It’s a wild privilege to govern a made-up universe and design lives and a tone. It’s thrilling and empowering to write characters and decide how they’ll grow, fail, spiral, who they fuck, even when they slip and fall (which my character does quite often). But more and more, it’s become a mirror, reflecting the difference in my own life: the planned and executed process of a television show versus the sprawling, unknown storyline of an effortlessly ravishing, ultra-sophisticated, thirty-three-year-old woman.
Lately, Broad City has begun to permeate into my whole being. It’s become a visual diagram of where I’ve been and where I’m going. The show is the thing that has defined me thus far professionally, the thing all future endeavors will probably be compared with. But it is a reproduction of my reality. An exaggerated reproduction, obviously, but one in which the core of Abbi and Ilana, and the DNA of the New York City we created within the show, is a copy of us, a “ditto” of the city we inhabited in our twenties. Reproducing something so close to my own experience has forced me to pay close attention, to be more aware of the changes occurring both within the show and within myself. The show had become so familiar, and safe, that I couldn’t help but worry—like Mike Teavee in Willy Wonka, if we get sucked into the fake world on the screen for too long, we might get stuck.
Ilana and I had recently decided that we would end the show after the fifth season. We’d been debating what felt right for us and, more important, what felt right for them, the other Abbi and Ilana. Shows shouldn’t go on forever, the best end before they’ve outstayed their welcome, and in editing Season 4, I had been feeling a strong pull. It’s so extremely rare to have the ability to make that decision to end on our own terms. It’s a gift and a real testament to Comedy Central and their support of the content that they’ve let us make that call. What a bizarre turn of events. To have your wildest dreams come true, and then to begin the conversation on when and how that particular dream should end.
To contemplate the end, I have to go back to the beginning:
I met Ilana in an improv practice group in 2007. It was at a shitty rehearsal space in Midtown, one of many, rented out by the hour to practice the art of improv. It sounds counterintuitive to practice improvising, but it was, at least for me, about learning to unlearn. Improv and the core beliefs behind it were like a bible of values I didn’t know I was looking for: Don’t think. Yes, and. Support. Always have each other’s backs. Use the top of your intelligence. It was invigorating and it also scared the shit out of me. I don’t think I’d ever, in my whole life, purposely put myself in a more terrifying situation than getting up on stage and doing improv. But it was the rawest, most incredible high I’d ever felt. The things we are most afraid of are the things that will ultimately change our whole makeup.
I found improv on a fluke. It was September of 2006, and I’d been in New York City for a little over a month, living in Astoria, Queens. I moved to the city because I’d been accepted to the Atlantic Theatre Conservatory, a two-year acting program. I was set on being a serious actor, and I aimed for the tippity-top of the seriousness shelf, Mamet, baby! I attended classes for one week and lost my shit—I couldn’t do it, I wasn’t good enough. I broke down on the northeast corner of 15th Street and Eighth Avenue and I think of that moment every single time I see someone cry in public. Crying publicly is a rite of passage in New York. A rite of passage, a weekly activity, whatever you want to call it. I was twenty-two and had no idea what I was going to do next. I was the first person in my entire family to move outside of the Philadelphia area, for a career that couldn’t be more foreign or unrealistic to anyone I’d ever met. I’m sure Atlantic is wonderful for a lot of students. I’m sure they’ve left feeling inspired and changed and legitimate dramatic actors. But the classes made me paralyzed, trapped inside my own head, unable to speak—the dissection of dialogue and the repetition left me with the constant feeling I was doing it all wrong. It isn’t how my brain works. I know that now, but at the time, I felt like a complete failure. I had to make a decision fast or I would lose my initial deposit. Should I stay and stick it out even though my body seemed to be having an allergic reaction to every part of this place, or quit? I quit. I had moved to New York City for this opportunity, and almost immediately, quit. I felt immature, adrift, and like a fraud. I’d repeat that in my head for weeks afterward, silently insulting, scolding, and tearing myself down—I suppose the repetition class wasn’t completely lost on me! It’s comforting now to reflect on these moments, the pivotal mistakes, the forks in the road. To look back and know it’s okay, it was all part of it. The comfort lies really in my future self, eventually looking back at me now in this current, heartbroken state, thinking—It’s okay, it was all part of it.
At the time of the great “Quickly Quitting My Dreams” movement of 2006, I had a day job as a sales associate at the Anthropologie at Rockefeller Center—something I was excited to share with my character in Season 4 of Broad City. I did, like Abbi says on the show, grow up in Wayne, Pennsylvania, the town where Anthropologie built their first brick-and-mortar store, so there was a weird, suburban familiarity in working there. But more than that, I’d specifically sought out the Rockefeller location for its proximity to Saturday Night Live. It was the closest I could get. I basically worked at SNL…or rather, counted windows up to the eighth floor and stared longingly from the street. I loved SNL. I grew up watching the old reruns on Comedy Central, went as characters for Halloween, and even made a bet with my brother that by the time I was twenty, I’d become a cast member (I still owe him that hundred bucks). Growing up I was hardly involved in school plays, as they were mostly musicals, but I did perform many incarnations of SNL sketches—the Cheerleaders, Mary Katherine Gallagher, and Roseanne Roseannadanna—at sleepovers and before basketball or soccer practice, and anywhere else I could find an audience. In eighth grade, I was my homeroom’s student council representative, and instead of just reporting the monthly issues I’d seen at the student council meetings back to my homeroom, I reported them as Linda Richman (the Mike Myers character), doing Coffee Talk. Around this time, I wrote Lorne Michaels a letter telling him to watch out for me, because I’d be there one day. I think I even wrote that he should save the letter, that he’d see! This letter was either never read, dumped in the trash, or flagged as threatening? “Watch out for me”!? What balls. So, getting out of the subway and walking past Rockefeller Center on my way to work was a thrill to say the least.
One night around this time, I came home after work, still bummed about my acting fail, and my roommate, a friend I’d gone to college with, brought up this place, the Upright Citizens Brigade. I did a lot of characters in my video work at school and she recommended I go see a show, thinking I would really respond to it. I had never heard of it, or the television show with the same name (I clearly hadn’t branched out from SNL), but, without much else on my plate, I checked it out. I went alone, and having not really seen much live comedy I had no idea what to expect. I found a seat in the back and watched a show, about what I couldn’t say, but I sat there in complete awe, paralyzed in a new way. This. This thing, whatever unexplainable thing they were doing on that stage, I wanted in. It was astounding, this group of people got up there and were wild and reckless and then somehow pulled it all together to make complete sense. I laughed in more ways at weirder things than I knew were possible. I had stumbled into a basement under a Gristedes and found exactly what I needed. That roommate and I don’t speak anymore. She and her boyfriend were the seed of inspiration for my character’s living situation on Broad City. We hadn’t spoken for years by the time the show was on the air, though I’m sure me exaggerating that experience on television probably sealed the deal. That said, my comedy career can be traced back to that frustrating evening after work, her thoughtfully pointing me in my next direction. I will forever be grateful to her for that recommendation, and also for those tumultuous months when her boyfriend moved in to our apartment and ate some of my food.
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nbsp; I started taking classes at UCB as soon as I could, and even though I was scared almost constantly, it was a different fear than at Atlantic. The energy at UCB was smart and quick and alive. I was still timid, but I stayed, knowing if I paid attention and threw myself into this, I could one day do the thing I realized I wanted, to make people laugh. Improvising was such a mix of emotions: like you’ve taken a drug and discovered a new color, and also like you might have the shits at any moment, right in the middle of the room. I had never participated in something I was so enamored with, or whose tricks and secrets I was so eager to learn. I’d go to see as many live shows as I could, studied my favorite players’ styles, read books about technique. There was even an improv resource center online (the IRC), a site run by the community, full of comments and theories. I would read it all, take in as much as I could. I had found my tribe. I didn’t yet have the courage or confidence to walk among them; instead, I trailed behind until I did, like a kid sister not fully integrated in the fun outing.
Improv, and long-form improv specifically, is often compared to a cult, because its followers succumb to its teachings, willing to sacrifice all other personal socializing, shedding all extra income on classes and practices, performance spaces and coaches. And it is, if you love it; you get sucked into that high, as a performer and an audience member. It takes over. There were no whisperings of buying land in Oregon just yet, but UCB would go on to open up more locations, so who knows. When I was a student, I remember reading something Amy Poehler (who is one of the four founders of the UCB) wrote about improv, that it was her church, her religion. I felt that way. It was a meeting place, a gathering full of people trying their best to expand themselves and learn. The ultimate goal was to be present, and to laugh, together. In everyday life, the chance for that sort of connection and collaboration is so rare, but when I walked into a show, or a classroom, or a rehearsal, those odds rose dramatically. I was hooked.
About a year into studying improv, I had been practicing one night a week with a group for about a month. It was a mash-up of a few kids from my level 201 improv class at UCB, and some people I hadn’t known beforehand. On this night, my friend Tim Martin (who we later had on Broad City as Dale, Ilana’s creepy ex-roommate/lover) brought two new people into the group to practice, Ilana and her brother Eliot. They had taken a class with Tim, and he thought they’d fit in. Ilana and I were the only two women in the group, and I was convinced she was the actor that played Maeby on Arrested Development. I didn’t know Alia Shawkat’s name, and the show had ended by this time. I thought it would make sense that this girl had moved to New York and was getting into improv. I couldn’t believe she was practicing with me! We all went to this bar afterward, Peter McManus Café, McManus for short. It was the bar everyone in the community hung out in, after every show, almost every night. On 19th Street and Seventh Avenue, it was, and I think still is, the improv community’s Cheers. For years I was a mess in there, too nervous to talk to anyone not in my class at the time, too apprehensive to fully immerse myself in the scene. Like most adult scenarios, everything is high school all over again. So, it was the seniors, the cool kids, the ones on the house teams, the ones whose moves I studied at shows, sitting in the green booths in the back, sharing pitchers of beer, laughing. Slowly, over time, I pulled up a chair to those booths, got my own seat on the ripped, taped-over leather, and became a part of it all. But on this night, I wasn’t there yet. I was still a noob, so my group and me sat up front as our teachers and coaches partied in the back. Ilana and I sat at the corner of the bar and hit it off right away. I told her I was from outside Philadelphia, and she told me she was from Long Island. Two of my best friends from college were from Long Island, from Smithtown. She could not believe it, she was from Smithtown! She bizarrely knew both of these people from high school and I quickly realized she was not Maeby. It feels false to look back on a moment, a conversation, and see an inciting incident of your own life’s movie, like a formulaic Hollywood script, broken down beat by beat in a screenwriting handbook, but those handbooks sell so many copies for a reason! It was right there at the corner of the bar at McManus that my life changed completely. Ilana was so refreshing, this brassy girl with big opinions, bold, animated, and who seemed to know exactly who she was. And me, shy and insecure, pulling awkwardly at my clothes, outgoing only after a few drinks. There was a spark, a dynamic between us I had never experienced with another person, like she could see my potential self, sitting at the bar, and I, hers. She also definitely asked me if I was Jewish and didn’t believe me at all when I told her I was. She made me laugh almost immediately. I’d been in New York for about a year, and I remember waiting for the subway on my way home that night, giddy—this was why I moved here, to meet people like her.
Ilana and I were friends for two years while we performed with this improv team. We called ourselves Secret Promise Circle. Sidenote: Improv team names for the most part, are disgusting. They are like TBTs of you in the first outfit you picked out for yourself: mismatched (but not in a cool way), head-to-toe tie-dye, etc. A choice you were proud of at the time, that turned into a humiliating and endearing blunder later in life. The seriousness of our team, of all the teams we were surrounded by, was both adorable and motivating. We had to take ourselves seriously. We worked day jobs we couldn’t care less about—I had moved on to catering and assisting, the others had desk jobs, temped, and waited tables in order to take part in this other nighttime gig. We paid coaches and rented rehearsal spaces and theaters by the hour and bought cheap liquor to give the audience (usually under fifteen people) free shots. We spent night after night in basements, testing the waters of our own courage in those underground labs, gaining the experience onstage to get better. And we needed to get better, all of us.
We performed a lot of shitty improv: embarrassing missteps, cocky showboating, wacky characters played nowhere near the top of our intelligence, and entire scenes performed in thick (borderline racist) accents. Oy. But every once in a while, there’d be a move or a scene or, rarely, an entire show that would kill. It would usually include one of us becoming someone else’s life-size penis, but still! I rode the high off those moments for months. All of this, with the goal to become good enough to actually make money through comedy, to be able to quit the catering gig and do this for a living. That seemed unattainable, as I didn’t really know anyone personally that had achieved it. I’d seen a few people from afar, the veteran improvisers who hung out in those back, green booths at McManus, slowly move up. I watched them in commercials and movies, saw them become performers on SNL or writers on sitcoms. Every time one of them broke out, it was thrilling. I just saw them perform at UCB, at the grungy basement theater in Chelsea, the theater I too was a part of. They were making it happen. If they could do it, maybe I could too.
Since I started at UCB, I knew, as did my peers, that the only path to success was to get on a Harold team. Harold teams are the theater’s house teams. There were about nine or so Harold teams, each comprising eight people. I should also mention, for some unexplainable reason, there was almost never more than two women per team. Yes, there were more men at the theater and in classes, but this was a systemic problem, and a clear issue, like most institutionalized misogyny, that wasn’t discussed or fought often or hard enough. Looking back, it’s something I detest about my upbringing in comedy, the ingrained, uneven gender balance and lack of diversity that I did nothing to try and change. I didn’t fit in yet, and was too enamored—and scared—of the community to call out its flaws. Now, in my work, I do everything I can to alter that balance.
These Harold teams were highly coveted to say the least, and those two slots silently delegated to women…seemed almost impossible to get. The teams performed a “Harold,” which is the main format of improv you’re taught as a student. A structure (about thirty to forty minutes) in which to play, that consists of three acts, or beats, where scenes and characters heighten to a place where ideally, they all weave together. The
Harold felt akin to learning the foundations of representational drawing in art school: Once you can master that, the classic fundamentals, you can branch out. The Harold was developed in Chicago by Del Close and brought to New York by the UCB Four (the four founders of the theater). That last sentence is almost taken verbatim from the announcement made in the beginning of “Harold Night,” every Tuesday at the theater, and is something I wasn’t aware I’d memorized until just now. The audition process for Harold teams was brutal. It was done yearly, when new teams were created, and people on current teams were sometimes moved around or cut completely. The whole community became tense—the perfect vibe in which to be your funniest self! I auditioned three years in a row, and all three times I got a callback, but never made it onto a team. I knew in my gut I was good, that I was funny, but this was a yearly setback. I hadn’t remembered how upset I was each time until my dad very recently and randomly said to me on a call after I told him about a new project in the works, “Bet they wish they put you on a Harold team now!” He held on to it longer than I had and I held on to it for…a while. Paul Downs and I still talk about an “incredible” Harold audition we did together in 2007 (something our other friends immediately roll their eyes at), so I guess that chip is still there on my shoulder somewhere. But ultimately it was the most prodigious gift that neither Ilana nor I got on a team. That frustration transformed into “Fuck this.” We set out to do our own thing, partly as our only option, but also to prove ourselves to the institution we so badly wanted to be allowed inside. I came up at UCB but was never fully let in until I became successful on my own. Until I created content for myself.
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