yes please(39)

We asked Del to record the voice-over for our opening titles.

“From the dawn of civilization, they have existed in order to undermine it. Our only enemy is the status quo. Our only friend is chaos. They have no government ties and unlimited resources. If something goes wrong, we are the cause. Every corner of the earth is under their surveillance. If you do it, we see it. Always. We believe the powerful should be made less powerful. We have heard the voice of society, begging us to destabilize it. Antoine. Colby. Trotter. Adair. We are the Upright Citizens Brigade.”

Hardly anyone watched. I wonder why, with that incredibly accessible opening. But it gave us a place to be seen. The show fed the theater and the theater fed the show. We outgrew Solo Arts. We needed our own space. We found it at the old Harmony Theater on Twenty-Second Street in Chelsea. The space had been a burlesque house, and after taking it over we spent days dismantling stages and smashing mirrors. The greenroom was lined with lockers, and those lockers were filled with old bikinis and Prince mix tapes. I stupidly volunteered to clean the bathrooms, and I pulled at least a dozen condoms out of the horrible toilets. Even years after we opened in 1999 as a comedy theater, we would get confused men entering in the middle of the day. Well-dressed businessmen and Hasidic shopkeepers would saunter into the lobby, feign interest in the comedy flyers, and then quickly leave. The Twenty-Second Street space became a clubhouse for talented youngsters who are now your favorites. I celebrated the end of the millennium at that theater, saw amazing shows at that theater, fought, cried, and made out at that theater. After 9/11, we all gathered there, grateful that our lives in comedy meant we didn’t work in a big building downtown. In 2002, our landlord was cited for a violation and the space was closed down. We panicked and then regrouped, and in the process learned that the theater was not the space, it was the people.



We opened our new 150-seat theater a year later and a few blocks away on Twenty-Sixth Street. It was a little fancier, but it was under a Gristedes supermarket and we had to contend with the sound of shopping carts being dragged and the threat of garbage water bursting through the floor and onto our heads. I continued to write and perform there while I was at SNL. During the big New York blackout in 2003, many of us spent the night sleeping onstage because our generator was working. During the writers’ strike in 2007, we put on our own SNL episode there with old sketches. Michael Cera hosted, our musical guest was Yo La Tengo, and we gave Lorne a birthday cake as he sat in the audience. When I enter the theater and there is a show onstage, it makes me feel safe in the knowledge that the world keeps turning. It also feels like I have died and I am attending my own funeral, so it’s good and bad.



Things have steadily moved along since. We opened our first theater in Los Angeles in 2005, the same year we shot a one-hour special for Bravo called Asssscat. It was an attempt to prove improvisation could work on TV, and it featured Tina and Dratch and Andy Richter, among others. In 2006 we opened our Training Center facility in New York, which finally gave us a proper office and classrooms. In 2008 we launched the comedy website UCBComedy.com. In 2010 we became an accredited theater school. In 2014 we opened a new UCB Training Center in New York with fourteen classrooms and a picnic table, and a big new theater space in Los Angeles. At each theater we produce an average of four shows a night and twenty-five shows a week, all under ten dollars.

I will keep bragging.

Last year we sold over 400,000 tickets, produced over 4,000 shows, taught over 11,000 students, and employed 216 people. Del had died in 1999 after a long battle with emphysema. The day before he died, there was a Wiccan ceremony in his hospital room attended by Bill Murray and Harold Ramis (rest in peace). Del had drunk a chocolate martini and was gone the next day. Del always knew when to edit. His famous last words to Charna were “I’m tired of being the funniest person in the room.” He donated his skull to be used in productions of Hamlet at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. Del filmed a message to the UCB with specific instructions on how to carry on. It was brilliant and touching and not especially lucid. He gave us our motto, “Don’t think.” In his honor we started the Del Close Marathon, an annual fifty-two-hour marathon of improvisation, which welcomes groups from all across the country. Fifteen years later, it now has fifty-six straight hours of improvisation on seven stages performed by over four hundred different groups. Our free improv show Asssscat has now been running for eighteen years.

My twenty years with the Upright Citizens Brigade could fill a book. Hopefully someone else will write it, because writing a book is awful and because most of my memories are drug fueled and rose colored. All I know is I will be quick to give photo approval, since I am very young and skinny in most of the pictures. But I will say this: New York can be a lonely place. I think we stuck together during hard times and provided a home for people to feel less alone. The UCB community is a collaborative and loving group, and it is filled with the funniest people I know. I am proud of the fact that Ian and Besser and Walsh and I never made money our motivating factor. We never took a salary, we never charged artists to perform, we never had a two-drink minimum. Artists could rehearse and perform and know they would be in front of an audience who spoke their language. This audience could pay very little to see great comedy, never knowing what famous people would show up, but always knowing that some of the people they were watching would one day be famous.

UCB’s motto is “Don’t think.” It started as a directive from Del, transformed into a comment on corporate doublespeak, and now serves as the guiding principle for our school and theater. Don’t think. Get out of your head. Stop planning and just go. The theater belongs to the people. It belongs to Alex Sidtis and Susan Hale, who run the spaces and keep the company strong. It belongs to the hundreds of people who have stood on the stage and the many more who have watched shows performed on the stage. It belongs to the students who are waiting to get time onstage, and the employees and interns who helped build the stage. Don’t think. Just do. We did.