Ian Roberts Part 2 - 2/16/07
JF: So, what was the audience’s response to The Horror?
IR: [laughs] The audience response would be like ‘Waaaah?’ There was no reason to expect anything but comedy from Improv Olympic. The first night we did the show, I can’t remember what it was but it definitely was along the lines a rape, a child molestation, some horrible murder. There was just silence in the theater, then from the back you hear ‘HAHAHAHA’ [laughs]. He just loved that the audience was so freaked out by it. I think people were also kind of interested.
Those were some pretty good shows. The first one was ‘3 Mad Rituals.’ The second one was ‘Dynamite Fun Nest.’ That name was come up with by some word generator Del had. Both of those shows were great. I think people were at least interested in that.
It was amazing working with Del. It’s like I’m coasting [now]. I’ve worked on improv tons as a teacher, but I’ve never [been as submerged as deeply in it as I was then]. I think improv’s kind of a young person’s thing, because you never get paid for it. To be good, like any thing else in the world, you have to be working on it minimum three days a week, minimum. If you really want to be great, why wouldn’t you be working six days a week and then really why not seven? What pianist wouldn’t? What dancer wouldn’t? What painter?
But very few people get the opportunity to put in the effort you need to get really good. For a while there, the guys from the Upright Citizens Brigade all hung out together all the time. We were either rehearsing for Upright Citizens Brigade shows or hanging out together. When we hung out, we would do bits constantly, so we were honing our game-finding ability. We were always playing games.
Then we got this very formal work with Del, where we’re rehearsing three to five days a week for months on end. As a performer, that’s my big base that I got one time in my life. At the time, it’s conceited to say, but what the hell, we were a great team. There’s no secret to it. We were naturally talented guys, but we worked our asses off for a while there. And we had a great sense of ensemble because we hung out together all the time. Still when we get on stage together it’s effortless, because we just know each other so well. It will always be there.
JF: Why did The Family break up? And do you ever regret The Family breaking up?
IR: No, you can’t. We broke up because improv comedy doesn’t pay. People get gigs and that’s the end of it, you know? Adam McKay got hired by Second City. I got hired by Second City. Neil Flynn was always pursuing acting and he moved to L.A. eventually.
It’s too bad the world isn’t into improv and that can’t be a thing in and of itself. Basically, I think that no improv team can stay together [forever]. Like I say, even getting good at improv is a young person’s thing, because how can you commit? It doesn’t pay, so you have to do it in your off hours. You do it at night. Or, we were such a bunch of bums we actually did do it during the day, because no one had jobs. But once you’ve got a wife and a kid you can’t be going away every night and doing shows and rehearsing. It doesn’t pay.
When I’m teaching, I say ‘You want to get good at this? How many of you are in an ensemble? You’re on a team at a theater or have a practice group. How often are you rehearsing?’ It’s like ‘Once a week.’ I tell them ‘You know what? You will never be a great team. It’s going to take minimum, minimum three days a week.’
I always tell them how I love the title of the book ‘Respect for Acting.’ I don’t really love the book. I don’t really think it’s a great book that teaches acting, but I love that title. I love what that means. You have to have a method to do it. You have to practice it like anything else. The whole thing about my, our teaching is that everything has rules. We have lots of rules to teach improv, because if you didn’t …because you hear a lot of bullshit. How can you have any way to do it, because they’re not teaching you anything dependable like you would have in other art forms? Do this. Do this. Do this. Here’s a way to do it.
I used to hear when I would do exercises in improv class ‘This is putting me in my head.’ It’s a subtle criticism. It’s kind of saying ‘How is this a good exercise? I feel less good working on this than when I started.’ And it used to challenge me. I’d feel bad. ‘Wow, am I teaching them poorly?’ Then I realized of course it puts you in your head. [laughs] By putting you in your head, you mean you’re having to consciously work to try to do this. It’s the same thing when you’re learning a sport. When you learn the fundamentals of a sport, you had to concentrate to do them, so you can be ‘in the zone,’ unconscious when you’re actually playing. You’ve practiced these fundamentals so much now they feel like second nature.
If you buy the concept that we’re not instinctual animals, we’re habitual animals, we learn what we do by habit, then how do you work to make this a habit? I always use sports analogies when I teach improv. There’s a saying in sports: ‘Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.’ Don’t just get together with a group of people and improvise five days a week. Have a focus in your rehearsal. What are you working on to get better? What exercise are you going to work on? The same way they might drill with some sport. Work on some fundamental of it.
JF: How did the UCB start and what did you hope to get out of the UCB that you weren’t getting elsewhere?
IR: One thing was to do scripted work, and also to do concept shows. The beginning especially they were concept shows. The first one was Virtual Reality. That was one that seems like so nothing now. One of the guys in the group introduced me to this new thing, virtual reality, putting on goggles. You feel like you’re in a different world. It was brand new at the time.
Half of the show was improvising with audience members. We’d bring them up and I’d be this guy who was supposed to be a holographic projection, Cyber Guy John. Cyber Guy John would bring you up on stage and you’d participate in a scene. They’d be the President of the United States in a crisis, and we’d improvise around them.
One of the cool ones was a virtual road trip. Adam McKay would take out an audience member in my crappy Ford Festiva. We’d film it. He’d take them all over town as though they were going cross country, then we’d come back. Somebody would edit it back stage, and we’d show it during the show. During that road trip, McKay or one of the guys in the group would hit Horatio Sanz with my car. The audience would think it really happened. He’d get up and run back to the theater. Then later in the show we’d show that virtual road trip and you’d see from the inside of the car Horatio Sanz getting hit by my car. So, it was crazy conceptual type of stuff.
But how it started was there was a group before the Upright Citizens Brigade called Cerebral Stripmine, then that broke apart. McKay and Besser and Horatio Sanz, that was really the core. There were guys who did peripheral stuff, film stuff and bits during the show. Then they asked me if I wanted to start the Upright Citizens Brigade, and I did. I wasn’t improvising with them. I was on some other teams. I guess they liked my work and asked me to be in it. Thank God I was the kind of guy who said yes to anything at the time. I say that to any young performer: ‘You don’t have something booked that night of the week? Say yes.’ [laughs] You want to do this? Let’s do it.
We had just a blast. You asked before about why was it formed? I’ll say this, maybe, the only one I can think of who might have been thinking ahead, because he’s always been more motivated and goal-oriented, Besser might have been thinking that way, but I think the rest of us were just bums, just doing it because it was fun. I think that was actually so to our benefit. We just followed what we wanted to do. Nothing was geared to make history. Nothing was made to be palatable or get us ahead. It was just whatever occurs to us that we think is interesting.
I think it was a great thing for us. We were just pursuing comedy and found our sensibility. At the very end, when we started thinking about going to New York, then we made it pure sketch shows. It had never been pure sketch shows, but there were still elements that were interesting. We used the Harold format in our scripted material, having scenes come together, tie together. That was something that still made it not just a straight ahead sketch show. We definitely became a lot more straight ahead than we had been for the last four or five years, whatever it was.
JF: Did you ever want to get more experimental with your TV show?
IR: No, we were happy with it. There’s no regrets for the Upright Citizens Brigade television show. I mean that was pretty frickin experimental. [laughs] That was the Harold format on TV. Nobody had ever done exactly that. Monty Python had that great form of the tangent flow of the show. One element takes you to the whole next scene. You follow one tangent that goes all over the place. You always hesitate to profess to have invented the wheel, but I don’t know. I don’t think anybody else did that Harold format before, where you have these scenes that seem unrelated and by the end the elements come together. We always did that in the Upright Citizens Brigade shows.
And that frame was kind of crazy, guys who are patrolling the world, secretly causing chaos. It wasn’t the most straight ahead show in the world.
JF: [laughs] Yeah, that’s true. So, what was the experience of moving to New York like? And what did you think of New York the city and the artistic community when you got there?
IR: Personally, I can’t speak for the other guys in the group, but in Chicago I felt completely not goal-oriented. It was like looking two inches in front of your face, or thinking one minute ahead. It was just like ‘Whatever. Let’s do this. Let’s do this.’
Moving to New York, that’s when the group became what it became, the one that’s cemented the Upright Citizens Brigade, me, Walsh, Besser, Amy. It was that group. We sat down at the Salt and Pepper diner, which was near where the Improv Olympic was. We said ‘Look, we have to move, to either New York or L.A.’ I think the what happened was Besser had a manager from 3 Arts, Dave Becke. So, all this time Besser was telling Dave Becke ‘You’ve got to see my sketch group The Upright Citizens Brigade.’
So, we finally went out in did a showcase of the show we were running in Chicago in New York. People responded to it. Dave Becke signed us up off of that show, I believe. He called us back and said ‘Hey, some people didn’t get out for the first time. You’ve got to come back. Some people still want to see you.’ So almost two weeks later, we went out again to do another one time show. Then after that we sat down in that diner and said ‘Look, we’ve got to move.’
It was really rough for Amy and Walsh. Besser and I were instantly up for it. We were like ‘Whatever. We’ll go,’ but Walsh had his whole family in Chicago and was doing Second City and that was an option. Amy had been offered to get one of the Main Stages, either the ETC or the Main Stage of Second City. It was like ‘Wow, really? We’re going to go?’ Then we said ‘We’ve got to go. This is huge. We’re good. We could get a TV show.’ We just agreed. We made a year commitment that we would do nothing else that would take us away from the group completely. So, I didn’t even audition for anything. You could do day work, like be on the Conan O’Brien show, or a one day role on a movie or something like that, but it was complete commitment to the Upright Citizens Brigade, that was what we were pursuing.
We came to New York with two scripted shows and doing an improv show, and going to the big open mic at the time, which was ‘Eating It’ at the Luna Lounge. It was an open mic for alternative comedy. So, we were basically onstage four nights a week almost instantly. I think the feeling was ‘Who are these guys?’ We didn’t kind of like just slowly come up. We had been doing that away from New York. We didn’t need that. We had been doing shows quietly just for the sake of doing shows. When we got there it was like ‘Boom. Let’s go. Get industry to the shows. You can see us any night of the week.’
We put up two sketch shows at the same time at different theaters, started ASSSSCAT our free improv show, and we would do Luna every week. No one did Luna every week. We’d go there every single week and work out a new bit. Improv was really helpful with that. Some people really need to script things and memorize them perfectly. We would, the day of, throw out some concepts, pick a concept, basically kind of beat it out, then improvise through it. And industry came to that. So, we kind of quickly saturated people’s awareness of the Upright Citizens Brigade.
What it was like improv-wise, there was really no long-form improv. Off of ASSSSCAT, we started teaching classes and at the beginning we got this crazy, crazy high-caliber of people. They all started taking the classes. They were great already great, but hadn’t found a place to do what we were doing. It was kind of the same way that I came to Chicago, but in reverse. I came to Chicago somewhat waiting to be activated, to find the thing that I was good at. That happened when I found Improv Olympic. But it kind of worked in reverse in New York. There were tons of people with great skills who wanted to do open improv, but there was no place to do it. You’re kind of hesitant to make the ‘We invented the wheel kind of statement,’ but I think that we kind of introduced long-form into New York City.
JF: So what were those early classes like in New York? How do you fine-tune these improvisers who have a lot of experience, but want to do long-form?
IR: Most people who are funny have some sort of naïve understanding of ‘the game.’ There is something to having that formalized for you, and no longer depending upon inspiration. You know the fundamentals are there for you. I think that’s the difference. I don’t want to name names, because to do it you’ve got to first say that they weren’t as fantastic as they’ve now become, but suffice to say, there are people now in New York who blow people away, they’re fantastic, they’re some of the best comedy improvisers in the country, they had some bad habits. They would make jokes, and kind of wreck a scene by trying to be funny instead of following the game. I think what’s good for people to understand is ‘Here’s what we’re doing. Here’s how you do this.’
I think the best compliment you can get, if you’re doing what we’re doing well, is for someone to say ‘No way was that improvised. That was a written scene.’ What we’re trying to do is kind of to improvise a sketch. A sketch has a game. Someone wrote it. They know what the focus of the scene is. If you improvise the way we teach to improvise, at it’s best, that’s what it’s like. It seems like a scripted scene. I think that we help people be able to more dependably do improv that seems like a well-written sketch.
JF: How much input do you guys have at the UCB Theater? And do you guys have a goal with the UCB Theater or is that goal just to let people do what they enjoy doing?
IR: I’d say that what goes up in our theater is every kind of comedy except for mainstream sketch. I think there’s no other theater in New York that’s exactly that. We’re not an improv theater. We’re a comedy theater, but improv is kind of the big teaching base with that concept of the game pervading everything that’s done there.
I feel that the game is at the heart of all comedy: patterns, narrowing the behavior of people. The same way caricature kind of exaggerates certain physical characteristics of a person, the game sort of takes life and exaggerates certain aspects. Instead of something being one awkward, unusual behavior, it becomes a dependable pattern. That’s basically what the art of all comedy is. We have all kind of comedy at our theater. We even have stand-up. It tends to be more alternative. We do comedy musical stuff. We do one person shows. We do improv, sketch.
The goal of the theater is to be a place where that if you’re good, we’ll put you up at our theater. Like when people try to define pornography, they say ‘I know it why I see it.’ When there’s something that matches well with the UCB Theater, we know it when we see it. Is it funny? Is it not generic or old-fashioned? Is it a unique point of view? All this sounds pretentious, but is it challenging? We pick Artistic Directors who are some of the best people at our theater. We feel like they have a good idea, and that they’ll like what we like. The whole idea is that when people come to the theater they feel like they’re seeing an Upright Citizens Brigade show. ‘Oh yeah, that’s the kind of stuff that gets done at that theater.’ The Aspen Comedy people come to our theater to find great shows to take to Aspen. I think it’s now coming to the point where the industry knows that ‘Yeah, we should go to the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater to cast comedy stuff.’
I know that’s kind of general, but I think our goal is to have great comedy that’s not mainstream boring. At one end of the spectrum, there’s the most easily digestible sitcom that’s on TV. We hope to be somewhere on the other end of the continuum. Hopefully, it’s challenging and unique.
JF: Do you think that ‘the game’ ever gets a bad wrap?
IR: Yes, I think that there are a lot of places that position ourselves in opposition to us. They kind of refer to the game derisively, and say that ‘We do relationship-based improv or we do slow improv,’ or something. I find that very bogus.
If it’s funny, it is the game. You can do the game badly or you can do the game well, but there is nothing to criticize about the game done well. This thing about relationship scenes, we do have relationship in our scenes. My explanation is relationship is covered by the yesand part of improv. I kind of divide finding your scene into two aspects. The beginning is yesand part where you’re kind of fleshing out the world of the scene. The game part is the if-then part. You’re not just agreeing with the person and adding more information. You stop adding information and narrow it down. You start playing a pattern. If this happens, then this would happen and this would happen. That’s the game part of the scene.
As far as relationship, that gets developed in the yesanding. In yesanding, I say something that acknowledges the reality that you just brought up and adds information. I can only do that with someone I’m in a relationship with. How can I add to that reality if I don’t share that reality?
What I see in people who set themselves up in opposition with what we do and say they do relationship improv is people calling each other ‘Ma’ and ‘Pa’ and speaking in Southern accents, doing unfunny improv that meanders and is lousy. I think to sell themselves they need to offer something unique. Often the thing the unique thing they’re offering in terms of comedy improv [is unsound]. I’ll debate anybody on this: if there’s no game, there’s no comedy. If you’re setting yourself up as ‘We’re anti-game.’ Well, go ahead. I’m not interested. If it’s funny, they are doing the game, despite the fact that they’re not acknowledging it. This other thing of slow improv, you know, whatever. Speed has nothing to do with anything.
So, yeah, I think it does get a bad wrap. It’s completely fake. It’s completely false. Anybody who’s criticizing the game is just trying to sell a product. They’ve got to say they’ve got something different than what we’re doing.
Now, the game can be done badly. That’s a thrust in our organization, to make sure we keep our people [on point]. For us the [crux] of comedy is the game, but you’ve got to play things at the top of your intelligence. What does that mean? It doesn’t mean use big words, or share specific information that only you know. What that means is react like a human being. If people aren’t doing that, well, that’s part of good improv. That sneaks out sometimes. People are playing the game, but not reacting like they would. I always teach people in classes ‘When you start playing the game, do think ‘Oh now I’m doing comedy’ and now you stop being a human being.’ Almost every time you do a scene basically as crazy as that seems it’s probably happened, in the grand scheme of things.
In comedy, you’re showing the day that broke the pattern. The only memories you even have in your life are the days when things didn’t go the way you would have them go. You remember the day that you got the crazy cab driver or you made a fool of yourself or you messed up the dinner. So, when you’re playing a game, don’t now go into some freaky comedy acting. Just respond. Just be a human being. It goes on both sides. When you are kind of driving the game and exhibiting the unusual behavior, realize no one sets out to be an idiot. If you agree that people are pursing pleasure and avoid pain, that’s the best choice they could make at that moment.
Stuff like this gets brought up in straight acting. There’s this quote from Lee Marvin. They asked him ‘How do you feel about having played so many villains through your career?’ He said ‘I’ve never played a villain. I’ve played people who were making the best choices they could given the circumstances they were given.’ Like they say when you’re a villain and you’re acting, don’t twirl your mustache. Don’t ‘be a villain.’ Just be who you are. It’s the same thing. When you’re being an idiot in comedy, think of your own life. Think of all the idiotic, stupid things you’ve done. At the time just before you did these things you said ‘Yup, let’s do that,’ and you pursued it with belief that made sense.
I think sometimes when the game gets a bad wrap it’s because people aren’t doing all the work involved in playing the game. There’s also an acting aspect of it. There’s ‘play at the top of your intelligence,’ which means pursue it like you belief it’s a worthy goal.
We meet these people in life. If there’s someone you can think to imitate, the reason you can imitate them is because you can paw them down to some salient qualities. You’re like ‘Oh, that idiot,’ but they’re a human being in their life. They’re not a comedy character.
So, I don’t know. I think sometimes people aren’t doing all the work, and they’re going around saying they’re doing game improv. They’re just not doing it well. But done well, I don’t see how you can have a problem with it. Improv that uses the game, that’s basically every Monty Python scene, every Kids in the Hall scene, every Upright Citizens Brigade scene. Scripted comedy has a game. If I can make my improv comedy look like scripted, which is what happens if you play the game well, if you don’t like that, then I’m not interested in doing something you like. So, go ahead. You do your thing. I’ll do mine.
JF: With the students that you’ve taught have you found it more important to focus on acting skills or more on playing the game skills?
IR: It changes. I think at the beginning you focus a lot on the game. When I teach I tend to teach a level four, you have to have a couple early classes, and I work a lot on the acting aspect of it, the playing it real. What would you do? That can kill a game [if you’re not acting properly]. A lot of times I compare it to handball. You need to be a wall for somebody, a solid wall. If someone hits the ball and you don’t come back with what you would do, the ball just kind of trickles off and the other person is left hanging.
It’s stuff like that. The person who’s driving the game, they have a pattern of behavior that’s unusual. It might be required that you just respond the way that you would respond. This is somebody that you are in a relationship with and they’re doing this. What would you say to that? What would you do? And the degree to which you to it is the degree to which you’re helping your scene partner. When someone’s kind of driving the game, they’ve got some sort of unusual behavior, they believe in that. If you respond to it, if you resist it, if you are shocked by it, if you challenge them on it, you give them something to do. They believe in that. They’re going to continue pursuing it. But if you don’t give them what realistically they need back, the scene dies.
I find the higher level I get I find sometimes the more fundamental I get, because you realize you still need to learn the most basic, basic thing. I used to think yesanding is like a primary color. You don’t mix anything to make it. It just is. It’s even hard to describe. It’s like what is blue? Well, blue is blue. Blue is things that are blue. I don’t know how to describe it or break it down further.
Well, here’s what yesanding is: implicitly agreeing with what that person says or even the reality, and adding to it. Then I came up with an excersize to break down yesanding to help people yesand better. This is based off of this belief that there’s this flash that happens. For everything you hear, it conjures up something unique to you, because your experience, what that means to you. So, they’ll say a line to you and you say back ‘That makes me think of…’ You’re just reporting what happened when that line got said. So, someone said that line to you and it brings up the image of a high school cafeteria from your past. ‘That makes me think of my high school cafeteria where this was this woman who used to shake. When she brought the fries to the plate, you’d lose half the fries, because she shook so much.’
Then you develop a fictional line that uses that specific information of yours. The hope is that you drill that enough that when someone says a line to you you’re in touch with your specific reality of what that brings up to you, and you fictionalize it. What’s that going to do is it’s going to give you a yesand line that’s unique and has specific information in it that only you could bring to do to the scene. When they do that and do it well, working from a one word suggestion in open scene work, not based on a monologue, bringing no premise to a scene, within three lines something comes up that’s unusual and specific that gets them on the path to finding the game.
So, that’s an example of working on a thing that’s so fundamental, but it can be incredibly useful. I said that my ideal of improv would be to do a scene where someone comes up and says ‘There’s no way that was improvised. It was too perfect. That was a written sketch.’ Well, a written sketch, since it’s only three to five minutes, has a set-up that’s incredibly short. You do have this need to set up the world as it is, as it was, before the comedy, so they know why it’s funny. In movies, they call it ‘The World Before.’ It’s that ten to fifteen minutes that shows how the world was, the inciting incident happens, then we go on to the whole comedy of the movie, then we resolve it and return order. You have something similar to that in sketch, typically only two to three lines, which kind of set up the normal expectation: the generic, neutral way we’d expect things to go, if it was like the way we hope most things go, which is to not be bumpy, to not be extreme, to not upset the order, but then you right away start having the comedy come in.
What happens sometimes with people working from neutral in improv is you get a minute and a half of yesanding with no comedy. Nothing unusual has happened yet. I think that’s because people are yesanding too generally. They’re not using their specific reality. They’re not yesanding very well. But with this exercise you’ll find invariably, there I go again, there’s some slight variation, they’ll get to the unusual thing in the scene within five lines maximum and so often three. If you can get good at that, you can be consistently a better improviser, because you’ll have scenes that will be funny really quickly.
That’s the thing when I hear about this slow comedy, or as if there’s some value to not getting to the game, how is that valuable? If that’s what it means. If that’s what the outcome is. Would you think it was a good sketch, if a Monty Python sketch had a minute and a half that wasn’t funny? You’d say ‘They’re usually better than that.’ Or any sketch team that you admire. In my mind, when we’re doing long-form, we’re doing improvised sketch. So, let’s have it get to the comedy the same way sketch does.
IR: [laughs] The audience response would be like ‘Waaaah?’ There was no reason to expect anything but comedy from Improv Olympic. The first night we did the show, I can’t remember what it was but it definitely was along the lines a rape, a child molestation, some horrible murder. There was just silence in the theater, then from the back you hear ‘HAHAHAHA’ [laughs]. He just loved that the audience was so freaked out by it. I think people were also kind of interested.
Those were some pretty good shows. The first one was ‘3 Mad Rituals.’ The second one was ‘Dynamite Fun Nest.’ That name was come up with by some word generator Del had. Both of those shows were great. I think people were at least interested in that.
It was amazing working with Del. It’s like I’m coasting [now]. I’ve worked on improv tons as a teacher, but I’ve never [been as submerged as deeply in it as I was then]. I think improv’s kind of a young person’s thing, because you never get paid for it. To be good, like any thing else in the world, you have to be working on it minimum three days a week, minimum. If you really want to be great, why wouldn’t you be working six days a week and then really why not seven? What pianist wouldn’t? What dancer wouldn’t? What painter?
But very few people get the opportunity to put in the effort you need to get really good. For a while there, the guys from the Upright Citizens Brigade all hung out together all the time. We were either rehearsing for Upright Citizens Brigade shows or hanging out together. When we hung out, we would do bits constantly, so we were honing our game-finding ability. We were always playing games.
Then we got this very formal work with Del, where we’re rehearsing three to five days a week for months on end. As a performer, that’s my big base that I got one time in my life. At the time, it’s conceited to say, but what the hell, we were a great team. There’s no secret to it. We were naturally talented guys, but we worked our asses off for a while there. And we had a great sense of ensemble because we hung out together all the time. Still when we get on stage together it’s effortless, because we just know each other so well. It will always be there.
JF: Why did The Family break up? And do you ever regret The Family breaking up?
IR: No, you can’t. We broke up because improv comedy doesn’t pay. People get gigs and that’s the end of it, you know? Adam McKay got hired by Second City. I got hired by Second City. Neil Flynn was always pursuing acting and he moved to L.A. eventually.
It’s too bad the world isn’t into improv and that can’t be a thing in and of itself. Basically, I think that no improv team can stay together [forever]. Like I say, even getting good at improv is a young person’s thing, because how can you commit? It doesn’t pay, so you have to do it in your off hours. You do it at night. Or, we were such a bunch of bums we actually did do it during the day, because no one had jobs. But once you’ve got a wife and a kid you can’t be going away every night and doing shows and rehearsing. It doesn’t pay.
When I’m teaching, I say ‘You want to get good at this? How many of you are in an ensemble? You’re on a team at a theater or have a practice group. How often are you rehearsing?’ It’s like ‘Once a week.’ I tell them ‘You know what? You will never be a great team. It’s going to take minimum, minimum three days a week.’
I always tell them how I love the title of the book ‘Respect for Acting.’ I don’t really love the book. I don’t really think it’s a great book that teaches acting, but I love that title. I love what that means. You have to have a method to do it. You have to practice it like anything else. The whole thing about my, our teaching is that everything has rules. We have lots of rules to teach improv, because if you didn’t …because you hear a lot of bullshit. How can you have any way to do it, because they’re not teaching you anything dependable like you would have in other art forms? Do this. Do this. Do this. Here’s a way to do it.
I used to hear when I would do exercises in improv class ‘This is putting me in my head.’ It’s a subtle criticism. It’s kind of saying ‘How is this a good exercise? I feel less good working on this than when I started.’ And it used to challenge me. I’d feel bad. ‘Wow, am I teaching them poorly?’ Then I realized of course it puts you in your head. [laughs] By putting you in your head, you mean you’re having to consciously work to try to do this. It’s the same thing when you’re learning a sport. When you learn the fundamentals of a sport, you had to concentrate to do them, so you can be ‘in the zone,’ unconscious when you’re actually playing. You’ve practiced these fundamentals so much now they feel like second nature.
If you buy the concept that we’re not instinctual animals, we’re habitual animals, we learn what we do by habit, then how do you work to make this a habit? I always use sports analogies when I teach improv. There’s a saying in sports: ‘Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.’ Don’t just get together with a group of people and improvise five days a week. Have a focus in your rehearsal. What are you working on to get better? What exercise are you going to work on? The same way they might drill with some sport. Work on some fundamental of it.
JF: How did the UCB start and what did you hope to get out of the UCB that you weren’t getting elsewhere?
IR: One thing was to do scripted work, and also to do concept shows. The beginning especially they were concept shows. The first one was Virtual Reality. That was one that seems like so nothing now. One of the guys in the group introduced me to this new thing, virtual reality, putting on goggles. You feel like you’re in a different world. It was brand new at the time.
Half of the show was improvising with audience members. We’d bring them up and I’d be this guy who was supposed to be a holographic projection, Cyber Guy John. Cyber Guy John would bring you up on stage and you’d participate in a scene. They’d be the President of the United States in a crisis, and we’d improvise around them.
One of the cool ones was a virtual road trip. Adam McKay would take out an audience member in my crappy Ford Festiva. We’d film it. He’d take them all over town as though they were going cross country, then we’d come back. Somebody would edit it back stage, and we’d show it during the show. During that road trip, McKay or one of the guys in the group would hit Horatio Sanz with my car. The audience would think it really happened. He’d get up and run back to the theater. Then later in the show we’d show that virtual road trip and you’d see from the inside of the car Horatio Sanz getting hit by my car. So, it was crazy conceptual type of stuff.
But how it started was there was a group before the Upright Citizens Brigade called Cerebral Stripmine, then that broke apart. McKay and Besser and Horatio Sanz, that was really the core. There were guys who did peripheral stuff, film stuff and bits during the show. Then they asked me if I wanted to start the Upright Citizens Brigade, and I did. I wasn’t improvising with them. I was on some other teams. I guess they liked my work and asked me to be in it. Thank God I was the kind of guy who said yes to anything at the time. I say that to any young performer: ‘You don’t have something booked that night of the week? Say yes.’ [laughs] You want to do this? Let’s do it.
We had just a blast. You asked before about why was it formed? I’ll say this, maybe, the only one I can think of who might have been thinking ahead, because he’s always been more motivated and goal-oriented, Besser might have been thinking that way, but I think the rest of us were just bums, just doing it because it was fun. I think that was actually so to our benefit. We just followed what we wanted to do. Nothing was geared to make history. Nothing was made to be palatable or get us ahead. It was just whatever occurs to us that we think is interesting.
I think it was a great thing for us. We were just pursuing comedy and found our sensibility. At the very end, when we started thinking about going to New York, then we made it pure sketch shows. It had never been pure sketch shows, but there were still elements that were interesting. We used the Harold format in our scripted material, having scenes come together, tie together. That was something that still made it not just a straight ahead sketch show. We definitely became a lot more straight ahead than we had been for the last four or five years, whatever it was.
JF: Did you ever want to get more experimental with your TV show?
IR: No, we were happy with it. There’s no regrets for the Upright Citizens Brigade television show. I mean that was pretty frickin experimental. [laughs] That was the Harold format on TV. Nobody had ever done exactly that. Monty Python had that great form of the tangent flow of the show. One element takes you to the whole next scene. You follow one tangent that goes all over the place. You always hesitate to profess to have invented the wheel, but I don’t know. I don’t think anybody else did that Harold format before, where you have these scenes that seem unrelated and by the end the elements come together. We always did that in the Upright Citizens Brigade shows.
And that frame was kind of crazy, guys who are patrolling the world, secretly causing chaos. It wasn’t the most straight ahead show in the world.
JF: [laughs] Yeah, that’s true. So, what was the experience of moving to New York like? And what did you think of New York the city and the artistic community when you got there?
IR: Personally, I can’t speak for the other guys in the group, but in Chicago I felt completely not goal-oriented. It was like looking two inches in front of your face, or thinking one minute ahead. It was just like ‘Whatever. Let’s do this. Let’s do this.’
Moving to New York, that’s when the group became what it became, the one that’s cemented the Upright Citizens Brigade, me, Walsh, Besser, Amy. It was that group. We sat down at the Salt and Pepper diner, which was near where the Improv Olympic was. We said ‘Look, we have to move, to either New York or L.A.’ I think the what happened was Besser had a manager from 3 Arts, Dave Becke. So, all this time Besser was telling Dave Becke ‘You’ve got to see my sketch group The Upright Citizens Brigade.’
So, we finally went out in did a showcase of the show we were running in Chicago in New York. People responded to it. Dave Becke signed us up off of that show, I believe. He called us back and said ‘Hey, some people didn’t get out for the first time. You’ve got to come back. Some people still want to see you.’ So almost two weeks later, we went out again to do another one time show. Then after that we sat down in that diner and said ‘Look, we’ve got to move.’
It was really rough for Amy and Walsh. Besser and I were instantly up for it. We were like ‘Whatever. We’ll go,’ but Walsh had his whole family in Chicago and was doing Second City and that was an option. Amy had been offered to get one of the Main Stages, either the ETC or the Main Stage of Second City. It was like ‘Wow, really? We’re going to go?’ Then we said ‘We’ve got to go. This is huge. We’re good. We could get a TV show.’ We just agreed. We made a year commitment that we would do nothing else that would take us away from the group completely. So, I didn’t even audition for anything. You could do day work, like be on the Conan O’Brien show, or a one day role on a movie or something like that, but it was complete commitment to the Upright Citizens Brigade, that was what we were pursuing.
We came to New York with two scripted shows and doing an improv show, and going to the big open mic at the time, which was ‘Eating It’ at the Luna Lounge. It was an open mic for alternative comedy. So, we were basically onstage four nights a week almost instantly. I think the feeling was ‘Who are these guys?’ We didn’t kind of like just slowly come up. We had been doing that away from New York. We didn’t need that. We had been doing shows quietly just for the sake of doing shows. When we got there it was like ‘Boom. Let’s go. Get industry to the shows. You can see us any night of the week.’
We put up two sketch shows at the same time at different theaters, started ASSSSCAT our free improv show, and we would do Luna every week. No one did Luna every week. We’d go there every single week and work out a new bit. Improv was really helpful with that. Some people really need to script things and memorize them perfectly. We would, the day of, throw out some concepts, pick a concept, basically kind of beat it out, then improvise through it. And industry came to that. So, we kind of quickly saturated people’s awareness of the Upright Citizens Brigade.
What it was like improv-wise, there was really no long-form improv. Off of ASSSSCAT, we started teaching classes and at the beginning we got this crazy, crazy high-caliber of people. They all started taking the classes. They were great already great, but hadn’t found a place to do what we were doing. It was kind of the same way that I came to Chicago, but in reverse. I came to Chicago somewhat waiting to be activated, to find the thing that I was good at. That happened when I found Improv Olympic. But it kind of worked in reverse in New York. There were tons of people with great skills who wanted to do open improv, but there was no place to do it. You’re kind of hesitant to make the ‘We invented the wheel kind of statement,’ but I think that we kind of introduced long-form into New York City.
JF: So what were those early classes like in New York? How do you fine-tune these improvisers who have a lot of experience, but want to do long-form?
IR: Most people who are funny have some sort of naïve understanding of ‘the game.’ There is something to having that formalized for you, and no longer depending upon inspiration. You know the fundamentals are there for you. I think that’s the difference. I don’t want to name names, because to do it you’ve got to first say that they weren’t as fantastic as they’ve now become, but suffice to say, there are people now in New York who blow people away, they’re fantastic, they’re some of the best comedy improvisers in the country, they had some bad habits. They would make jokes, and kind of wreck a scene by trying to be funny instead of following the game. I think what’s good for people to understand is ‘Here’s what we’re doing. Here’s how you do this.’
I think the best compliment you can get, if you’re doing what we’re doing well, is for someone to say ‘No way was that improvised. That was a written scene.’ What we’re trying to do is kind of to improvise a sketch. A sketch has a game. Someone wrote it. They know what the focus of the scene is. If you improvise the way we teach to improvise, at it’s best, that’s what it’s like. It seems like a scripted scene. I think that we help people be able to more dependably do improv that seems like a well-written sketch.
JF: How much input do you guys have at the UCB Theater? And do you guys have a goal with the UCB Theater or is that goal just to let people do what they enjoy doing?
IR: I’d say that what goes up in our theater is every kind of comedy except for mainstream sketch. I think there’s no other theater in New York that’s exactly that. We’re not an improv theater. We’re a comedy theater, but improv is kind of the big teaching base with that concept of the game pervading everything that’s done there.
I feel that the game is at the heart of all comedy: patterns, narrowing the behavior of people. The same way caricature kind of exaggerates certain physical characteristics of a person, the game sort of takes life and exaggerates certain aspects. Instead of something being one awkward, unusual behavior, it becomes a dependable pattern. That’s basically what the art of all comedy is. We have all kind of comedy at our theater. We even have stand-up. It tends to be more alternative. We do comedy musical stuff. We do one person shows. We do improv, sketch.
The goal of the theater is to be a place where that if you’re good, we’ll put you up at our theater. Like when people try to define pornography, they say ‘I know it why I see it.’ When there’s something that matches well with the UCB Theater, we know it when we see it. Is it funny? Is it not generic or old-fashioned? Is it a unique point of view? All this sounds pretentious, but is it challenging? We pick Artistic Directors who are some of the best people at our theater. We feel like they have a good idea, and that they’ll like what we like. The whole idea is that when people come to the theater they feel like they’re seeing an Upright Citizens Brigade show. ‘Oh yeah, that’s the kind of stuff that gets done at that theater.’ The Aspen Comedy people come to our theater to find great shows to take to Aspen. I think it’s now coming to the point where the industry knows that ‘Yeah, we should go to the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater to cast comedy stuff.’
I know that’s kind of general, but I think our goal is to have great comedy that’s not mainstream boring. At one end of the spectrum, there’s the most easily digestible sitcom that’s on TV. We hope to be somewhere on the other end of the continuum. Hopefully, it’s challenging and unique.
JF: Do you think that ‘the game’ ever gets a bad wrap?
IR: Yes, I think that there are a lot of places that position ourselves in opposition to us. They kind of refer to the game derisively, and say that ‘We do relationship-based improv or we do slow improv,’ or something. I find that very bogus.
If it’s funny, it is the game. You can do the game badly or you can do the game well, but there is nothing to criticize about the game done well. This thing about relationship scenes, we do have relationship in our scenes. My explanation is relationship is covered by the yesand part of improv. I kind of divide finding your scene into two aspects. The beginning is yesand part where you’re kind of fleshing out the world of the scene. The game part is the if-then part. You’re not just agreeing with the person and adding more information. You stop adding information and narrow it down. You start playing a pattern. If this happens, then this would happen and this would happen. That’s the game part of the scene.
As far as relationship, that gets developed in the yesanding. In yesanding, I say something that acknowledges the reality that you just brought up and adds information. I can only do that with someone I’m in a relationship with. How can I add to that reality if I don’t share that reality?
What I see in people who set themselves up in opposition with what we do and say they do relationship improv is people calling each other ‘Ma’ and ‘Pa’ and speaking in Southern accents, doing unfunny improv that meanders and is lousy. I think to sell themselves they need to offer something unique. Often the thing the unique thing they’re offering in terms of comedy improv [is unsound]. I’ll debate anybody on this: if there’s no game, there’s no comedy. If you’re setting yourself up as ‘We’re anti-game.’ Well, go ahead. I’m not interested. If it’s funny, they are doing the game, despite the fact that they’re not acknowledging it. This other thing of slow improv, you know, whatever. Speed has nothing to do with anything.
So, yeah, I think it does get a bad wrap. It’s completely fake. It’s completely false. Anybody who’s criticizing the game is just trying to sell a product. They’ve got to say they’ve got something different than what we’re doing.
Now, the game can be done badly. That’s a thrust in our organization, to make sure we keep our people [on point]. For us the [crux] of comedy is the game, but you’ve got to play things at the top of your intelligence. What does that mean? It doesn’t mean use big words, or share specific information that only you know. What that means is react like a human being. If people aren’t doing that, well, that’s part of good improv. That sneaks out sometimes. People are playing the game, but not reacting like they would. I always teach people in classes ‘When you start playing the game, do think ‘Oh now I’m doing comedy’ and now you stop being a human being.’ Almost every time you do a scene basically as crazy as that seems it’s probably happened, in the grand scheme of things.
In comedy, you’re showing the day that broke the pattern. The only memories you even have in your life are the days when things didn’t go the way you would have them go. You remember the day that you got the crazy cab driver or you made a fool of yourself or you messed up the dinner. So, when you’re playing a game, don’t now go into some freaky comedy acting. Just respond. Just be a human being. It goes on both sides. When you are kind of driving the game and exhibiting the unusual behavior, realize no one sets out to be an idiot. If you agree that people are pursing pleasure and avoid pain, that’s the best choice they could make at that moment.
Stuff like this gets brought up in straight acting. There’s this quote from Lee Marvin. They asked him ‘How do you feel about having played so many villains through your career?’ He said ‘I’ve never played a villain. I’ve played people who were making the best choices they could given the circumstances they were given.’ Like they say when you’re a villain and you’re acting, don’t twirl your mustache. Don’t ‘be a villain.’ Just be who you are. It’s the same thing. When you’re being an idiot in comedy, think of your own life. Think of all the idiotic, stupid things you’ve done. At the time just before you did these things you said ‘Yup, let’s do that,’ and you pursued it with belief that made sense.
I think sometimes when the game gets a bad wrap it’s because people aren’t doing all the work involved in playing the game. There’s also an acting aspect of it. There’s ‘play at the top of your intelligence,’ which means pursue it like you belief it’s a worthy goal.
We meet these people in life. If there’s someone you can think to imitate, the reason you can imitate them is because you can paw them down to some salient qualities. You’re like ‘Oh, that idiot,’ but they’re a human being in their life. They’re not a comedy character.
So, I don’t know. I think sometimes people aren’t doing all the work, and they’re going around saying they’re doing game improv. They’re just not doing it well. But done well, I don’t see how you can have a problem with it. Improv that uses the game, that’s basically every Monty Python scene, every Kids in the Hall scene, every Upright Citizens Brigade scene. Scripted comedy has a game. If I can make my improv comedy look like scripted, which is what happens if you play the game well, if you don’t like that, then I’m not interested in doing something you like. So, go ahead. You do your thing. I’ll do mine.
JF: With the students that you’ve taught have you found it more important to focus on acting skills or more on playing the game skills?
IR: It changes. I think at the beginning you focus a lot on the game. When I teach I tend to teach a level four, you have to have a couple early classes, and I work a lot on the acting aspect of it, the playing it real. What would you do? That can kill a game [if you’re not acting properly]. A lot of times I compare it to handball. You need to be a wall for somebody, a solid wall. If someone hits the ball and you don’t come back with what you would do, the ball just kind of trickles off and the other person is left hanging.
It’s stuff like that. The person who’s driving the game, they have a pattern of behavior that’s unusual. It might be required that you just respond the way that you would respond. This is somebody that you are in a relationship with and they’re doing this. What would you say to that? What would you do? And the degree to which you to it is the degree to which you’re helping your scene partner. When someone’s kind of driving the game, they’ve got some sort of unusual behavior, they believe in that. If you respond to it, if you resist it, if you are shocked by it, if you challenge them on it, you give them something to do. They believe in that. They’re going to continue pursuing it. But if you don’t give them what realistically they need back, the scene dies.
I find the higher level I get I find sometimes the more fundamental I get, because you realize you still need to learn the most basic, basic thing. I used to think yesanding is like a primary color. You don’t mix anything to make it. It just is. It’s even hard to describe. It’s like what is blue? Well, blue is blue. Blue is things that are blue. I don’t know how to describe it or break it down further.
Well, here’s what yesanding is: implicitly agreeing with what that person says or even the reality, and adding to it. Then I came up with an excersize to break down yesanding to help people yesand better. This is based off of this belief that there’s this flash that happens. For everything you hear, it conjures up something unique to you, because your experience, what that means to you. So, they’ll say a line to you and you say back ‘That makes me think of…’ You’re just reporting what happened when that line got said. So, someone said that line to you and it brings up the image of a high school cafeteria from your past. ‘That makes me think of my high school cafeteria where this was this woman who used to shake. When she brought the fries to the plate, you’d lose half the fries, because she shook so much.’
Then you develop a fictional line that uses that specific information of yours. The hope is that you drill that enough that when someone says a line to you you’re in touch with your specific reality of what that brings up to you, and you fictionalize it. What’s that going to do is it’s going to give you a yesand line that’s unique and has specific information in it that only you could bring to do to the scene. When they do that and do it well, working from a one word suggestion in open scene work, not based on a monologue, bringing no premise to a scene, within three lines something comes up that’s unusual and specific that gets them on the path to finding the game.
So, that’s an example of working on a thing that’s so fundamental, but it can be incredibly useful. I said that my ideal of improv would be to do a scene where someone comes up and says ‘There’s no way that was improvised. It was too perfect. That was a written sketch.’ Well, a written sketch, since it’s only three to five minutes, has a set-up that’s incredibly short. You do have this need to set up the world as it is, as it was, before the comedy, so they know why it’s funny. In movies, they call it ‘The World Before.’ It’s that ten to fifteen minutes that shows how the world was, the inciting incident happens, then we go on to the whole comedy of the movie, then we resolve it and return order. You have something similar to that in sketch, typically only two to three lines, which kind of set up the normal expectation: the generic, neutral way we’d expect things to go, if it was like the way we hope most things go, which is to not be bumpy, to not be extreme, to not upset the order, but then you right away start having the comedy come in.
What happens sometimes with people working from neutral in improv is you get a minute and a half of yesanding with no comedy. Nothing unusual has happened yet. I think that’s because people are yesanding too generally. They’re not using their specific reality. They’re not yesanding very well. But with this exercise you’ll find invariably, there I go again, there’s some slight variation, they’ll get to the unusual thing in the scene within five lines maximum and so often three. If you can get good at that, you can be consistently a better improviser, because you’ll have scenes that will be funny really quickly.
That’s the thing when I hear about this slow comedy, or as if there’s some value to not getting to the game, how is that valuable? If that’s what it means. If that’s what the outcome is. Would you think it was a good sketch, if a Monty Python sketch had a minute and a half that wasn’t funny? You’d say ‘They’re usually better than that.’ Or any sketch team that you admire. In my mind, when we’re doing long-form, we’re doing improvised sketch. So, let’s have it get to the comedy the same way sketch does.
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