#comedy theater

[oldshowbiz]

Laff-O-Rama

[maho-dou]

Who is this mysterious girl?

[theavc]

Exclusive: Hannibal Buress, Natasha Leggero, and more to play Bonnaroo’s comedy tent

In a statement to The A.V. Club, Bonnaroo’s comedy programmer Rocky Benloulou-Dubin says that the fest strives to “come up with unique lineups and once-in-a-lifetime collaborations,” noting that she looks “forward to see how the magic unfolds.”

Bonnaroo will be held June 8-11 in Manchester, Tennessee, and musical headliners include The Weeknd and U2. Tickets are on sale now.

[maho-dou]

Pop ❤

[maho-dou]

Just burn off all the calories!

[maho-dou]

Is hard to be a witch apprentices nowadays

[countlessscreamingargonauts]

I have discovered Mischief Theater. The Goes Wrong stuff has had me crying laughing for two days now.

[dynamoe]

I’m doing improv at the “New” iO. Anything you miss about your UCB days?

Youth? Sense of infinite possibility on a distant horizon? Status and power over naïve comedy students I could get drunk and convince to return to my bed?

Vaguest answer: being a part of a community with a shared purpose (making comedy) and being able to experiment with ideas because the stakes were so low. No one was watching.

For the uninitiated, "UCB" is the Upright Citizens Brigade (Theatre), a comedy theater specializing in improv and sketch in New York and "iO" is Improv Olympic, a comedy theater in Chicago that trained the 3 of the 4 founders of the UCB. (Walshie was an Annoyance guy.)

Thank you for your question, my first from a non-anonymous in ages.

I was in the first generation of performers (more or less) with the UCB in New York City. The UCB-4 moved to NY from Chicago in 1996; I started going to shows/taking classes in 1998.

I miss having all your collaborators living a subway ride away and you'd see them every week... or multiple times a week. If you had an idea for a show, you could throw it on stage in under a month. You didn't make any money, but you didn't lay out any money either. You probably had no audience, too.

That's probably the influence of improv— your ideas were disposable so you didn't hold onto anything and get precious about it. The downside is there's no record of our output. The few photographs look terrible and there's no video. Nothing was written down.

I learned to design at UCB on the job, too. Someone always needed a flyer and I was the only person who knew/had Photoshop. There were no standards and no oversight so I could do whatever I wanted on a flyer. The quality of promotions before I started was so bad that anything I came up with was a step up. So, the only physical memento of the early UCB is 200ish flyers I designed.

I've been waffling on doing an interview-based history podcast covering those first years, before we had a physical theater of our own when the "community" was maybe two dozen people. I bought the equipment a year ago, but still haven't come up with a decent enough title to COMMIT to it.

(I also have so many regrets from that time, I'm trying hard not to add caveats to all of these points.)