In 2003, the Times reported that “some 500 students” were enrolled in “30 or so improvisation and sketch-comedy classes” at U.C.B. In 2011, New York had the figure at approximately eight thousand. The organization doesn’t reveal numbers (the better to avoid quibbling about not paying its performers), but one current employee let slip the latest tally: last year, U.C.B. trained twelve thousand students. That’s about five million dollars in revenue.
The popularity of U.C.B. has given rise to competing New York schools (the Peoples Improv Theatre, the Magnet, the Annoyance), as well as a flourishing “indie” scene of ragtag shows in bars. Liz Allen, who coached the actors in “Don’t Think Twice,” a new movie, directed by Mike Birbiglia, about a dysfunctional improv troupe, ran a promotional bus tour called “Improv Across America.” On Facebook, Birbiglia advertised free workshops around the country; more than a hundred and twenty improv theatres applied. U.C.B. Comedy, the organization’s production arm, churns out podcasts and hundreds of videos each year. As of last fall, the U.C.B. Four have a TV series again, “The U.C.B. Show,” a half hour of sketch and standup, on Seeso, NBC’s streaming comedy platform. Before Kanye West filmed a “Curb Your Enthusiasm”-esque comedy pilot for HBO, he hired Matt Besser to give him private improv classes at home.
The Upright Citizens Brigade was originally the name of a nefarious mega-corporation in a sketch from the group’s very early days—a genesis that some might view as prophetic. “Is it more corporate now? Of course it is,” Gethard told me. “That’s because we won!”
As my class progressed, the group of strangers with whom I spent Sunday mornings seemed a little less strange: Beatles fan Adam worked at a marketing agency; a cat fanatic named Alex sold organic juices for pregnant women. There was John, a self-confessed “chronic blusher” and investment banker; Andrew, an interactive-content editor at Slate; and Gerard (one of the oldest in the class, at thirty-two), an attorney who dreamed of making it as a music producer. Mozzarella Michelle started an e-mail chain so that we could correspond throughout the week, wishing one another happy birthday and arranging to meet up at improv performances. (Students in 101 classes are required to attend two U.C.B. shows.) I saw on Instagram that Alex and Michelle had gone together to get piercings.
Soon, I discovered that I was very bad at “object work”—somehow, no one understood that I was hiding the top-secret invisible documents under my invisible hat. I found that it was hard to make up a conversation on the fly without asking questions—questions being another improv no-no. Dwyer taught us that “when somebody gives you information about your character, we call it a ‘gift,’” and I was gifted, at various times, with the following information: I was a baby named Fuckshit, a bighearted tofurkey farmer, and a cheerleader with skin grafts on my palms. My embarrassment began to dissipate: I leaped, I sang, I got “married” twice.
Eventually, we started picking up on the concept of the game. For instance, when my partner and I established that we were working in a chopped-salad place where patrons kept finding body parts in their salads, we deftly identified that the presence of the body parts was the unusual thing, and moved from “yes, and”-ing to “if, then”-ing: if we wanted to save our jobs, then we’d have to plug the leak in the pipe that ran from a neighboring morgue to the ceiling above the toppings station.
Anxious about our graduation show, I sought last-minute inspiration at a Harold Night at U.C.B.’s Chelsea theatre. Standing in line, I was surrounded by aspiring improvisers. “It’s been ten hours of improv; it’s pretty much all I’ve done today,” a guy in front of me said cheerfully. Inside the theatre, standing room was three rows deep.
U.C.B.’s theatre on Franklin Avenue, in Los Angeles, is across the street from the Scientology Celebrity Center, and devoted U.C.B.-ites like to joke about the proximity. In a “Going Clear” parody on YouTube, a woman confesses, “I thought I was just doing improv... the next thing you know, you’ve lost several years of your life.” Another says, “Look at the rules they force you to follow: you have to agree with everything, you can’t say no, you can’t ask questions.”
About a mile away, U.C.B.’s Sunset Boulevard theatre is another sort of celebrity center. On a recent evening, in its tidy greenroom, three of the U.C.B. Four (Poehler was not there) hung out before performing an ASSSSCAT show (a free improv performance with famous guests). They all wore jeans and dad-ish sneakers. Besser, in a Weakerthans concert T-shirt, his tone sardonic, began relating the U.C.B. origin story. “I think we’d all agree that we had zero vision for having classes in New York,” he said.
Roberts broke in, explaining how their casual coaching had morphed into an organized method: “We’d experienced improv teaching where there was this kind of mysticism—‘Everybody’s friends, and everything you do is good.’ Our thing was: No! Everything you do isn’t good. And we’ve got to tell you how you can make it better.” Roberts wore a soft cast on one arm—he’d broken it tackling an audience volunteer onstage.
“A lot of the improv schools before we started were just teaching people: Be fearless and you’ll succeed,” Walsh said.
“Freedom and fearlessness—it’s the cart before the horse!” Roberts barked, waving his broken arm. “If someone says, ‘I hate this thing, it’s so restrictive’—well, comedy is restrictive. ”
The three men felt no nostalgia for the scrappy early days. Walsh said, “We did ill-minded things in Chicago, like giving hits of nitrous to strangers onstage.”
“If I look at it now, from the perspective of a mature guy who owns a business, I’m, like, That was crazy!” Roberts said.
“That was in the days when we would hand out flyers,” Walsh said.
Besser frowned, and said, “Students should still have to do that—like Indian rituals where you don’t even know why you’re doing it. Just handing out pieces of paper.”
Walsh: “With nothing on them.”
Roberts: “Like a hazing!”
I asked them if they’d heard of the Zenprov podcast that Mark Thompson had told me about. (From a sample episode: “If you think what love is—it’s expansive, it’s light.... You can’t ‘yes, and’ without love.”)
“That way lies madness,” Roberts replied.
“A lot of people will bend our words,” Besser said. “To me, one of the interesting things about Del the prophet, the Jesus of improv, is how people take things he said and claim them, claim him—saying, ‘Del would’ve wanted it this way.’”
What denomination did that make U.C.B.?
“Unitarian, man,” Besser said.
“Episcopalian,” Roberts argued. “The thinking man’s Christianity.”
“I was going to say Scientology,” Walsh said.
On the phone later, Poehler, a lapsed Catholic, insisted, “It’s not a cult! There’s nothing about it that’s interested in changing anybody’s point of view, personal politics, or way of life.” But, she said, “there is something very devotional about showing up every week in front of a crowd and chanting similar things.” She added, “I think there’s probably too much sex and drugs for it to be an organized religion, although, these days, what do I know?”
Walsh gazed around the well-appointed greenroom, with its leather sofas, and said, “I’d be surprised if Del envisioned this.”
Close probably would also not have envisioned UCB@Work, a hugely profitable branch of the organization, which handles corporate workshops, branded content, and the touring company. Cameron McCall, U.C.B.’s head of sales, explained that UCB@Work conducts about three professional-development workshops a week. Last year, it trained some six thousand suits. A basic single-instructor workshop can set a corporate client back around three thousand dollars.
The other day, before a session for G.E. executives-in-training at SubCulture, a theatre in Greenwich Village, four U.C.B. performers—Chelsea Clarke, John Murray, Lydia Hensler, and Abra Tabak—sat around and talked about past clients. Hensler and Tabak had just returned from a successful gig at an advertising agency’s retreat in Mexico. “They were drunk for four days,” Hensler said, appreciatively. There were hot tubs in the hotel rooms.
Onstage, Clarke launched into the Dale Carnegie version of the U.C.B. dogma. “Basically, we’re working on trusting each other, making moves, and supporting each other,” she told the students.
Hensler introduced the concept of “yes, and.” “‘Yes, but’ is the thing we always have to look out for, in business and in life,” she warned.
Eventually, participants were divided into teams and tasked with using their new skills to prepare a presentation to sell a manifestly bad idea. While the groups brainstormed, John Wisdom, from G.E.’s communications department, told me that this was part of a two-week management course. Improv, he said, “fosters the spirit of discovery and in-the-moment thinking.” During the course, the would-be execs also visit a neuroscientist and an artist who paints skulls.
The first team presented a new initiative for Home Depot. “Do you want to see more and do more at the Home Depot?” a man asked, pacing the stage. His teammates shouted, “Sex sells!” Their plan: staffing the store with Victoria’s Secret models. “They’re all going to be wearing nice lingerie, so all the men that come into our store can live in a vertical market.”
During a Q. and A., someone asked the instructors, “Do you ever turn this off?”
Murray said, “I think my wife would probably say no.”
If there is a downside to the ubiquity of improv, it is that U.C.B.’s implicit promise—if you go through its system, you’ll be insured some sort of real-life success—can’t hold up. Even if you are among the very best at a thing that no one will pay you to do, where does that leave you?
Mike Still, a former U.C.B. artistic director, said that only about six per cent had made the cut at his recent house-team auditions in Los Angeles—thirty-seven out of six hundred. People often try out four or five times. It’s like a bar exam with a laugh-o-meter.
Sasheer Zamata was rejected the first three times she auditioned. “I would complain to my mom, and she would be, like, ‘Who are these people?’” Zamata recalled. “‘Are you getting paid? Are you on TV yet?’” The “Broad City” partners Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer met on a U.C.B. practice team; they started their Web series after failing, multiple times, to get onto a house team.
The hypercompetitive atmosphere has led to some grievances. Pyramid-scheme theories have been floated: if U.C.B. is charging so much for classes, does not compensate performers, and makes them pay for practice space and coaches, where’s all the money going? Nick Vatterott, a standup comic, posted a rant on Facebook earlier this year in which he referred to U.C.B. as “the evil comedy corporate chain that has adopted a business model that makes sweatshops look like they’re overpaying their employees.” The comedian Ziwe Fumudoh recently paused in her stand-up set to inform the audience, “This is my P.S.A.: An improv class costs as much as an abortion. Get an abortion and you’ll learn real fast.”
The U.C.B. Four, who own the company but do not take salaries, argue that the revenue helps keep ticket prices low (often less than ten dollars) and allows them to pay the touring company and teachers and to invest in growth (leasing the East Village theatre put them a million dollars in debt). In 2013, in the Times, Besser defended the system. “I don’t see what they do as labor. I see guys onstage having fun. It’s not a job,” he said. “We pay our performers, just not with money.”
