The Upright Citizens Brigade expanded, in the course of two and a half decades, into a veritable laugh factory, with schools and theatres on both coasts and star alumni.Photograph by Christopher Gregory / NYT / Redux
A lot of people texted me on Tuesday, when Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts, Matt Besser, and Matt Walsh—the co-founders of the Upright Citizens Brigade, an improvisational-comedy colossus—announced that they would be permanently closing their swanky Hell’s Kitchen theatre and their bustling training center, near Penn Station. Essentially, they would be withdrawing from New York, the city where they’d got their start, in the mid-nineties, as a scrappy improv troupe from Chicago with plans to proselytize the “yes, and” approach to comedy and life. People were texting me the way they do when a beloved but long-toothed public figure dies of natural causes—accompanied by a frowny emoji, no condolence note necessary.
To be clear, I am not an improv fanatic. I am not one of those guys who initiate unwanted conversations in bars about their Harold teams. But, five or so years ago, I took a U.C.B. Improv 101 class “undercover,” to write about the experience—and the rapid ascent of U.C.B., the institution—for this magazine. So the news was of interest. For many months, as I wrote the piece, I found myself obsessed with improv comedy, and might even have started some unwanted conversations on the subject, in bars and out of them. We’re not so different, improv guy and I. I, too, felt a sharp pang reading a tweet by the comedian Max Silvestri: “Now UCB, Now You Don’t.”
U.C.B., which started as a mom-and-pop comedy-instruction shop housed in a former strip club, expanded, in the course of two and a half decades, into a veritable laugh factory, with schools and theatres on both coasts and a star-studded pool of alumni. (Donald Glover, Ilana Glazer, and Aubrey Plaza all got their start in U.C.B. classes.) Along the way, the company encountered many of the issues that typically accompany sudden growth—issues of inclusion, safety, oversight, authenticity, and quality. Performers weren’t paid, even as ticket prices were raised. Venues with character (read: grime) and major infrastructural flaws (read: grimy bathrooms) were upgraded to sleek, anonymous arenas (with perfectly normal bathrooms). On March 12th, as many performance spaces in New York and L.A. began to shutter, U.C.B.’s artistic directors informed employees that their theatres and training centers would be closing indefinitely. Less than a week later, they laid off all theatre staff.
Back when I was reporting my magazine piece, graduates of the system often described U.C.B. as cultlike. It’s true that the company asked you to pay hundreds of dollars for each successive class, so that you could—maybe, eventually—become an unpaid performer. (As a favorite parody video put it, “Look at the rules they force you to follow: you have to agree with everything, you can’t say no, you can’t ask questions.”) But, even as someone who’d signed on as a skeptic, I felt, hearing the news, a bit like an ex-acolyte who couldn’t help but look fondly on my sunny days doing collective farm work (or object work) in a field (or a cramped stage). U.C.B., whatever its flaws, did provide a real home to many wide-eyed dreamers in New York, who wandered in seeking camaraderie, or a new identity. Improv guy is probably a step up from hacky-sack guy or essential-oils girl, after all.
Improv guy gets a bad rap because improv comedy is often very bad. The honing that comes from editing and rehearsing a sketch tends to be absent in a spontaneously generated scene. Watching people fail at it can be viscerally painful. But improv can also be shockingly good, and when it is, it feels like a bit of closeup magic. The truth is that this coronavirus pandemic comes for good and bad culture alike. This pandemic does not distinguish between open-mike nights at your local Laff Shack and a perfectly crafted set played to thousands. Comedy clubs of all stripes have taken baseball bats to their knees, and comedians are gig-less, audience-less, at a time when we need humor most.
U.C.B. was a wonderfully imperfect thing. In its early days, the performers gave nitrous hits to the audience and Adam McKay staged his faux suicide off a roof with a mannequin. Even if it has morphed into something more corporate, more generic, the closure of its New York spaces hit me the way the cancellation of N.B.A. basketball hit my partner. I remember watching his face fall—if that’s gone, what’s left? For everyone, I suspect, there is something that has been put on pause or entirely eradicated that, however frivolous, drives home the fact of our awful new reality. Sometimes, it can even feel like the bulldozing of a former home.
But I won’t wax too elegiac. In February, I dragged the aforementioned partner to a Valentine’s Day performance at the former U.C.B. theatre in Chelsea, now inhabited by Improv Asylum. We saw a show called “Nate,” starring Natalie Palamides, which was the most inventive, fucked-up, hilarious, one-woman, topless, tragicomic performance about sexual consent I’ve ever seen. It was no longer U.C.B., where I’d attended a show called “Gutenberg! The Musical!” as a teen and laughed so hard I thought I’d pass out. But it was the same space. Same sticky floors. Slightly better-staffed bar.
In their parting letter, the U.C.B. Four, as the empire’s founders have come to be known, wrote, “UCB is not leaving New York City. The school and the theater will continue on in a pared-down form, which will be very similar to how we operated when we first started in NYC over 20 years ago.” The plan is to hold classes and shows in rented spaces around the city. I hope this means that more people will be able to find a home, a family, a cult, whatever, among their fellow comedy nerds, at a safe distance. But the real hope—other than that for the health of our community—is that all truly good things will find a way back. Maybe, in the case of improv comedy, it won’t be the same venture, helmed by the same four friends. But Poehler, Roberts, Besser, and Walsh, via an ever-extending web of talent, have trained thousands and thousands of people in their faith of truth in comedy. No virus can stifle that. Just try to rid “King Lear” of the Fool. Bad play.
Source：The New Yorker