http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw3Iv1sb25I

http://www.thesuburbs.org.uk/Board/index.php?PHPSESSID=fee76ff6e060d0a36031d15be2310b26&topic=897.0

more about this later… but for now…

now lets go have some fun!

Thanks for your support, everyone.

its been a beautiful year so far.

hope you understand that i post this in good spirits, and with love for all involved!

-nick

EDITORS NOTE: this is long, and seems to be getting attention, so i will give you an out right here.

if you don’t wanna read this, and know what i’m talking about… here is the general gist:

UCB 161:

for every pack of cigarettes rocco bummed off me (one by one), rob r. gave back to me when he brought cartons over to the theater from his day job.

if you understand that, read on when you have time… and thanks!

if not, you can get started now!

161.

I wrote this last year.  

I thought I’d post it, then I never did… i wanted to let it all cool off… besides, enough people were saying enough things about it.

But last night, I hung out with an old close buddy of mine.  We were mutually excited about how good we were respectively doing, mentally and otherwise… and without talking about this specific thing, i said to him:

“i am just now realizing that if you put yourself all the way out there, there is a community of good people out there who will catch you and help you.”

I was going to just let this sit around forever and maybe send it to the people I found influential MUCH later in my life… but instead, I’ve decided to take my own advice from last night and hope someone catches me, so I’m signing it (it was written as an anonymous post) and putting it into the world.

The people who know me on a day to day basis know how important all this stuff really is to me, and everything I write is so that my friends and loved ones understand me better… 

So…  If you feel me, great.  

If not, I don’t know or care about you.  I’m sure you’re nice, but let the big kids talk for a while.

now…  REWIND:

Well, well, well. 

That New York Magazine piece got me really charged up about the UCB Theater in New York and its Cultural Significance, and I’ve got a few things to say, in a kind and reverent manner, of course.

Before I get going, a quick caveat.  These are all true stories and feelings.  I’m writing them the way I remember them, because I think they may have intrinsic value to kids who are just starting out, as well as for people who are curious about what one non-famous person thought shit was like ten years ago.  

I’ve also been inspired by enough stories from other people to humbly want to put mine forth, hoping someone will get a charge out of it.  

And finally, I feel like I might explode if I don’t get all the shit that this article stirred out of my fucking head.  

As I would never say anything in a letter that I wouldn’t say to someone’s face, I would gladly cop to this stuff if someone was to ask me about it in person.  I’ll also have you know that I sat on this letter for about 48 hours (editors note: turned out to be MUCH LONGER) before deciding to post it.  

Also, the comment thread in the NYMAG article, particularly the guy who said that he wishes he was at the theater ten years ago, may have tipped me in the direction of sharing.  

I’m gonna say some names, but they are all names that are out there already.  Nothing in here is meant or should be taken in a negative light… its really just one person’s story.  

OK lets hit it:

I started going to UCB shows while they were performing at Solo Arts.  I had heard about them in a piece in New York magazine, and yes, it is rather ironic that i’m spitting all this up cause of their dot com.  I began going to shows in 1998.  At my first Asssscat, I almost broke my neck tripping over the half-stairs you had to walk up to get to the performance space. 

Its important to realize that if you are a loudmouth attending your first real improv show, you are guaranteed to give a loud and shitty suggestion, and if its bad enough, you will thankfully never suggest anything ever again. This is why most improvisers I know stay FAR away from suggesting shit.  Because I am the giant loudmouth I just described, I screamed the words “evil cheerleaders” to Ian Roberts.  I did this to impress the girl i was with, who was a cheerleader, and in hindsight it was really forced on my end.  

Anyone who has done improv for more than 4 minutes knows that it is a really hard thing to force ANYTHING, much less a shitty, non-impressive suggestion.  

Ian Roberts winced at how shitty a suggestion it was, and then the players proceeded to step back and string together the most incredibly funny shit i had ever seen.  

On my personal FUNNY scale, my first asssscat was much funnier than the time my buddy Brian and I went to see ‘Brain Candy’ drunk off a forty and a half of malt liquor each, and it was at least AS funny as when I pissed my pants in the movies watching Wayne’s World.

I went to a few more solo arts shows and saw many amazingly funny people perform, as well as some of the genuine New York character type people you see around if you live here for long enough.    

At this point, like many others have more illustriously said than I will, I realized that i was falling in love with long form improv… and I began taking classes at the theater.  I was lucky enough to be part of the 1st wave of classes to be held in the new theater at 161.

Now, I understand how lucky i was to be around during this time period… but make no mistake, I also had to have courage to just walk up in there after the amazing shit i saw at solo… and i did NOT just walk up in there.  I chain-smoked and thought really hard about leaving and never coming back… but instead, I listened to a bunch of Alkaline Trio songs as loud as possible, dropped my nuts, and got in there at 9AM on sunday morning.  

Please understand that in my life experience up until now, the luck/skill equation is almost always a wash.  You need both… and in this case, my skill was “mustering up enough fake courage to try long form improv with an entire group of people i don’t know.”

Now, I wasn’t going in completely dry… I had some theater experience in HS (shouts to Mr. Stan Serafin and his beautiful wife Gina… we almost put each other in straitjackets, but he told me to try improv in college.  RESPECT.)  Theater classes in my college, however, were fucking AWFUL.  

My 101 was full of ultra-poseurs who wore “NYU Drama” sweatshirts to our intro to theater classes… which really sucked, because I went to Hofstra.  

Even though Hofstra was only a straight hour on the GCP away from the heart of Manhattan, it may as well have been sixty-six million miles away in a cultural sense.  Everyone still loved ‘Rent’ from like 3 years ago, and no one had heard of ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ except my professor.  I had figured i’d have some insufferable people in my class (its drama class, after all,) but there was at LEAST a 30 to 1 douche to normal person ratio in the Drama department.  Truly awful.  It was either get away from performing altogether (not likely for me at this point,) or dive in at UCB.  

I dove.  Best decision of my life.

I realized a lot of things about myself while studying at UCB.  Here were the three most important to me at the time:

1.  i was NOWHERE NEAR as funny as i thought i was before i showed up at 161.  

2.  Being funny in real life does NOT make you a talented comedy actor.  I can’t even tell you for sure that it helps.  Some of the best improvisers I know are also the most serious offstage.  (Shouts to mike ludwig and ian roberts!)

3.  I was lucky as shit to be born in Queens and not have to waste 30000 years trying to figure out how to get to NYC.  Thanks for not moving to some shithole, Beautiful Parents Of Mine!

I did my first ever harold scenes in public with Tara Copeland from Mother (and CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM… we see you, Tara!)  They were about “dawson’s creek,” and anyone who has seen Tara perform at UCBT knows that this makes total sense.  

I kept the butt of the last cigarette I smoked the night of my first class performance, and wrote “UCB” on it with a red bic.  

I don’t have it anymore, but I kept it in my wallet for longer than a grown man who now knows that its gross to carry a smoked cigarette butt around in his wallet would care to admit.

I loved this place.  Really really had love for it, like it was a person.  Why?  I’ll tell you.

It is simply impossible to overstate how important it is to find a group of people who believe in the same shit as you do, comedically or otherwise.  I had spent most of my high school years in the hardcore music scene in and around NYC, going to shows and playing in bands.  (MUCH RESPECT TO ALL MY OLD NYHC FRIENDS. DOUBLE-CROSSED, SUB-LEVEL, CODE RED, and RPOD in particular. also SHOUTS TO SLK.) Some bands were good, some lousy… but how you played didn’t matter as long as you showed up and contributed.  Even if all you did was carry an amp down a flight of stairs into a church basement, you were appreciated and respected for your help.  

Anyway, this feeling of mutual respect and appreciation i felt in my very tiny corner of the NYHC scene was in full effect around the UCB Theater at the time.  Everyone was valuable, from the funny crazy people on stage right down to the guy who would bust his ass carrying heavy boxes of fliers back to the theater from Kinko’s or wherever in the summertime.  If the theater needed to be painted, thirty motherfuckers would show up at the drop of a hat to eat pizza, drink beer, and get the place re-coated in three or four hours.  

In my very humble opinion, the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater was built into the place it is today by people who trusted and cared about each other enough to carve time out of their lives to make the place go… and even in its current form, UCBT still exists because of people who share this ethic.  Shouts to Alex, Susan, BRIAN (sorry i missed ya the 1st time) Eli, Pat, and Chuck D from Detroit, all the people that got corn syrup and red food coloring all over themselves for Killgore each year, and ALL the interns that clean puke and piss off the floors, and all the people that work at the three (!!!) theaters now that I don’t know and are no doubt pissed that I didn’t shout them out.  

Go talk to THOSE people, New York Magazine.

Since I was a broke college student at the time, and I wasn’t about to ask my parents for money to join what they believed to be a cult (seriously,) I began interning at the theater on Friday nights to get free classes.  Shannon O’Neill was my intern partner, and I will now fuck up her hardass attitude by saying that she was always such a sweet person to me.  When I became a lit teacher after all this, Shannon came to my middle school and ran three-line scenes with little kids.  Before you go crazy asking me how i could let Shannon “shit jokes 24/7” O’Neill around children… understand that some of those kids had the best times of their lives that day!  thanks spo.

Anyway, we would bring up cases of soda, make beer runs for performers, and get people assscat and feature-feature t-shirts from the shithole basement that Brett Gelman talked about in the NYmag article.  Also in that basement were a set of drums that Ian Roberts left at the theater.  Owen Burke would drag them out when he played after midnight Dar Silicon shows with his brother, and I would jam poorly and loudly on them whenever I had to go downstairs until the house manager told me to stop.

While I worked at the theater, I was privileged to see some of the most incredible performers and shows, all for free.  These were the pre-Amy Poehler on SNL days, which i guess is a whole two (three?) generations ago now.  Anyway, the UCB4 were still doing shows together, and I worked the house for the sketch show they were doing at the time, called “That’s F’ed Up,” which nymag.com had pictures of in its article, pictures plucked from maybe thousands that Jason Spiro took before digital cameras made it so that any guy with money could take a decent picture. (we see you, spiro!)  

I saw “Thats F’ed Up” almost as many times as it ran.  Besser played DMX, Wu, and Big Pun in-between sketches… in real life, he was a white dude from Arkansas that loved Hardcore Rap Music more than anyone I knew growing up in NYC.  Poehler once closed a show by yelling “GOODNIGHT” straight into a dudes face from the stage cause he was in the first row and had his feet up on the stage like a fucking idiot.  

Those guys were DOING IT, and so even though my little tiny opinion matters to no one but myself, I gladly co-sign their recent co-opting of the ramones logo on their website… cause at this time, the UCB was as three-chord-punk-rock as i’d ever imagine comedy could be.

Real recognizes real, so amazing performers begin coming in with shows right away.  I’m going to mention some of them now, partially because writing this is bringing them back into focus, and partially because this list of shows is literally soaked through with talent.  

I saw Louie CK run a show of his short films at UCB-T.  I’d imagine this is post “Chris Rock Show,” but definitely pre “Lucky Louie.”  

In one of these films, Louie steals an ice cream cone from a child, licks it, then jumps into a waiting helicopter a few feet past the frame, and flies away.  This film would eventually be adapted into the ending of the first ever short film in the critically lauded blah blah blah FX show he would later do.  Or maybe he just showed the Western Standoff short film that became the finale of “Pootie Tang.”  Louie peddled a dvd of his shorts with us at the theater merch table for 10 bucks.  i thought his films were amazing, but that ten bucks was a little steep… i was a poor college kid, for christ sakes!

I saw the Naked Babies do their show a million times also, called “these are rocketship people.”  John Ross Bowie, Rob Corrdry, Brian Huskey, and Seth Morris smoked fake weed (i think it was fake) on stage, then slowed-down the drum fill of Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” and acted in slo-mo to it… to hilarious effect and LIGHT YEARS before it was in ‘The Hangover.’  They also played in drag as well as I have seen since the Kids in the Hall.

(I will stop here for a second to shout out Bowie, who once gave me offhand advice at mcm once that has been more important to me throughout my life than he will ever know: follow your heart, and all will be fine.  I only stop to say this because I’ve been writing a lot these days, and i am trying to be more brave about it, but its fucking hard.  That said, there are few people more brave than JRB when it comes to showing his ass on stage (not actually showing it, but giving it ALL up. you feel me?)  When I write weirdo tech articles on my tumblr, its because I am hoping that I can hit ONE person in the gut the way that dude did it for me.  All the love, JRB.) Ok, back to business.

I saw Jessica St. Clair and Jason Mantzoukas do the best relationship comedy show I’ve ever seen, called “I Will Not Apologize.”  You are about to seperately find out who these two people are in a major way.  I only say this because if NYM decided to do this article in 3 years, they would be all over Jess & Jason’s jocks.

EDITORS NOTE: this is a great time to mention mark sarian… who is a dirty awful phillies fan, but also gave me a shot editing shit involving people and jokes that were at black belt level… and i wasn’t even a white belt.  i was just a kid who thought “karate kid” was fucking awesome. thanks for hooking up the menu book. i learned about how to treat clients and people with differing opinions than my own (reyes »» rollins) from you.

I saw Jackie Clarke and Patrick McCartney do an incredibly dirty and fucked up comedy show, called “Perverts,” that was grosser and funnier than anything I’ve ever watched on South Park.

I saw a sketch group called Mr. A$$ (Gelman, Jon Daly, Vadim Newquist, and Josh Perilo) do a sketch to “I’m Sailing Away” that nearly made me piss my pants laughing for the first time since my aforementioned “waynes world’ incident.  

Towards the end of 161, I also helped tech Daly and Gelman and Vadim’s run of their one-person shows… Daly ended his show as Bono with that asshole american flag jacket: amazing.  Vadim played slayer, the donnas, and did incredible character work. Gelman… 1000 cats?!  Noah Warner’s music was incredible, and gelman did something so great with that show.  (for all the people that don’t get it… please understand that you never will, and that the existence of this show is perfect and a beautiful and gentle way of an artist speaking to you… saying “fuck you audience, i know what i’m doing, and you are lucky to see me doing it.”  also, jake would close it with fight the power… which was probably the illest thing ever done on stage at ucb… until team chud poured a 40 of old e out into the bucket of truth for del while ‘big pimpin’ played…  that was MY illest moment, anyway… and i’m sure everyone from 161 has one or two of these… anyway, thanks brett… I still sing the harmony of cats 313 and 314 in my head sometimes.  i remember cutting your reel in your above ground zero apartment… and listening to elliott smith on my way home at 1230 in the morning on a sunday night, thinking to myself “as long as i can just keep doing work like this, everything will be fine.”

Know who else was great?  Andy.  When I jumped out of the UCB world and into the Teaching world… all the middle school kids were FLOORED that i knew who andy WAS, much less had a drink or 7000 with him in mcm!  Him and Matt Pack are the only other white guys i know that love rap music as much as i do.

I am so happy that those guys live in a world were they can be as fucking crazy and absurd as they want.  I’ll lump my pal chris gethard in there too, who is a demented motherfucker, but someone who really gives a shit about helping people in this world, in addition to being honest and funny as shit.

All these folks jumped… and guess what? 

the world caught them.  

PS - Shouts to hines and john f. too… you guys fight the good fight over there, i know it.  monkeydick was the first diy team to make it at ucb, and PSE was UCB-NJ as far as i’m concerned.  later! oops! forgot erik. good dude! i wish i didn’t always get to the PACK (MATT PACK!!) party as you are leaving, i like talking tv with ya. and casey! and tony (one ballsy motherfucker!) whoa! those guys are funny as smart as fuck!!!  (getting the pattern yet?!?)

FINAL PS - SHOUTS TO THE HAROLD NIGHT CREW.  TARA (CURB) D.M. (BEST PUNKEST ILLUSTRATOR EVER, who i put my foot in my mouth talking to literally every time i do so) CHRISTINE WALTERS (AWESOME producer) JESSE FALCON (was in an ancient onion picture with me and then went on to invent HULK HANDS ?!?) GETH (ENOUGH ALREADY SAID) GEMBERLING (IS, OF COURSE, PART OF THE THING I AM EDITING NOW, WHICH IS THE BEST THING EVER!), AND I THINK SPO DID THAT SHOW TOO, RIGHT? I’LL EDIT THIS LATER.  (i need a fucking drink!)…  

HOSTED BY MATT DECOSTER… TRAPEZE ARTIST AND LAWYER!

(the whole idea of harold night was to get matt decoster filmed in a tuxedo) 

]ALSO, SHOUTS TO FIGHT NIGHT!  BIG BIG BIG FUN!

(rip union diner, with the red dolly pardon background)

HUGE MAJOR FINAL FINAL FINAL (IF YOU WORK IN POST, YOU KNOW NOTHING IS EVER REALLY FINAL…) PS- THANK YOU WILL BECTON!  YOU GAVE ME A SHOT ANSWERING PHONES AT POST FACTORY… AND FROM THERE MY CAREER SAILED INTO OUTER SPACE!!!  WE SEE YOU OVER AT CONAN, BUDDY!   SORRY FOR DISCONNECTING YOUR OVERSEAS GIRLFRIEND ON THE PHONE BY ACCIDENT THAT ONE TIME…  BE GOOD!

and a little bit to Jodi And Case… I love you guys.  but i am very tired and need to stop writing now!

dedicated to ESPO BURNS BABSTOCK LEONE BECKFORD POMPA… ALL MY TEACHERS AND PARENTS.

to HCTV (and 3/4 of the vip photo haaaaaaa)

AND to M.T.

both of them.

1 used to take improv classes (i remember everything.  i have marilu henner disease)

1 is going to be a smart cookie

AND

to the oldest M.T.

who i forgot the first time

give a dog a home

i’m out