J.D. AMATO
We’re doing a project where we ask people: what’s your UCB? We had a great time talking to J.D. Amato about experimental improv, ( ), the Gethard Show, and creativity.
(Note: We actually did this interview last May, but due to insane laziness on my part, it's only now being posted. Dumb! - LW)
LW: How’d you find UCB?
JD: I literally stumbled upon UCB. I accidentally found it.
At one point, I walked up 8th Avenue, and I saw the UCB awning. I’d always heard of the UCB and I went to film school, so there were kids who’d take classes. But I always felt like it was something that was too cool for me? I never had anything to do with comedy, or performing, or theatre. I didn’t understand: How do you get tickets to go there? When do you go there? Are you allowed to go there? Am I allowed to go there?
That night, because of all that stuff, I decided, you know what, I’m gonna buy a ticket for whatever’s there and just walk in. It must have been some midnight show. It wasn’t a full house—bunch of people scattered around seats and a bunch of people on stage. There were no microphones, no scripts, nothing. Coming from a film school world, I was used to more formal elements to storytelling. I always used to say, “I consider myself a storyteller, not a filmmaker!” But, then I saw this group of people gathered around in a circle. It felt like a weird tribe, almost. Gather around the fire and tell a story! I watched that and thought, “If I believe in any way that I am a storyteller, then I need to be doing this.”
That night I went home, I looked up the classes, and I signed up for a 101. There was one slot left, it started the next week. Immediately when I hit submit I was like, “what have I done, and why did I do this?! What is this?!” Then I got sucked into it.
EO: Who was your 101 teacher?
JD: I had 101 with Greg Tuculescu. That was a really fun class. That’s the class where I met Phil Jackson and Scott Holmes, and we ended up being in Jump On Three together.
I went into it not knowing UCB at all. And I remember that first thing, he explained Crazy Eights, and I remember Greg Tuculescu saying, “Yeah you count to eight and you shake your hand!” and I thought, “Shake your hand? Oh no. I made a mistake.”
I almost got up and was like, “Nope! I made a mistake! You can keep the money! Have a good one! See ya!”
LW: How quickly did you get sucked into it?
JD: Basically the first improv show I ever saw was TJ and Dave in Chicago. I saw that and I immediately thought, oh my gosh, this is magic. My roommate at NYU had done iO in Chicago, and was visiting Chicago while I was home for winter break, and invited me to a show. I went, and it was the first time I’d seen any improv, and it was some of the best that exists. So when I stumbled upon UCB that night months later, I already knew it could be this magical, interesting thing.
Coincidentally, our 101 also started the week before DCM. And so I went to DCM, sat in a seat for twelve hours, went home, slept for three hours, and went back. Because oh my gosh, seeing all of the best teams in a row, and feeling like, “This is amazing!” It was a perfect storm of things lining up, and I was completely sucked into it.
LW: You feel like you’ve uncovered a secret, almost.
JD: That’s how I felt. I went to all these shows at DCM, and I kept running into Phil Jackson and Scott Holmes, so we’d go to all these DCM shows together.
Then I went to Harold Night every week for like two years, back when it was five Harolds straight. So yeah, I got obsessed super quick.
LW: Who were your favorite teams and performers?
JD: Phil and I, after every rehearsal or anything, we’d pow-wow on the corner and talk about UCB stuff. We’d make stuff up—like, “Well what if you put this person on this team?” We’d make fake teams. We both had our favorites. Our teams.
My favorite team: Bastian. Bastian ended up being known a lot for their very game-based, premise comedy. But when I saw them—I didn’t realize until afterwards—was when Gethard started coaching them. So he was coaching them to try this thematic, big picture stuff.
I remember Bastian did a Harold where the suggestion they got was “drunk,” I think. Right away—I think it was Lydia—pointed to everyone on the back line in pairs of twos and said, “Sober, tipsy, drunk,” and immediately took that on, as a meta thing. They were doing a Harold where two of the members were “sober,” two were “tipsy,” and two were “drunk.”
The “sober” people tried to keep things on the rails. The “drunk” ones were Oscar and John Murray. Basically the set fell apart because the people that were “drunk” kept ruining it. They’d step up and fall over, and someone would run over and help them up...John Murray got super mad and started swinging punches, and he got out his actual phone and called his wife. And his wife thought he was actually drunk.
The team was like, “John, hang up, we have to do third beats!” and he was screaming, “I don’t care, I love her!” The audience didn’t know how to feel. They had to carry John offstage. He had his shirt off. The whole audience was uncomfortable because it felt like they were actually drunk, but it was just something they chose to do!
I remember seeing them and feeling like, “This is my team!” That was one of my favorite Harolds. They had a string of Harolds like that. I wanted to see people do stuff that was out there and made people uncomfortable.
I loved Erik Tanouye, because during that period they’d be all over the place, and he’d be this assassin that would clean up all the loose ends of everything. He’d come in in the last thirty seconds and say some explanation of what had just happened. The whole audience would grab their heads in amazement, because he’d tie up every loose end in one little bow. There was a period of time where they were the team I was super excited about.
EO: When did Jump On Three form?
JD: After 201, because Phil met this guy Matt Dennie in 201, who he was telling me all about, and they wanted to create a team together. At that point, Phil, Scott Holmes, and I were doing Improdome, which was a show where you would get up the nerve to show up, and then inevitably do the worst improv you’ve done in your life. But we were, all three, all committed to this, and agreed to go full steam ahead regardless.
Around 301 we formed Jump On Three with Dennie, Phil, Scott Holmes—we met this girl Maelle at the UCB open house—who the world now knows as one of the most talented illustrators and creative minds. We found our crew.
LW: You guys did a lot of more experimental shows!
JD: Yeah! Very early on, before we were any good at improv, we wanted to do very physical improv. Very sound and movement kind of stuff. We started very simple from there, then wanted to create these big, thematic, organic, anything-can-happen kind of shows.
The big turning point for us, I think, was Tesla’s show, Tesla: Welcome to the Lab. It was one of the better indie shows going on. We asked them if we could be the new team for one of their shows, and they let us do their DCM show, which was DCM week at Player’s Theatre downstairs—a for real, big theatre.
It was a Monkeydick reunion, a fwand reunion, Tesla, and Jump On Three. That was maybe our fourth show we ever did. And we went out and had a good show for a new indie team! After the show, Don Fanelli, who had just gotten on Harold Night, came up to us. And he had taken like four pages of notes on our set, and said, “I want to coach you guys.” He had been brought up by Gethard and saw what we were doing and that we wanted to go that direction.
At that point, I don’t think he’d ever coached before, or hadn’t coached a team consistently. We said yes. This is what we want—someone who’s into it! With him, we started building toward the stuff we ended up getting to.
LW: When did you start to feel included around UCB?
JD: That’s a tough one.
EO: Nobody knows how to answer this.
JD: Because there’s a part of you that never feels included. You feel included, but there are certain aspects that you never feel included in. I’ve been a house performer, I should feel very comfortable at the theatre, but I still feel very nervous. Like, “I’m not supposed to come to this show,” or, “I’m standing in the wrong place.”
It’s completely made up in your own head. You never look at anyone in the UCB world and think, “Well, what is this person doing here?”
I think being in my first 600 was when I felt like, “Oh, okay, I think I’m getting okay at this, I think I’m getting good at this. I think I have some control over this thing.” The more indie shows we started doing: you start feeling like part of a community, you start knowing people.
I think the first time I really started feeling included was when I could go to an indie show and know all the other teams there, and they’re all friends. Which sounds so goofy now, because so many of us are so ingrained in this community. But when you first start out, everyone’s a stranger. You only know people based on what they do on stage and stuff like that. So with the people you’re coming up with, you start to realize, “Oh hey, we did a bunch of shows together! I think you’re really funny!” Then you spend a couple hours talking about stuff, and all of a sudden you gain this friend that you’d never known before.
Something fun about being at the point where your weekend nights could be you going to Under St. Marks and hanging out with a bunch of people doing improv. Suddenly, you’re a part of a community. You know a whole new group of friends and people.
I think that’s when you first start feeling included. Then you go to Harold Night and you see those people and you talk, and you talk about the Harolds afterwards, and then you talk about whether you’d get up the nerve to go to McManus or not, and you always decide not to go, not yet.
LW: You were also in Gethard’s ( ) class!
JD: ( ), yes. ( ) was a funny class. I like to think it came out of a dare, in a weird way. Gethard hadn’t taught for a long time before that class, and he was always a venerable improv teacher who everyone talked about—these infamous moments of him being brutally honest, or letting a team do something outside the box.
Around the time that Don Fanelli was coaching Jump On Three, me, Phil, and Matt Dennie got into the 3-on-3 tournament. And when we do 3-on-3, we come out to classical music, we hold up fake wine glasses, and we wear khakis and black shirts. We all match. So Fanelli had told Gethard, “You gotta check these guys out—if you were still teaching, these would be your guys.”
Chris had heard a bunch about us, and came out and saw us wearing those khakis, knew we were Fanelli’s guys, and started making fun of us. He was like, “Cute uniforms, guys! I like to do good improv, but you guys can do the uniforms!” Just completely making fun of us. And at that point, none of us really knew him personally, so we were just like, oh god, Gethard’s making fun of us.
We had a really good set, and Gethard said, “Jump in my car, we’ll go to McManus and talk.” The entire car ride Gethard was giving us shit, and as Chris remembers it, Phil was firing back, Dennie was laughing, and I was seething with anger. Eventually I remember Gethard said, “I dunno, guys like you make me wanna teach again! I got a lot of things I could tell ya.”
To which Phil responded, “You mean, like, ‘awesome scene’?” and Chris said, “I would destroy you. Fine. I’m gonna start teaching again and I’m gonna rip you apart.”
A couple months later, I did the RV tour with the Gethard Show. That’s when he and I became very close. On the trip he brought up the idea of teaching again. Soon after that, the applications for ( ) went out. ( ) was cool because he accepted all of Jump On Three together into the class, as a team. For us, we felt this weird pressure...that he felt that all of us had to be in this. So we’d have team meetings about how we needed to behave in the class.
We were among the youngest people there in terms of improv years. It was a lot of people we looked up to—people who were on Harold Night at the time. So we were like, “We need to go in there, do our thing, be the hardest working people there, and anything he says, we gotta do.”
That was super fun. Just the amount that that class pushed people to go from being good improvisers to really expanding their comfort zones and doing interesting stuff...
I think you can track a lot of the progress in a lot of those people’s improv based on before that class and after that class. There’s a shift, or an underlining of who they were as improvisers. Because the class was very much about who you are as a person and how you can bring that on stage.
First of all, it was a twenty-seven-person class. To get into it, you had to write an essay. And then he selected people to be in the class based on those essays. Then before it started, there were eight weeks of assignments you had to get done before class.
The assignments were anything from, “Send us a link to something you truly love and explain to us why you love this thing” to “Meet up with someone that you don’t know in this class and go on an adventure that’s outside of both your comfort zones.” Or, “Find something online that you disagree with and write an essay defending that thing, from the perspective of that thing.” Stuff like that. Then we had to all bring in an object that symbolized who we were as people, and spend the week with other people’s objects.
A lot of things that forced you to be very honest about who you were and also explore who you were and who these other people were. So when we got to the first day of class, we all felt like we knew everyone.
Because every night, there was maybe ten pages of stuff to read. The rule was, you can opt to not participate, but you have to read anything anyone writes. If you don’t feel comfortable doing something, fine (nobody ever did that), but if you don’t read everything: leave the class. So we all were very diligent and respectful, and went in day one with this extreme understanding of each other, and that began a process of rehearsing that was super interesting because you knew stuff about each other and you were pushed to use your own life in your improv. He would even call people up in groups based on who had things in common in their lives.
There were twenty-seven of us on stage, so the big lesson was that unless there was something you felt you needed to say, or do, or felt compelled to address: don’t force it. Because when there’s twenty-seven of us up there, one of us definitely has something in one of our brains that needs to get out. So, we’d wait, and let whatever needed to take place, take place.
LW: So you got involved with the Gethard Show around the same time?
JD: A couple months after me, Matt Dennie, and Phil Jackson did the 3-on-3 tournament, Chris was asking people for help with the video stuff, but also someone that was willing to get in some trouble, and be out there on the road in the middle of it. A couple of people had told him, “I think you’re talking about J.D.!”
I was back home in Chicago and I got a text from him that was like, “Hey, it’s Gethard. I’m doing this RV trip. Do you want to come and make videos for it?” At that point I’d been to the Gethard Show and talked to Chris a lot, so I said absolutely. On that trip, Chris and I became very close. We like the same end result, but we get to it in different ways—in ways that balance each other, so we became a good duo for that.
I think a big moment was when through a series of events he ended up getting thrown out of the RV on the side of the road, and I jumped out with him. We spent a day and a half together wandering down the highway outside of Waco, Texas. Our joke was, “You’ve made a mistake when you’re trying to get to Waco, Texas, thinking then things will be good.”
That’s when we became good friends.
Then ( ) happened, then after ( ) I did one or two small things on the stage show, and Chris said, “I have this idea—do you want to do this with me?” and the idea was to bring the Gethard Show to public access. That was [three] years ago.
It was fun doing the Gethard Show on top of all the UCB stuff. It branched off at a certain point, and the very strange thing for us was that people started to know the Gethard Show first—then would find UCB through the Gethard Show. There was still a lot of overlap, but our audience was not just UCB. It became the Gethard Show audience.
EO: Let’s talk about Harold Night.
LW: In doing these interviews, a lot of people love it, but have mixed feelings.
JD: For so many of us, wherever you are in this process, it’s this goal that you want to achieve. And it’s a big deal. It’s a thing you work so hard for, and you obsess over, you spend every night talking about it for three hours and how you’re gonna get there, and what you’re gonna do.
Then you get on to it, and it’s fun, and it’s just more improv. It’s improv, except you’re given a team, and the team is controlled by the theatre. And it can be a fine thing, or it can be a thing that doesn’t work out sometimes.
You see the things that are good about Harold Night, and you see the things that can be bad, and then you realize, being on it, that even if you have a stellar show, a week later it’s sort of forgotten, because the next week another Harold Night happens. Suddenly, you’re like, “Oh, if I really want to make stuff, this isn’t it.”
Because with improv, when you’re on a team that’s created around you—what you’re doing on stage isn’t a direct, pure version of your creative voice. Not because that is a flaw of improv, but that’s how improv works. It’s about the collective consciousness, the group mind. Which is excellent, especially when you have a group mind that you’re very in-tune with. But if you want to create things—which is why a lot of people are here—improv is not the perfect outlet to get your creative voice out there.
It’s a very hard medium to say the things you want to say as a storyteller, or creator, or whatever. And so it’s fun. It’s a thing that’s really fun to do. But I think very quickly, you think, “I like this, but how am I going to say the things I need to say?”
There’s a version of that where you find ways with improv to speak more purely to what you have in your head. But something like Harold Night, it’s not always possible to do that, because you’re not always on a team that thinks the same way, or wants to say the same things. Which is why indie teams are so interesting: you can find those people, and know you all have this to say, or all these parts of us line up, so our creative voice comes out unified. But, even then, it’s very difficult.
Which is why I think you get the thing where people just say, “Eh, Harold Night’s fun!” Not because people are disappointed in it, or they don’t like it. Just because it’s more improv. It’s improv.
And improv is great and fun, but it’s like a tribal ritual. And at some point you have to go on your spirit walk through the forest alone. Or with your band of fellow warriors. Leave the tribe. And it’s still good to have the tribe, but the tribe isn’t everything. Unless you become a priest, which, in this case, is an improv teacher.
What was fun about Rocks, which was my last Harold Team: from the beginning, it was clear we were a team of “leftovers” from the mix-up. And very early on, we said that it doesn’t matter if we’re funny or charismatic, we’re just going to be the team that does the most out-there stuff. Let’s try to be the weirdest team. We do what we want to do, and we’ll crash and burn, we’ll probably be around for a very short time. But let’s all agree to be the team that tries to do whatever we want. So that was a super fun thing.
All those people had such different backgrounds, but we all agreed to this one contract of ideas. Always supported the weird stuff. Even the way we came on stage: someone would say, “I’ve always wanted to come on stage like this!” and then we did that. A lot of our shows would be weird things that the audience wouldn’t know how to take, but we just went headlong into this weird thing. Which was super fun. It was a bummer when we were broken up.
That was a team that definitely lined up with the things I liked in improv. It was funny because not everybody on that team was from that same school of thought, yet still agreed to it. The thing that made me happiest on that team is Steve Theiss—he’s one of the straight-up best improvisers to exist, but his comfort zone is not in attacking the audience and crossing the line. He is the person that has learned everything about improv and can make any scene work. He is such a good improviser. But, regardless, if there was ever a time I’d run screaming, diving into the audience to do some dumb thing, the first person off the back line to support it would be Steve Theiss, even though that’s not the thing he necessarily likes. He was right there.
It was a really fun thing that we all agreed and all went for it. Nobody was pouting, or holding back, or being scared. Everyone went forth, sails to the wind, to see what happened. Everyone. Which is not easy in any construct. Sometimes it would be a disaster, and sometimes it would be very fun. But we were all bummed out when the team was broken up and a bunch of us got cut.
At the end of the day, I was like...good. That was what I wanted to do on Harold Night.
That was the team I wanted. That was very much the kind of team I want to be on. I have no hard feelings about not being on Harold Night because it’s like, yeah, I got to do Rocks.
And I had a year with Creature, which was a very fun team that I really enjoyed. We had our rough spots and our weaknesses, but we still put on good shows. And the people who were on that team are people I’m still good friends with! It was a fun team.
LW: Would you stop hanging around UCB?
JD: I wouldn’t want to. I’d have to be forced out, I think. I really like UCB. As much as sometimes I do come off as extremist in my views, I do love UCB, and I love being around. I still go to Harold Night all the time because those are all my friends and I think they are all really funny and really talented.
Even if I’m not doing improv as much anymore, or even if there comes a time where I’m not putting shows up at UCB, being around a community of people that are all making really interesting stuff and working constantly makes you keep working, and creating interesting new takes on things.
Even if you’re not on stage, just being around people who think similarly and want to make stuff makes you walk home thinking, “Okay, what is the next thing I’m going to make?”
So I don’t wanna leave UCB. I still walk home from shows and times at McManus and conversations with friends at UCB—and I’ll probably walk home from hanging out with you guys right now—and think, “Okay, what’s the next thing I’m going to make? I loved their idea! Now what’s a thing I want to do?!” That’s what’s cool about UCB.
The only way I see myself not being a part of it is if I did something that really offended everyone and they just wouldn’t have me back. I’ve been toying with that! So I can see that happening, but hopefully not. Even if they kicked me out, I’d be at the fifty-yard limit, at the fence, trying to still be a part of things, going, “Hey! What are you guys doing? Wanna come over here? No? Okay! Cool!”
So many of my friends come from UCB. So many people I respect and love watching come from UCB. Even if someone kicked me out, I don’t think that would do it! I’d probably do whatever I could to stay around everybody.
Yeah, I really like UCB.
Follow J.D. on Twitter!
[Edited for length.]