yes please(23)

ImprovOlympic had a mommy and a daddy, and Charna Halpern was the mommy. She is the Stevie Nicks of improvisation. She is feminine and witchy but does not take any shit. Charna was my first real improv teacher and she ran the place. She was responsible for putting groups together, deciding who could proceed to the next level, and making sure everyone was fed. She had the keys to the place—literally and figuratively—a responsibility I didn’t truly understand until much later when I was running a theater of my own. It is incredibly hard to balance ego and opportunity as well as paychecks and liquor license boards. Being a small comedy theater owner is exciting and lonely. The shows are exhilarating, but few people stick around to help you sweep up. Charna took a liking to me, and me to her. She told me I was just as good as the big boys. She believed in me. She said there was another new improviser in another one of her classes whom she thought I would really like. Her name was Tina and she was like me but with brown hair. Yes, yes. I’m getting to it!

If Charna was the mommy, Del Close was the daddy. He was worshipped from afar and the man everyone was trying to please. He also had a beard, a tendency to be grumpy, and an amazing backstory. He was a comedy genius who had taught all of my heroes: Gilda Radner and Bill Murray and Chris Farley. He swallowed fire, toured with Lenny Bruce, named SCTV, and, according to him, was a good friend of Elaine May. He was a respected Chicago theater actor who believed improvisation was not an acting tool but a genuine performance form on its own. Del was also a Wiccan and a drug addict, and I was catching him in the last ten years of his too-short life. His story could fill many books. He is the most famous guy in comedy whom nobody knows. They weren’t married, but Charna was Del’s wife and emotional surrogate who encouraged his genius while running ImprovOlympic and keeping the lights on.

I took a class from a member of the Family, Matt Besser, and we started dating soon after. Matt was a talented Jewish boy from Arkansas who was effortlessly cool. He dressed like a punk rock soccer player. He had a fierceness about him that was exhilarating. He truly didn’t care what people thought. He was also an artist and big thinker. I first saw him onstage playing a Southern female waitress in an improv scene. He paid such fine attention to detail. He played this woman with total grace, while still being really funny. Matt was the first of many men I’ve been attracted to because they know how to play women. He was antsy and cranky and had big plans. He encouraged me to write, create, and take risks. He introduced me to artists like Big Black and GG Allin and helped me film my first “reel,” or excerpts of my best stuff for talent agents. Matt asked me to join the Upright Citizens Brigade, a relatively young sketch group. They needed a girl. I had heard of their shows around town, which seemed like a mixture of improvisation and performance art. They had done a show where each member sat on a street corner and had a Thanksgiving dinner. They did a show where they pretended a member was committing suicide. They did a show where they took an audience member for a virtual-reality tour out into the streets of Chicago. Most of their stuff was about getting the audience out of their chairs and out of their comfort zone. The Upright Citizens Brigade name came from a fake big bad corporation that was mentioned in one of their shows. The idea was this group had co-opted the name and was causing chaos on purpose—picture Occupy Wall Street if they renamed themselves “Halliburton Inc.” Like I said, Matt had big ideas. He had a big plan for the UCB and I wanted to be part of it. I grabbed his coattails and held on tight.

Besser turned me on to Fugazi. He talked about the spirit of Ian MacKaye and how Fugazi never charged a lot for their shows. He wanted the Upright Citizens Brigade to feel like that—owned by the people. We had no plans for a school or theater or television show, but we all felt an itch. I scratched mine reading Daniel Clowes comic books and shopping at thrift stores for old Doc Martens. I went to bars and saw Liz Phair. I lived in a scary part of Chicago and watched police shoot a dog in our backyard. I started improvising with people better than me and got better myself. I started to call myself an artist.

The audience was staring at me as veteran improviser and all-around captain Dave Koechner pointed and yelled, “Sell it!” I had bailed on a scene. That meant I had started a scene with someone and either failed to commit, laughed, or negated that person’s choice. Improvisation is like the military. You leave no man behind. It’s your job to make your partner look good and if you are afraid to look stupid you should probably go home. Improvisation was about not being cool. Nobody stood outside of improv theaters in tiny leather jackets smoking cigarettes. Being “clever” wasn’t rewarded. It was about being in the moment and listening and not being afraid. I had let my partner down and I was being told to “sell it!” This was a way to shame young improvisers. It was a rolled-up-newspaper-swat approach. When Dave Koechner told you to “sell it,” it meant you had to do the monkey dance. The monkey dance was really embarrassing.

I was part of an improv team called Inside Vladimir. We’d named ourselves after a gay porn title we saw at JJ Peppers, a Chicago convenience store that sold only porn and food. Very convenient, indeed. Tina Fey was one of my team members. She was sharp, shy, and hilarious. We took classes together and sat in the back. She would whisper funny and harsh things about Del to me. When we did scenes together, they weren’t particularly funny or interesting. There was absolutely nothing pointing to the fact that anyone on our team would be successful in any kind of comedy career. We were all just trying to keep up. Inside Vladimir performed frequently at ImprovOlympic, and the men on our team were great and supportive and totally fine with Tina and me taking over. Together we wrote a two-woman show that we performed one night only. It was called Women of Color and had a sketch about two policewomen named Powderkeg and Shortfuse. I think we did fifteen minutes of written material and then padded the rest with improv. Soon after, we performed the Del Close–invented long-form structure called “The Dream.” In it, you interviewed a member of the audience about their day and performed what you thought their dream would look like at night. And the gentleman in the audience who raised his hand? A young Seth Meyers. I don’t remember one thing about meeting him but I’m sure in Seth’s memoir he will describe it as the night he saw god.