guy named Dave McNerland, Jodi Lennon. I forget who else.
JF: Did you guys improvise at the end of the week?
MW: What I learned at the Annoyance was that you can start with no idea, and the director kind of leads you through, especially improv excersizes to see where characters can find relationships, character traits, then eventually you discover a scene, then you discover a plot, then you track the plot. Normally, by the end of 6 months you have a show that you developed through improv, but we did that at an excellerated pace. We did that in a week. We were challenging ourselves.
So, basically, we probably drank until 3 in the morning, and got up at like 11, then 11 to 3 doing scenes or trying characters. It was a lot of fun. It was a tremendous amount of fun. We’d go off and write a song, then we’d try the song. We had a piano player with us. It was Dave Adler. We’d try that song. If it didn’t work, we’d go back. The clock started clicking down. I think the show was going up on Saturday night. We literally had to block it, get costumes, rehearse dance numbers. It was […] Judy Garland putting on a show.
JF: Do you ever miss being involved in things as unusual as that?
MW: It was pretty idyllic. There was a definite belief that if we just commit to the process over product that will make this magical. There was no judgment. No critical analysis. It was more like support the person you’re with, to be fearless on stage, to aggressively chase what you think is funny, and not judge it or over-think it basically. That’s kind of what the Annoyance was all about. It was amazing, yeah. It was of the most fun weeks I’ve ever had. It was like camp. We had a chilli cookoff on one night, or we would play games at 2 in the morning and just be obnoxious with Trivial Pursuit competitions.
JF: How did you become involved with the UCB?
MW: The UCB was originally a show called Cerebral Stripmine, which was me, Armando, Horatio Sanz, Adam McKay, Besser and Rick Roman. We just started hanging out, causing trouble, and putting up shows. UCB proper, the name, I think was first thrown out at a show at Café Volaire on Clarke and Belmont …and the Roxy. We would do shows at the Roxy. The Roxy shows were Adam, Horatio, Besser, and Armando a bit. We would just do bits inside of variety shows at the Roxy, or we would do improv scenes where we would be like ‘for our suggestion, we need a reason to eject a homeless person.’ ‘I need a tuber. Please give me a tuber.’ Our improv would just be someone getting raped, someone chugging a beer, just nonsense, then we had another improvised thing called ‘Machine Gun Blackout.’ In Machine Gun Blackout we’d get a suggestion really fast, then after we got a suggestion we’d see how fast the scene could decay into a fight then black out. We’d do 7 or 8 suggestions right in a row. …Is that clear?
JF: Yeah, it sounds like it was almost an outlet for you guys to goof off, a little bit.
MW: Exactly, that’s exactly it. Then we would do these scenes at the Roxy and say things like ‘thank you, we’ve been Assassins for Social Justice,’ and at some point the Upright Citizens Brigade stuck.
JF: So, was it in New York that you guys got popular?
MW: No, we did a virtual reality show at Café Voltaire. That’s where Besser, I think he was part of an evil organization that was funding our virtual reality show, then it morphed into we were the Upright Citizens Brigade. After that show, I pretty much focused on the Annoyance. I would occasionally do shows where Besser and Ian would join in. Amy came years after that.
JF: When did the UCB become your main focus?
MW: I really met Ian when I started touring with Second City. Ian Roberts and I wound up on the same touring company, then Amy Poehler when we were auditioning for something. My whole focus become that. At the time, I was occasionally doing UCB then I think Adam McKay was going to do a UCB show and he couldn’t do it, so Besser and Ian asked me to step back in full-time.
JF: What made you guys move to New York?
MW: We wanted a TV show. We wanted to get a special. So, we basically said it would be either LA or New York. We sat down in the Salt and Pepper diner right outside of Charna’s place after a rehearsal, and said we can go to L.A. or New York. We were going to give it 6 months and see how it went. After that we’ll see. We decided New York because it’d probably be easier to get an audience to follow us. So, we had a fund raiser at Charna’s place. Matt and Amy drove a truck out, then I drove my van out with Horatio. My van kept breaking down, literally running out of antifreeze in the freezing cold, but we got there and I sold my van.
We spent 8 years in New York. I guess since 94 we had been doing shows in Chicago like ‘Bucket of Truth,’ ‘Punch Your Friend in the Face,’ more late night or midnight shows at Charna’s place. When we got to New York in March of 96, we basically took all the shows we had been doing and started doing shows that were new, then we opened up ASSSSCAT.
JF: So, what was your impression of New York when you moved there? Both the city and the improv going on there?
MW: There wasn’t a lot going on. There was Chicago City Limits, then there was another one, I forget what it was, but it was almost like a cult more than an improv theater.
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