I remember reading about your show "May I Help You, Dumbass?" , which I just think is awesome, so basically your phone would ring and people thought they were calling a help center for—was it AOL or something like that?

Actually, a tech support place for a bunch of different companies, [Kmart] and all sorts of big corporations.

And you would just take the phone calls…

I was tech support.

You would take the phone calls and mess with people and obviously had fun with it and got a show out if it. Did you ever consider changing your number or did you kind of enjoy messing with people?

No, that would be admitting defeat and, you know, that way they win, though I can’t let Kmart defeat me—that would be pathetic. What I did do is I told them what was wrong, and the problem was that they didn’t put an area code before their number, and I called up the place and told them that, and they didn’t do it, so…

So, technically they were making the mistake.

Yes, it was their fault.

So, they kind of had it coming.

Yes, and that company is out of business now.

You don’t feel any responsibility for that do you?

I feel [totally responsible].

I’m going to start in with the questions that our readers were contributing. Dan Telfer asks, “Where do you find it’s harder to do public performance art and prank stuff on the street—Chicago, NY, and LA—where are the people and cops most, and least, game for that kind of stuff?”

Well, when we did it in Chicago, it was more hiding a camera versus a hidden camera. We didn’t have that tiny camera technology, so people really weren’t used to those things happening, so we got the best reactions back then, because pranking people wasn’t a common thing. They weren’t looking for it.

When we moved to NY, still prank shows weren’t that big a deal at that point, but New Yorkers are used to just weirdos in general, like all the time, whether it’s a real crazy person or someone who just wants attention, there’s always something weird going on, so sometimes we would do pranks and not get much of a reaction, because it was NY. That’s why we started to move our pranks, when we learned that lesson, to New Jersey. We’d go to smaller towns in Jersey to do most of our pranks, so we really didn’t do many pranks in NY besides the Today Show and stuff. Well, we did some stuff in Washington Square, but more of it was in Jersey.

In LA, I haven’t really done much here at all, but it’s illegal in California to have a hidden camera, so you don’t see many LA pranks. I mean, my prank show, Cross Balls, is kind of a different kind of trap. It’s not going up to people—they’re walking into your traps.

Did you ever have any issues with cops or with people interfering with things you were trying to do?

Well, in Chicago a lot, and that’s what made it a lot of fun, but they broke up a half a dozen of our shows for one reason or another, because we used to bring the audience out into the street a lot of times in our show, do some kind of scene in the street, whether it was starting a riot—like, one time in Wicker Park, we were doing a show called Virtual Reality, and we told the audience that they were going on a virtual riot, and we took them outside with Tiki torches and, unfortunately, cap guns, which looked like real guns, and we went out and stopped traffic on North Ave and Damen, and of course that brought the police—torches and guns—and Horatio go taken away in a cop car that night, as he screamed, “Fight the power!”

There’s another legendary prank that these younger improvisers hear about—Adam McKay staged a public suicide in Chicago. Were you around for that?

Yeah, that was that same show.

I heard that passersby and "the public" were really blasé about it. He took out ads and all that kind of crazy stuff, and still nobody tried to stop him?

Yes. [Laugh] That is true. That was part of the same Virtual Reality show, and the audience was told that they’d get to watch a virtual suicide. We did do ads and fliers for weeks before the show, and he went up on the building across the street from -- do you guys still have Orbis there? Well, this theater on North anyway. He went up to the top of this six story building, we had a megaphone, and he started shouting down, “You can’t stop me, you can’t stop me!” and then he jumped off the building and hit a sign and a top of a car -- of course, it was a mannequin -- but it’s funny how people reacted to things like that.

Another show we were smashing a TV in the street, another show we were putting fireworks in a kid’s mouth and lighting it, and it’s funny the things that people don’t stop you from doing.

Studio CDR on the Franklin Strip at UCB:

A question from Paul Robinson asks about deciding when it's time to move to New York or LA. Do you think for some of the people here that are thinking, “Am I ready yet? Should I wait a year?” It’s important to be really firm in what you’re doing and have enough experience and a game plan and enough good stuff to show—is that kind of the advice you’d have for people at that stage?

Well, no, that would imply that you can’t grow in LA or NY either, and there’s a lot of people who begin here—I don’t know. It’s where you’re at and how happy you are. If I was living in Chicago and I had a theater where I got to go up a lot and do whatever I wanted to, why move to LA or NY if you think you can grow there in Chicago.

You have to grow somewhere, you have to get your act together, so to speak, somewhere, whether it’s LA, NY, or Chicago, or Atlanta or Austin, or whatever. It’s wherever you’re most comfortable getting it together. I think it’s easier to get it together in LA or NY now than it was back when I was in Chicago.

Another thing that we’re seeing here, for various reasons, is that people here, because they can go out to the coasts to do various shows but still live here, and because they can get their content out online, they can kind of make professional momentum…Maybe that’s more possible with people lately.

Totally.

We have a question from Dyan Flores. She asks, “Now that the UCB is becoming somewhat of an institution with the theaters, training centers…have you guys thought about any other arenas you’d like to enter—a production company or theme park?”

Yes, and that’s always been in our plan. The real plan is for UCB to be our own television network—we want to buy out the CW. Right now we don’t have the funds. Until then, we’re going to start up UCBComedy.com, probably next month, definitely by November, and we consider that our new third stage for the performers, because it won’t be an open YouTube kind of thing, but it will be for our performers, basically, to make videos for. Where that goes to—hopefully selling DVDs and making TV shows.

So, if you did get to the point of having your own network, it would be developing and producing original TV shows and all that stuff?

Yeah, I think that’s where it’s headed.

Here’s a question from 'Dandy' that might be a joke, and feel free to make fun of me if I fell for this, but someone says, “Rumor has it when you walk into a UCB theater in NY, you take the performers off the wall, watch the shows, and cross off the faces of the ones you don’t want performing on your stage. Do you really do that?”

Finally, a good question. I know where this comes from. What we’d used to do was we’d take the performers, you know, every show you’d take the performer’s photo off the wall, and if they had a bad show, you’d use White Out and White Out their face, and then we’d put a letter grade on their face, an A to F letter grade on how good an improviser they are.

That’s the old days, and now what we have is we can do it all online just with their photo, so we don’t allow bad improvisers on our stage to begin with.

It’s very efficient now, we just have pretty much an equation, you know, weight, and height, and reach, wing span, and the photo most of all—that’s about seventy-five percent of the equation, how good they look in the photo—and that’s why you can look at this and see that UCB performers are better-looking than other improvisers. We know, everybody knows that, usually, the better looking you are, the funnier you are.

There’s totally a correlation. One of our questions from our readers refers to the UCB as a large corporate institution. Do you see yourselves that way?

[Laugh] We are definitely for profit. Are we a large corporate institution? I think we’ll be an institution the day that I don’t know a majority of the performers, but I feel like right now, I know a majority of the them, so I still think that we’re an ensemble. That’s the way I like to think of ourselves. We do have a lot of classes, but what’s the question?

JH asks: "As iO and UCB have become large corporate institutions that teach their own form of Harold, do you feel the artistic risk has been taken out of the form to comply with a go-by-the-syllabus style of performing to make it easier for students?"

This is in regards to The Harold?

Yeah, or just the way that the teaching is done given that it’s through an institution, does it refine it too much or make it like an ABC...

Right. Harold is what it is. A Harold is a Harold. It’s like saying you’re doing a new style of flip where you don’t flip all the way around, you just flip halfway and then you roll over to your side. It’s like, well, you can go ahead and do that, but that’s not a flip. A flip you have to come all the way around.

So, the Harold, it just is what it is—it’s three beats of three different scenes, they heighten and explore as they go along, you have two group scenes, and hopefully the third beats find a way to tie together somehow. So, anyone that teaches The Harold teaches that. That’s what a Harold is. If you can pull that off and pull that off well, that’s very impressive. I’m not really sure that I’ve seen anything more impressive than that. Maybe other forms are equally impressive, but I haven’t really seen more impressive than pulling off a Harold, so the way we believe is, if you can pull off a Harold than you can do anything. You have your whole life to go be artistic.

When you’re in school and you’re learning, you need to learn the basics. You need to learn how to fine line draw before painting abstractly. It’s easy to paint abstractly, there’s no discipline to it, and it’s completely subjective. So, my improv group, The Family, we at one point in doing a Harold, we’re bored with it, and we started doing what we call The Spineless Harold where you didn’t necessarily come back to a scene if it didn’t work, and we flourished doing that, and it might have been considered more artistic how we were able to explore, but it was also easier, and when we pulled it off, it might have been funnier, but maybe not more impressive. But I think we were able to do that and do that with ease, because we had started doing it the right way to begin with. So to me, you learn how to draw a circle, which is what a Harold is, perfectly first, and once you know how to do that, you can draw anything. So, that’s our philosophy.

As far as defining technique and syllabus -- when I was a student in Chicago before the iO, I did just about every school in town, and everybody was all over the place in terms of teaching philosophies. People would use the same words but mean completely different things, so they’re say things like “finding The Game” or “relationship” or “theme.” There’s all these words that everybody uses, but they mean completely different things. That was never really acknowledged, so it just confuses people when they go from school to school. “My last teacher said this, but it’s totally contradictory,” and it’s because it is contradictory. People have to realize that you have to choose the philosophy that works for you best, but you can’t think that every philosophy is on the same page, because they’re not. There’s different styles of improvising.

Okay, another question from one of our readers, Todd Rice, an improv question I hope I don't screw up. "Do you find that there’s an overemphasis in some cases to finding The Game of the scene to the detriment of the reality of the characters?"

In our philosophy—you know, it’s all subjective—you should always be finding The Game, but you should also always be grounded in reality, but it’s not the fault of The Game that you might not be grounded in reality. If you’re heightening and exploring, then you’re hopefully, as you’re exploring, you’re grounding The Game, and that makes sense to improvisers probably, but a lot of people say this phrase heighten and explore, and they’re really not thinking about the “and explore,” they’re thinking just heighten as if it means the same thing, but it doesn’t. Exploring is kind of going sideways where heightening is going up, and if you just keep heightening without exploring, exploring is usually adding a logic to your scene, saying this absurd thing, whether it’s a character or a premise, is heightening. If you just heighten without any logic, it just seems silly and wacky, and who likes that scene? If you explore, and explain, and give a philosophy to the scene then you’ll accept the absurd heightening, it won’t just seem wacky and silly. It seems like a good sketch, which is our goal, to improvise a scene that’s worthy of being written up into a sketch—that’s the easiest way of saying that the goal of a UCB improv scene is, not to be a play, but to be a sketch.

Do you have any ideas about the ongoing conversations about improv working or not working on TV, and if something gets lost between the live element and television?

Well, let me ask you this: is live stand-up better than stand-up on TV?

Yeah.

But, by how much? You still enjoy watching a DVD of stand up, right? So, it loses some, but how much? I think it’s a negligible amount. I mean, you could say the same about live music versus on a CD, too, so it’s always great to be five feet away, and it’s always great to see something live. You can’t argue that, but I think it’s lame to say that’s the only way that you can enjoy improv. Yes, shitty improv is not fun to watch on TV, but good improv, where the improv scenes are worthy of being written up into a sketch, that’s worthy of watching, I think.

I think it’s funny, unless people really need costumes and props, and that can add to certain scenes, but other scenes it’s just like, you know, whatever. Who cares we’ve built a restaurant set? Being in that black box with two chairs—I imagined the restaurant, I didn’t need the restaurant set and the waitress apron and whatever. So, I don’t know, I don’t really agree with that, and what sucks about being on TV is when you have to censor yourself, and if you’re doing long form and you have a flow going, breaking it up with commercials, that’s what sucks about being on TV. When we did our AsssCat on Bravo, which is why we just recently filmed our own DVD of AsssCat where we’re able to do it in our theater versus in a studio and without commercial breaks, and just do it how you really do it, so if you’re censoring yourself because you’re on TV, I think that’s always less than, but if it’s a good scene, it’s a good scene. The days of the excitement of watching two people create a scene and their delight and commitment—we’re done with those days. It needs to be funny, too, now, and it’s not like Who’s Line Is It Anyway? where you’re playing a parlor game, you’re creating a sketch, so if it’s funny, I don’t know why it shouldn’t be funny on television as well.

What’s an average week for you? Where do you have to focus and spend most of your time?

Well, we have a lot of great people running the various facets of the UCB, so it just depends on what the latest project is. Right now, one of my day-to-day focus is getting this UCBComedy.com launched. Six month ago it was working on the AsssCat DVD, and we all have our own careers going, too, so we try to juggle that.

What do you enjoy most about what you do?

As a comedian? Finding that one person in the audience that really hates you and focusing on them, and by the end of the show making them at least smile for the right reason, and using all the money that I make to help victims of Katrina.

About this one-man show…

I know it's $15. A lot of people think I’m only worth $11-$12, but I swear I’m going to bring—it’s going to be worth $16. At least. It’ll be worth $19. For $16, you’ll get a $19 show, and if you’re not a fan or you barely know my work, it’ll be a $16 show, even if you don’t know anything about me, it will be worth at least $16. I heard there’s been a lot of big comedians in there, like not taking full advantage of what the Lakeshore has to offer, like their light show. I hear Greg Giraldo was there, and he barely used the lighting at all, like he just had one set his whole show. I’m gonna completely—the light show’s gonna be amazing. I will say this, it will be better than any other comedian that’s been there so far.

Will you be using more dry ice than any other comedian?

I come with fog machines. I don’t know what vaudeville act’s been using dry ice. We have heavy duty, top of the line fog machines for my show, and I show porn—what other comedian shows porn during their set?

Is there free pizza, too?

No, I’m not begging people. I’m not giving shit away. I’m not begging people to come to my show, I’m just saying I have from $16 to $19 worth of a show, depending on how much you already like me. That’s my guarantee.

- Elizabeth McQuern