SEVEN MINUTES WITH FLEA OF CHILI PEPPERS
Give it away
Through the Silverlake Conservatory of Music, rock bassist Flea offers musical opportunities to everyone
By Carl Kozlowski
When Michael Balzary was a self-proclaimed "wild child" growing up in LA in the late 1970s, he found much-needed direction and inspiration through the music education programs at Fairfax High School. It was there that he also found his lifelong best friend, Anthony Kiedis, adopted the nickname of "Flea" as his public moniker and started his life's work as rock's premier bassist when the two teamed up to create the mega-selling rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers.
But when Flea, who's now 45, went back to speak to Fairfax High students several years ago, he made a discovery that shocked him.
"They used to have a marching band, orchestra, jazz band and all sorts of student productions to play in, but now they had basically no music program at all, just a volunteer teacher and a few instruments," Flea recalls. "They used to give you the instruments and teach you how to play, and now it was all gone. Then I read a book called "Songs of the Unsung" by Horace Tapscott, a great musician who started a music school in South Central in the '60s. I was really inspired by him and, after reading it, decided to start a school."
Thanks to the fact that the Chili Peppers have sold well over 40 million albums, Flea had the wherewithal to put his intentions into action. He put up the money and oversaw the planning for the Silverlake Conservatory of Music, and even personally knew and enlisted the teachers before it opened in 2001. And for the past three years, he's recruited the Chili Peppers along with some of rock's biggest names — from Patti Smith to Tracy Chapman to this year's special guest, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam — to perform a fiery fund-raiser called Hullabaloo to raise most of the school's annual budget.
This year's Hullabaloo is being held Saturday night at the Henry Fonda Theatre in Hollywood, offering fans the chance to see one of the best live bands on the planet rock it out in a venue that holds just 1,400 people. The prices range from $250 for regular admission to the show and an open bar and appetizer spread beforehand, to $500 for VIP tickets that entitle buyers to attend an exclusive rooftop after-party at a Hollywood hotspot with a special performance by popular local scenester Mickey Avalon.
All the money goes to a great cause, as the Silverlake Conservatory of Music currently teaches 600 Angelenos of every age and background among the six studios that rotate users all day long, including free lessons for those who can't afford them. Keeping with Flea's old public school tradition, the Conservatory also provides the instruments for the students to use — "that's why we need a fund-raiser," Flea says, laughing.
"We just ask that you take care of the instrument we give you and that you show up on time," says Flea. "I don't know if music programs are coming back to the schools. I would hope that would be a priority in a kid's education, but who knows? Maybe if we get a decent leader in this country."
The Conservatory doesn't just focus on rock music. Emanating from its studio walls on a recent Tuesday afternoon were piano riffs from famous classical pieces, the squawk of a tuba and assorted other jazz instruments. While it may seem surprising, the mix of sounds is totally apropos for a school run by Flea, who also is a proficient trumpet player. He studied the trumpet as well as bass guitar at Fairfax High, but also was heavily influenced by his stepfather, acclaimed jazz musician Walter Urban, Jr.
"I just love music, period," says Flea. "Jazz is one of the most sophisticated forms of music in terms of harmonics, covering the spiritual and emotional as well."
And with that spirit of musical adventure helping guide the Chili Peppers to ever more sophisticated albums and critical acclaim — including a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year for their 2006 double-CD "Stadium Arcadium" — Flea can look toward his own future with excitement, but, more importantly, can see the futures of a new generation of musical talent blossom.
"I was a street kid out of control. Having music was the one thing that was a discipline that was essential to me. It gave me something to do and something to believe in," he explains. "School music programs were everything to me; they gave me a path away from self-destruction and toward giving good energy to the world. There are a lot of kids like me who need this. I just wanna give back. That's the whole thing."
Monday, January 14, 2008
JON LOVITZ'S SECOND ACT
JON LOVITZ'S SECOND ACT
'SNL' alum takes a shot at career reinvention with his Laugh Factory residency
By CARL KOZLOWSKI
You may think you know Jon Lovitz, but you don't. Maybe you think of him like most people do, as one of the prime performers in the Saturday Night Live renaissance of the late '80s, who played a wide array of deceitful yet ultimately lovable characters, ranging from Mephistopheles himself to Tommy Flanagan the pathological liar to the sonorous-voiced Master Thespian. Or perhaps you recall him for the distinctively paunchy, hilariously nasal characters he portrayed in more than a hundred TV and film roles following his stint with the late-night powerhouse. He's one of those rare performers whose mere appearance signals laughter on the way.
Yet that impression is far too limiting, for Lovitz is also a man who can tell a vivid tale of the harrowing days he spent trapped in New York City after 9/11. He can also amaze you with a candid, impassioned defense of his friend Michael Jackson. (Hell, it's stunning to think of Jon Lovitz and the King of Pop being friends in the first place.) And now, he's making a bold leap by opening up his life onstage, taking a swing at standup-comedy success with a weekly Wednesday-night showcase at the Laugh Factory.
He decided to take this creative turn because, at 46, he was growing tired of playing the same types of roles and had experienced occasional dry spells between films. Eager to shake things up for himself, he approached Laugh Factory owner Jamie Masada last June. Lovitz's initial performance was so enthusiastically received, Masada instantly urged him to work up a full routine.
Lovitz's performance rests squarely on his shoulders, and for a guy who's built a career on playing insecure losers, he steps up to the challenge in surprisingly strong fashion. Veering from topic to topic on a recent Wednesday – politics to bizarre childhood tales to ridiculously overstated complaints about the state of television advertising – he conveyed a childlike spirit that won over two consecutive crowds, no matter how conservative their politics or stringent their morality. But most of all, his appearances are another example that, in showbiz, it's never too late to reinvent yourself.
"I've seen plenty of comics become actors, developing their persona and career and image through standup before signing a TV sitcom or movie deal," says Masada, who has watched literally thousands of the comedy hopefuls who wander through his club's doors. "[Lovitz] has one-in-a-billion timing that has taken him farther in the past six months than I've seen people go in 20 years of trying. I can see him taking this show to Broadway by the time he's finished here." Masada has given Lovitz an unheard-of yearlong commitment. "Like very few people – Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, and Chris Rock – he can make anyone of any age and any background laugh hard."
Lovitz's journey to the standup world began with what he recalls as an idyllic childhood as the only boy among five kids growing up in Tarzana, where he says his doctor father helped spearhead the construction of the suburb's main hospital. Friends star Lisa Kudrow was a neighborhood friend of his, and Lovitz's father was also the family physician for the Jacksons – as in Michael, Janet, and the rest.
Those experiences helped Lovitz hone a sense of the absurd at a very young age, as well as a fierce loyalty to his friend Michael. One of the funniest bits in his show comes when he recounts the difference between growing up "not a Jew, but Jewish" and the disparities he perceived between his upbringing and that of a macho kid in Texas: "Most boys at 12 go hunting with their fathers, kill a deer, and then learn how to gut them and skin them. I had the same experience with a bagel. My father would come in screaming, 'You're cutting it wrong! Look at all the dough you're wasting!'"
Yet it was around that time, at age 13, that Lovitz saw Woody Allen's classic 1969 film Take the Money and Run and decided he wanted to be just like him.
"I heard his routine and performed that and other Jewish comics like Lenny Bruce's routines in my college dorm, and when I graduated I took comedy workshops on Saturday nights at the Comedy Store," he recalls. "I always wanted to do it but didn't have the guts to take the stage on my own like that, until [fellow SNL alums] Dana Carvey and Dennis Miller told me I should do it, and I heard how much Dana was making at it. Right away, I started hosting shows for [fellow SNL-ers] Kevin Nealon, Victoria Jackson, and Norm MacDonald. I did 10 minutes first; then they asked if I could do 30."
Lovitz was able to work at getting into SNL because of his father's thorough emotional support. Despite his success as a doctor, the senior Lovitz had really wanted to be an opera singer, and so the patriarch encouraged his children to follow their hearts careerwise. Thus, young Jon headed off to UC Irvine to pursue acting – a professor there served as the inspiration for the Master Thespian – and soon afterward began performing with the legendary Groundlings comedy troupe, where SNL producer Lorne Michaels discovered him.
During Lovitz's five-year run on the late-night powerhouse, he recalls upsetting only one celebrity with a stinging impersonation: iconic gay playwright/actor Harvey Fierstein. Lovitz pretended that Fierstein was hosting a talk show from his boudoir, desperately hustling attractive male guests for physical affection while always being thoroughly rebuffed.
"Harvey didn't like it, and he came in to the show to complain about it," says Lovitz. "His point was that he was getting more famous as me than as him. Watching him, I realized I was doing him quite well. He thought I was doing a gay stereotype," laughs the comedian. "But I only played him one time after that. If it hurts someone, it's not worth doing."
That surprisingly gentle philosophy is rare among today's generation of notoriously mean-spirited humorists, but it allows Lovitz to get away with poking extensive fun at all types of politicians and pop culture. Even when the admittedly staunch Democrat calls on the Republicans in the Laugh Factory crowd to raise their hands and "out" themselves, they do it joyfully and wind up laughing harder at his take on Bush than even the Democrats in the house. And when Lovitz fires off his best riff of the show, complaining about celebrities like Bob Dole or Tony Bennett making ads for penile dysfunction medications, it's hard to find an audience member who isn't doubled over with laughter.
At the end of the night, Lovitz surprises the crowd one more time by sitting at a portable keyboard and pounding out jazz-pop tunes he's written. But even these are childishly dirty and absurdly off-kilter in the best way, as they revolve around another unlikely friend of his – squeaky-clean TV dad Bob Saget of Full House fame – and Lovitz's unfounded impression that Saget is gay. As he spells out one incredibly deluded allegation after another in a voice that could lull an infant to sleep, Lovitz tickles the ivories with fast-jazz fury, transformed by the moment into the all-around entertainer he's always dreamed of being. As the audience bursts into a final round of applause, one senses Masada is right: This is career reinvention at its most exciting, and could very well signal the rebirth of a star.
'SNL' alum takes a shot at career reinvention with his Laugh Factory residency
By CARL KOZLOWSKI
You may think you know Jon Lovitz, but you don't. Maybe you think of him like most people do, as one of the prime performers in the Saturday Night Live renaissance of the late '80s, who played a wide array of deceitful yet ultimately lovable characters, ranging from Mephistopheles himself to Tommy Flanagan the pathological liar to the sonorous-voiced Master Thespian. Or perhaps you recall him for the distinctively paunchy, hilariously nasal characters he portrayed in more than a hundred TV and film roles following his stint with the late-night powerhouse. He's one of those rare performers whose mere appearance signals laughter on the way.
Yet that impression is far too limiting, for Lovitz is also a man who can tell a vivid tale of the harrowing days he spent trapped in New York City after 9/11. He can also amaze you with a candid, impassioned defense of his friend Michael Jackson. (Hell, it's stunning to think of Jon Lovitz and the King of Pop being friends in the first place.) And now, he's making a bold leap by opening up his life onstage, taking a swing at standup-comedy success with a weekly Wednesday-night showcase at the Laugh Factory.
He decided to take this creative turn because, at 46, he was growing tired of playing the same types of roles and had experienced occasional dry spells between films. Eager to shake things up for himself, he approached Laugh Factory owner Jamie Masada last June. Lovitz's initial performance was so enthusiastically received, Masada instantly urged him to work up a full routine.
Lovitz's performance rests squarely on his shoulders, and for a guy who's built a career on playing insecure losers, he steps up to the challenge in surprisingly strong fashion. Veering from topic to topic on a recent Wednesday – politics to bizarre childhood tales to ridiculously overstated complaints about the state of television advertising – he conveyed a childlike spirit that won over two consecutive crowds, no matter how conservative their politics or stringent their morality. But most of all, his appearances are another example that, in showbiz, it's never too late to reinvent yourself.
"I've seen plenty of comics become actors, developing their persona and career and image through standup before signing a TV sitcom or movie deal," says Masada, who has watched literally thousands of the comedy hopefuls who wander through his club's doors. "[Lovitz] has one-in-a-billion timing that has taken him farther in the past six months than I've seen people go in 20 years of trying. I can see him taking this show to Broadway by the time he's finished here." Masada has given Lovitz an unheard-of yearlong commitment. "Like very few people – Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, and Chris Rock – he can make anyone of any age and any background laugh hard."
Lovitz's journey to the standup world began with what he recalls as an idyllic childhood as the only boy among five kids growing up in Tarzana, where he says his doctor father helped spearhead the construction of the suburb's main hospital. Friends star Lisa Kudrow was a neighborhood friend of his, and Lovitz's father was also the family physician for the Jacksons – as in Michael, Janet, and the rest.
Those experiences helped Lovitz hone a sense of the absurd at a very young age, as well as a fierce loyalty to his friend Michael. One of the funniest bits in his show comes when he recounts the difference between growing up "not a Jew, but Jewish" and the disparities he perceived between his upbringing and that of a macho kid in Texas: "Most boys at 12 go hunting with their fathers, kill a deer, and then learn how to gut them and skin them. I had the same experience with a bagel. My father would come in screaming, 'You're cutting it wrong! Look at all the dough you're wasting!'"
Yet it was around that time, at age 13, that Lovitz saw Woody Allen's classic 1969 film Take the Money and Run and decided he wanted to be just like him.
"I heard his routine and performed that and other Jewish comics like Lenny Bruce's routines in my college dorm, and when I graduated I took comedy workshops on Saturday nights at the Comedy Store," he recalls. "I always wanted to do it but didn't have the guts to take the stage on my own like that, until [fellow SNL alums] Dana Carvey and Dennis Miller told me I should do it, and I heard how much Dana was making at it. Right away, I started hosting shows for [fellow SNL-ers] Kevin Nealon, Victoria Jackson, and Norm MacDonald. I did 10 minutes first; then they asked if I could do 30."
Lovitz was able to work at getting into SNL because of his father's thorough emotional support. Despite his success as a doctor, the senior Lovitz had really wanted to be an opera singer, and so the patriarch encouraged his children to follow their hearts careerwise. Thus, young Jon headed off to UC Irvine to pursue acting – a professor there served as the inspiration for the Master Thespian – and soon afterward began performing with the legendary Groundlings comedy troupe, where SNL producer Lorne Michaels discovered him.
During Lovitz's five-year run on the late-night powerhouse, he recalls upsetting only one celebrity with a stinging impersonation: iconic gay playwright/actor Harvey Fierstein. Lovitz pretended that Fierstein was hosting a talk show from his boudoir, desperately hustling attractive male guests for physical affection while always being thoroughly rebuffed.
"Harvey didn't like it, and he came in to the show to complain about it," says Lovitz. "His point was that he was getting more famous as me than as him. Watching him, I realized I was doing him quite well. He thought I was doing a gay stereotype," laughs the comedian. "But I only played him one time after that. If it hurts someone, it's not worth doing."
That surprisingly gentle philosophy is rare among today's generation of notoriously mean-spirited humorists, but it allows Lovitz to get away with poking extensive fun at all types of politicians and pop culture. Even when the admittedly staunch Democrat calls on the Republicans in the Laugh Factory crowd to raise their hands and "out" themselves, they do it joyfully and wind up laughing harder at his take on Bush than even the Democrats in the house. And when Lovitz fires off his best riff of the show, complaining about celebrities like Bob Dole or Tony Bennett making ads for penile dysfunction medications, it's hard to find an audience member who isn't doubled over with laughter.
At the end of the night, Lovitz surprises the crowd one more time by sitting at a portable keyboard and pounding out jazz-pop tunes he's written. But even these are childishly dirty and absurdly off-kilter in the best way, as they revolve around another unlikely friend of his – squeaky-clean TV dad Bob Saget of Full House fame – and Lovitz's unfounded impression that Saget is gay. As he spells out one incredibly deluded allegation after another in a voice that could lull an infant to sleep, Lovitz tickles the ivories with fast-jazz fury, transformed by the moment into the all-around entertainer he's always dreamed of being. As the audience bursts into a final round of applause, one senses Masada is right: This is career reinvention at its most exciting, and could very well signal the rebirth of a star.
HANGIN' WITH JO KOY
HANGIN' WITH JO KOY
Elevated Laughter
Filipino-American 'Tonight Show'comic JoKoy headlines Asian talent showcase
By Carl Kozlowski
Growing up all around the planet as a military child, JoKoy dreamed of being a standup comic. Watching Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams and Whoopi Goldberg during their 1980s performing heydays, he could barely wait to graduate from high school in order to break off on his own and take the plunge into onstage stardom himself.
Like countless other performers in the entertainment industry, the road to success wasn't fast. But thanks to incredible perseverance, JoKoy (a stage name he took from his childhood nickname) finally landed on "The Tonight Show" in January and achieved one of the most incredible and rare feats that any comic could hope for: a standing ovation on his first appearance.
With his career newly afire from that success, he has found himself in greater demand than ever across the country and landed an appearance on ABC's fellow late-night show "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" this past Monday.
This weekend, the Filipino-American performer takes the stage at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium as the headliner of "Asian Elevation," a show being touted as "the premiere Asian Pacific American talent show," and gives Pasadenans a chance to catch his magic live and in person.
"'The Tonight Show' was amazing, and that was the greatest day of my life. I got that from [performing at the Just for Laughs comedy festival in] Montreal, where the show's talent bookers saw me, liked my routine and wanted to put me on the show," he recalls. "I couldn't wait. Six months later, I was finally on it. And then to have a standing ovation was even more amazing because they told me I was only the third comic ever to receive one on the show."
It is that kind of acclaim that has made JoKoy, who was born on an American military base in Japan but finally settled in Seattle with his family for his high school years, a hero to legions of young Asian-American performers. His presence at "Asian Elevation," which features 10 eclectic acts vying for a $1,000 grand prize, should easily garner him a similar response to his appearance on "The Tonight Show."
The 35-year-old comic started performing in 1995 in Las Vegas, where his family had moved after he graduated from high school. He credits his experiences there, in which he balanced "odd jobs" with nonstop performances at open mikes and eventually rented theaters to produce his own showcase shows all over Sin City, as his true "growing-up years."
In fact, JoKoy is part of a small but die-hard group of Asian-Americans who have braved the standup comedy world amid decades that have seen other minority stars from the aforementioned Murphy to current Latino favorite Carlos Mencia get their moments to shine. He's proud to be in a tradition that includes Pat Morita, Kevin Shea, Edwin San Juan, Dan Gabriel and current "MAD TV" star Bobby Lee, but he feels that the time has come for Asian-American comics to truly kick in the doors to success.
"There's basically a handful of Asian comics out there, and just a handful of funny ones too. I want more. That's my goal, and it just takes time," he says. "Hopefully we're the pioneers to helping others get out there because the more of us, the better. I don't want us to be Asian comics; just be a funny comic, and if you're Asian, you're Asian. I can make anybody laugh, and I want my fans to be every color."
Onstage, JoKoy is able to elicit waves of laughter by talking about anything from bathroom habits to male-female relations to his personal stories of life with his 3-year-old son. But his strongest barbs come in attacking the stereotypes held against his race:
"Being Asian in LA means you get the worst compliments. 'Oh, you're Asian? I love orange chicken,'" he squeals in an excited Caucasian girl's voice. "Don't thank Asians for orange chicken, thank the Mexicans. They know how to cook it."
"Asians are always considered to be bad drivers. I drove here; I've got a car. We build the best cars; you don't think we can drive them? You think an engineer at Lexus is bragging about what he built, but when it comes time to drive, he goes (in thick Asian accent) 'Oh no, I just build car …'?"
Speaking of his inspirations for material and the road he's traveled thus far, JoKoy also notes how amazed he is to be actor/comic Jon Lovitz's official opening act for both Lovitz's weekly Wednesday night shows at West Hollywood's Laugh Factory and for Lovitz's upcoming national comedy tour. But as he notes, sometimes all the timing falls into place.
"They say it takes you 10 years to find your [comedic] voice, and it really came around my ninth or 10th year onstage. I realized I know how to say something and say it funny, and no matter the topic, I can make it funny," he explains. "Some things I say are my point of view — being Asian in America and then about my son also and observational off- the-wall stuff — but it's all delivered the same way. I'm having fun, and people just get it."
Elevated Laughter
Filipino-American 'Tonight Show'comic JoKoy headlines Asian talent showcase
By Carl Kozlowski
Growing up all around the planet as a military child, JoKoy dreamed of being a standup comic. Watching Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams and Whoopi Goldberg during their 1980s performing heydays, he could barely wait to graduate from high school in order to break off on his own and take the plunge into onstage stardom himself.
Like countless other performers in the entertainment industry, the road to success wasn't fast. But thanks to incredible perseverance, JoKoy (a stage name he took from his childhood nickname) finally landed on "The Tonight Show" in January and achieved one of the most incredible and rare feats that any comic could hope for: a standing ovation on his first appearance.
With his career newly afire from that success, he has found himself in greater demand than ever across the country and landed an appearance on ABC's fellow late-night show "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" this past Monday.
This weekend, the Filipino-American performer takes the stage at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium as the headliner of "Asian Elevation," a show being touted as "the premiere Asian Pacific American talent show," and gives Pasadenans a chance to catch his magic live and in person.
"'The Tonight Show' was amazing, and that was the greatest day of my life. I got that from [performing at the Just for Laughs comedy festival in] Montreal, where the show's talent bookers saw me, liked my routine and wanted to put me on the show," he recalls. "I couldn't wait. Six months later, I was finally on it. And then to have a standing ovation was even more amazing because they told me I was only the third comic ever to receive one on the show."
It is that kind of acclaim that has made JoKoy, who was born on an American military base in Japan but finally settled in Seattle with his family for his high school years, a hero to legions of young Asian-American performers. His presence at "Asian Elevation," which features 10 eclectic acts vying for a $1,000 grand prize, should easily garner him a similar response to his appearance on "The Tonight Show."
The 35-year-old comic started performing in 1995 in Las Vegas, where his family had moved after he graduated from high school. He credits his experiences there, in which he balanced "odd jobs" with nonstop performances at open mikes and eventually rented theaters to produce his own showcase shows all over Sin City, as his true "growing-up years."
In fact, JoKoy is part of a small but die-hard group of Asian-Americans who have braved the standup comedy world amid decades that have seen other minority stars from the aforementioned Murphy to current Latino favorite Carlos Mencia get their moments to shine. He's proud to be in a tradition that includes Pat Morita, Kevin Shea, Edwin San Juan, Dan Gabriel and current "MAD TV" star Bobby Lee, but he feels that the time has come for Asian-American comics to truly kick in the doors to success.
"There's basically a handful of Asian comics out there, and just a handful of funny ones too. I want more. That's my goal, and it just takes time," he says. "Hopefully we're the pioneers to helping others get out there because the more of us, the better. I don't want us to be Asian comics; just be a funny comic, and if you're Asian, you're Asian. I can make anybody laugh, and I want my fans to be every color."
Onstage, JoKoy is able to elicit waves of laughter by talking about anything from bathroom habits to male-female relations to his personal stories of life with his 3-year-old son. But his strongest barbs come in attacking the stereotypes held against his race:
"Being Asian in LA means you get the worst compliments. 'Oh, you're Asian? I love orange chicken,'" he squeals in an excited Caucasian girl's voice. "Don't thank Asians for orange chicken, thank the Mexicans. They know how to cook it."
"Asians are always considered to be bad drivers. I drove here; I've got a car. We build the best cars; you don't think we can drive them? You think an engineer at Lexus is bragging about what he built, but when it comes time to drive, he goes (in thick Asian accent) 'Oh no, I just build car …'?"
Speaking of his inspirations for material and the road he's traveled thus far, JoKoy also notes how amazed he is to be actor/comic Jon Lovitz's official opening act for both Lovitz's weekly Wednesday night shows at West Hollywood's Laugh Factory and for Lovitz's upcoming national comedy tour. But as he notes, sometimes all the timing falls into place.
"They say it takes you 10 years to find your [comedic] voice, and it really came around my ninth or 10th year onstage. I realized I know how to say something and say it funny, and no matter the topic, I can make it funny," he explains. "Some things I say are my point of view — being Asian in America and then about my son also and observational off- the-wall stuff — but it's all delivered the same way. I'm having fun, and people just get it."
BOB SAGET IS A DIRTY BASTARD BUT I DIG HIM
BOB SAGET IS A DIRTY BASTARD BUT I DIG HIM
Bob Saget is an Old, Dirty Bastard (Who Knew?)
By Carl Kozlowski
As one of the dads on the long-running ABC sitcom Full House, Bob Saget found himself trapped for 9 years in a hell of milquetoast characters and endlessly recycled family crises. Compounding the agony was his other weekly gig as the host of America's Funniest Home Videos, reciting horrible jokes accompanying an endless stream of people falling down and taking hits to the crotch.
Basically, if you asked anyone over age 10 back in the early 90s what they thought of Bob Saget, at best they'd respond that he was lame.
But there was always a much hipper, funnier, and downright dirtier comic just dying to get out. Saget cashed the TV checks but yearned for the day he could perform uncensored again. He was the wicked mind who directed Norm McDonald's cult classic comedy Dirty Work, and in an infamous cameo in the stoner favorite Half Baked, he joked "I suck dick for crack." Star comics with far more hipster cred than Saget could ever dream of possessing gave him props as the most brilliantly dirty mind of them all, but no one in the power suites of Hollywood or the streets of Middle America would ever believe it.
Now the evidence is readily available on movie screens across America. For Bob Saget tops nearly 100 of our greatest comic minds, including George Carlin and Robin Williams, by telling the dirtiest version of the dirtiest joke ever told in the new documentary, The Aristocrats. As the movie's ads trumpet, the film is unrated because it would have received the commercially suicidal rating of NC-17 for having "No violence. No nudity. Unspeakable obscenity!"
And Saget's taking the newfound notoriety all the way to the bank again, performing most Friday nights at L.A.'s top comedy club, The Laugh Factory, to wild response and taking his show on the road to shocked college and theater audiences nationwide.
"I'm actually almost ashamed of how dirty I got. I guess people are talking about it, but then they also talk about the guy who shoots people," jokes Saget, who also just finished an acclaimed off-Broadway run in the new play Privilege. "In two years I'll be G-rated again because so much of what I do is R-rated. I was just in Athens Georgia for 700 people, and they added another show because the line was like a rock concert. Marquee said 'Second Show Added To Full House.' I guess I'll never really escape it."
Saget started his odd career journey at the age of 17, after graduating high school in his native Philadelphia and appearing in his college friends' student movies. He took the train to New York City as often as possible and quickly made a great impression on the standup scene, landing comedy powerhouse Chris Albright as his manager before Albright went on to head comedy programming at HBO.
While Saget's early shows were more innocent than his current nirvana of naughtiness, centering around such gags as having his guitar spew water while he sang "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," he always had a dark sense of humor. That bizarre bent came from numerous family tragedies, as Saget lost two sisters and his dad lost four brothers to untimely deaths.
Saget rode his stage persona to the nine-year run of "Full House" and the massive success of "Home Videos," but for ten years that meant he abandoned live comedy. When the shows ended and Saget realized his directing career wasn't catching fire, he decided to hit the road again.
"It was a real proud moment to say 'I suck dick for coke' in 'Half Baked,'" Saget recalls with more than a trace of sarcasm. "But somehow Harvard decided to honor me as a member of their humor magazine the Harvard Lampoon, a year after they honored [acclaimed playwright] David Mamet! They actually put together a 2 ½ hour show honoring me, and I realized there must be a market for me at colleges again."
As Saget notes, getting back into a good comic rhythm is not as easy as riding a bike. Nonetheless, he poured out effort and soon found his act was better received than ever before, as he decided to say literally anything that came to mind. Sure, it might be a shock to see Danny Tanner from Full House lobbing F-bombs, but after the initial ten seconds of gasps, audiences can't help laughing.
His return to the stage has led to a flurry of other work that never seemed possible during his G-rated Full House days. For instance, Saget lampooned his squeaky-clean image brilliantly in a recent episode of HBO's show Entourage, allowed his house to get driven into for the WB network's Jamie Kennedy Experiment, and just finished an acclaimed dramatic turn on Showtime's series Huff. Best of all was his run in Privilege, which gave him a newfound confidence in his abilities.
"I wish I wasn't so dirty in this movie, but everyone's talking about it. Then again, they talk about you if you shoot a guy," he notes wryly. "I actually don't understand what the big deal is, I haven't changed that much, just gotten older. I'm not X-rated at all, I do no gynecological material. I do sex jokes, some dick jokes and poop comedy. I talk about my kids and relationships, some news stuff. But people that know me, its no big deal because I haven't changed. I just always wanted to make people laugh as much as I could."
Bob Saget is an Old, Dirty Bastard (Who Knew?)
By Carl Kozlowski
As one of the dads on the long-running ABC sitcom Full House, Bob Saget found himself trapped for 9 years in a hell of milquetoast characters and endlessly recycled family crises. Compounding the agony was his other weekly gig as the host of America's Funniest Home Videos, reciting horrible jokes accompanying an endless stream of people falling down and taking hits to the crotch.
Basically, if you asked anyone over age 10 back in the early 90s what they thought of Bob Saget, at best they'd respond that he was lame.
But there was always a much hipper, funnier, and downright dirtier comic just dying to get out. Saget cashed the TV checks but yearned for the day he could perform uncensored again. He was the wicked mind who directed Norm McDonald's cult classic comedy Dirty Work, and in an infamous cameo in the stoner favorite Half Baked, he joked "I suck dick for crack." Star comics with far more hipster cred than Saget could ever dream of possessing gave him props as the most brilliantly dirty mind of them all, but no one in the power suites of Hollywood or the streets of Middle America would ever believe it.
Now the evidence is readily available on movie screens across America. For Bob Saget tops nearly 100 of our greatest comic minds, including George Carlin and Robin Williams, by telling the dirtiest version of the dirtiest joke ever told in the new documentary, The Aristocrats. As the movie's ads trumpet, the film is unrated because it would have received the commercially suicidal rating of NC-17 for having "No violence. No nudity. Unspeakable obscenity!"
And Saget's taking the newfound notoriety all the way to the bank again, performing most Friday nights at L.A.'s top comedy club, The Laugh Factory, to wild response and taking his show on the road to shocked college and theater audiences nationwide.
"I'm actually almost ashamed of how dirty I got. I guess people are talking about it, but then they also talk about the guy who shoots people," jokes Saget, who also just finished an acclaimed off-Broadway run in the new play Privilege. "In two years I'll be G-rated again because so much of what I do is R-rated. I was just in Athens Georgia for 700 people, and they added another show because the line was like a rock concert. Marquee said 'Second Show Added To Full House.' I guess I'll never really escape it."
Saget started his odd career journey at the age of 17, after graduating high school in his native Philadelphia and appearing in his college friends' student movies. He took the train to New York City as often as possible and quickly made a great impression on the standup scene, landing comedy powerhouse Chris Albright as his manager before Albright went on to head comedy programming at HBO.
While Saget's early shows were more innocent than his current nirvana of naughtiness, centering around such gags as having his guitar spew water while he sang "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," he always had a dark sense of humor. That bizarre bent came from numerous family tragedies, as Saget lost two sisters and his dad lost four brothers to untimely deaths.
Saget rode his stage persona to the nine-year run of "Full House" and the massive success of "Home Videos," but for ten years that meant he abandoned live comedy. When the shows ended and Saget realized his directing career wasn't catching fire, he decided to hit the road again.
"It was a real proud moment to say 'I suck dick for coke' in 'Half Baked,'" Saget recalls with more than a trace of sarcasm. "But somehow Harvard decided to honor me as a member of their humor magazine the Harvard Lampoon, a year after they honored [acclaimed playwright] David Mamet! They actually put together a 2 ½ hour show honoring me, and I realized there must be a market for me at colleges again."
As Saget notes, getting back into a good comic rhythm is not as easy as riding a bike. Nonetheless, he poured out effort and soon found his act was better received than ever before, as he decided to say literally anything that came to mind. Sure, it might be a shock to see Danny Tanner from Full House lobbing F-bombs, but after the initial ten seconds of gasps, audiences can't help laughing.
His return to the stage has led to a flurry of other work that never seemed possible during his G-rated Full House days. For instance, Saget lampooned his squeaky-clean image brilliantly in a recent episode of HBO's show Entourage, allowed his house to get driven into for the WB network's Jamie Kennedy Experiment, and just finished an acclaimed dramatic turn on Showtime's series Huff. Best of all was his run in Privilege, which gave him a newfound confidence in his abilities.
"I wish I wasn't so dirty in this movie, but everyone's talking about it. Then again, they talk about you if you shoot a guy," he notes wryly. "I actually don't understand what the big deal is, I haven't changed that much, just gotten older. I'm not X-rated at all, I do no gynecological material. I do sex jokes, some dick jokes and poop comedy. I talk about my kids and relationships, some news stuff. But people that know me, its no big deal because I haven't changed. I just always wanted to make people laugh as much as I could."
WHAT DO WILL FERRELL, JON LOVITZ & PEE WEE HERMAN HAVE IN COMMON?
WHAT DO WILL FERRELL, JON LOVITZ & PEE WEE HAVE IN COMMON??
THE EVENT INFO AT THE END IS OLD, BUT THE STORY TELLS YOU PLENTY ABOUT A PLACE THAT MADE TONS OF COMEDY FOLKS FAMOUS!
THEY'RE ALL GONNA LAUGH AT YOU!
The Groundlings have given improv comedy Lisa Kudrow, Pee-wee Herman, and the late, great Phil Hartman. After 30 years, the troupe is still feeding modern comedy
By CARL KOZLOWSKI
hink of American comedy over the last three decades, and chances are you'll come up with a member of improvisational comedy-theater troupe the Groundlings. After all, the company has launched the careers of top talents from original Saturday Night Live Not Ready for Prime Time Player Laraine Newman to The Critic's Jon Lovitz to Friends' Lisa Kudrow. It's also given us Pee-wee Herman, the SNL cheerleaders played by Will Ferrell and Cheri Oteri, and the incredibly diverse characters of the late, great Phil Hartman.
Add the stellar, Emmy-nominated work of Cheryl Hines on HBO's groundbreaking sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm, and throw in a dash of Edie McClurg's dead-on depiction of every high school's batty, bitchy secretary in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and you've got a recipe for comedy that's satisfied the nation's appetite for laughter like no other group in the country. Yet, the Groundlings have also slipped under America's pop-culture radar, never drawing quite the praise and attention of Chicago's and Toronto's equally influential Second City troupes. In fact, they seem to go largely unrecognized outside the heart of the Los Angeles comedy industry.
But on Tuesday night, the Groundlings will get their rightful due. The venerable troupe is celebrating its 30th anniversary at the Henry Fonda Music Box Theater with an all-star, roof-raising fundraiser that's sure to be the comedy event of the year. Things have come a long way since their early days as a hippie comedy collective, where anyone could wander in and learn at a workshop or perform in a show for a mere buck a week – and, even more oddly, as a group started as a way for a boy from the Bible Belt named Gary Austin to reinvent his life and give others the chance to do the same.
"It's funny, looking back, because in the '60s, I was very conservative," recalls Austin, who founded the Groundlings in 1972. Today, at 63, sitting in the troupe's Melrose Avenue home base, he looks like Garry Shandling's slightly older brother. "But when I was a little kid, I always loved performing and getting in front of audiences. There were three things I wanted to do: be an evangelist, be a baseball player, and be a cowboy singer – all things done before crowds of people."
That need for notice stemmed from being raised in the hardscrabble oil fields of Oklahoma and Texas, as his father spent his post-Navy career working for the notorious Halliburton company. Austin remembers stories his mother told him about her own rough childhood in Oilton, Oklahoma – a town built so close to oil derricks that children were covered by the misty black spray while walking to and from school every day.
Austin spent his high-school summers working for Halliburton and his Sundays surrounded by holy-rolling members of the Nazarene church. He came away with a distaste for both that has since sparked him to write the acclaimed solo shows Oil and Church. He escaped to San Francisco State University, "where I was finally introduced to the world at large," and joined a sketch-comedy troupe that served as a fun outlet for his repressed creativity.
But it wasn't until he graduated and landed his first job as a social worker in Watts – "where my first week was right during the [1965] riots" – that he spotted a sign on Sunset Boulevard advertising an appearance by seminal San Francisco improv troupe the Committee and decided to check it out.
"I was blown away by it and knew I had to be a part of it," says Austin, recalling a feeling that countless performers would later have after seeing the Groundlings. "You had to come to a workshop every Saturday afternoon, and there were 50 people taking the class for a buck apiece. Del Close [regarded within comedy as the ultimate improv teacher] took over directing the workshops and reinvented the form there with a game called the Harold.
"But my favorite recollection is the Group Grope, where everybody was lying on the floor, feeling each other up," he continues, cackling. "This was the '60s. Often, the Group Grope got us going, and we'd extend the experience beyond the workshop."
By 1972, the Committee had charted a decade-long run in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and founder Allan Myerson decided to move on. Those who stayed behind, however, wanted to form their own group – and thus, the Groundlings were born.
"I picked the name based on Shakespeare's description in Hamlet of the people who watch plays while sitting on the ground," explains Austin. "It was a name that didn't force us to only do comedy, like [now-defunct competing troupe] Kentucky Fried Theater, because at first we wanted to be open to all types of theater."
Not Ready for Prime Time
Whatever Austin's intentions, the group took off quickly due to its comedic elements and rave reviews from the Los Angeles Times. Although city zoning and parking regulations tied up plans to perform in their own space for years, the doors of far more established venues, like the Improv comedy club, were opened to them, and soon the Groundlings were packing theater seats. A rotating group of 90 students competed for 25 available performing slots in the weekly shows. Stars like Lily Tomlin dropped by regularly to watch, and, one night in 1975, she brought along a young NBC producer named Lorne Michaels.
Michaels was scouting the nation for talent, hoping to create an entertainment revolution of his own with Saturday Night Live. Among the Groundlings, he immediately took a liking to Laraine Newman. A fan of improv ever since she started performing it at Beverly Hills High School at age 15, Newman had also seen the Committee in San Francisco and liked the idea of being able to create her own material with improv, rather than struggling to fit others' demands.
"I was at CalArts for about a minute, when my sister took me to a Gary Austin workshop, and I loved it immediately," recalls Newman. "So many people I came through there with became [members of] the top writing staffs on sitcoms like Cheers and Just Shoot Me. But most importantly, I learned about being in a company and how to deal with the give and take of other people's time on stage. It didn't help fully when I got to SNL, because the stakes were much higher there, but for any show folk, there is a familial feel, whether you're in summer stock or road tours or Broadway."
For Newman, the character creation encouraged by the Groundlings enabled her to come up with such SNL-worthy individuals as Cheri the Stewardess and a Valley girl who was part of The Godfather's group-therapy sessions. It also led to her currently fruitful voiceover career and a recent lifetime achievement award from the Chicago Improv Festival. "The training really holds up, no matter what you do," she says.
Michaels also wanted to hire a Groundling named Archie Hahn and invited Austin to direct the new venture, but both declined – a decision Austin still doesn't regret.
"I believe the Groundlings would have dissolved if I'd gone," Austin says. "I was the only teacher and hadn't trained anybody else how to do it yet. I'm very glad I also didn't have to deal with the drug problems at SNL, because you had actors coming in late and stoned, and they would win any argument in making NBC decide whether they or the director had to go," he says. "The chaos might not have succeeded, and I'd come back home without a theater, because I'd forsaken the same ship I'd asked everyone else to sacrifice for. To sacrifice that for anything would have been a mistake."
Yet Austin did leave in 1979, handing control of the troupe and its school to Tom Maxwell, a fellow Southerner who had come to L.A. years before as a USC graduate film student. That was also the year the Groundlings finally found their footing with the opening of their permanent location on Melrose.
During his time working with Austin, Maxwell had seen a growing need to weed through applicants for spots in the Groundlings school, and over the next decade he created a stratified system that made students' talent levels easier to define and track. But more important, his decade-long reign through the '80s saw the city and the entertainment industry becoming more aware of the Groundlings.
"It's always been a character-driven company, in that we built scenes and shows around characters rather than themes," says Maxwell, speaking from his home in Vermont, where he continues to write several produced sitcom scripts a year. "But in 1984, the Olympic Arts Festival gave us a breakout hit with Phil Hartman's Chick Hazard show; our special show Casual Sex was being made into a movie; and [Groundling member] Paul Reubens was breaking out into his own solo show as Pee-wee Herman at the Roxy."
During this time, amid the "Morning in America" era of shiny happy Reaganness, the shows also lost some of their early political flavor – a factor that continued in the Groundlings' most recent main-stage show, Groundlings' National Park. But, according to Maxwell, "It was never a conscious decision to be more or less political – just, let's work with what's happening organically. If an actor wanted to be political, they could, and if they didn't, that was fine, too."
Phil Hartman Stumbles In
Mainly, the Groundlings served as a home for an ever-changing band of comedy hopefuls. It was a place where a Columbia Pictures accountant, like Julia Sweeney, or a member of A&M Records' publishing staff, like Cheri Oteri, could finally exercise the creative spirits bursting within them. But perhaps the most famous Groundling to date (maybe next to Will Ferrell) was Phil Hartman – a man who literally stumbled across the cast when his then-girlfriend and future fellow performer Jaye P. Morgan took him to see the troupe for his birthday.
Hartman's tragic 1998 death at the hands of his wife, Brynn, has turned his story into a shared legacy of countless Groundlings members. Much like the similarly untimely death of Second City Chicago graduate Chris Farley, Hartman's time with the troupe has taken on mythic proportions.
"I was in the backstage room giving notes to actors when I noticed our 30-seat theater was filled with laughs, and our show hadn't even started yet," Austin recalls. "But I looked, and there was this guy standing on stage. After the show, he and Jaye P. asked how to be Groundlings. We had just started doing auditions to weed people out, but he flew through them, and he soon was writing for the main-stage show."
During his decade-long stretch with the Groundlings, Hartman was best known for creating an improvised detective sketch called "Chick Hazard," in which he would construct and solve a different crime each week based on audience suggestions. But for Austin, Hartman's funniest creation was "Lightman." As Austin talks, he leaps onto the theater's stage to re-create this character.
"Phil comes from backstage and toward the audience, dressed in 27 lit flashlights and a bathing suit, with one more standing on his head," says Austin as he continues his performance. "He would shine them on the audience and then say, in a deep, dramatic voice, 'I am Lightman!' And would shine it on whomever he wanted to interview on the spot in the audience. It wasn't the best sketch he ever did, but it was the most popular."
Edie McClurg was a member of the Groundlings' official first cast from 1975 to 1985, having honed her chops with the Pitschel Players' troupe in San Francisco and as a standup at L.A.'s Comedy Store, where she battled for stage time with the late Shirley Hemphill of What's Happening!! fame. Oddly enough, she had a straight-laced ´´ career before setting foot on a comedy stage: She taught radio classes at the University of Missouri-Kansas City for eight years, then became operations manager and jack of all trades at Kansas City's NPR affiliate.
That officiousness and prim and proper Midwestern viewpoint helped McClurg launch a career of playing stuffy, upright women who wield a sharp tongue when audiences least expect it – particularly in Ferris Bueller and in Planes, Trains and Automobiles as the car-rental checkout clerk who suffers a foul-mouthed tirade from Steve Martin.
"When we started, it was more of a commune, and if you came up with some type of material in the workshop, it would get in the show," recalls McClurg, who sprinkles her conversation with the high-pitched chuckle immortalized in the aforementioned John Hughes films. "Improvisation has been the core of my technique, and when I'm presented with a script, I always fill it in with what I call the noise of life – little comments characters say under their breath – so it's fuller than a character just talking to another character."
While McClurg was one of the earliest Groundlings stars, Jon Lovitz came along in the early '80s as part of the second big wave of talent. In fact, when he was plucked by Lorne Michaels to become the second Groundling on SNL in 1985, Tom Maxwell laughed and said, "We've got one once a decade."
At the time he joined the Groundlings, Lovitz was torn between serious acting dreams and the comedic side his acting teachers kept trying to force him to develop. He had already bounced between New York and L.A., and felt studying with the troupe was a way to give his life and career some direction.
"I remember driving there to the theater the first time and crying, because I was really committing my life to being a comedian, and I was wondering, what if it doesn't work out?" recalls Lovitz. "But I went, and I loved it, and then I met Phil Hartman, and he invited me to understudy his show Chick Hazard: Olympic Trials."
Lovitz's voice trails off for a second.
"Jesus, it's been 20 years," he continues. "But I have a career because of it. When I was doing the show with Phil, Laraine came and saw it, and I wound up hired in '85 on SNL. They kept me for the next year and asked who I worked well with, and I said Phil, so they put him on SNL, too. Then I told Lisa Kudrow, whom I've known as a little sister since she was six, that the Groundlings were the way to go when she asked me how to get into acting. It took her 10 years before she got Friends, but look at her now."
That sense of family – of personal recommendations helping to launch careers and fulfill dreams – crops up time and again when talking to Groundlings alums. For Lovitz, who spoke at the greatest length and with the most passion of anyone interviewed for this story, going through the troupe was the best school experience he had ever known.
"The camaraderie was just great there," he says. "It was like a bunch of class clowns working together. In real school, you get in trouble for goofing off, but here was a school that taught you how to goof off really well. I was a messenger, and we all had day jobs, but people loved it so much that they were paying to be a part of it. I learned how to create characters, how to write and supervise my scenes. I still use everything I learned there."
Learning Her Enthusiasm
Although Hartman was a colleague of Lovitz's, he was a teacher to many others who passed across the Groundlings stage. Julia Sweeney started taking his classes at the Groundlings in 1984, and by 1986 was a member of the Sunday Company – the intermediate performance level that showcases alternative forms of sketch comedy and allows much experimentation en route to berths in the main performance company. After becoming a good friend and mentor to Sweeney, Hartman also gave her a recommendation that inspired Lorne Michaels to hire her for SNL in 1989.
"There's so many memories there, because it's like talking about the home you grew up in," explains Sweeney, who's now preparing to launch her third solo show, Letting Go of God. "It really taught me how people had careers in show business, and that people could cobble together fine livings in showbiz even if they weren't big stars."
It was also where she launched her most famous character, Pat – a drooling, annoying office drone of indeterminate gender, who drove people to squeamish laughter for years both on the Groundlings stage and at SNL. Whether Pat is a male or a female is a question Sweeney has to this day never resolved publicly.
"I was working with somebody as an accountant, who was a guy, who had some of Pat's mannerisms, like drooling and standing too close," Sweeney recalls, chuckling. "Then there was a woman who was annoying, too. I realized I couldn't play the man, so I combined the two."
For Cheri Oteri, who started with the Groundlings in the early '90s as part of a relatively quick journey to stardom on SNL and her own recently announced sitcom deal with ABC, the troupe offered a chance to break out of cubicle hell at A&M's publishing company. She had long been the funny person at the water cooler, with coworkers telling her to get into standup. Although the prospect of standup cowed her, she became immediately intrigued by the moment-to-moment risks of improv.
"I had never done acting or anything like that before," she says. "But then I auditioned, and it was like my world opened up, because I found something that interested me so much and excited me and would be so difficult as well. There were so many people I enjoyed watching there, and I would always run up the back stairs to catch my favorite sketches that other people did." On Friday nights, she would go to the late show by herself after work. "I would learn more than I ever had from watching improv games," she says.
Just as Phil Hartman was the teacher and gateway for so many who entered the Groundlings troupe, Lisa Kudrow was the catalyst and teacher for Cheryl Hines as she set foot in the theater to pursue her dreams. Now an Emmy-nominated star for her turn as Larry David's ever-suffering wife in Curb Your Enthusiasm, the theater and television production graduate from the University of Central Florida was not impressed with the Groundlings the first time she saw them in the early '90s. But she gave them a second chance two years later, after meeting Hartman's sister. Today, she maintains such a strong love for the troupe that she's the only alum to currently sit on the nonprofit theater's board.
"They really encourage you to find out what's funny about you, instead of trying to be funny for someone else. I learned that improvising and giving and taking with your fellow actors was an interesting way to work, and one that turned out to be key to what I do now," says Hines, whose work on Curb depends on improvising lines at a rapid clip. "There was a moment when I was taking a class at the Groundlings when I decided I don't really care what other people think about me. Once I stopped worrying whether someone thought I was funny or not, it really changed my perspective on comedy."
Ultimately, it's that total freedom to say and express oneself in a way that may not be flattering or polite that bonds Groundlings graduates across their numerous creative endeavors. And perhaps it's fitting that the alum who really scored in standup proudly represents brashness in all its glory every time she's onstage: the indefatigably vicious comedian Kathy Griffin.
"I had moved here from Chicago at age 18, after getting my first commercial, and didn't know anybody and assumed that the privileged kids like Emilio Estevez were always going to get the breaks," recalls Griffin. "But I went to see a Groundlings show and walked backstage and met Phil Hartman, who took me around and introduced me to people. Soon I was there and found that the people there, no matter how successful they were getting, couldn't get enough improv. It was actually kind of sick."
Griffin says she misses the political incorrectness of those times the most. "My favorite sketch was, I did a monologue as a black woman watching Rambo and talking to the screen," she says. "It was a really big hit there, got great reviews, and got me a lot of meetings and auditions. But I'd go to a meeting at, say, 20th Century Fox, only to find out an executive wanted me to crack their friends up, and there was no real audition after all. The ironic thing is that I can't even play the woman watching the screen and yelling anymore, because people are just so uptight now. Times have changed." But the Groundlings live on.
THE EVENT INFO AT THE END IS OLD, BUT THE STORY TELLS YOU PLENTY ABOUT A PLACE THAT MADE TONS OF COMEDY FOLKS FAMOUS!
THEY'RE ALL GONNA LAUGH AT YOU!
The Groundlings have given improv comedy Lisa Kudrow, Pee-wee Herman, and the late, great Phil Hartman. After 30 years, the troupe is still feeding modern comedy
By CARL KOZLOWSKI
hink of American comedy over the last three decades, and chances are you'll come up with a member of improvisational comedy-theater troupe the Groundlings. After all, the company has launched the careers of top talents from original Saturday Night Live Not Ready for Prime Time Player Laraine Newman to The Critic's Jon Lovitz to Friends' Lisa Kudrow. It's also given us Pee-wee Herman, the SNL cheerleaders played by Will Ferrell and Cheri Oteri, and the incredibly diverse characters of the late, great Phil Hartman.
Add the stellar, Emmy-nominated work of Cheryl Hines on HBO's groundbreaking sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm, and throw in a dash of Edie McClurg's dead-on depiction of every high school's batty, bitchy secretary in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and you've got a recipe for comedy that's satisfied the nation's appetite for laughter like no other group in the country. Yet, the Groundlings have also slipped under America's pop-culture radar, never drawing quite the praise and attention of Chicago's and Toronto's equally influential Second City troupes. In fact, they seem to go largely unrecognized outside the heart of the Los Angeles comedy industry.
But on Tuesday night, the Groundlings will get their rightful due. The venerable troupe is celebrating its 30th anniversary at the Henry Fonda Music Box Theater with an all-star, roof-raising fundraiser that's sure to be the comedy event of the year. Things have come a long way since their early days as a hippie comedy collective, where anyone could wander in and learn at a workshop or perform in a show for a mere buck a week – and, even more oddly, as a group started as a way for a boy from the Bible Belt named Gary Austin to reinvent his life and give others the chance to do the same.
"It's funny, looking back, because in the '60s, I was very conservative," recalls Austin, who founded the Groundlings in 1972. Today, at 63, sitting in the troupe's Melrose Avenue home base, he looks like Garry Shandling's slightly older brother. "But when I was a little kid, I always loved performing and getting in front of audiences. There were three things I wanted to do: be an evangelist, be a baseball player, and be a cowboy singer – all things done before crowds of people."
That need for notice stemmed from being raised in the hardscrabble oil fields of Oklahoma and Texas, as his father spent his post-Navy career working for the notorious Halliburton company. Austin remembers stories his mother told him about her own rough childhood in Oilton, Oklahoma – a town built so close to oil derricks that children were covered by the misty black spray while walking to and from school every day.
Austin spent his high-school summers working for Halliburton and his Sundays surrounded by holy-rolling members of the Nazarene church. He came away with a distaste for both that has since sparked him to write the acclaimed solo shows Oil and Church. He escaped to San Francisco State University, "where I was finally introduced to the world at large," and joined a sketch-comedy troupe that served as a fun outlet for his repressed creativity.
But it wasn't until he graduated and landed his first job as a social worker in Watts – "where my first week was right during the [1965] riots" – that he spotted a sign on Sunset Boulevard advertising an appearance by seminal San Francisco improv troupe the Committee and decided to check it out.
"I was blown away by it and knew I had to be a part of it," says Austin, recalling a feeling that countless performers would later have after seeing the Groundlings. "You had to come to a workshop every Saturday afternoon, and there were 50 people taking the class for a buck apiece. Del Close [regarded within comedy as the ultimate improv teacher] took over directing the workshops and reinvented the form there with a game called the Harold.
"But my favorite recollection is the Group Grope, where everybody was lying on the floor, feeling each other up," he continues, cackling. "This was the '60s. Often, the Group Grope got us going, and we'd extend the experience beyond the workshop."
By 1972, the Committee had charted a decade-long run in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and founder Allan Myerson decided to move on. Those who stayed behind, however, wanted to form their own group – and thus, the Groundlings were born.
"I picked the name based on Shakespeare's description in Hamlet of the people who watch plays while sitting on the ground," explains Austin. "It was a name that didn't force us to only do comedy, like [now-defunct competing troupe] Kentucky Fried Theater, because at first we wanted to be open to all types of theater."
Not Ready for Prime Time
Whatever Austin's intentions, the group took off quickly due to its comedic elements and rave reviews from the Los Angeles Times. Although city zoning and parking regulations tied up plans to perform in their own space for years, the doors of far more established venues, like the Improv comedy club, were opened to them, and soon the Groundlings were packing theater seats. A rotating group of 90 students competed for 25 available performing slots in the weekly shows. Stars like Lily Tomlin dropped by regularly to watch, and, one night in 1975, she brought along a young NBC producer named Lorne Michaels.
Michaels was scouting the nation for talent, hoping to create an entertainment revolution of his own with Saturday Night Live. Among the Groundlings, he immediately took a liking to Laraine Newman. A fan of improv ever since she started performing it at Beverly Hills High School at age 15, Newman had also seen the Committee in San Francisco and liked the idea of being able to create her own material with improv, rather than struggling to fit others' demands.
"I was at CalArts for about a minute, when my sister took me to a Gary Austin workshop, and I loved it immediately," recalls Newman. "So many people I came through there with became [members of] the top writing staffs on sitcoms like Cheers and Just Shoot Me. But most importantly, I learned about being in a company and how to deal with the give and take of other people's time on stage. It didn't help fully when I got to SNL, because the stakes were much higher there, but for any show folk, there is a familial feel, whether you're in summer stock or road tours or Broadway."
For Newman, the character creation encouraged by the Groundlings enabled her to come up with such SNL-worthy individuals as Cheri the Stewardess and a Valley girl who was part of The Godfather's group-therapy sessions. It also led to her currently fruitful voiceover career and a recent lifetime achievement award from the Chicago Improv Festival. "The training really holds up, no matter what you do," she says.
Michaels also wanted to hire a Groundling named Archie Hahn and invited Austin to direct the new venture, but both declined – a decision Austin still doesn't regret.
"I believe the Groundlings would have dissolved if I'd gone," Austin says. "I was the only teacher and hadn't trained anybody else how to do it yet. I'm very glad I also didn't have to deal with the drug problems at SNL, because you had actors coming in late and stoned, and they would win any argument in making NBC decide whether they or the director had to go," he says. "The chaos might not have succeeded, and I'd come back home without a theater, because I'd forsaken the same ship I'd asked everyone else to sacrifice for. To sacrifice that for anything would have been a mistake."
Yet Austin did leave in 1979, handing control of the troupe and its school to Tom Maxwell, a fellow Southerner who had come to L.A. years before as a USC graduate film student. That was also the year the Groundlings finally found their footing with the opening of their permanent location on Melrose.
During his time working with Austin, Maxwell had seen a growing need to weed through applicants for spots in the Groundlings school, and over the next decade he created a stratified system that made students' talent levels easier to define and track. But more important, his decade-long reign through the '80s saw the city and the entertainment industry becoming more aware of the Groundlings.
"It's always been a character-driven company, in that we built scenes and shows around characters rather than themes," says Maxwell, speaking from his home in Vermont, where he continues to write several produced sitcom scripts a year. "But in 1984, the Olympic Arts Festival gave us a breakout hit with Phil Hartman's Chick Hazard show; our special show Casual Sex was being made into a movie; and [Groundling member] Paul Reubens was breaking out into his own solo show as Pee-wee Herman at the Roxy."
During this time, amid the "Morning in America" era of shiny happy Reaganness, the shows also lost some of their early political flavor – a factor that continued in the Groundlings' most recent main-stage show, Groundlings' National Park. But, according to Maxwell, "It was never a conscious decision to be more or less political – just, let's work with what's happening organically. If an actor wanted to be political, they could, and if they didn't, that was fine, too."
Phil Hartman Stumbles In
Mainly, the Groundlings served as a home for an ever-changing band of comedy hopefuls. It was a place where a Columbia Pictures accountant, like Julia Sweeney, or a member of A&M Records' publishing staff, like Cheri Oteri, could finally exercise the creative spirits bursting within them. But perhaps the most famous Groundling to date (maybe next to Will Ferrell) was Phil Hartman – a man who literally stumbled across the cast when his then-girlfriend and future fellow performer Jaye P. Morgan took him to see the troupe for his birthday.
Hartman's tragic 1998 death at the hands of his wife, Brynn, has turned his story into a shared legacy of countless Groundlings members. Much like the similarly untimely death of Second City Chicago graduate Chris Farley, Hartman's time with the troupe has taken on mythic proportions.
"I was in the backstage room giving notes to actors when I noticed our 30-seat theater was filled with laughs, and our show hadn't even started yet," Austin recalls. "But I looked, and there was this guy standing on stage. After the show, he and Jaye P. asked how to be Groundlings. We had just started doing auditions to weed people out, but he flew through them, and he soon was writing for the main-stage show."
During his decade-long stretch with the Groundlings, Hartman was best known for creating an improvised detective sketch called "Chick Hazard," in which he would construct and solve a different crime each week based on audience suggestions. But for Austin, Hartman's funniest creation was "Lightman." As Austin talks, he leaps onto the theater's stage to re-create this character.
"Phil comes from backstage and toward the audience, dressed in 27 lit flashlights and a bathing suit, with one more standing on his head," says Austin as he continues his performance. "He would shine them on the audience and then say, in a deep, dramatic voice, 'I am Lightman!' And would shine it on whomever he wanted to interview on the spot in the audience. It wasn't the best sketch he ever did, but it was the most popular."
Edie McClurg was a member of the Groundlings' official first cast from 1975 to 1985, having honed her chops with the Pitschel Players' troupe in San Francisco and as a standup at L.A.'s Comedy Store, where she battled for stage time with the late Shirley Hemphill of What's Happening!! fame. Oddly enough, she had a straight-laced ´´ career before setting foot on a comedy stage: She taught radio classes at the University of Missouri-Kansas City for eight years, then became operations manager and jack of all trades at Kansas City's NPR affiliate.
That officiousness and prim and proper Midwestern viewpoint helped McClurg launch a career of playing stuffy, upright women who wield a sharp tongue when audiences least expect it – particularly in Ferris Bueller and in Planes, Trains and Automobiles as the car-rental checkout clerk who suffers a foul-mouthed tirade from Steve Martin.
"When we started, it was more of a commune, and if you came up with some type of material in the workshop, it would get in the show," recalls McClurg, who sprinkles her conversation with the high-pitched chuckle immortalized in the aforementioned John Hughes films. "Improvisation has been the core of my technique, and when I'm presented with a script, I always fill it in with what I call the noise of life – little comments characters say under their breath – so it's fuller than a character just talking to another character."
While McClurg was one of the earliest Groundlings stars, Jon Lovitz came along in the early '80s as part of the second big wave of talent. In fact, when he was plucked by Lorne Michaels to become the second Groundling on SNL in 1985, Tom Maxwell laughed and said, "We've got one once a decade."
At the time he joined the Groundlings, Lovitz was torn between serious acting dreams and the comedic side his acting teachers kept trying to force him to develop. He had already bounced between New York and L.A., and felt studying with the troupe was a way to give his life and career some direction.
"I remember driving there to the theater the first time and crying, because I was really committing my life to being a comedian, and I was wondering, what if it doesn't work out?" recalls Lovitz. "But I went, and I loved it, and then I met Phil Hartman, and he invited me to understudy his show Chick Hazard: Olympic Trials."
Lovitz's voice trails off for a second.
"Jesus, it's been 20 years," he continues. "But I have a career because of it. When I was doing the show with Phil, Laraine came and saw it, and I wound up hired in '85 on SNL. They kept me for the next year and asked who I worked well with, and I said Phil, so they put him on SNL, too. Then I told Lisa Kudrow, whom I've known as a little sister since she was six, that the Groundlings were the way to go when she asked me how to get into acting. It took her 10 years before she got Friends, but look at her now."
That sense of family – of personal recommendations helping to launch careers and fulfill dreams – crops up time and again when talking to Groundlings alums. For Lovitz, who spoke at the greatest length and with the most passion of anyone interviewed for this story, going through the troupe was the best school experience he had ever known.
"The camaraderie was just great there," he says. "It was like a bunch of class clowns working together. In real school, you get in trouble for goofing off, but here was a school that taught you how to goof off really well. I was a messenger, and we all had day jobs, but people loved it so much that they were paying to be a part of it. I learned how to create characters, how to write and supervise my scenes. I still use everything I learned there."
Learning Her Enthusiasm
Although Hartman was a colleague of Lovitz's, he was a teacher to many others who passed across the Groundlings stage. Julia Sweeney started taking his classes at the Groundlings in 1984, and by 1986 was a member of the Sunday Company – the intermediate performance level that showcases alternative forms of sketch comedy and allows much experimentation en route to berths in the main performance company. After becoming a good friend and mentor to Sweeney, Hartman also gave her a recommendation that inspired Lorne Michaels to hire her for SNL in 1989.
"There's so many memories there, because it's like talking about the home you grew up in," explains Sweeney, who's now preparing to launch her third solo show, Letting Go of God. "It really taught me how people had careers in show business, and that people could cobble together fine livings in showbiz even if they weren't big stars."
It was also where she launched her most famous character, Pat – a drooling, annoying office drone of indeterminate gender, who drove people to squeamish laughter for years both on the Groundlings stage and at SNL. Whether Pat is a male or a female is a question Sweeney has to this day never resolved publicly.
"I was working with somebody as an accountant, who was a guy, who had some of Pat's mannerisms, like drooling and standing too close," Sweeney recalls, chuckling. "Then there was a woman who was annoying, too. I realized I couldn't play the man, so I combined the two."
For Cheri Oteri, who started with the Groundlings in the early '90s as part of a relatively quick journey to stardom on SNL and her own recently announced sitcom deal with ABC, the troupe offered a chance to break out of cubicle hell at A&M's publishing company. She had long been the funny person at the water cooler, with coworkers telling her to get into standup. Although the prospect of standup cowed her, she became immediately intrigued by the moment-to-moment risks of improv.
"I had never done acting or anything like that before," she says. "But then I auditioned, and it was like my world opened up, because I found something that interested me so much and excited me and would be so difficult as well. There were so many people I enjoyed watching there, and I would always run up the back stairs to catch my favorite sketches that other people did." On Friday nights, she would go to the late show by herself after work. "I would learn more than I ever had from watching improv games," she says.
Just as Phil Hartman was the teacher and gateway for so many who entered the Groundlings troupe, Lisa Kudrow was the catalyst and teacher for Cheryl Hines as she set foot in the theater to pursue her dreams. Now an Emmy-nominated star for her turn as Larry David's ever-suffering wife in Curb Your Enthusiasm, the theater and television production graduate from the University of Central Florida was not impressed with the Groundlings the first time she saw them in the early '90s. But she gave them a second chance two years later, after meeting Hartman's sister. Today, she maintains such a strong love for the troupe that she's the only alum to currently sit on the nonprofit theater's board.
"They really encourage you to find out what's funny about you, instead of trying to be funny for someone else. I learned that improvising and giving and taking with your fellow actors was an interesting way to work, and one that turned out to be key to what I do now," says Hines, whose work on Curb depends on improvising lines at a rapid clip. "There was a moment when I was taking a class at the Groundlings when I decided I don't really care what other people think about me. Once I stopped worrying whether someone thought I was funny or not, it really changed my perspective on comedy."
Ultimately, it's that total freedom to say and express oneself in a way that may not be flattering or polite that bonds Groundlings graduates across their numerous creative endeavors. And perhaps it's fitting that the alum who really scored in standup proudly represents brashness in all its glory every time she's onstage: the indefatigably vicious comedian Kathy Griffin.
"I had moved here from Chicago at age 18, after getting my first commercial, and didn't know anybody and assumed that the privileged kids like Emilio Estevez were always going to get the breaks," recalls Griffin. "But I went to see a Groundlings show and walked backstage and met Phil Hartman, who took me around and introduced me to people. Soon I was there and found that the people there, no matter how successful they were getting, couldn't get enough improv. It was actually kind of sick."
Griffin says she misses the political incorrectness of those times the most. "My favorite sketch was, I did a monologue as a black woman watching Rambo and talking to the screen," she says. "It was a really big hit there, got great reviews, and got me a lot of meetings and auditions. But I'd go to a meeting at, say, 20th Century Fox, only to find out an executive wanted me to crack their friends up, and there was no real audition after all. The ironic thing is that I can't even play the woman watching the screen and yelling anymore, because people are just so uptight now. Times have changed." But the Groundlings live on.
COMEDY ON THE FRONT LINES
Comedy on the Front Lines
While entertaining U.S. troops, two L.A. comics see the war for themselves
By CARL KOZLOWSKI
It's been a long time since standup comic Butch Bradley bombed on stage. But since 9/11, when the staunch conservative was inspired to do his part in the "war on terror," he has traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan on four different trips to perform for U.S. troops in some of the planet's most heavily bombed areas.
That same sense of comedic derring-do also served fellow comic Sarah Tiana well on her own recent trip to Iraq. A committed antiwar liberal before her journey, she wanted to see for herself just what the situation overseas actually was – and she returned with a new perspective.
Although both L.A.-based comedians traveled separately, with Tiana under the auspices of the organization Comics on Duty and Bradley with the USO and Dog Tag Comedy, they represent a new generation of wartime comics, artists who often put aside their own misgivings about the war to follow in the classic tradition of Bob Hope and the USO, providing American soldiers with laughter in dark times. While their backgrounds and careers have taken distinctly different paths, each has learned that, while war is indeed hell, entertaining the troops is a little slice of heaven.
"One base I performed at had been attacked the day before by 20 terrorists, and, though they killed them quickly, one soldier said he was under such duress that he realized during my show he hadn't laughed in months, and said how good it felt," Bradley recalls. "That's why you go. It's the first thing in my life I did that felt completely good. It's also a reality check. Freedom's not free; there's a cost, and these people know and respect freedom so much that they're over there trying to spread it."
Bradley grew up amid the casinos and comedy clubs of Atlantic City, watching masters like Don Rickles and Rodney Dangerfield from the time he was 11. He credits his "cool mom who worked in the casinos" with letting him get this early comedic education, and he never looked back while launching a performing career that's taken him to headlining status in Vegas and his hometown, numerous appearances on Comedy Central and CBS's The Late Late Show, as well as his overseas adventures.
Tiana, meanwhile, realized just three years ago that comedy was her calling, when friends told her to try it just as she was about to give up her dream of acting. She grew up in the small Southern town of Calhoun, Georgia, where people didn't start comedy careers but did join the military. Her innate curiosity about the world – coupled with the fact that many from her hometown were dodging bullets in a far-off desert –inspired her to sign up to make soldiers laugh.
"I would say I'm pretty liberal, but I don't believe in being partisan," says Tiana, a regular at the Improv and the Comedy Store who's also played colleges nationwide. "I just believe in my heart, and I wanted to go over there and see for myself, not to just be told what to think by either side. That's a big problem in this country: believing everything they read, taking everything they watch on the news at face value."
While Bradley and Tiana were both happy about bringing some relief to the troops, they faced plenty of hardships and frightening moments as well. Bradley notes that Iraq's existing infrastructure has allowed it to make many advances, despite the incessant fighting within its borders, yet he found that Afghanistan remains rife with risk. In fact, a Black Hawk helicopter he was on drew rocket fire that came so close he felt the heat when it passed by.
"I did a show at a base called Salerno, where many of the troops were spending their time assisting the victims of the Pakistani earthquake, but the base had still been attacked 46 times," he says. "At night, there's no lights on at all, because they're afraid of drawing enemy fire." When traveling between bases, he adds, they risked fire whether in the Black Hawks or vehicle convoys in which "being successful means that everyone made it through alive. You're taught to constantly look for cellphones that can set off insurgents' bombs, or for single-driver cars and motorcycles that can easily be suicide bombers."
Being female, Tiana believes she was so protected by her troop guards that she was often distracted from the dangers. While her worst moment came when "a rat peed on me while I was using a computer," she found that being a woman among thousands of men with long-term loneliness was memorable in its own way.
"I've never been asked to pose for so many pictures in my life, and so many of them wanted me to pose holding their guns," she recalls. "So many men said I reminded them of their wife or girlfriend, and so I went out of my way to really give them attention. I'd put on extra perfume, and I'd find they'd rub their shirts against it to keep that scent with them, but at the core I was treated with so much respect for having taken the risk of being there."
Thanks to their armed escorts, Bradley and Tiana were able to see life outside the bases' protective isolation. Along the main highway that U.S. contractors have built through Afghanistan, he started to notice signs of modern life never before seen in the desolate country – such as its first fully operational Exxon station. Now, one might be understandably cynical that Big Oil has already set up shop there, but other signs of progress are unquestionably impressive.
"One of the greatest things is going into Kabul and seeing that women are free to work and wear real clothes of their own choice, instead of being forced to wear burqas and being beaten if they want to act on their own," says Bradley. "That kind of radical society they had with the Taliban was just a masculine society controlling women and children, and using the Koran to get what they want."
Tiana's most powerful experience of the Iraqis' newfound freedoms was being able to visit the ziggurat that stands on the site where it's believed that Abraham – a religious leader jointly respected in the Koran, the Torah, and the Bible – was born. Under Saddam Hussein's rule, all visitors outside of the dictator's inner circle were blocked from going there, but now it hosts thousands of pilgrims a day. She also saw the lush vegetation that returned to regions of Iraq after coalition forces knocked down dams Hussein had created along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to prevent opposing Muslim factions' basic access to water.
"I've always hated war and the concept of fighting and violence," she says, "but when you go there and see it yourself, you realize that there is real progress being made. Besides, right or wrong, the decisions have been made to be there, and our troops have to be supported, like family. You always support family."
While entertaining U.S. troops, two L.A. comics see the war for themselves
By CARL KOZLOWSKI
It's been a long time since standup comic Butch Bradley bombed on stage. But since 9/11, when the staunch conservative was inspired to do his part in the "war on terror," he has traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan on four different trips to perform for U.S. troops in some of the planet's most heavily bombed areas.
That same sense of comedic derring-do also served fellow comic Sarah Tiana well on her own recent trip to Iraq. A committed antiwar liberal before her journey, she wanted to see for herself just what the situation overseas actually was – and she returned with a new perspective.
Although both L.A.-based comedians traveled separately, with Tiana under the auspices of the organization Comics on Duty and Bradley with the USO and Dog Tag Comedy, they represent a new generation of wartime comics, artists who often put aside their own misgivings about the war to follow in the classic tradition of Bob Hope and the USO, providing American soldiers with laughter in dark times. While their backgrounds and careers have taken distinctly different paths, each has learned that, while war is indeed hell, entertaining the troops is a little slice of heaven.
"One base I performed at had been attacked the day before by 20 terrorists, and, though they killed them quickly, one soldier said he was under such duress that he realized during my show he hadn't laughed in months, and said how good it felt," Bradley recalls. "That's why you go. It's the first thing in my life I did that felt completely good. It's also a reality check. Freedom's not free; there's a cost, and these people know and respect freedom so much that they're over there trying to spread it."
Bradley grew up amid the casinos and comedy clubs of Atlantic City, watching masters like Don Rickles and Rodney Dangerfield from the time he was 11. He credits his "cool mom who worked in the casinos" with letting him get this early comedic education, and he never looked back while launching a performing career that's taken him to headlining status in Vegas and his hometown, numerous appearances on Comedy Central and CBS's The Late Late Show, as well as his overseas adventures.
Tiana, meanwhile, realized just three years ago that comedy was her calling, when friends told her to try it just as she was about to give up her dream of acting. She grew up in the small Southern town of Calhoun, Georgia, where people didn't start comedy careers but did join the military. Her innate curiosity about the world – coupled with the fact that many from her hometown were dodging bullets in a far-off desert –inspired her to sign up to make soldiers laugh.
"I would say I'm pretty liberal, but I don't believe in being partisan," says Tiana, a regular at the Improv and the Comedy Store who's also played colleges nationwide. "I just believe in my heart, and I wanted to go over there and see for myself, not to just be told what to think by either side. That's a big problem in this country: believing everything they read, taking everything they watch on the news at face value."
While Bradley and Tiana were both happy about bringing some relief to the troops, they faced plenty of hardships and frightening moments as well. Bradley notes that Iraq's existing infrastructure has allowed it to make many advances, despite the incessant fighting within its borders, yet he found that Afghanistan remains rife with risk. In fact, a Black Hawk helicopter he was on drew rocket fire that came so close he felt the heat when it passed by.
"I did a show at a base called Salerno, where many of the troops were spending their time assisting the victims of the Pakistani earthquake, but the base had still been attacked 46 times," he says. "At night, there's no lights on at all, because they're afraid of drawing enemy fire." When traveling between bases, he adds, they risked fire whether in the Black Hawks or vehicle convoys in which "being successful means that everyone made it through alive. You're taught to constantly look for cellphones that can set off insurgents' bombs, or for single-driver cars and motorcycles that can easily be suicide bombers."
Being female, Tiana believes she was so protected by her troop guards that she was often distracted from the dangers. While her worst moment came when "a rat peed on me while I was using a computer," she found that being a woman among thousands of men with long-term loneliness was memorable in its own way.
"I've never been asked to pose for so many pictures in my life, and so many of them wanted me to pose holding their guns," she recalls. "So many men said I reminded them of their wife or girlfriend, and so I went out of my way to really give them attention. I'd put on extra perfume, and I'd find they'd rub their shirts against it to keep that scent with them, but at the core I was treated with so much respect for having taken the risk of being there."
Thanks to their armed escorts, Bradley and Tiana were able to see life outside the bases' protective isolation. Along the main highway that U.S. contractors have built through Afghanistan, he started to notice signs of modern life never before seen in the desolate country – such as its first fully operational Exxon station. Now, one might be understandably cynical that Big Oil has already set up shop there, but other signs of progress are unquestionably impressive.
"One of the greatest things is going into Kabul and seeing that women are free to work and wear real clothes of their own choice, instead of being forced to wear burqas and being beaten if they want to act on their own," says Bradley. "That kind of radical society they had with the Taliban was just a masculine society controlling women and children, and using the Koran to get what they want."
Tiana's most powerful experience of the Iraqis' newfound freedoms was being able to visit the ziggurat that stands on the site where it's believed that Abraham – a religious leader jointly respected in the Koran, the Torah, and the Bible – was born. Under Saddam Hussein's rule, all visitors outside of the dictator's inner circle were blocked from going there, but now it hosts thousands of pilgrims a day. She also saw the lush vegetation that returned to regions of Iraq after coalition forces knocked down dams Hussein had created along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to prevent opposing Muslim factions' basic access to water.
"I've always hated war and the concept of fighting and violence," she says, "but when you go there and see it yourself, you realize that there is real progress being made. Besides, right or wrong, the decisions have been made to be there, and our troops have to be supported, like family. You always support family."
IT'S THE UPRIGHT CITIZENS BRIGADE!!!
Righteous Hilarity
Upright Citizens Brigade pushes comedy boundaries for the masses~ By CARL KOZLOWSKI ~
It's a packed house at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, where the crowd is being treated to a hilarious in-depth analysis of R. Kelly's epic song cycle and video "Trapped in the Closet." Onstage, hipster comic luminaries like Patton Oswalt and Paul F. Tompkins are among the panel of "experts" assembled to discuss the symbolic undercurrents of Kelly's ludicrously involved, 15-chorus epic of adultery and revenge.
The audience cheers like rowdy British soccer fans at a World Cup match. Yet the folks behind this UCB production, as always, have a stunning surprise for their fans: The actual amorous midget (Drevon Cooks) who features prominently in the climax of "Closet" comes bursting through the backstage door to take the absurdity to an even higher level.
In the world of the UCB Theatre – founded by the eponymous quartet who achieved cult-hero status with a three-year sketch series on Comedy Central – anything goes, and every show aims to top the one before it. The cover price is low – from free to $8 – because to UCB, it's way more about the funny than about the money.
"I think our comedy is what's different and helps us stand out. If people are talented, we let them do anything they want," says UCB founding member Ian Roberts. "As long as it's funny, we're with them. We're never 'The Man,' telling them what to say or do."
Roberts formed the UCB in Chicago during the early '90s, along with Matt Walsh, Matt Besser, and Amy Poehler. It's a testament to their unique bond that, despite individual successes, the four still work together as tightly as possible, more than a decade after they met amid the Windy City's thriving improv scene.
Mixing together an anarchic combination of adventurously unhinged improvisation and demented characters with an undercurrent that satirizes the cultural fear of our times, the UCB became a nearly instant sensation in Chicago. When close associate Adam McKay was hired as a writer for Saturday Night Live in 1997, he hooked the group up with agents as well, and they all headed off to make their mark in the Big Apple, which had traditionally been averse to improvisational comedy.
As graduates of the ImprovOlympic training center (which has an L.A. base now, known as I.O. West, in Hollywood), their specialty was long-form improv, in which multiple scenarios are built from a single suggested topic, resulting in interweaving scenes that flow in and out of each other for up to an hour at a time. New Yorkers had never seen anything like it, and the combination of a novel art form with super-cheap ticket prices and big-name guest talent quickly made the Brigade a sensation – particularly for a weekly showcase that became known as "Asssscat."
"We felt we were onto something almost from our first show, and it wasn't long before we had long lines wrapped around the block," recalls cofounder Walsh, who has gone on to solo success as a Daily Show correspondent and appears in the forthcoming Comedy Central series Man Bites Dog. "We soon managed to get a Comedy Central pilot through our manager, and the first season of our TV series [also called Upright Citizens Brigade] was built mostly on ideas we took from 'Asssscat' scenes."
Walsh and Roberts are speaking in the backstage "green room" of their theater, following one of the free Sunday-night "Asssscat" shows, which are performed with a rotating array of L.A.'s best improvisers as well as such famous UCB friends as Tim Meadows and Andy Dick. Also in the room is the troupe's seemingly wildest member, Besser, who answers a question about the group's creative inspirations by ripping a long, furious hit off a bong.
If one can even attempt to define the UCB aesthetic without the use of drugs, it would seem they draw their greatest influence from Monty Python. Being on Comedy Central honed their creative abilities to the point where they not only were forced to edit their ideas down to the fast-paced bone, but also managed the brilliant trick of establishing clues to a running joke throughout each season that built to a final episode revolving around and explaining all the clues that had come before.
"We'd play with the reality of our setups and on cutting them down so the fun could begin fast," recalls Walsh. "By the time the third season finished, it was all so complex that Comedy Central decided it was too expensive to continue. We got replaced by British shows about robots and clips from Japanese game shows."
Yet, UCB's forced TV death didn't doom it into a creative dead end. Along with Walsh becoming a star in his own right on Comedy Central, Roberts has gone on to sell several unproduced screenplays. Besser enjoys the most bohemian life of the troupers, creating wicked one-man shows such as Dumbass, in which he discusses a yearlong period when his home phone number was mistakenly listed as the national customer-service line for an array of products, and his attempts to befuddle those who called him.
But it's the fourth member, missing on this night of recollections and revelry, who's made the greatest impact in the mainstream: Amy Poehler, who has achieved solo fame as the cohost of SNL's popular "Weekend Update" segment, as well as with a bevy of movie roles. But she chipped in to purchase the L.A. theater with her cohorts, and she continues to perform there whenever she has a week or the summer off from the New York-based comedy institution.
"We opened the theater here last August, because Besser, Ian, and I were all out here in L.A., and we still wanted a place to play," explains Walsh. "We were doing such crazy shit that we'd be getting kicked out of most other clubs, so we figured we'd own our own space where no one could bother us."
That approach has paid off with a new generation of students packing classes, eager to learn how to replicate the magic UCB long-form style, plus a full slate of shows even weirder than "Trapped in the Closet" proved to be. Among them are "Fucked Up and Illegal Videos," which featured everything from graphic bumfights to a vagina that smoked cigarettes, and "World's Dirtiest Sketch Contest," which is often literally scatological.
"This is a place where people share their ideas with each other and trade ideas rather than just being so competitive they don't watch each others' work and stand off on their own," explains Besser. "We'd rather have twice as many people here for half as much money per person than half as many people for twice the cost. Our demographic skews young, and when we were young we didn't have the money to see a $12 show. It would have prohibited me from seeing us, so that's how I choose the price."
"It's kind of impossible not to try something new at the prices we charge," adds Roberts. "Most shows are $5. How can you not check out something for $5?"
Indeed, when it comes to the UCB, there is no other choice but to go. Go now.
Upright Citizens Brigade pushes comedy boundaries for the masses~ By CARL KOZLOWSKI ~
It's a packed house at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, where the crowd is being treated to a hilarious in-depth analysis of R. Kelly's epic song cycle and video "Trapped in the Closet." Onstage, hipster comic luminaries like Patton Oswalt and Paul F. Tompkins are among the panel of "experts" assembled to discuss the symbolic undercurrents of Kelly's ludicrously involved, 15-chorus epic of adultery and revenge.
The audience cheers like rowdy British soccer fans at a World Cup match. Yet the folks behind this UCB production, as always, have a stunning surprise for their fans: The actual amorous midget (Drevon Cooks) who features prominently in the climax of "Closet" comes bursting through the backstage door to take the absurdity to an even higher level.
In the world of the UCB Theatre – founded by the eponymous quartet who achieved cult-hero status with a three-year sketch series on Comedy Central – anything goes, and every show aims to top the one before it. The cover price is low – from free to $8 – because to UCB, it's way more about the funny than about the money.
"I think our comedy is what's different and helps us stand out. If people are talented, we let them do anything they want," says UCB founding member Ian Roberts. "As long as it's funny, we're with them. We're never 'The Man,' telling them what to say or do."
Roberts formed the UCB in Chicago during the early '90s, along with Matt Walsh, Matt Besser, and Amy Poehler. It's a testament to their unique bond that, despite individual successes, the four still work together as tightly as possible, more than a decade after they met amid the Windy City's thriving improv scene.
Mixing together an anarchic combination of adventurously unhinged improvisation and demented characters with an undercurrent that satirizes the cultural fear of our times, the UCB became a nearly instant sensation in Chicago. When close associate Adam McKay was hired as a writer for Saturday Night Live in 1997, he hooked the group up with agents as well, and they all headed off to make their mark in the Big Apple, which had traditionally been averse to improvisational comedy.
As graduates of the ImprovOlympic training center (which has an L.A. base now, known as I.O. West, in Hollywood), their specialty was long-form improv, in which multiple scenarios are built from a single suggested topic, resulting in interweaving scenes that flow in and out of each other for up to an hour at a time. New Yorkers had never seen anything like it, and the combination of a novel art form with super-cheap ticket prices and big-name guest talent quickly made the Brigade a sensation – particularly for a weekly showcase that became known as "Asssscat."
"We felt we were onto something almost from our first show, and it wasn't long before we had long lines wrapped around the block," recalls cofounder Walsh, who has gone on to solo success as a Daily Show correspondent and appears in the forthcoming Comedy Central series Man Bites Dog. "We soon managed to get a Comedy Central pilot through our manager, and the first season of our TV series [also called Upright Citizens Brigade] was built mostly on ideas we took from 'Asssscat' scenes."
Walsh and Roberts are speaking in the backstage "green room" of their theater, following one of the free Sunday-night "Asssscat" shows, which are performed with a rotating array of L.A.'s best improvisers as well as such famous UCB friends as Tim Meadows and Andy Dick. Also in the room is the troupe's seemingly wildest member, Besser, who answers a question about the group's creative inspirations by ripping a long, furious hit off a bong.
If one can even attempt to define the UCB aesthetic without the use of drugs, it would seem they draw their greatest influence from Monty Python. Being on Comedy Central honed their creative abilities to the point where they not only were forced to edit their ideas down to the fast-paced bone, but also managed the brilliant trick of establishing clues to a running joke throughout each season that built to a final episode revolving around and explaining all the clues that had come before.
"We'd play with the reality of our setups and on cutting them down so the fun could begin fast," recalls Walsh. "By the time the third season finished, it was all so complex that Comedy Central decided it was too expensive to continue. We got replaced by British shows about robots and clips from Japanese game shows."
Yet, UCB's forced TV death didn't doom it into a creative dead end. Along with Walsh becoming a star in his own right on Comedy Central, Roberts has gone on to sell several unproduced screenplays. Besser enjoys the most bohemian life of the troupers, creating wicked one-man shows such as Dumbass, in which he discusses a yearlong period when his home phone number was mistakenly listed as the national customer-service line for an array of products, and his attempts to befuddle those who called him.
But it's the fourth member, missing on this night of recollections and revelry, who's made the greatest impact in the mainstream: Amy Poehler, who has achieved solo fame as the cohost of SNL's popular "Weekend Update" segment, as well as with a bevy of movie roles. But she chipped in to purchase the L.A. theater with her cohorts, and she continues to perform there whenever she has a week or the summer off from the New York-based comedy institution.
"We opened the theater here last August, because Besser, Ian, and I were all out here in L.A., and we still wanted a place to play," explains Walsh. "We were doing such crazy shit that we'd be getting kicked out of most other clubs, so we figured we'd own our own space where no one could bother us."
That approach has paid off with a new generation of students packing classes, eager to learn how to replicate the magic UCB long-form style, plus a full slate of shows even weirder than "Trapped in the Closet" proved to be. Among them are "Fucked Up and Illegal Videos," which featured everything from graphic bumfights to a vagina that smoked cigarettes, and "World's Dirtiest Sketch Contest," which is often literally scatological.
"This is a place where people share their ideas with each other and trade ideas rather than just being so competitive they don't watch each others' work and stand off on their own," explains Besser. "We'd rather have twice as many people here for half as much money per person than half as many people for twice the cost. Our demographic skews young, and when we were young we didn't have the money to see a $12 show. It would have prohibited me from seeing us, so that's how I choose the price."
"It's kind of impossible not to try something new at the prices we charge," adds Roberts. "Most shows are $5. How can you not check out something for $5?"
Indeed, when it comes to the UCB, there is no other choice but to go. Go now.
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