Third Beat

Ahh, Friday! Fresh faces, sanitary eating habits, and hydrated bodies. This was the way of life just days ago. It’s hard to believe now, after living in our own filth for the remainder of the weekend, that we were ever sober and possessed clean laundry.

I spent my time at the Del Close Marathon occupied with photography duties, so my recaps are brief (but pretty). Full sets of photos are not currently available, but I’ve chosen one from each show to tease y’all.

Favourite moments from Friday night:

Moments before door opening, Friday afternoon

-Chris Gethard as an unstoppable Andy Rooney during Stepfathers. Hilarious.

-Matt Walsh and Jon Glazer calling “time outs” during Apples & Oranges to explain improv technique to the crowd.

-Mark Sutton singing Dido during Bassprov. So out of context.

Wyatt Cenac sat in for Ed Helms in Satellites, the Dave Matthews Band inspired show. The ask-for was a favourite DMB lyric or song title, from a fan. The selected fan chose “Crash Into Me”. To which an actual douchey DMB fan responded “you’re not really a fan!”. Ok, I admit it, that d’bag was me. But no true DMB fan considers that song their favourite, and if they did they certainly wouldn’t publicly admit it. C’mon, fake DMB fans, leave Satellites alone! (I kid, of course. Sort of.)

Which does also bring up the point: when the (arguably) 2 biggest stars of DCM (Helms and Rob Riggle) bailed on shows, UCB’s lips were sealed. No changes were posted or made on the website. When everyone’s schedules are made so strategically (you can’t normally get BACK into a venue for hours after you’ve left), isn’t it kinda crappy to let people try to venue hop to see a specific person who isn’t even going to be there?

I’d had a long day so I turned in early, missing such epic performances as Yoda Hot Tub at 3am. But never fear — Sean over at The Comic’s Comic has the details of those shenanigans, including video of Brett Gelman’s backstage prep. Definitely worth checking out!

More to come re: Saturday’s shows, including my thoughts on staying awake long enough to witness my first-ever Match Game ‘76.

In the meantime, here are those shots from Friday night. Lots more under the jump.

Press Conference

View more photos

UCB THEATRE PANEL

Moderator: Paul Provenza

Panelists: Matt Besser, Ian Roberts, Matt Walsh, Neil Campbell, Andy Daly, Lennon Parham, Horatio Sanz

Good turnout for this one, presumably from nerds like myself who enjoy anything and anything to do with the UCBT. Paul Provenza was absolutely the best choice possible to moderate this panel. He does standup at their Los Angeles theatre, and is incredibly passionate about sharing good comedy with people.

From L: Sanz, Roberts, Parham, Daly

Provenza asked how they had the confidence to enter the teaching marketplace back in the late 90s, and Matt Walsh pointed out that nobody was doing longform in New York back then, never mind teaching it.

“I went through the Players Workshop in Chicago, for a year, and realized ‘oh, these guys don’t know what they’re talking about’,” said Matt Besser.

Ian Roberts noted that “we’re not a bilking organization” with endless levels of classes like a “9th Eagle level” or a “Silver Bear level”.

The discussion turned to the concept of the “game of the scene” which is the UCB’s focus above all else and sets them apart from other schools. Besser noted that this comes in very helpful for actors who are instructed to improvise with a script. They’ve been trained to immediately identify the “game” within the written scene and build upon it, which generally will improve a writer’s idea rather than take it in a completely different direction.

Provenza pointed out the unique business model of the theatre: nobody pays to do a show there, and nobody gets paid. Roberts confirmed that “the theatre, if you took away the classes, isn’t a money maker.”

“We have a really low [ticket] price and that’s a decision we made way back,” Roberts continued, saying that that goal was to be seen by as many people as possible, and keeping the price low accomplishes that. They would rather have a lot of people paying a little, than have half the number of people paying more.

Neil Campbell, Artistic Director of the UCBT-LA, said that there was no real place to do sketch in LA until UCBT opened its second location there in 2005. It was easy to gain a following in LA because everyone was “so happy to have a place to do it”.

Besser recalled opening their original theatre on 22nd St. in New York, a former porn theatre where they had to scrape condoms off the floor and throw bricks at the mirrors on the wall because they couldn’t get them down any other way.

He then mentioned going through a similar process (sans condoms) currently for their secondary New York location in the East Village, which will be opening in November of this year (“I think that’s news”). The new venue will feature mostly standup and sketch shows, while the main location on 26th street will continue to focus on improv.

Lennon Parham remembered her first time going to a show at the old space on 22nd, and feeling like an outcast because everyone seemed to know each other (of course, she became a part of the community, and is LA-bound for her role in the new CBS series Accidentally On Purpose).

She also spoke about the common vocabulary UCB performers have, so everyone knows how to play with each other. Also, “there are so many UCB people in the world, it’s inevitable you’re going to work with them,” she said.

An audience member asked about bailing on scenes that aren’t working. Andy Daly said that the back line can almost always bail you out, and Roberts said that “sometimes the only way to play a scene real is to walk off the stage, but it’s up to your scene partner to keep you there.” The don’t-kill-your-scene-partner lesson followed.

Daly confirmed that for a short period, the theatre experienced a “mild Robin Williams infestation.” When he would drop in for Asssscat, he would naturally start a scene at the very front of the stage, making it hard for the others to interact with him.

“Once he realized we were going to make whatever choice he made funny, he relaxed,” said Parham.

Horatio Sanz noted that despite the difference in styles, “he’s like the Pope. If he shows up, you have to invite him into your house.”

From L: Besser, Campbell, Walsh, Provenza, Sanz, Roberts, Parham, Daly

The Alternative Show is one of those “sure things” of the festival, and with its midnight start time typically ends up capping off my week in Montreal. All the comics have gotten to know each other and are slightly loopy from the lack of sleep, and the paying audience usually only fills the main level, leaving the balcony for us laminate-clad folks who just didn’t get enough of host Andy Kindler at the State of the Industry address.

It became clear off the top that Kindler has a following in Montreal, something certainly not lost on him.

“This is a very vocal crowd and I don’t enjoy that,” he said.

Reggie Watts & Jon Dore double up at Saturday night's Alternative Show

“Maybe I’m old school, but I found that very distracting,” Kindler said.

If slapstick is included in the Alternative Show does that mean it’s cool now? I sure hope so. Josh Fadem fell down, got tangled in the mic cord, split his pants, got stuck while taking his sweater off, fell down some more… and did manage to get some jokes out in the process. Hooray for physical comedy, and a secondary hooray for having a special mic brought out for him to screw around with instead of causing problems with the normal one (is it wrong of me to notice these things?)

Aubrey Plaza, who is new at all this from having to learn standup for her role in Funny People, had some good stuff about old people on the internet, and New York City being “the only city where I’m afraid of having trash blown into my mouth.” During the week many were hailing her fast progress, but as should be expected there’s some work to do on the presentation side. Her awkward/blase/depressed tone works, but we could do without all the “umms” and then breaking that character by giving us a relatively chipper thanks/goodbye at the end.

Matt Besser brought out his Jason Yellow character (the no-armed deaf and blind comic) from North America’s Best Comic, one of my favourites from that show the night before. It was weird enough to work well, although Besser seemed to have forgotten about one of his characters traits. His “braille” setlist was taped to his leg so he could read it with his bare foot, but he kept looking down at it instead. But I think everyone was laughing too hard to care, so let’s move on.

Nick Kroll’s initial “what’s uuuuup Montreal!” gangsta schtick was hilarious unto itself even before he promised his set was “goona be a lot more Goldblum-y than that.” I can’t wait to see his newly pitched show about a bilingual hat called Fedora the Explorer.

And while I’m at it, allow me to burn one of Matt Braunger’s best lines: “Wild boys! Wild boys! Sorry, I have Duran Tourettes”. Runner up: “Since you guys have 15 sex shops for every 1 sex shop in this town…”

Marc Maron began the final set of the night with a tale about himself, Kindler, and Eugene Mirman getting lost while driving to a Target in the outskirts of Cincinatti — wherin we learn that he does a fantastic Kindler impression.

Maron moved onto a chunk very close to my heart, about his experience in Winnipeg a few months ago. “What the fuck is this? how many times can someone show me the windiest corner in North America?… I fought the urge to go up to people and say ‘you can just GO. Get on a bus or a plane or a train and just GO someplace where there’s coffee shops and black people…’” (I’m a former Winnipegger and did finally realize a few years ago that I could indeed just GO.)

He closed with a story about what must be the craziest woman he’s ever met on the road (I hope), who wanted him to help deliver a letter to the Governor at 1:30am because he’d saved her from Mormons. Or something like that. The crowd loved Marc, cementing my suspicion that everyone who loves Andy also loves him. A great way to bookend the evening.

When an improv nerd walks into a theatre and sees UCB Theatre co-founders Matt Walsh, Matt Besser, and Ian Roberts standing in the centre of the stage, the reaction is almost physical. These are the guys, and unless you live in LA, you’ll rarely see them on stage together outside of their annual Del Close Marathon appearances.

While there was an unjust supply of empty seats (which the Montreal improvisers I met in the lobby afterwards called the “Zoofest effect”), there was definitely a core group of young improv nerds with this-is-so-effing-cool looks on their faces that indicated that they knew the importance of these shows, even if the majority of Montreal didn’t.

So what is Asssscat? I’ll hand it over to Wikipedia:

“A guest monologist, often a celebrity, gets a suggestion and tells a true story inspired by it. Then the improvisers create scenes inspired by the monologue. If the improvisers feel they want another monologue, they call the monologist back onto the stage. There’s two halves of about 25 minutes each. Each half has only one, maybe two, or (rarely) three monologues, through the structure only requires one. It’s based on the Armando.”

The three welcomed Horatio Sanz, Lennon Parham, Chad Carter, and Andy Daly to the stage, with Chris Gethard as the monologist. I would have much rather seen Gethard in the regular cast, and some effort made to get a non-UCB person in the monologist role. The city is teeming with comedy stars right now, so to not see that opportunity taken was a bit disappointing.

From the audience suggestion of “radish”, Gethard offered up a few different stories about food, leading to first beats about a talkative customer at a restaurant, and ice cream parlour owners deciding to be mean to customers.

His second set of stories about being pursued online by gay guys, and being enticed to a girl’s bedroom on the pretense of watching a movie inspired innuendo-heavy scenes, and brought back the talkative-restaurant-customer game in a scene with Parham and Sanz on a blind date.

Gethard’s third story was about meeting Morrissey, and how his blog entry about it went viral (I’ll admit to having shared the link on my Facebook myself). The comments about him and his appearance were brutal, and this inspired a final batch of scenes mainly about people commenting on each other’s appearances.

It seemed shorter than a typical Asssscat in New York (the show has run every Sunday night for over a decade), but nobody can really complain. Whether 100% of them knew it or not, this was the best improv that audience may ever see in Montreal.

Following this was North America’s Best Comic, a show out of UCBT-LA. The sparse audience (sparser after the 4 walkouts in the first 10 minutes) was witness to a stream of standup characters competing for the title including Walsh as a bitter comic screwed by the industry who turned into a Christian comic, Besser as a blind and deaf guy with no arms, Parham as a washed-up divorcee, and Daly as a high-energy comic who only spews out vague references.

Matt Walsh, Andy Daly & Matt Besser (r, as the Pope). Photo by Sharilyn Johnson

While I loved absolutely everyone involved as individuals, the standup part of me didn’t fall in love with this show. I do get that this is an exercise in character work (and it’s character work done well). And I do get that this is a parody of what became an awful, awful tv show. But there’s an ongoing perception among standups that improvisers don’t respect the art (and vice versa). Maybe it’s because I identify myself as a standup person slightly more than an improv person, but I felt like the performers didn’t have the perspective to warrant winking at the audience, which I think is necessary. The same would be true if a bunch of standups got on stage and acted like clichéd bad improvisers. You would suspect that deep down, they kinda meant it.

Was it bad? No, certainly not. Did it warrant a primetime slot on Friday night? I would have rather seen Parham and Gethard have another chance to do their one-person shows, or a lengthier Asssscat in its place. It’s definitely more of a show for that late-night-at-DCM mood.