yes please(38)

It was an interesting time to be doing comedy. Stand-ups had ruled the eighties, with some of them, like Roseanne Barr and Jerry Seinfeld, parlaying their success into eponymous television shows. The nineties were still a time when comedy could make you big bucks if a network wanted to give you a “development deal.” But that was for the select few. For the rest of us, there was a movement happening in New York and Los Angeles, a wave some were calling “alternative comedy.” To some, we seemed like a bunch of green-apple performers reading half-baked ideas out of notebooks. But we knew it was something else. People were trying things out onstage and mixing everything together in an exciting soup. Stand-ups were incorporating music, performance artists told jokes, musicians wrote sketches. Small theaters were offering “alternative” nights, and audiences were treated to performers who were totally different yet tonally compatible. Anything seemed possible. Michael Portnoy (aka Soy Bomb) would contort his body to music and then Sarah Vowell would read a story and then Dave Chappelle would tell jokes. It felt like a language I understood and comedy I could participate in. My improvisational training had prepared me for this. I met Janeane Garofalo at a book club with Andy Richter’s wife, Sarah Thyre. I loved Janeane’s stand-up and her work on The Ben Stiller Show and in Reality Bites. We would walk all over New York and talk about life and art and politics. I would fight the urge to call her my idol and slowly we became close friends. Being in New York felt alive and weird and new.

“The show is not over!” I shouted into the microphone to the young and buzzed Luna Lounge crowd. We announced that we were all going to head across the street for the finale. Once again, the UCB was taking the audience outside. Cynthia True, our good friend and a comedy writer for Time Out New York, was going to stage an event. She would be walking down the street naked in an attempt to raise money and protest her rent increase. What had started as a gentle dare was now going to be a Lower East Side happening. We spilled out onto the sidewalk and I raced around the corner to help Cynthia prepare for her bold strut.

In those first few years in New York we had been lucky. Our second year in the city we found a small dance studio called Solo Arts and made it our de-facto home. It was a five-story walk-up with a wonky floor, and my brother, Greg, served as our bartender. We programmed shows five nights a week and taught classes to pay the rent. At night we drew crowds with our free show, Asssscat, a completely improvised show where we would get an audience suggestion that would inspire a monologist to tell a story, and we would improvise off of those stories. The title Asssscat came from a scene where Horatio and Besser and McKay and others were bombing so badly that they started loudly saying “ass cat” in a singsongy voice. The word represented a giant f*ck-around; a night where anything goes. We did two shows every Sunday. It was the closest thing I had to church.

We supported ourselves with odd jobs and writing gigs. Conan O’Brien’s show was speaking to a massive and young audience, and he would put us in weekly bits on Late Night. If you said more than six lines on air you made six hundred dollars, and comedy pieces like “Staring Contest” helped pay my rent. I once spent hours running around a hot track wearing the giant “Foam Rubber Andy” costume. Nipsey Russell was there that day and told me, “Hollywood has one typewriter and one thousand copy machines.” I nodded my sweaty head as if I understood what he meant. Brian Stack, a former Chicago improviser and writer for Conan, wrote a character for me called Andy’s Little Sister. Her name was Stacey and she wore headgear and was obsessed with Conan. I would sit in my tiny dressing room and memorize long monologues that often ended with my tackling Conan at his desk. It was another character to add to my repertoire of adolescent, lisping maniacs. Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider saw the bit when they were visiting and cast me in the film Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo. I was paid the basic daily rate the day I showed up on set in the summer of 1998. My first shot was with thousands of extras in Anaheim Stadium. It was my first big Hollywood movie but not the first time I had been on film. My film debut was Tomorrow Night, a 1998 New York indie from an up-and-coming auteur named Louis CK. I played “Woman Sprayed with Hose.” Soon after, The State’s Michael Showalter and David Wain would cast me in their cult classic Wet Hot American Summer, a film whose behind-the-scenes stories would make for a steamy beach read.

For a while we worked on a new Broadway Video online show called This Is Not a Test. We were all confused when the tech guys explained how in the future, everyone was going to eventually read articles on their computers. I scoffed at the idea. We spent our afternoons writing comedy and shaking our heads at white supremacist message boards. After weeks of writing, we watched the first demo and the slow flashing graphics looked like an old Lite-Brite. I was happy when we were eventually fired, because I was convinced this Internet thing was a passing fad.

This lack of technological foresight is why I am an actor.

Comedy Central took notice of us in 1998, due to our manager Dave Becky’s persistence and network executive Kent Alterman’s vision. We were offered a sketch show, and Upright Citizens Brigade aired on Wednesday nights after another brand-new show: South Park. One of us got great ratings. Besser and I broke up, and much to our mutual credit, we handled it smoothly. Matt met and fell in love with his now wife, Danielle Schneider, and UCB went to work writing, producing, and starring in our sketch show. It was all-consuming and totally exhilarating. Under the directorial genius of Phil Morrison, we were allowed to sit in an office (an office!) and think of sketch ideas (they would pay us!) and we would go to set (we had a set!) and it would get on television (my parents could watch it!). When UCB premiered on Comedy Central, my parents threw a huge viewing party in their basement. My father got a UCB license plate soon after. The show was based on a long-form improvisational format our mentor Del Close had invented called “The Harold.” Scenes were connected, characters lived in different worlds, and most shows were built around a theme. The premise was that a group called the Upright Citizens Brigade worked out of an underground bunker. We rarely used pop culture or parody, except for the always popular Unabomber, Harry Truman, Albert Einstein, and Jesus. RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan once played a neighbor who lived underground next to us and lent the UCB some sugar. The show ran for three seasons, and in those few short years I learned how to be in front of a camera, how to manage an incredibly long workday, and how truly awful it is to wear prosthetics.