To understand the Upright Citizens Brigade—which will permanently take over the Lakeshore Theater weekly starting Tuesday 11, with groups farmed from its theaters in New York and Los Angeles—it’s best to start at the beginning…before the days of “ass pennies” (a coined catchphrase from its eponymous Comedy Central series) and countless copycats on the coasts.
The Chicago-bred comedy group’s first sketch show, Virtual Reality, played in 1990 at the long-gone Wicker Park theater Kill the Poet. UCB lifers Matt Besser and Ian Roberts, along with early members like Horatio Sanz and Adam McKay, took the audience outside, handed them torches and cap guns, and instructed them to storm “city hall”—a building across the street. The police arrived and took Sanz away in handcuffs…and the show, of course, went on. Later in the show run, they staged a suicide by throwing a dummy from a six-story building. “We closed three different theaters in Wicker Park,” says Besser, who insists it wasn’t UCB’s fault.
Still, it’s not surprising that after UCB became a foursome (Besser and Roberts were joined by Matt Walsh and Saturday Night Live’s Amy Poehler) and relocated to New York in 1997 to film three seasons of its TVshow, it would opt for its own live theater space. “At one point, one [theater owner whom we were renting from] said, [Yelling] ‘Matt Besser, this is not Chicago,’ meaning you can’t treat this New York theater like one of the crazy theaters you came from in Chicago,” Besser says. “If we were gonna spill a little fake blood onstage, we didn’t want to sweat it.”
To earn some extra cash for the UCB Theatre, which opened in a former strip club in 1999, the four members started teaching improv classes (all had performed at iO while in Chicago). Their training focused largely on finding the “game” of a scene—a scenic or character detail, heightened for comic effect.
This approach differs from Chicago-style improv, which tends to lean heavier on grounded character work, and makes UCB’s comedy more rapid-fire. The group’s tactics have rubbed off on generations of emerging performers—each of the 20 or so weekly sketch and improv shows at UCB New York and L.A. (an outpost since 2005) is what UCB touring company director Eli Newell calls, “balls out.” He cites a recent sketch group that performed a scene in which four-year-olds played a made-up game called “Anne Frank” in an attic. An irate audience member yelled at the manager after the show, but nothing changed.
“We do what we think is funny, edgy, irreverent,” Newell says. “It’s not for shock value, not to offend people—it’s what we think is funny. If we didn’t, we’d be boring and doing shows for 80-year-olds on cruise ships. A lot of times it walks the line, but that’s our identity.”
The series at the Lakeshore will put up shows that have found success within UCB’s confines. ASSSSCAT, the theater’s signature fast-and-loose long-form improv group, kicks off week one with Besser, Walsh, Roberts, Sanz and Andy Daly in tow. Once the celebs start the series in grand fashion, they cede the slot to groups hand-picked by the UCB theaters—the list includes Hot Sauce (young, dorky guys with solid scenic sensibilities) and Death by Roo Roo (filthy and fast all-male improv).
When asked whether UCB would ever open its own Chicago theater, Newell laughs. “One step at a time,” he says cryptically enough. For the time being, he’s happy working with the Lakeshore—though the four UCB members trained at iO up till 11 years ago, he adds that the choice not to return to the Wrigleyville theater was obvious. “UCB has changed and grown into its own brand of comedy,” he says. “Going to iO would be like going back to your high-school girlfriend when you’re dating a model.”
See the beauty of UCB’s style of comedy Tuesday 11 at ASSSSCAT.
