The Greek system was huge at Dartmouth and though I never aspired to be in a sorority, it seemed like “Everyone’s doin’ it!” so I went ahead and rushed. I was not invited back to any sororities after the first round of rush. Lest you think I had social issues, this one really baffled me, because making friends had never been a problem for me. I think I was wearing the wrong dress—a little corduroy number. Yes, I was rocking a corduroy dress, with long sleeves, that I thought was cute but clearly was all wrong. I felt as if I had now been literally cast out to match the general figurative outcast feeling I already had there. In addition, I was also rejected by the damn Freshman Cabaret—a little medley of dumb sketches and stuff that anyone who’d ever set foot on a stage, or even never set foot on a stage and just had some general enthusiasm, could be in! You can see how I may not have been feeling in tip-top form. Oh, and I was also rejected from the a cappella singing group the Decibelles (!), but that rejection I’m sure I deserved. Throw into this mix that I had a roommate who was, um, let’s call it “making love” to anything that moved, at rates that made me wonder if she was going for some sort of plaque above the large fireplace in the student center. I was on the other end of the spectrum, pure as the Hanover snow, which was probably still about five feet high in April.
After a summer of being back home working as a bus boy at the Magic Pan in the Burlington Mall (Do you remember the Magic Pan? Home of that newfangled eighties delicacy, the crepe! It’s what passed for exotic French food in the world of the suburbs), I returned to Dartmouth for sophomore fall to discover that I had a bad lottery number for housing, so I had to move from my old-school, beautiful, centrally located ivy-covered dorm down to a faraway land called the River Cluster—an ugly group of seventies-looking cinder-block towers that was the equivalent of Siberia. No one hung out at the River Cluster. You just went there to sleep. I had been assigned a roommate, but she somehow escaped, and as a measure of how depressed I was to be there, I never even moved my stuff into her larger area of the room. I stayed in my tiny side of the room and did nothing with the larger part, which could have been turned into some sort of fun living area, I suppose, but that would mean you’d have to somehow lure people down to the River Cluster, which wasn’t going to happen. As I said, I was starting to feel depressed, something I hadn’t experienced previously, so much so that I worked up my courage to go to the school counselor. I was really nervous about it. This meant I actually had a problem. I no longer had the ability to keep fooling myself that I liked this place.
I walked into the counselor’s office and had another instant gut feeling. I took one look at this guy and was like, “Nope!” I wanted some hip, young warm person that I would feel comfortable talking to. I had never been to a counselor. I didn’t know what to expect. Out walked a man who was older than my dad, with gray balding hair, a powder-blue sweater, and the neutral expression passed down from generation upon generation of the salt-of-the-earth, granite-in-your-veins New Englanders. At the time, though, with my lack of belief in my instincts, a subtle thought merely wafted through my brain—almost like a scene from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a tiny voice said, “He’s one of them!”
The counseling session was completely fruitless. I think I said something to the effect that I was just not finding anyone here that I liked, that this wasn’t my scene and I was thinking of transferring. He would respond only by asking me about my family and kept trying to dig around with an “Is everything OK at home?” tactic. “YES! EVERYTHING’S GREAT AT HOME!” I wanted to shout back. “THAT’S THE PROBLEM! Sully’s there! And Smitty! And I think I was happier working at the Magic Pan!” That may sound strange since I was fortunate enough to be at this esteemed campus, but when you aren’t happy, you aren’t happy, and the detriments were vastly outweighing the blessings.
I was still thinking of transferring. I think I had gone so far as to pick up some applications for other schools, and that’s when, during my sophomore winter, I saw the Dartmouth improv group perform. “Ooh!” I thought. “I could do that!” I had always gravitated toward comedy in theater anyway. I got to sit in on one of their rehearsals through a friend from acting class. They invited me to join the group, which was called Said and Done, and it was my salvation. Finally, I had found some people who enjoyed looking foolish and were a bit offbeat and were definitely funny and creative.
Improvisation was the perfect branch of acting for me—it’s perfect for those who don’t like to prepare, or, as one might also call them, the lazy. There are rules to improv that can help you be a better improviser, but you don’t have to study for a test or rehearse a monologue. You don’t have to “find your moments” or learn your lines. You are in your moment and you make up your own lines. If you are any good, your lines are funny. And they are funnier than anything you could have thought of if you were sitting staring at a computer (back then, that was the Mac 128k) trying to think up some comedy.
My college improv group doing that mainstay piece of beginning improvisers: the Machine!
At one of the first Said and Done rehearsals I attended, I experienced that thing that happens in improv, when the line comes out of your mouth before your brain has registered what you are about to say. We were doing some sort of group poem about money or something, and I said, “I’m so rich that it’s no surprise, when I’m tired, I get Gucci bags under my eyes.” Now, I’m not saying that is the most brilliant line ever, but hey, I was nineteen years old and I hadn’t experienced the phenomenon before. “How did I think of that?” I wondered. I didn’t feel like I had thought of it. It’s a sort of flow that happens when you are completely in the moment and not getting in your own way. Not trying so hard, not planning ahead, just getting out of your own head and letting the magic happen. You could apply this to any activity, of course. You could apply it to life.
The biggest rule of improv is called “Yes And.” Basically, this means that whatever your scene partner says to you, you agree and then add to it. So if you are starting a scene and your partner says, “I made you a birthday cake, Grandma!” you don’t respond, “I’m not your Grandma, and that’s not a cake—it’s an old shoe!” You would get a quick laugh, but you would kill the reality of the scene entirely. A “Yes And” exchange would be: “I made you a birthday cake, Grandma!” “Oh, thank you, dear. I feel thirty-five years young!” By agreeing to what your partner laid out and adding to it, you’ve established a relationship and even given your partner something to play with—that this family has a grandmother who is thirty-five years old—and the scene can develop from there. “Yes And” would serve me well, not only onstage but offstage too. Without my realizing it, “Yes And” would contribute to one major career success and one major life event far down the road from the rehearsal room in Hanover, New Hampshire, during the winter of my sophomore year.
Chicago:
Overnight Success in Ten Years!
By the time I graduated, I had ferreted out a group of friends who are still a part of my life to this day. I ended up meeting a lot of my Dartmouth friends through the theater department. Then there’s another branch of my guy friends at Dartmouth who all came out of the closet in rapid succession after graduation. (This would begin my long-standing tradition of always having a fab group of gay men to hang with at a moment’s notice.) I knew I didn’t want to go through life thinking, “What if I had tried to become an actor?” I decided I at least wanted to give it a shot. I had no idea how to go about giving acting a shot, though. There was no set plan like it seemed all my classmates had who were applying to med school or law school or going into the corporate world. My improv group had done an exploratory trip to Chicago over the summer to check it out, and I decided to move there after graduating to try to get into the improv comedy mecca of the country, the Second City.
I remember sitting in my packed car, about to leave my parents’ house, thinking, “I’ll be back in a year and then I can go to grad school and become a therapist.” I drove out with Son
ja, a girl from my improv group. Sonja was a bit of an eccentric and would be one of the two people I knew in Chicago, in addition to being my roommate. Just to give you a little snapshot of Sonja: One time, a friend was sitting next to her in class, where she observed Sonja feel something that was stuck in her tights. Sonja, thinking no one was watching, worked the object up her leg and somehow retrieved it out of the waistband of her tights, whereupon she discovered the object was a raisin. She then ate it.
Back in Massachusetts, as we packed up my car to set off on our journey, one of the items Sonja loaded into my Honda was a bag of flour. I mean, what if they didn’t have flour in Chicago? It lasted the whole trip, until we pulled up in Chicago, she opened the door to get out, and it exploded all over my car. She would go on to eventually become a professor of theater at the University of Minnesota.
I began my professional comedy career with an instant bomb to the ego, when Sonja and I both auditioned for classes at Second City, and Sonja got in and I did not. We had heard that getting into the classes was a mere formality. Anyone with any improv experience gets into the classes. That’s what we had heard. I had been in Chicago for two weeks and wondered if I should get back into my flour-covered car and drive home to Massachusetts.
Needless to say, I didn’t. I stayed. I did some plays. I took some classes elsewhere and got into the Second City classes later that year. I also started at Improvolympic, where I “studied” under the esteemed improv guru, Del Close. I would go watch the house team, Blue Velveeta, perform every single weekend, which was a good way to learn by osmosis. After two years in Chicago, I auditioned for the Second City touring company and … I had instant success and was off on my path to the top like the rising star that I was? No. I did not get into the touring company on my first try. I did get in the following year, on the second try. This became my pattern—again and again. Ol’ Two-Time Dratch, they used to call me. No, they didn’t.
The touring company of Second City was certainly not a glamorous gig, but everyone in it was excited because it was the first step to getting onto the mainstage someday. Well, I shouldn’t say everyone was excited, because there was always someone in the tourco who’d been touring for several years and was waiting for their break and was embittered and had had it with the road. Eventually, that could be you. But for now, freshly hired, you are excited. Occasionally, you would get to go somewhere really desirable: Alaska, New Orleans, and the coveted “ski tour,” on which you perform in all these ski resort towns in Colorado and Utah. More often, though, the tour entailed a seven-hour drive in a van to go to Upper Michigan or Lower Bumdiddle, Indiana. We’d perform at colleges (fun), town events (could be fun), and corporate gigs, where we’d change the lines of the scenes to accommodate the company: “Why, that’s almost as funny as Jerry Harrison’s golf game!” (Thunderous inside-joke-recognition applause.) We got paid sixty-five bucks a show back then. I ended up touring for two and a half years. Finally, after being passed over the first time to move up out of tourco (another “second try”), I got on the mainstage, where I performed eight shows a week for almost four years.
The Second City started up in Chicago in 1959 and, in the early days, produced such esteemed alumni as Fred Willard, Joan Rivers, Alan Arkin, and Peter Boyle. Second City eventually became a feeder to SNL: John Belushi, Bill Murray, and Chris Farley all came out of Second City Chicago. Out of the Toronto branch of SC came Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, and Martin Short. The shows at Second City are mainly sketch comedy, like SNL sketches, with some improv thrown in. After the show every night but Friday, there’s an improv set in which the cast gets suggestions from the audience and just makes stuff up for about a half hour. If an improv scene happens to go really well, the actors in it might make a mental note and remember it for later, to incorporate it into the next written show.
I was there in the early to mid nineties, which felt like a special time to be in Chicago. So many people there ended up being on your TV or movie screens today. While I was in the touring company, on the mainstage were Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, and Amy Sedaris, all in the same cast. Even back then, Amy Sedaris was this pretty little girl who would screw her face up into the ugliest expressions. I learned a lot from just watching her perform, because she was so fearless and bold in her choices. She wasn’t content to be the girly-girl who would play the “Honey!” parts—the trap it was easy for women improvisers to fall into. As in “Honeeyyyyy! I told you to take out the trash!” “Honeeyyyyy! I thought we were going out tonight!!” “Honeeyyyyy! Were you flirting with the waitress?!” (I had learned early on at Improvolympic that it was easy to “cast” yourself into these roles in an improvised scene and let the guys have all the fun. All of the really good women improvisers I knew avoided the “Honey!” parts because it meant they would be relegated to the sidelines of a scene, occasionally stepping in to pour imaginary coffee.) Amy Sedaris would play these little squirrel-like characters and goofy oddballs. Stephen Colbert was the twinkly-eyed, good-looking smarty-pants who actually performed a song about the conflict in the Balkans and managed to make it hilarious. (“We’re talkin’! We’re talkin’! We’re talkin’ ’bout the Balkans!”) And Steve Carell could make anything funny. I don’t think I ever saw him die onstage. In one scene, a couple had a ton of kids, and the cast kept running through the stage, each one playing a different unruly child. Steve Carell simply walked through, holding up a piece of foam mat and said, “I found foam!” and could bring the house down with just that line. Adam McKay, later the head writer of SNL and Will Ferrell’s writing partner, was with me the whole time from Improvolympic to the mainstage and was always thinking of new ways to do sketch, to screw with the audience and to mess with their heads, or to use comedy to challenge corporate America. I was there just to get some yucks, but he was always thinking with a higher goal in mind. Also on the mainstage with me for two shows: Tina Fey. Amy Poehler was my understudy for the touring company. Horatio Sanz, Nia Vardalos, and many of the eventual writers for Conan O’Brien were at Second City when I was there, as well as a bunch more people you may never have heard of but you should have because there was so much talent going on there in that time. I mention a lot of the people who became famous because you know who they are, but I learned something about comedy from every person I worked with at Second City. Everyone brought their own self to the work, so I was always delighted by my cast mates and laughing along with the audience, wondering, “How’d they think of that?!” Improvising every night after the show, I would sometimes forget I was supposed to go out and participate too because I was so busy laughing at what my fellow performers were doing.
My first year on the mainstage, I remember feeling tentative. The stage was so big, the room was so vast, I was new up there, and it felt like someone else’s turf. It took almost a whole year until I felt truly comfortable on that stage, but after that year, I lost much of my fear and hit a whole other zone of improvising. The nightly improvising eventually improved my skills in ways I couldn’t imagine. I was able to channel that intangible thing, when you get out of your head, with far greater frequency. Mind you, we’d still bomb occasionally in the improv set, usually when I had a visitor from out of town in the audience. Afterward, I’d sheepishly say, “No, this is usually really funny! I swear!” That was just your run-of-the-mill, every-once-in-a-while, audience-not-laughing-at-all set. Oh, that was child’s play, because occasionally there were also the looking-into-your-fellow-performer’s-eyes, what-the-hell-is-happening moments. There was the drunk lady wandering onto the stage from the side stage door, just walking right into a scene, trying to participate with her own “lines.” We ushered her off the stage only to hear her crashing down the stairs with the sound effect you’d hear in a movie. Then there was the time we were performing a special show for a foundation, and Adam McKay and Scott Adsit were doing a scene called “Gump,” wherein Adsit had taken an exam to enter a corporate job and it was discovered that he was legally retarded. The word retar
ded was said about twenty times in this scene. We didn’t know it, but the foundation was for developmentally disabled kids, and the poor person who had booked the event had to stand up at intermission and give a speech about how “many people still don’t know that the word retarded is offensive!” Oh, Lord, and then there was the time when Adam and our director Tom Gianas’ “messing with the audience” kick went way out of my comfort zone: Adam and Adsit walked out during the improv set to tell the audience that then-President Clinton had been shot. A gasp rose up from the crowd. Adam and Adsit then wheeled a TV onstage and said we were going to check in on the latest news, and proceeded to play sports bloopers and laugh at them and just wait for the dazed audience to mill out of the room. That was probably my most uncomfortable moment ever on a stage—a time when “Yes And” was stretched to its breaking point for me. But that’s risk taking. Screwing with the audience was never my thing, but those who didn’t mind the discomfort became masters and turned it into their own art form. Of course, now that I see the bit in print and I’m not having to live it, it actually sounds kind of funny.
We’d go out pretty much every night after the show to one of two completely smoke-filled bars. We’d often start at the Last Act and then, if it was a really late night, move on to the Old Town Alehouse, which closed at four A.M. … five A.M. on Saturdays. We were in our twenties or early thirties and there was no reason not to go out almost every night. On weekends we’d stay until last call, when the bartender, a woman whose name I knew only as Yoyo, would start yelling, “Let’s GOOOO, people! Let’s GOOOO!” One of the actors, Jerry Minor, became particularly adept at imitating her and could fool people into thinking the bar was closing. People drank and drank, smoked and smoked, and laughed and laughed. You could look around the room and every improviser in the bar was somehow connected to you, because at some point, you’d all shared that unique terror of standing in front of three hundred people and not knowing what you were going to say next.
Girl Walks Into a Bar . . .: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle Page 3