Upright Citizens Brigade

OK, stay tuned for further posts but this one is fresh in my mind, so it goes first. Last night I went to see the Upright Citizens Brigade.






I had no idea what this was, so I was really pleasantly surprised. It's an improv comedy institution...at the beginning of the show, somebody from the audience calls out a word and then one of the improvers delivers a monologue based off of the word. Then, after that's over, the other improvers make up skits based off of the monologue. The monologuer did two monologues for each word, and they ran through the cycle four times.

I have been to bad improv before, and I have been to ok, that was fairly funny improv before, but I have not been to awesome improv before and all I can say is - if you want to see awesome improv, go to the Upright Citizens brigade. The comedians there last night were...

Amy Poehler (Saturday Night Live)
Seth Meyers (Saturday Night Live head writer)
Jack McBrayer (30 Rock)
Scott Adsit (30 Rock)

And a couple of other really funny people whose names I don't know off the top of my head and can't look up on an NBC website.

I don't know if you have ever tried to get tickets to Saturday Night Live, but I have looked into it and you have to send in a postcard in August (only August!) listing three dates you'd like to attend during the upcoming year, and then you are put into a lottery and maybe you will get seats sometime during the next year, hopefully on one of the dates you specified. Or you can show up at the studios really really early in the morning on a Saturday and stand in line and maybe get any tickets that have cropped up from cancellations or whatnot, if they are available and you are not too far back in the line. And then be ready to stay up late because Saturday Night Live is, I believe, actually live.

This show was free (free!), although you can also reserve in advance and pay like $8. It doesn't take a year's advance planning or trudging through the snow in the wee hours of your precious weekend, hoping against all hope that you're the only person insane enough to do it. On top of which, the theater is teensy tiny and it's really fun to see a lot of incredibly talented comedians improvise. Plus, everybody was free to be as foul-mouthed or inappropriate as they liked, which was also pretty fun.

I'd try to sum up some of the skits but I imagine they're only funny when a funny person tells the story/does the act. Humor is mysterious that way.