Ian Roberts Part 1 - 2/16/07
Ian Roberts is a veteran actor, improviser and writer. He studied improvisation at the Improv Olympic in Chicago where he a member of the legendary team The Family. He is a member of the Upright Citizens Brigade with whom he has founded two comedy theaters and training centers and created a long-running sketch show on Comedy Central. He currently lives in Los Angeles.
JF: Where were you born?
IR: I was born in Queens, NY.
JF: What were some early influences on your sense of humor?
IR: Abbot and Costello was one of the first ones. My dad and I used to watch it. When I got older, I would say Monty Python was the biggest influence in my teen years. Those are the conscious [influences], but then the honest, horrible answer was old sitcom re-runs that they didn't have to pay any residuals for like ‘Bewitched,’ ‘I Dream of Genie,’ ‘Gilligan’s Island,’ and ‘F-Troop.’ That’s the horrible truth of the matter. That’s why, when I teach improv, I try to tell people not to try and use their conscious mind to try to be funny, because when you do that I tell them that when you do that you’re pulling from a storehouse of awful comedy.
JF: Do you see the influence of any of those early comedy shows that you watched in your comedy now, especially with Abbot and Costello?
IR: [laughs] Perhaps. I don’t think I do it consciously, but I know I like comedy where there is a straight man, kind of a harried straight man. Now-a-days, I would say that the guy who’s cornered market on that is Ben Stiller, you know? There’s two ways of looking at a straight man. One way is like an Abbot: a dry one, who’s always above the stuff that would happen to him. I guess when I use the term what I'm talking about is a guy who’s reactive. Crazy things happen to him and he reacts. That’s kind of the Ben Stiller movie, like Meet the Parents, what’s the one when he goes looking for his real parents...
JF: Oh yeah, with Mary Tyler Moore.
IR: Yeah, so funny. That’s another one where does that shtick. Along Came Polly. Something About Mary. I love that in comedy, a guy who’s basically not being funny. Then he has a whole other way that he does in comedy, where he’s a big character, like in Zoolander or Dodgeball, but I love this other thing that he does, which is what I love in general in comedy.
As far as Python, I don’t know. Del Close said ‘Whatever relates to art to drugs.’ [laughs] He said when he took heroin it was like the world opened up to him. It’s like [laughs] ‘Oh my god. The world can be this whole different way.’ It’s like that with Python comedy-wise. I’m not sure what the specific input is, but everything I do is somewhat influenced by that. That that absurdist sensibility, even if I’m not doing something absurdist, and intelligence, whether I achieve it or not, it’s something I admire.
JF: When did you know that you wanted to be a performer?
IR: Somewhere in my high school years. Not that that’s when I started being funny, but that’s when I started thinking secretly [about it]. I went to college and I was like I want to do theater. I did two plays in high school, but mostly played foot ball, did some drugs and drank and kind of was the class clown. But somewhere around there, I was like ‘I should check out the theater program of these colleges that I was looking at, because I think I want to do that.’ So, I went to college trying to reinvent myself. I thought I’d get into theater, but I never told anybody really. I tried to do a couple other things, like being an English major or a Psychology major.
I kind of got it all backwards. I’ve had to come full circle to do the most natural thing, which is improv comedy and now my main focus is writing screen plays, that’s how I spend most of my time and make most of my money. It went from kind of being a class clown and making people laugh, from that my Dad said ‘You know you should go get in a play.’ I guess it seemed like I was extraverted or whatever, or goofing around all the time.
I didn’t want to do that in high school. I was scared. Luckily, I had an out. The play had rehearsals during foot ball practice. I came home and my dad was like ‘You try out for the play?’ I was like ‘I couldn’t. I had to do foot ball practice.’ My dad was like ‘They can’t discriminate against my son! I’m going into the school.’ [laughs] The school was like ‘No guys auditioned. We’d love to have him audition.’ That’s how I ended up getting into a play. [laughs]
Yeah, I went to college and I always had this impulse to be funny and try to entertain people. I tried to find what I thought was a channel for that, which was scripted acting. So, I spent all this time with scripted acting. When I got out of college, I did all these plays in Milwakee. At the same time, I was doing ComedySportz, which is short-form improv. It wasn’t quite what I wanted to do.
When I got to Chicago, I discovered long-form improv, finally. It was kind of what I had done my whole life. I kind of had taken on characters and intuitively done scenes with people when joking around. The first time I remember improvising was with my brother on vacation as kids in Colorado. We did this bit where we were playing these guys who would complain how much they hated the food, while stuffing their face with lobsters. ‘Oh this is terrible!’ We’d be shoving food into our faces. We were always joking around a lot. So, it was kind of this long, crazy path to get to this thing that we did completely naturally.
JF: So, what was that experience like as a theater major and doing plays? How did change you and what were some lessons that you took from?
IR: I always tell my classes, when I try to get them to be willing [to fail], the only kind of student that frustrates me is the student that thinks they have nothing to learn. I always try to start the class with ‘please, be willing to fail. I could care less. Why would you be here if you knew how to do it?’ I try to say please don’t be the kind of student who’s taking a class so I could discover them. I’m going to look at them and see light around their face, and say ‘Oh my God, you are the Chosen One. I have nothing to teach you. [laughs] You have come to me fully formed.’ You always have to be willing to make mistakes.
In that little speech, I would always tell them that my only skill as an actor was knowing that I was no good. And I wasn’t. I was terrible. But at least I knew I was terrible. But I would notice the difference though: some people would get very comfortable doing this terrible, fake acting. By the way, I’ve come to consider myself a very average actor, but at least I’ve worked my way up to average from awful. But as an actor I was always trying to pursue being more real. My first answer was that, it was funny, was nonchalance, not real, but kind of everything was matter of fact. Kind of ‘Oh,’ off hand, kind of ‘Oh, loose delivery,’ but that doesn’t work. The point is do whatever. Do whatever you’re supposed to be doing. I think that’s the biggest thing.
I went to a school where theater couldn’t have been less important in the school. I went to Grinnell College. If there were twenty theater majors, I’d be very surprised. There definitely weren’t. There were maybe five theater majors at a given year, but that meant I got every play I auditioned for basically. And it was very relaxed. There was one teacher who was pretty good in that he wouldn’t push you to do anything that was too bullshit. He kind of let you find your own way. And he did kind of experimental theater. We did these interesting shows, so that was something that I kind of got out of it, but the biggest thing I got out of it was finding my own way.
Also, in college I got in my first improv group. I took one semester away from school at a place called the Eugene O’Neil Theater Center. It was a semester long program in Connecticut. Also, I went to a summer program run by the National Shakespeare Conservatory, which I don’t think exists anymore. It was some acting program run out of New York. So, I got really into acting and came back, and at Grinnell they had basically no acting program. We had two acting classes. One was a special one time only and the other was intro to acting and after that it was done. I took this other girl I knew from Evanston who had been involved with the Piven theater company. They do a lot of improv and story theater. I said ‘Lets start this acting workshop. We’ll get together. We’ll work out of acting books. We’ll do the exercises. And three days a week we’ll be able to have a little acting class.’ She said ‘That’s interesting, but here’s my idea.’ She also came back all inspired from the off season, and wanted to start an improv troupe and work on story theater. She said ‘I think if we both start something like this I think we’ll split the people who are interested in theater at the school.’ So, I said ‘Ok, we’ll do yours.’ With that we got a bunch of non-actors involved too and started a group called Proteus. That was the first time I started doing comedy improv. That was a blast. It was basically long-form. We did do theater games, but we did a lot of just open improv. That was the first time I got to formally use this skill I had been naively develop over the years.
JF: So, what brought you to Chicago?
IR: Well, right after college I went to Milwaukee for no better reason than to follow a girl I was dating at the time. I kind of had a, I guess the old fashioned term was a nervous breakdown. My senior year I got my first bout of clinical call depression. I was like ‘What hell the am I going to do? I can barely function.’ I went to Milwaukee and rented a room in some guy’s house. His parents had died and he had the whole house free. I got a job on a grounds crew. My girlfriend broke up with me not far into that summer.
Inertia kept me in Milwaukee for a couple years. I did a couple of plays and got involved with ComedySportz. Then this girl I had gone to college with, who was a theater major, wrote me a letter about how inspired she felt. She just graduated from grad school, and how she was working with this repertory company and how excited she was. I was like ‘Man, I have to get out of Milwaukee.’ [laughs] It was a good place to heal my wounds in a way, kind of get my feet wet, because when I got out of college ‘I was like I don’t know if I want to do theater. I don’t even know if I want to get up in front of people right now.’ It seemed too daunting.
So, I got that letter and I was like ‘I have to get out of here. I have to take the next step.’ What I enjoyed the most was the comedy and improv, so like so many people I thought ‘I’ll go out and do Second City.’ I thought I’ll go there, boom, get in. I went there, sent a headshot, sent a letter saying I was interested in auditioning. Really soon after I got there they said ‘Come on in and audition.’ I tanked. Didn’t get in.
At that time it was a very closed shop. You had to wait tables and work the door and do all this stuff so you could kind of be in the community, then work your way up. It doesn’t mean the people who did that weren’t funny. There were people who knew the way it worked, played that game and did that. I didn’t want to do that, so after two or three times auditioning I thought ‘Screw this. I guess I’m not going to do Second City.’
At the same time, when I first got there, one of the first weeks I was there, I saw Improv Olympic in the basement of this place called Papa Milano’s and saw ComedySportz. I know two guys in the guys in the show I saw I still work with today. They’re still in the community, Kevin Dorff and Dave Koencher. I saw it and I was like ‘Oh man, that’s what I want to do,’ but it started weird, because it was a Harold, so the first five to ten minutes was an opening. It was kind of a weird poetry slam, group happening. [laughs] I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know what it was, but I didn’t think it’d be something that I’d want to be doing. Once they got to scene work, the heart of the Harold, it was like ‘Great, open scene work!’
The frustration with ComedySportz for me in Milwaukee when we’d rehearse we’d do open scene work and I’d do really well. I’d feel like ‘Oh, I’m one of the good guys in this group.’ When we did the show, it was short-form and I was at the best adequate. So, I just felt it wasn’t what I wanted to do. At the same time, when I got to town I also joined Player’s Workshop, which I thought was the training center for Second City, but it turns out it’s like a pyramid scam. They’ve got that, and they’ve got the Training Center of Second City, which has two crazy parts of six levels a piece. So, I get to the second to last class of the sixth class, it takes a whole year, and someone said ‘So, are you going to do the training center?’ I was like ‘What do you mean? This is the training center.’ ‘No, no, no.’ They had a whole other six levels of classes. [laughs]
JF: Uch.
IR: That really had no benefit to me at all, Player’s Workshop, as far as learning about comedy, but I did make a couple life time friends from that. It was good to have a bunch of people who I knew in Chicago, but it did nothing for me training-wise. Improv Olympic, I met the guys from the Upright Citizens Brigade through that. Ultimately, I got on a great improv team. That was pretty huge. So, that’s a long answer to how I got to Chicago.
JF: How did your experience with short-form affect you while doing long-form? Did it help you or hurt you, or both?
IR: It did nothing. I think anyone who has skill at long-form can do short-form. It’s a game with one rule that’s predetermined. That’s all short-form is. I didn’t do anything negative or positive. It wasn’t particularly satisfying. To an uninitiated audience, in the Milwaukee audience no one had seen long-form improv, so people loved it. People loved ComedySportz shows. We were packed every night. We did six shows a week, then did touring shows. But I can’t say that it had any affect on my work. It didn’t mess up my work, and it didn’t teach me a thing.
The only thing was I got more practice doing long-form in rehearsals, so I got a little more experience without someone still formalizing what I was doing. I was getting better at it and understanding it more. I remember I even got sent down to open a ComedySportz somewhere in a suburb of Milwaukee. When I went there, I was naively trying to teach them to do long-form. I wasn’t trying to focus on any one game, but basically kind of getting them to understand how to be funny. [laughs] How to, basically, find the game. I think I called it ‘finding the hook’ of the scene. I was like ‘You’ve got to do more of that. You’re a guy who does this, so you’ve got to do more of that.’ I have a vague memory of someone doing a scene in a supermarket and they were somehow trying to find frog-based products. Somehow I knew you have to keep doing this. That’s what special about you in this scene.
I guess what it did [laughs] was it kind of helped me heal. I was up in front of people all the time. I realized that even though I got so depressed, …kind of at the same time I was medicated, got myself out of therapy, and was getting my head straight, it was good to get up on stage all the time and have that effect.
JF: Who were some of the early groups or people who influenced you? And what did you take away from them?
IR: There were many. That one I went and saw. They were a really good group. If you want the era, it was this group called Blue Velveeta.
JF: Was that the group that you saw?
IR: Yeah, I believe. If it wasn’t the exact group, I know they all had an affiliation with that group. At least it describes the era that I’m talking about. It was just a one time thing. It was just seeing them. It made me think ‘Oh, I want to do that,’ then within a pretty short time, within a few classes I was on some team, then within a very short time we were the house team.
There was some big shake-up. That team kind of screwed Charna. They took off. In fact, they took her space from her. They talked to the owner of the space and said ‘Look, we’re the real reason why people are coming here. Get rid of her.’ They called themselves the Comedy Underground. They took over her space, and she had to start over. She moved to this place called the Wrigleyside. We played upstairs at the Wrigleyside. My era came with that change of the guard. So, really quickly I was on a house team.
There were two teams that were the top teams, The Victim’s Family and Corky’s Callback. I was initially on Corky’s Callback with Matt Besser, then he jumped over to The Victim’s Family, because all these guys who ended up being Upright Citizens Brigade were in that group. Then I went over to that team. Then one guy in that group died. He drove a cab and he drove the cab into the Chicago River and died. Then The Victim’s Family seemed like a macabre name for the group, so we changed it to The Family. That became this really good group that got directed by Del Close. We did two [runs of] shows.
I’ll tell you something that had a direct effect. There was this really good group called …oh shit, I can’t remember. They played this place called the Remains Theater. This is actually kind of important, because it actually challenged Del. Improv Olympic was doing this thing where they had two teams go up per show, and we’d do kind of a short-formish game at the beginning, middle and end of the show, then two Harolds. We’d do a dream. We’d do a machine, [laughs] then we’d do a musical option. We’d do all these short-form type games, but the heart of the show was two Harolds. It was kind of stuck it that. It was doing that for years, then I went and saw this group and …I can’t believe I can’t remember the name.
JF: Jazz Freddy?
IR: No, it preceded Jazz Freddy.
JF: Ed?
IR: Ed. There you go. Been doing your work, huh? Ed blew me away. Ed was something that really did impress me. I was the only guy involved in our [class] who saw that. I think we all possibly felt ‘We don’t want to see anybody else. We’re all doing the best stuff.’ So, I went to Del, I was taking a class with him, and said ‘I saw the most amazing show. They took one suggestion, one, and went for an hour and a half.’ And it really ticked Del off that I was saying to him something that wasn’t his that really impressed me more than anything else I’d seen. He was like ‘Wa? I’ve never heard of this.’ [laughs] He was kind of pissed off. I think he was like ‘Fuck that. We’re going to do something.’
Then with The Family, we approached him and said ‘Let’s do our own show where we go for an hour and a half.’ We did not to it by taking one suggestion. We did it by developing these forms. He had been working on it for years, but we were the first to do it as a performance form, The Movie. The Family did that. We did the Check-in Deconstruction, which was something he had gotten off of this one woman who had been on Hill Street Blues. She was a former Second City person. She now directs. Anyway, she had a group of all women improvisers. She introduced Del to this thing they did to start their rehearsals, where they checked-in and told interested things that happened in their day, because they didn’t get together enough and thought they were loosing touch with each other.
He took that and used it as the starting point for a form. It was the Check-in Desconstruction. You’d come in with your day and act it out. You’d play yourself for the day and kind of imply everyone else. You had to fudge your dialog, like a Bob Newhart phone call, where you get what the other person is saying. Like ‘No, Mr. President, I don’t think you should change ‘Four score and seven years ago,’ to’ I don’t know, whatever. So, you’d act out your whole day, then we’d break down that check-in and use it as inspiration for scenes.
We did something that really tripped Del’s trigger. He was really interested in it. It was called The Horror. The Horror was taking some disturbing news piece and basing a long-form off of that. This was not a comedy piece. It was typically about a murder or child molestation or a fire. His theory was when you do something [like that] on stage the actual moment can never play. You can never do better than that on stage. You can’t really show it. So we did everything that led up to that moment, everything but that moment: the people who the thing happened to, the person who pulled the trigger, the aftermath of it, moments before.
This is all off seeing that group, Ed, Del getting his competitive juices up, and us wanting to be the undisputed big shots of Improv Olympic. Nobody had their own show. It wasn’t run that like that. Everybody just did Harolds. We had our own show once a week that was an hour and a half to two hours.
Jazz Freddy, I would say that Ed was a huge influence on them. That same guy who worked on Ed worked on Jazz Freddy with them. Jazz Freddy was really good, but I didn’t find them seminal in the same way that Ed was. Ed really was ‘Wow, that’s a whole leap there.’
JF: Where were you born?
IR: I was born in Queens, NY.
JF: What were some early influences on your sense of humor?
IR: Abbot and Costello was one of the first ones. My dad and I used to watch it. When I got older, I would say Monty Python was the biggest influence in my teen years. Those are the conscious [influences], but then the honest, horrible answer was old sitcom re-runs that they didn't have to pay any residuals for like ‘Bewitched,’ ‘I Dream of Genie,’ ‘Gilligan’s Island,’ and ‘F-Troop.’ That’s the horrible truth of the matter. That’s why, when I teach improv, I try to tell people not to try and use their conscious mind to try to be funny, because when you do that I tell them that when you do that you’re pulling from a storehouse of awful comedy.
JF: Do you see the influence of any of those early comedy shows that you watched in your comedy now, especially with Abbot and Costello?
IR: [laughs] Perhaps. I don’t think I do it consciously, but I know I like comedy where there is a straight man, kind of a harried straight man. Now-a-days, I would say that the guy who’s cornered market on that is Ben Stiller, you know? There’s two ways of looking at a straight man. One way is like an Abbot: a dry one, who’s always above the stuff that would happen to him. I guess when I use the term what I'm talking about is a guy who’s reactive. Crazy things happen to him and he reacts. That’s kind of the Ben Stiller movie, like Meet the Parents, what’s the one when he goes looking for his real parents...
JF: Oh yeah, with Mary Tyler Moore.
IR: Yeah, so funny. That’s another one where does that shtick. Along Came Polly. Something About Mary. I love that in comedy, a guy who’s basically not being funny. Then he has a whole other way that he does in comedy, where he’s a big character, like in Zoolander or Dodgeball, but I love this other thing that he does, which is what I love in general in comedy.
As far as Python, I don’t know. Del Close said ‘Whatever relates to art to drugs.’ [laughs] He said when he took heroin it was like the world opened up to him. It’s like [laughs] ‘Oh my god. The world can be this whole different way.’ It’s like that with Python comedy-wise. I’m not sure what the specific input is, but everything I do is somewhat influenced by that. That that absurdist sensibility, even if I’m not doing something absurdist, and intelligence, whether I achieve it or not, it’s something I admire.
JF: When did you know that you wanted to be a performer?
IR: Somewhere in my high school years. Not that that’s when I started being funny, but that’s when I started thinking secretly [about it]. I went to college and I was like I want to do theater. I did two plays in high school, but mostly played foot ball, did some drugs and drank and kind of was the class clown. But somewhere around there, I was like ‘I should check out the theater program of these colleges that I was looking at, because I think I want to do that.’ So, I went to college trying to reinvent myself. I thought I’d get into theater, but I never told anybody really. I tried to do a couple other things, like being an English major or a Psychology major.
I kind of got it all backwards. I’ve had to come full circle to do the most natural thing, which is improv comedy and now my main focus is writing screen plays, that’s how I spend most of my time and make most of my money. It went from kind of being a class clown and making people laugh, from that my Dad said ‘You know you should go get in a play.’ I guess it seemed like I was extraverted or whatever, or goofing around all the time.
I didn’t want to do that in high school. I was scared. Luckily, I had an out. The play had rehearsals during foot ball practice. I came home and my dad was like ‘You try out for the play?’ I was like ‘I couldn’t. I had to do foot ball practice.’ My dad was like ‘They can’t discriminate against my son! I’m going into the school.’ [laughs] The school was like ‘No guys auditioned. We’d love to have him audition.’ That’s how I ended up getting into a play. [laughs]
Yeah, I went to college and I always had this impulse to be funny and try to entertain people. I tried to find what I thought was a channel for that, which was scripted acting. So, I spent all this time with scripted acting. When I got out of college, I did all these plays in Milwakee. At the same time, I was doing ComedySportz, which is short-form improv. It wasn’t quite what I wanted to do.
When I got to Chicago, I discovered long-form improv, finally. It was kind of what I had done my whole life. I kind of had taken on characters and intuitively done scenes with people when joking around. The first time I remember improvising was with my brother on vacation as kids in Colorado. We did this bit where we were playing these guys who would complain how much they hated the food, while stuffing their face with lobsters. ‘Oh this is terrible!’ We’d be shoving food into our faces. We were always joking around a lot. So, it was kind of this long, crazy path to get to this thing that we did completely naturally.
JF: So, what was that experience like as a theater major and doing plays? How did change you and what were some lessons that you took from?
IR: I always tell my classes, when I try to get them to be willing [to fail], the only kind of student that frustrates me is the student that thinks they have nothing to learn. I always try to start the class with ‘please, be willing to fail. I could care less. Why would you be here if you knew how to do it?’ I try to say please don’t be the kind of student who’s taking a class so I could discover them. I’m going to look at them and see light around their face, and say ‘Oh my God, you are the Chosen One. I have nothing to teach you. [laughs] You have come to me fully formed.’ You always have to be willing to make mistakes.
In that little speech, I would always tell them that my only skill as an actor was knowing that I was no good. And I wasn’t. I was terrible. But at least I knew I was terrible. But I would notice the difference though: some people would get very comfortable doing this terrible, fake acting. By the way, I’ve come to consider myself a very average actor, but at least I’ve worked my way up to average from awful. But as an actor I was always trying to pursue being more real. My first answer was that, it was funny, was nonchalance, not real, but kind of everything was matter of fact. Kind of ‘Oh,’ off hand, kind of ‘Oh, loose delivery,’ but that doesn’t work. The point is do whatever. Do whatever you’re supposed to be doing. I think that’s the biggest thing.
I went to a school where theater couldn’t have been less important in the school. I went to Grinnell College. If there were twenty theater majors, I’d be very surprised. There definitely weren’t. There were maybe five theater majors at a given year, but that meant I got every play I auditioned for basically. And it was very relaxed. There was one teacher who was pretty good in that he wouldn’t push you to do anything that was too bullshit. He kind of let you find your own way. And he did kind of experimental theater. We did these interesting shows, so that was something that I kind of got out of it, but the biggest thing I got out of it was finding my own way.
Also, in college I got in my first improv group. I took one semester away from school at a place called the Eugene O’Neil Theater Center. It was a semester long program in Connecticut. Also, I went to a summer program run by the National Shakespeare Conservatory, which I don’t think exists anymore. It was some acting program run out of New York. So, I got really into acting and came back, and at Grinnell they had basically no acting program. We had two acting classes. One was a special one time only and the other was intro to acting and after that it was done. I took this other girl I knew from Evanston who had been involved with the Piven theater company. They do a lot of improv and story theater. I said ‘Lets start this acting workshop. We’ll get together. We’ll work out of acting books. We’ll do the exercises. And three days a week we’ll be able to have a little acting class.’ She said ‘That’s interesting, but here’s my idea.’ She also came back all inspired from the off season, and wanted to start an improv troupe and work on story theater. She said ‘I think if we both start something like this I think we’ll split the people who are interested in theater at the school.’ So, I said ‘Ok, we’ll do yours.’ With that we got a bunch of non-actors involved too and started a group called Proteus. That was the first time I started doing comedy improv. That was a blast. It was basically long-form. We did do theater games, but we did a lot of just open improv. That was the first time I got to formally use this skill I had been naively develop over the years.
JF: So, what brought you to Chicago?
IR: Well, right after college I went to Milwaukee for no better reason than to follow a girl I was dating at the time. I kind of had a, I guess the old fashioned term was a nervous breakdown. My senior year I got my first bout of clinical call depression. I was like ‘What hell the am I going to do? I can barely function.’ I went to Milwaukee and rented a room in some guy’s house. His parents had died and he had the whole house free. I got a job on a grounds crew. My girlfriend broke up with me not far into that summer.
Inertia kept me in Milwaukee for a couple years. I did a couple of plays and got involved with ComedySportz. Then this girl I had gone to college with, who was a theater major, wrote me a letter about how inspired she felt. She just graduated from grad school, and how she was working with this repertory company and how excited she was. I was like ‘Man, I have to get out of Milwaukee.’ [laughs] It was a good place to heal my wounds in a way, kind of get my feet wet, because when I got out of college ‘I was like I don’t know if I want to do theater. I don’t even know if I want to get up in front of people right now.’ It seemed too daunting.
So, I got that letter and I was like ‘I have to get out of here. I have to take the next step.’ What I enjoyed the most was the comedy and improv, so like so many people I thought ‘I’ll go out and do Second City.’ I thought I’ll go there, boom, get in. I went there, sent a headshot, sent a letter saying I was interested in auditioning. Really soon after I got there they said ‘Come on in and audition.’ I tanked. Didn’t get in.
At that time it was a very closed shop. You had to wait tables and work the door and do all this stuff so you could kind of be in the community, then work your way up. It doesn’t mean the people who did that weren’t funny. There were people who knew the way it worked, played that game and did that. I didn’t want to do that, so after two or three times auditioning I thought ‘Screw this. I guess I’m not going to do Second City.’
At the same time, when I first got there, one of the first weeks I was there, I saw Improv Olympic in the basement of this place called Papa Milano’s and saw ComedySportz. I know two guys in the guys in the show I saw I still work with today. They’re still in the community, Kevin Dorff and Dave Koencher. I saw it and I was like ‘Oh man, that’s what I want to do,’ but it started weird, because it was a Harold, so the first five to ten minutes was an opening. It was kind of a weird poetry slam, group happening. [laughs] I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know what it was, but I didn’t think it’d be something that I’d want to be doing. Once they got to scene work, the heart of the Harold, it was like ‘Great, open scene work!’
The frustration with ComedySportz for me in Milwaukee when we’d rehearse we’d do open scene work and I’d do really well. I’d feel like ‘Oh, I’m one of the good guys in this group.’ When we did the show, it was short-form and I was at the best adequate. So, I just felt it wasn’t what I wanted to do. At the same time, when I got to town I also joined Player’s Workshop, which I thought was the training center for Second City, but it turns out it’s like a pyramid scam. They’ve got that, and they’ve got the Training Center of Second City, which has two crazy parts of six levels a piece. So, I get to the second to last class of the sixth class, it takes a whole year, and someone said ‘So, are you going to do the training center?’ I was like ‘What do you mean? This is the training center.’ ‘No, no, no.’ They had a whole other six levels of classes. [laughs]
JF: Uch.
IR: That really had no benefit to me at all, Player’s Workshop, as far as learning about comedy, but I did make a couple life time friends from that. It was good to have a bunch of people who I knew in Chicago, but it did nothing for me training-wise. Improv Olympic, I met the guys from the Upright Citizens Brigade through that. Ultimately, I got on a great improv team. That was pretty huge. So, that’s a long answer to how I got to Chicago.
JF: How did your experience with short-form affect you while doing long-form? Did it help you or hurt you, or both?
IR: It did nothing. I think anyone who has skill at long-form can do short-form. It’s a game with one rule that’s predetermined. That’s all short-form is. I didn’t do anything negative or positive. It wasn’t particularly satisfying. To an uninitiated audience, in the Milwaukee audience no one had seen long-form improv, so people loved it. People loved ComedySportz shows. We were packed every night. We did six shows a week, then did touring shows. But I can’t say that it had any affect on my work. It didn’t mess up my work, and it didn’t teach me a thing.
The only thing was I got more practice doing long-form in rehearsals, so I got a little more experience without someone still formalizing what I was doing. I was getting better at it and understanding it more. I remember I even got sent down to open a ComedySportz somewhere in a suburb of Milwaukee. When I went there, I was naively trying to teach them to do long-form. I wasn’t trying to focus on any one game, but basically kind of getting them to understand how to be funny. [laughs] How to, basically, find the game. I think I called it ‘finding the hook’ of the scene. I was like ‘You’ve got to do more of that. You’re a guy who does this, so you’ve got to do more of that.’ I have a vague memory of someone doing a scene in a supermarket and they were somehow trying to find frog-based products. Somehow I knew you have to keep doing this. That’s what special about you in this scene.
I guess what it did [laughs] was it kind of helped me heal. I was up in front of people all the time. I realized that even though I got so depressed, …kind of at the same time I was medicated, got myself out of therapy, and was getting my head straight, it was good to get up on stage all the time and have that effect.
JF: Who were some of the early groups or people who influenced you? And what did you take away from them?
IR: There were many. That one I went and saw. They were a really good group. If you want the era, it was this group called Blue Velveeta.
JF: Was that the group that you saw?
IR: Yeah, I believe. If it wasn’t the exact group, I know they all had an affiliation with that group. At least it describes the era that I’m talking about. It was just a one time thing. It was just seeing them. It made me think ‘Oh, I want to do that,’ then within a pretty short time, within a few classes I was on some team, then within a very short time we were the house team.
There was some big shake-up. That team kind of screwed Charna. They took off. In fact, they took her space from her. They talked to the owner of the space and said ‘Look, we’re the real reason why people are coming here. Get rid of her.’ They called themselves the Comedy Underground. They took over her space, and she had to start over. She moved to this place called the Wrigleyside. We played upstairs at the Wrigleyside. My era came with that change of the guard. So, really quickly I was on a house team.
There were two teams that were the top teams, The Victim’s Family and Corky’s Callback. I was initially on Corky’s Callback with Matt Besser, then he jumped over to The Victim’s Family, because all these guys who ended up being Upright Citizens Brigade were in that group. Then I went over to that team. Then one guy in that group died. He drove a cab and he drove the cab into the Chicago River and died. Then The Victim’s Family seemed like a macabre name for the group, so we changed it to The Family. That became this really good group that got directed by Del Close. We did two [runs of] shows.
I’ll tell you something that had a direct effect. There was this really good group called …oh shit, I can’t remember. They played this place called the Remains Theater. This is actually kind of important, because it actually challenged Del. Improv Olympic was doing this thing where they had two teams go up per show, and we’d do kind of a short-formish game at the beginning, middle and end of the show, then two Harolds. We’d do a dream. We’d do a machine, [laughs] then we’d do a musical option. We’d do all these short-form type games, but the heart of the show was two Harolds. It was kind of stuck it that. It was doing that for years, then I went and saw this group and …I can’t believe I can’t remember the name.
JF: Jazz Freddy?
IR: No, it preceded Jazz Freddy.
JF: Ed?
IR: Ed. There you go. Been doing your work, huh? Ed blew me away. Ed was something that really did impress me. I was the only guy involved in our [class] who saw that. I think we all possibly felt ‘We don’t want to see anybody else. We’re all doing the best stuff.’ So, I went to Del, I was taking a class with him, and said ‘I saw the most amazing show. They took one suggestion, one, and went for an hour and a half.’ And it really ticked Del off that I was saying to him something that wasn’t his that really impressed me more than anything else I’d seen. He was like ‘Wa? I’ve never heard of this.’ [laughs] He was kind of pissed off. I think he was like ‘Fuck that. We’re going to do something.’
Then with The Family, we approached him and said ‘Let’s do our own show where we go for an hour and a half.’ We did not to it by taking one suggestion. We did it by developing these forms. He had been working on it for years, but we were the first to do it as a performance form, The Movie. The Family did that. We did the Check-in Deconstruction, which was something he had gotten off of this one woman who had been on Hill Street Blues. She was a former Second City person. She now directs. Anyway, she had a group of all women improvisers. She introduced Del to this thing they did to start their rehearsals, where they checked-in and told interested things that happened in their day, because they didn’t get together enough and thought they were loosing touch with each other.
He took that and used it as the starting point for a form. It was the Check-in Desconstruction. You’d come in with your day and act it out. You’d play yourself for the day and kind of imply everyone else. You had to fudge your dialog, like a Bob Newhart phone call, where you get what the other person is saying. Like ‘No, Mr. President, I don’t think you should change ‘Four score and seven years ago,’ to’ I don’t know, whatever. So, you’d act out your whole day, then we’d break down that check-in and use it as inspiration for scenes.
We did something that really tripped Del’s trigger. He was really interested in it. It was called The Horror. The Horror was taking some disturbing news piece and basing a long-form off of that. This was not a comedy piece. It was typically about a murder or child molestation or a fire. His theory was when you do something [like that] on stage the actual moment can never play. You can never do better than that on stage. You can’t really show it. So we did everything that led up to that moment, everything but that moment: the people who the thing happened to, the person who pulled the trigger, the aftermath of it, moments before.
This is all off seeing that group, Ed, Del getting his competitive juices up, and us wanting to be the undisputed big shots of Improv Olympic. Nobody had their own show. It wasn’t run that like that. Everybody just did Harolds. We had our own show once a week that was an hour and a half to two hours.
Jazz Freddy, I would say that Ed was a huge influence on them. That same guy who worked on Ed worked on Jazz Freddy with them. Jazz Freddy was really good, but I didn’t find them seminal in the same way that Ed was. Ed really was ‘Wow, that’s a whole leap there.’
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