Rob Huebel 5/23/06 Part 2
JF: You’ve been working with Paul Scheer and Rob Riggle for a long time. Did you guys meet each other in classes and start forming groups at that time?
RH: We were all in different groups. I think Owen and I have been performing together the longest, or at least for me. He’s been the one person who I’ve consistently performed with for the longest, but we were all in different groups way back then. Paul and Rob Riggle and Dannah Feinglass were in a group called ‘Cowbot,’ like Robot but with a cow. Owen and I were in a group called ‘Frank Johnson,’ but we all knew each other from classes and stuff. We were all friendly that way. Eventually, we kind of self-selected each other. We kind of broke away from our groups and said ‘why don’t we form our own group?’ So that’s what we did.
JF: How long had you guys been performing on Harold teams before you formed Respecto?
RH: I think we had been performing on other Harold groups for about 3 years. We were still taking classes I think and doing various Harold teams. Frank Johnson wasn’t my first Harold team. There were other ones. You just kind of bounced around. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out. Even if it looks like this great super-group, sometimes it just doesn’t work out. People have different levels of commitment, and different plans for their life. Not everybody is like ‘I’m going to be a pro-comedian!’ People have jobs and have other things that they want to do. But I think eventually we saw, that we all wanted to make a living doing some form of comedy. I don’t know anybody that makes a living through improv, but we wanted to make a living performing. We were serious about that. I think we self-selected each other and formed Respecto Montalban, that was our group for a long time.
JF: So, how was that allowed? Weren’t the Harold teams put together by the UCB?
RH: That’s a good question. I don’t know. Back then there wasn’t really a Harold committee. It was just the 4 UCB guys and they sort of put together teams, I think, probably more Besser than anybody. I can’t remember if anybody asked Besser or if we just said ‘we’re just going to do this.’ At some point, it’s just like you’re an adult. You should be able to do whatever you want. It’s not like summer camp, you know? But I can’t remember if anybody asked them or if we just told them ‘this is what we’re doing.’
JF: Wow. That’s ballsy. At least now-a-days that’d be ballsy.
RH: [Laughs] It’s kind of ridiculous that that’s ballsy, but I guess. It’s like why not do that, I say, if you know people that you want to perform with? It may be probable chaos if people did that all the time, but I think we felt that we’d earned it. We’d been put on various teams for a few years. We didn’t do it after 6 months, and say ‘we’re forming this group and fuck everyone else!’ We’d been performing for a few years and were like ‘let’s put together these people.’ I can’t remember how it went down. Paul Scheer would know. He was a really good memory.
JF: What was the early experience like on Respecto? Did you guys immediately click or did it take some time?
RH: I think we were all really excited about performing together. I think we were all really excited to be onstage together and to try to do something different. We kind of got a reputation for playing really fast; sometimes almost out of control, you know, to a fault. Sometimes it would get too crazy and just fall apart. Sometimes it would get crazy and it would just be [wonder [?]]. We had some shows that we were so proud of, not every show. There were a lot of crappers. We definitely had our share of shitty shows. But we were all having a great time performing together, and we excited to be performing with people that we wanted to be performing with.
I think the Swarm was put together by Amy Poehler, but I think we may have been one of the first groups to self-select. We definitely, probably stepped on some people’s toes by doing that, people that we were performing with. It’s not like we weren’t friends with all those guys. We still wanted to be friends with them and respected them. We just wanted to be on stage with this particular group.
The early days were uneven definitely, but we were just psyched to be performing. Sometimes it would just get out of control. Shows would go so fast. We would get going so fast. It was like a snowball. We would try and rein it in. I think the good think about that group and still the group of guys who I’m still performing with here in L.A. we used to have a real blast doing it and I think that shows. Sometimes it’s not as smart as it should be. Sometimes it’s not as polished as it should be. You wouldn’t be able to say ‘oh, that was a perfect scene, ’ but we just had a blast performing together. I think that shows.
JF: How long did you guys do Harolds and when did you start working on the Evente?
RH: Wow that’s a really good question too. Again, I have like no sense of time on it, but we did Harolds for years. We did a Harold show for 3 years maybe. I think a few years definitely. Eventually, we became interested in doing another form, and Armando Diaz was nice enough to work with us on his Evente form. He worked with us for a while and helped us get set up with that.
Again, I’m not sure if we approached the UCB or how it worked. I think what happened was it was kind of a natural evolution. We had been doing Harolds for a few years, and there were these new Harold teams coming up behind us. There were all these new groups coming up. There was just a log jam of people who wanted to perform at Harold night. We were really lucky to develop this new form and put up a new show.
It was always with the understanding that you had to bring a crowd. You really had to get out there. Harold night was getting decent number, but at the end of the day they want you to get butts in the seats there. You can’t do a show just in front of your friends. You’ve got to get people to come and watch the shows. Now, we kind of take it for granted, because the theater has a really good reputation and people will come to it. But back then I can’t tell you how many days and nights we would go out flier, go down to Washington Square park.
We would do crazy things to get people to come to our shows. We would flier in the middle of winter. One time Owen dressed up like Santa Claus. We had these long rolls of wrapping paper, and we were telling people they could come up and hit Santa with these cardboard tubes of wrapping paper. ‘Take a crack at Santa for everything that he never brought you.’ We didn’t know it but some people were really going after Owen, really beating him up. I remember the police came. All of the sudden these cop cars flew up, because people were upset that Santa was getting beat up in Union Square. We would just do crazy stuff like that to get people’s attention. We were just trying to be funny for 2 seconds on the street in the hopes that someone would say ‘oh, maybe their show’s funny.’ So, we would just spend so much time out there doing that, but you kind of had to, you know?
We did that for our Harold shows, and once we got our own show we wanted to make sure that we got people there. We didn’t always. There were times when we didn’t have great crowds. Eventually, as we evolved and got better and the theater got bigger, people would start to come. We of course would like to think it was because of us, not just people wondering about the theater. Hopefully, they were coming to see our show specifically. I’d like to think that.
JF: What were you guys trying to accomplish with the Evente that you couldn’t maybe get at as well with the Harold?
RH: That is a good question. Um…
JF: You don’t have to say that every time. They’re not all that good.
RH: Yeah, none of them have been good questions. They’re just stumping me.
JF: Right.
RH: So, I’ll just say ‘that’s a stumper!’ But what were we trying to accomplish, I think we just wanted to do something bigger. The Harold is such a cool thing, but I think after a while it can feel a bit limiting. We wanted to do something just completely different.
Besser and Walsh were really good at putting at all these other kind of improv shows. They did ‘Real, Real World.’ They did ‘Feature, Feature.’ Billy Merritt put up ‘Piledriver,’ which was a wrestling show. It was really fun to do all these other types of shows. I think we wanted to do something totally different, something that you could tell a story with. I think that telling a story was really appealing to us. That was the big thing to us, telling a really cool story. And playing multiple characters, and also mess with the concept of time. We would go forward, move backwards in time, and use kind neat tricks in the telling of that story.
JF: Was there a form to the version of Evente that you guys did? Or some kind of guidelines that you tried to follow to give it a structure?
RH: Yeah, there was a form, and the fact that you can’t fucking see what it is is really fucking lame man! …I think the general skeleton of it was we would start off with an event. We wanted that to be really active. Everyone didn’t have to be in it, but we just wanted it to be high-stakes. Something big was happening. We wanted to start with that scene, then that scene would get edited, then we would deconstruct the events leading up to that scene. Whatever the subset of characters were, you would see them in what was happening in their lives like a week before. You can start whenever you wanted, but basically you would try to lay out those characters. Say we just saw a scene involving some crisis for example. Now let’s break it down and get a little of these characters’ backstories. You get to see a lot of character games and character exposition. You always try to hit what their character games were.
So we follow this subset of characters until the midpoint of the show when we would go back to the event, whatever that big action or crisis, high-stakes thing was. We would do the scene again, but you would see it with more information now. It would go on a little longer. Now you sort of knew where the characters were coming from. You knew their backrounds, their history, how they came to that event. You got to see the scene with fresh eyes.
The second part of the show would be moving forward. What are ramifications of that scene? Now going forward, what’s going to happen in their lives? How is this story going to be resolved? How are they going to deal with the effects of that big event?
JF: After that first event scene, would you guys try and have 3 different or however many different storylines going on with different characters?
RH: I don’t know if there was a set number of storylines. I think it kind of depended on that event itself, how many people were in that scene. I think it was good to have at least 2 different storylines to follow, maybe 3. Sometimes it would get too complicated. If it got too fractured, I think the audience would get lost. I think we would get lost. I think in a perfect world, it was good to trim it down and focus on this 1 main character and the people that surround him, or this 1 main character, his world, and this side character and his world. So, I would say 2 or possibly 3 but you kind of want to keep it [limited.]
In the end, the audience doesn’t know what the structure is. They just want to see a story. So, it’s good to keep it simple. It’s going to help keep things straight in your own mind, if you can keep it simple.
JF: Did you guys change the form at all from what Armando was doing?
RH: Yeah, I’m positive we did. Poor Armando, I’m sure if he came to see a show later on, he’d be like ‘what is this? It’s not at all what I taught you.’ I wouldn’t be able to specifically say how we changed it. We tried to adhere to that structure. There was nothing where we were like ‘well, from now on we’ll do X.’ I don’t think we ever said that. We couldn’t really control it. Sometimes when you start a show it just goes in a direction and you sort of follow that direction. But yeah, I’m sure that changed over time from what Armando taught us. Probably you could see better Eventes somewhere else, but for us it was a fun way to explore those characters and a fun way to tell a story.
JF: Why did all the guys in Respecto move out to Los Angeles at the same time?
RH: Wow, that’s a good question. Excuse me, that’s not a good question, that’s a stumper. Well, the back story to that is that last summer we all took a trip to Rob Riggle’s lake house. Riggle has a lake house in the Lake of the Ozarks, which I think is in Missouri. We went there in like late August or something. Basically, we just drank and drank and rode jet skis and swam in this lake. We kind of just decided, I think that week, that it was time to move to L.A.
I was the last to go. I think Scheer and Riggle went first, then Owen, then Chad [Carter], and I was the last to go. It just felt like the natural evolution of things. I miss New York a lot. I think about it every day. New York is definitely more fun than L.A. L.A. is fun, but New York is just the greatest city ever. I think we all still feel that way. I think that you get to a point, to do bigger and better things there’s just more opportunity in L.A. I think a lot of us had auditioned for SNL, that’s a great thing and that’s in New York. Riggle had done that. We had auditioned for the Daily Show, that’s a great show and that’s in New York. Other than that so much else is out here. Definitely all the film stuff is out here. I think it was just time. I think we all started to feel like the old men in New York.
Really what was crazy was after all those guys left, I was thinking about going to L.A., but it was really weird. All of the sudden I felt like I was the oldest person in the city of Manhattan. I just felt really old. Because at the UCB and stuff, everybody was so much younger than me, which is great. It’s the natural progression of things. There will always be younger guys and girls coming up through the ranks. I just felt like it was time for me to come out here and try my luck here.
JF: Did you guys regret not having a goodbye show? Because you guys just left suddenly. It was like you guys snuck out of New York.
RH: I don’t know. I don’t think we meant to sneak out. It wasn’t really a conscious thing. I just didn’t seem like the thing to do, to have a big farewell show. I don’t think we wanted to be those guys, like ‘hey, come out one more time and hi-five us.’ I love that theater. I want to go back and perform at that theater and do ASSSSCAT and stuff like that. I think it didn’t feel like we were leaving forever. It felt like ‘ok, we’re going to go out to L.A. and do stuff out there. We’ll be back occasionally to do shows, and come back for the marathon and stuff like that, but for some reason it didn’t feel necessary to do a huge farewell show. I hope we didn’t come off like assholes. We didn’t mean to. I don’t really think that it felt like the right thing to do.
RH: We were all in different groups. I think Owen and I have been performing together the longest, or at least for me. He’s been the one person who I’ve consistently performed with for the longest, but we were all in different groups way back then. Paul and Rob Riggle and Dannah Feinglass were in a group called ‘Cowbot,’ like Robot but with a cow. Owen and I were in a group called ‘Frank Johnson,’ but we all knew each other from classes and stuff. We were all friendly that way. Eventually, we kind of self-selected each other. We kind of broke away from our groups and said ‘why don’t we form our own group?’ So that’s what we did.
JF: How long had you guys been performing on Harold teams before you formed Respecto?
RH: I think we had been performing on other Harold groups for about 3 years. We were still taking classes I think and doing various Harold teams. Frank Johnson wasn’t my first Harold team. There were other ones. You just kind of bounced around. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out. Even if it looks like this great super-group, sometimes it just doesn’t work out. People have different levels of commitment, and different plans for their life. Not everybody is like ‘I’m going to be a pro-comedian!’ People have jobs and have other things that they want to do. But I think eventually we saw, that we all wanted to make a living doing some form of comedy. I don’t know anybody that makes a living through improv, but we wanted to make a living performing. We were serious about that. I think we self-selected each other and formed Respecto Montalban, that was our group for a long time.
JF: So, how was that allowed? Weren’t the Harold teams put together by the UCB?
RH: That’s a good question. I don’t know. Back then there wasn’t really a Harold committee. It was just the 4 UCB guys and they sort of put together teams, I think, probably more Besser than anybody. I can’t remember if anybody asked Besser or if we just said ‘we’re just going to do this.’ At some point, it’s just like you’re an adult. You should be able to do whatever you want. It’s not like summer camp, you know? But I can’t remember if anybody asked them or if we just told them ‘this is what we’re doing.’
JF: Wow. That’s ballsy. At least now-a-days that’d be ballsy.
RH: [Laughs] It’s kind of ridiculous that that’s ballsy, but I guess. It’s like why not do that, I say, if you know people that you want to perform with? It may be probable chaos if people did that all the time, but I think we felt that we’d earned it. We’d been put on various teams for a few years. We didn’t do it after 6 months, and say ‘we’re forming this group and fuck everyone else!’ We’d been performing for a few years and were like ‘let’s put together these people.’ I can’t remember how it went down. Paul Scheer would know. He was a really good memory.
JF: What was the early experience like on Respecto? Did you guys immediately click or did it take some time?
RH: I think we were all really excited about performing together. I think we were all really excited to be onstage together and to try to do something different. We kind of got a reputation for playing really fast; sometimes almost out of control, you know, to a fault. Sometimes it would get too crazy and just fall apart. Sometimes it would get crazy and it would just be [wonder [?]]. We had some shows that we were so proud of, not every show. There were a lot of crappers. We definitely had our share of shitty shows. But we were all having a great time performing together, and we excited to be performing with people that we wanted to be performing with.
I think the Swarm was put together by Amy Poehler, but I think we may have been one of the first groups to self-select. We definitely, probably stepped on some people’s toes by doing that, people that we were performing with. It’s not like we weren’t friends with all those guys. We still wanted to be friends with them and respected them. We just wanted to be on stage with this particular group.
The early days were uneven definitely, but we were just psyched to be performing. Sometimes it would just get out of control. Shows would go so fast. We would get going so fast. It was like a snowball. We would try and rein it in. I think the good think about that group and still the group of guys who I’m still performing with here in L.A. we used to have a real blast doing it and I think that shows. Sometimes it’s not as smart as it should be. Sometimes it’s not as polished as it should be. You wouldn’t be able to say ‘oh, that was a perfect scene, ’ but we just had a blast performing together. I think that shows.
JF: How long did you guys do Harolds and when did you start working on the Evente?
RH: Wow that’s a really good question too. Again, I have like no sense of time on it, but we did Harolds for years. We did a Harold show for 3 years maybe. I think a few years definitely. Eventually, we became interested in doing another form, and Armando Diaz was nice enough to work with us on his Evente form. He worked with us for a while and helped us get set up with that.
Again, I’m not sure if we approached the UCB or how it worked. I think what happened was it was kind of a natural evolution. We had been doing Harolds for a few years, and there were these new Harold teams coming up behind us. There were all these new groups coming up. There was just a log jam of people who wanted to perform at Harold night. We were really lucky to develop this new form and put up a new show.
It was always with the understanding that you had to bring a crowd. You really had to get out there. Harold night was getting decent number, but at the end of the day they want you to get butts in the seats there. You can’t do a show just in front of your friends. You’ve got to get people to come and watch the shows. Now, we kind of take it for granted, because the theater has a really good reputation and people will come to it. But back then I can’t tell you how many days and nights we would go out flier, go down to Washington Square park.
We would do crazy things to get people to come to our shows. We would flier in the middle of winter. One time Owen dressed up like Santa Claus. We had these long rolls of wrapping paper, and we were telling people they could come up and hit Santa with these cardboard tubes of wrapping paper. ‘Take a crack at Santa for everything that he never brought you.’ We didn’t know it but some people were really going after Owen, really beating him up. I remember the police came. All of the sudden these cop cars flew up, because people were upset that Santa was getting beat up in Union Square. We would just do crazy stuff like that to get people’s attention. We were just trying to be funny for 2 seconds on the street in the hopes that someone would say ‘oh, maybe their show’s funny.’ So, we would just spend so much time out there doing that, but you kind of had to, you know?
We did that for our Harold shows, and once we got our own show we wanted to make sure that we got people there. We didn’t always. There were times when we didn’t have great crowds. Eventually, as we evolved and got better and the theater got bigger, people would start to come. We of course would like to think it was because of us, not just people wondering about the theater. Hopefully, they were coming to see our show specifically. I’d like to think that.
JF: What were you guys trying to accomplish with the Evente that you couldn’t maybe get at as well with the Harold?
RH: That is a good question. Um…
JF: You don’t have to say that every time. They’re not all that good.
RH: Yeah, none of them have been good questions. They’re just stumping me.
JF: Right.
RH: So, I’ll just say ‘that’s a stumper!’ But what were we trying to accomplish, I think we just wanted to do something bigger. The Harold is such a cool thing, but I think after a while it can feel a bit limiting. We wanted to do something just completely different.
Besser and Walsh were really good at putting at all these other kind of improv shows. They did ‘Real, Real World.’ They did ‘Feature, Feature.’ Billy Merritt put up ‘Piledriver,’ which was a wrestling show. It was really fun to do all these other types of shows. I think we wanted to do something totally different, something that you could tell a story with. I think that telling a story was really appealing to us. That was the big thing to us, telling a really cool story. And playing multiple characters, and also mess with the concept of time. We would go forward, move backwards in time, and use kind neat tricks in the telling of that story.
JF: Was there a form to the version of Evente that you guys did? Or some kind of guidelines that you tried to follow to give it a structure?
RH: Yeah, there was a form, and the fact that you can’t fucking see what it is is really fucking lame man! …I think the general skeleton of it was we would start off with an event. We wanted that to be really active. Everyone didn’t have to be in it, but we just wanted it to be high-stakes. Something big was happening. We wanted to start with that scene, then that scene would get edited, then we would deconstruct the events leading up to that scene. Whatever the subset of characters were, you would see them in what was happening in their lives like a week before. You can start whenever you wanted, but basically you would try to lay out those characters. Say we just saw a scene involving some crisis for example. Now let’s break it down and get a little of these characters’ backstories. You get to see a lot of character games and character exposition. You always try to hit what their character games were.
So we follow this subset of characters until the midpoint of the show when we would go back to the event, whatever that big action or crisis, high-stakes thing was. We would do the scene again, but you would see it with more information now. It would go on a little longer. Now you sort of knew where the characters were coming from. You knew their backrounds, their history, how they came to that event. You got to see the scene with fresh eyes.
The second part of the show would be moving forward. What are ramifications of that scene? Now going forward, what’s going to happen in their lives? How is this story going to be resolved? How are they going to deal with the effects of that big event?
JF: After that first event scene, would you guys try and have 3 different or however many different storylines going on with different characters?
RH: I don’t know if there was a set number of storylines. I think it kind of depended on that event itself, how many people were in that scene. I think it was good to have at least 2 different storylines to follow, maybe 3. Sometimes it would get too complicated. If it got too fractured, I think the audience would get lost. I think we would get lost. I think in a perfect world, it was good to trim it down and focus on this 1 main character and the people that surround him, or this 1 main character, his world, and this side character and his world. So, I would say 2 or possibly 3 but you kind of want to keep it [limited.]
In the end, the audience doesn’t know what the structure is. They just want to see a story. So, it’s good to keep it simple. It’s going to help keep things straight in your own mind, if you can keep it simple.
JF: Did you guys change the form at all from what Armando was doing?
RH: Yeah, I’m positive we did. Poor Armando, I’m sure if he came to see a show later on, he’d be like ‘what is this? It’s not at all what I taught you.’ I wouldn’t be able to specifically say how we changed it. We tried to adhere to that structure. There was nothing where we were like ‘well, from now on we’ll do X.’ I don’t think we ever said that. We couldn’t really control it. Sometimes when you start a show it just goes in a direction and you sort of follow that direction. But yeah, I’m sure that changed over time from what Armando taught us. Probably you could see better Eventes somewhere else, but for us it was a fun way to explore those characters and a fun way to tell a story.
JF: Why did all the guys in Respecto move out to Los Angeles at the same time?
RH: Wow, that’s a good question. Excuse me, that’s not a good question, that’s a stumper. Well, the back story to that is that last summer we all took a trip to Rob Riggle’s lake house. Riggle has a lake house in the Lake of the Ozarks, which I think is in Missouri. We went there in like late August or something. Basically, we just drank and drank and rode jet skis and swam in this lake. We kind of just decided, I think that week, that it was time to move to L.A.
I was the last to go. I think Scheer and Riggle went first, then Owen, then Chad [Carter], and I was the last to go. It just felt like the natural evolution of things. I miss New York a lot. I think about it every day. New York is definitely more fun than L.A. L.A. is fun, but New York is just the greatest city ever. I think we all still feel that way. I think that you get to a point, to do bigger and better things there’s just more opportunity in L.A. I think a lot of us had auditioned for SNL, that’s a great thing and that’s in New York. Riggle had done that. We had auditioned for the Daily Show, that’s a great show and that’s in New York. Other than that so much else is out here. Definitely all the film stuff is out here. I think it was just time. I think we all started to feel like the old men in New York.
Really what was crazy was after all those guys left, I was thinking about going to L.A., but it was really weird. All of the sudden I felt like I was the oldest person in the city of Manhattan. I just felt really old. Because at the UCB and stuff, everybody was so much younger than me, which is great. It’s the natural progression of things. There will always be younger guys and girls coming up through the ranks. I just felt like it was time for me to come out here and try my luck here.
JF: Did you guys regret not having a goodbye show? Because you guys just left suddenly. It was like you guys snuck out of New York.
RH: I don’t know. I don’t think we meant to sneak out. It wasn’t really a conscious thing. I just didn’t seem like the thing to do, to have a big farewell show. I don’t think we wanted to be those guys, like ‘hey, come out one more time and hi-five us.’ I love that theater. I want to go back and perform at that theater and do ASSSSCAT and stuff like that. I think it didn’t feel like we were leaving forever. It felt like ‘ok, we’re going to go out to L.A. and do stuff out there. We’ll be back occasionally to do shows, and come back for the marathon and stuff like that, but for some reason it didn’t feel necessary to do a huge farewell show. I hope we didn’t come off like assholes. We didn’t mean to. I don’t really think that it felt like the right thing to do.
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