Details Magazine - September 1998
THE MERRY PRANKSTERS
THE UPRIGHT CITIZENS BRIGADE IS NEW YORK’S BEST UNDERGROUND COMEDY GROUP. WILL THEIR NEW TV SHOW MAKE THEM THE NEXT MONTY PYTHON—OR WILL THE JOKE BE ON THEM?
BY GAVIN EDWARDS


(Click on images for larger version.)

It’s audience-participation time with the Upright Citizens Brigade. The seventy-five people crammed into this small fifth-floor Manhattan theater are being encouraged to hug people who are different from themselves: “Straight people, hug somebody you think might be gay! White people, hug a black person! Okay, there don’t seem to be a lot of black people here tonight, so white people are going to have to share the black people.”

Then a UCB representative named Antoine announces that it is time to apologize to every ethnic group who has ever suffered from stereotyping. Unfortunately, they don’t have time to express their regret to every creed and color, so one group will have to represent them all: the Jews. And since there isn’t time to apologize to every Jewish person, he picks one surprised young man sitting in the audience, Samuel, to represent them all.

Samuel is not pleased, but accedes. Antoine asks the audience to join in the apology.

“Dear Jew,” says Antoine, reading from an index card.

“Dear Jew,” they dutifully repeat.

“We are heartily sorry for having offended thee.”

“We are heartily sorry for having offended thee.”

“Jew.”

“Jew.”

“You should be free to ride your Jew bike.”

“You should be free to ride your Jew bike.”

“And wear your Jew clothes.”

“And wear your Jew clothes.”

“Without people making fun of you.”

“Without people making fun of you.”

“Jew.”

“Jew.”

“It doesn’t matter that you killed God’s only son.”

This is one step too far for the audience; they giggle uncomfortably, not repeating his words. Samuel boils over: “That’s not even historically accurate. The Romans killed Christ, and everyone knows that—”

Antoine cuts him off: “Please, Samuel. You’re representing your people.” He returns to reading from his card. “It doesn’t even matter if you blame the Romans….”

THE UPRIGHT CITIZENS BRIGADE consists of four young comedians, ages twenty-six to thirty-four: Matt Besser, Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts, and Matt Walsh—improv comics by training, tippers of scared cows by inclination. (Besser was planted in the audience as Samuel.) They do stage shows that mix the hilarious with the offensive, with freewheeling plot lines that loop back and tie themselves into Gordian knots. According to the group’s mythology, the Upright Citizens Brigade is an underground agency promoting chaos through a global network of secret agents everywhere. The UCB’s covert program of destabilization is the spur for most of the group’s sketches, just as SCTV used the framework of a TV station a generation ago. Up until recently, the Upright Citizens Brigade were haranguing passersby on the streets of New York just to get a handful to show up at one of their performances. But now, they have managed to swing their own television show—which begins this month on the Comedy Central network in its choicest time slot, Wednesday nights following South Park—and will bring their uniquely twisted vision to the airwaves.

Television, however, doesn’t have a shortage of sketch-comedy shows. What’s in short supply are successful ones. Each UCB member could probably reel off the contenders of the past few years: The State, Vacant Lot, Exit 57, Live on Tape, The Sports Bar, Mr. Show, The Dana Carvey Show, Mad TV. Most of the shows are deader than The Single Guy. Even the mighty Kids in the Hall foundered after CBS brought it to network TV. So while the UCB feverishly prepare for their debut, hoping it’s just the first season of a multiyear run, they know that this could be their only day in the cathode-ray sun.

ON THE TUESDAY before the UCB begin to film their first show, there’s a lot of work left to do: They have a six-year backlog of stage scenes to organize and adapt into ten TV shows.

The quartet assemble in Besser and Poehler’s shared office. One wall has a corkboard with index cards representing various sketches, with names like CYBORG HEART EXPLOSION, PIRATES’ MOTIVATIONAL MEETING, and KID PLAYING DOCTOR DIAGNOSES NEIGHBOR WITH CANCER. The card they are concerned with now is HUMAN FURNITURE, and whether the idea of leasing people as couches is funnier as a scene or a commercial.

They have always written their own material, but Comedy Central has provided them with a large staff (including an extra writer, Joe Ventura) and the entire floor of a Manhattan building. “Every day there’s somebody else who works here,” says Amy Poehler. “Another postsupervising director or something.”

Poehler is the UCB’s only female member. She grew up in the Boston suburbs, the daughter of high school teachers. The punch line of her favorite joke is “Horse cock.” Short, with dirty-blond hair, her girl-next-door looks let her disappear into characters ranging from Girl Scouts to porn stars. She’s achieved the most fame of the group so far, with a recurring role on Late Night with Conan O’Brien as Andy Richter’s excitable, lisping sister.

Besser speaks: “You could have a joke that the beds are people who keep getting fatter: twin-size, queen, king. Cut to a fat guy eating donuts: king-size and still growing!” The others nod appreciatively.

Matt Besser is the group’s most anal member. With his skinny frame and distracted air, he looks like he’s secretly a mad scientist. Raised Jewish in Little Rock, he roots for the Arkansas Razorbacks and the Chicago Bulls. When agitated, he pulls his dark curly hair as if it were made of taffy.

Roberts pipes up: “Or the lamp would be a guy holding the socket in his hand all day long.” The clean-cut Roberts is the group’s most logical mind and frequent on-stage straight man (he plays Antoine). He describes himself as the quartet’s healthiest member, and is on a diet that involves lots of protein shakes and cold sausages.

They’ve fallen silent again, staring at the board. Roberts squats with his hands on his knees, like a shortstop at the ready. Poehler lounges sideways on the couch. The pressure is palpable. Poehler sings “human furniture,” a fragment of a nonexistent jingle, then quiet reigns once more.

Besser suddenly barks, “A water bed is just a flabby wet guy.” Everybody laughs and comes to life; Poehler sits up. Fifteen minutes later, they’ve roughed out a TV commercial—one step closer to show time.

“We’re pretty serious,” Walsh tells me later. Walsh, from a Catholic family in the suburbs of Chicago, is the group’s diplomat. Slightly balding, with curly hair, he looks like he belongs in a police lineup with John McEnroe and Art Garfunkel. “Sometimes that’s to our discredit,” he says. “Jesus Christ, we’re doing comedy! We’re supposed to be enjoying it.”

What the UCB clearly does enjoy is having a new idea to play with, to bat around like four cats with a mouse. When they are informed that Tuesday is Pizza Day at the office, they pepper their assistant Josh with questions ranging from “Could we designate one Pizza Day liaison?” to “If I bought a really good calendar, would it have Pizza Day on it?”

Next on the agenda: brainstorming for a low-level celebrity who can make a cameo appearance on the show. But all pretenses of working disappear when they realize that having a journalist—me—observe them for a week means that they can switch back and forth willy-nilly from speaking on the record to off the record.

Soon, they have instructed Josh to make up individual two-sided cards for each of them, designating whether they are off or on. Minutes later, Josh tacks the cards onto the board. Arbitrarily, Poehler takes herself off the record immediately, meaning that I can’t ethically tell you that she said “My dad’s sending me all these Viagra jokes.”

Then Joe Ventura joins the meeting and tells Besser he thought his recurring character of Adair was supposed to be gay.

BESSER: You’re projecting. I like buttfucking—men, women, it doesn’t matter.
(Ventura flips Besser’s card to “Off.”)
ROBERTS: Too late!
BESSER: Fuck that! It’s on the record!
POEHLER: (changing the subject) We need a D-list celebrity.
BESSER: Janeane Garofalo?
POEHLER: She’s not D-list!
ROBERTS: I’d like to point out that they’re both off the record.
BESSER: Fuck that! Janeane Garofalo!
ME: Is that on the record?
BESSER: Hell yes! I’m always on!
(I flip Besser’s card over.)
POEHLER: (worried) She’s a friend.
ME: I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. You’re off the record.
(Poehler mimes frantic speech.)

IF YOU REALLY want to write binary code for a living, you move to Silicon Valley. If you really want to be a porn star, you move to Los Angeles. And if you really want to do improvisational comedy, you move to Chicago. The city has a reputation built on the Second City troupe, which produced alumni like John Belushi, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and John Candy. So around 1990, Besser moved from Denver to Chicago, Roberts moved from Milwaukee to Chicago, and Walsh headed into town from the Chicago suburbs. Second City, it turned out, was still performing twenty-year-old sketches, so they attached themselves to smaller groups, like the Annoyance Theater and the ImprovOlympic. Besser and Walsh were introduced to each other by Andy Dick (now of Newsradio), and they formed a comedy group with three others called Cerebral Strip Mine.

They dreamed of movie deals and starring on Saturday Night Live; the reality was substitute teaching and delivering singing telegrams. Roberts joined a year later, and the group changed its name to the Upright Citizens Brigade. Then in ’93 Poehler also moved to Chicago. She took an improv class taught by Besser; they started dating (and now live together). Recognizing that a funny, talented women is a major asset, the UCB admitted her.

They performed both improve and scripted shows like The Real, Real World (a parody of the MTV show) and Thunderball (a theater piece about a mutated version of baseball, with three balls in constant motion, tackling, and packs of dogs roaming the field). After one Thunderball show, they led the audience to Wrigley Field for a candlelight vigil and fake riot, which meant that the night ended with the UCB attempting to explain their principles of comedy to the Chicago police department.

When Pepsi sponsored an outdoor concert at Chicago’s Navy Pier, Besser, wearing a Pepsi T-shirt, showed up pretending to be a Pepsi promotion employee and bluffed his way onstage to give away raffle prizes. Meanwhile, other UCB members in the crowd, posing as disgruntled Pepsi workers on strike, started chanting “No Pepsi, no scabs!” Then the confrontation got surreal: Pepsi official Besser called the “protestors” up onstage and got them interested in winning a VCR, making them chug Pepsi and push two-liter bottles around with their noses. But when the “protestors” started to rile up the crowd again, Besser pushed them off the stage, snapping at the audience, “Those people don’t deserve to drink Pepsi, if you ask me!” The local police detained the UCB members posing as agitators and, deferring to corporate authority, asked Besser what they should do with them. He pondered for a moment before saying, “Oh, let them go.”

Before Ted Kaczynski was apprehended, Besser also dressed up to look like the FBI sketch of the Unabomber—mustache, aviator sunglasses, curly hair, hooded sweatshirt—and went to a Chicago post office to mail a package. He got a few double takes from other patrons, but the clerk blithely took his money—and his airmail parcel.

In 1994 their fifth member, Adam McKay, was offered a job as a writer at Saturday Night Live; he accepted it and left the group, and is now one of the show’s head writers. The following year, the remaining four all moved to New York. They had a pact: Nobody would do work that interfered with the UCB. So although they each appeared in commercials and had separately done small parts on Conan O’Brien, Besser abandoned his stand-up career and Poehler turned down a holding contract with Fox TV. “I don’t care how successful I would be by myself,” said Poehler. “If UCB went on and was successful and I wasn’t with them, it would be the most devastating thing to me.”

So in addition to pestering people on the street to come to their shows, they started teaching improve classes to make a little extra money, and to try to build a New York community of improv performers and lovers. They still teach those classes, and they still do a free improv show every Sunday night, sometimes with celebrity guests like Andy Richter sitting in. “They’re terrifyingly good, sharp, well-oiled,” Richter tells me. “Frankly, it’s intimidating to get up there with them.” Why does the UCB get so much work on Conan? “You get tired of trying to cut a bit you’ve worked on, auditioning twenty-five people, not one of whom brings a thing except what’s already there. It’s better to say, ‘Oh, just call Walsh.’ But I wasn’t the first one to recommend them to the show.” He pauses and laughs. “I didn’t do a fucking thing for them.”

The UCB also got some work with Comedy Central, on a project called Escape From a Wonderful Life. Capra’s Christmas classic had passed into public domain before control was regained by Republic Pictures, which asserted copyright over the story and the music. So, Comedy Central reasoned, you could legally use the film’s images with different voices and music to tell a different story: George Bailey’s efforts to go star in a different movie, maybe a Western or a gangster picture. Unfortunately, with the Paramount-Viacom merger, Republic and Comedy Central became part of the same corporate family and the completed project was never allowed to be broadcast.

They also made a short documentary film spoof, called The Little Donny Foundation. The central character was delicately described by The New York Times as “a boy tragically unaware of a physical deformity.” In other words, he has a foot-long penis hanging out of his shorts and doesn’t know it. Filled with perfectly deadpan testimonials from Little Donny’s friends and family, it’s the funniest UCB project you’ll never see—until the day when television is allowed to show a little boy with an exposed penis that accounts for 13 percent of his body weight. The film concludes with a “We Are the World”-style song by Little Donny Aid. The song’s video has a montage of New Yorkers of all walks of life, from newsstand owners to grandmothers, cheerfully singing along to the chorus, “Enormous penis.” How did the UCB get them to do that? By telling them that it was for a Planter’s commercial, and that they wanted them to sing “Enormous peanuts.” The movie makes a final plea: “Please, let Little Donny’s penis touch you like it’s touched so many others.”

Two years ago, the UCB had some good news: The Fox network wanted them to make a pilot. The bad news: Fox then didn’t pick it up. Last year, some more good news: Kent Alterman, the Comedy Central executive who’d hired them for the Wonderful Life project, wanted them to do another pilot. Even better news: After the UCB won an award at the ’98 U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen as Best Alternative or Sketch Act, Comedy Central picked up the show for a full ten episodes. “The UCB will either be a big success or a total failure,” predicts Kent Alterman, “with nothing in between.”

COMEDY CENTRAL WANTS the UCB to do a group interview with a reporter form the little-known magazine Satellite TV Week, so the UCB, being a cooperative bunch, do. At first, gathered around a speakerphone, they try to be straightforward, explaining that they will be doing sketch comedy, not improve. But then the reporter asks what makes them different from other comedy groups. The UCB have many answers to this question: Their show will be set apart by it’s SCTV-like framework. Or maybe it’ll be the inclusion of pranks on their show that will set them apart. Or maybe it’s just that they’ve known each other for years and have developed their own perverse, chaotic, infectious brand of humor; other shows are just-add-water ensembles that soon dehydrate again. The bottom line is that as much as they believe in themselves, sketch comedy might be the riskiest and most uncertain brand of television there is.

All that’s a little much for the readership of Satellite TV Week, so the UCB offer a simpler explanation: What sets them apart is that they get their audience stoned. In addition to actually being true—at one memorable show, the UCB passed out joins to the audience—this opens the Pandora’s box of UCB suggestions on how to get high.

ROBERTS: Mr. Clean on a handkerchief will do it, or Sterno. Or Aqua Net.
WALSH: Also, if you boil the cores of ten heads of iceberg lettuce, and then let them dry out for a couple of days, that’ll get you high. Plus, it lowers your blood pressure.
ROBERTS: I think it’s worth getting this information to your readers. I hope you’re not getting the impression that we’re obsessed with getting high, because nothing could be further from the truth. Although you can ingest your own hair and get a pretty wicked buzz.

The reporter from Satellite TV Week valiantly plows ahead, trying to fend off suggestions of poppy tea and oxygen deprivation. Walsh, trying to explain how UCB scenes overlap and merge, says it’s “à la the intertwining plots of Seinfeld, or Pulp Fiction, or Robert Altman’s films.” Finally, the reporter wraps up the phone call by asking if there is anything else she should have asked.

As a matter of fact, there is. “You haven’t asked us how you can keep getting high off one hit of acid,” Roberts tells her. “And the answer is: Drink your urine.”

ON A HOT Thursday night in New York City, two beloved comedy institutions are coming to an end. One is Seinfeld, and the other is the Upright Citizens Brigade’s five-month run of their show Saigon Suicide Squad. The Saigon Suicide Squad show mercilessly mocks overearnest efforts to eradicate prejudice, as with its “Apology to the Jews” segment. It never stays on course for long, with interruptions from UCB members planted in the audience or disguised as members of the Hong Kong Danger Duo, an inept stunt troupe intent on performing.

Standing in the aisle, dressed in her Hong Kong Danger Duo costume, Poehler shouts, “Confucius say, ‘Opinion is like apple: Everybody has two.’” While the audience ponders this nonsense, she punctuates her point by throwing two apples at Walsh, who is onstage and in character as Trotter.

“What the hell kind of accent is that?” Walsh demands.

“It’s a Hong Kong Danger Duo dialect,” she says.

“You’re not from Hong Kong.”

“Yes,” Poehler insists. “I from Hong Kong, Connecticut. It’s far east Connecticut. We have many silks and spices. It’s number-one danger capital in world.”

He tries to reason with her. “Look, your portrayal of Asian culture is offensive.”

“You offensive!” Poehler cries. “You number-one racist!” She appeals to the audience: “Just because I no do his laundry or build him railroad, he thinks I no from Hong Kong?”

While the crowd tries to bend their brains around that one, the show careens along, with the UCB doing the work of a dozen performers, employing many wigs and costumes. They’re loose tonight, ad-libbing some lines, taunting people sitting in the front row. This isn’t a blackout variety show, it’s the bastard child of Lenny Bruce and David Lynch. While Seinfeld is ending, something new is beginning. After an hour, the stage is covered with water, a half-chewed cheeseburger, a broken bottle, fake blood, and fake urine.

While the audience applauds, Poehler comes out, still in costume. “Thank you very much for coming to the last Saigon Suicide Squad show,” she says.

Walsh pokes his head out from backstage. He’s got something to say, something defiant, a manifesto for the next generation of TV comedy: “Fuck Seinfeld!”

I AM PRESENT when the UCB make one final effort to define their philosophy. Writer Joe Ventura has just received a phone call from the Comedy Central executive in charge of Standards and Practices. Ventura is trying to convey the gist of the conversation to the members of the UCB. “Here’s the problem,” he tells them. “You can’t say ‘asshole.’ ‘Asswipe’ is okay.”

“They say ‘asshole’ on NYPD Blue all the time,” Roberts reasonably objects.

Ventura’s not sure about this inconsistency. “I think that’s their thing,” he offers.

Besser ponders and finds a solution. “Well, maybe saying ‘cuntie’ is our thing.”