Girl Walks Into a Bar (5 page)

I remember sitting in my packed car, about to leave my parents’ house, thinking, “I’ll be back in a year and then I can go to grad school and become a therapist.” I drove out with Sonja, a girl from my improv group. Sonja was a bit of an eccentric and would be one of the two people I knew in Chicago, in addition to being my roommate. Just to give you a little snapshot of Sonja: One time, a friend was sitting next to her in class, where she observed Sonja feel something that was stuck in her tights. Sonja, thinking no one was watching, worked the object up her leg and somehow retrieved it out of the waistband of her tights, whereupon she discovered the object was a raisin. She then ate it.

Back in Massachusetts, as we packed up my car to set off on our journey, one of the items Sonja loaded into my Honda was a bag of flour. I mean, what if they didn’t have flour in Chicago? It lasted the whole trip, until we pulled up in Chicago, she opened the door to get out, and it exploded all over my car. She would go on to eventually become a professor of theater at the University of Minnesota.

I began my professional comedy career with an instant bomb to the ego, when Sonja and I both auditioned for classes at Second City, and Sonja got in and I did not. We had heard that getting into the classes was a mere formality.
Anyone
with
any
improv experience gets into the classes. That’s what we had heard. I had been in Chicago for two weeks and wondered if I should get back into my flour-covered car and drive home to Massachusetts.

Needless to say, I didn’t. I stayed. I did some plays. I took some classes elsewhere and got into the Second City classes later that year. I also started at Improvolympic, where I “studied” under the esteemed improv guru, Del Close. I would go watch the house team, Blue Velveeta, perform every single weekend, which was a good way to learn by osmosis. After two years in Chicago, I auditioned for the Second City touring company and … I had instant success and was off on my path to the top like the rising star that I was? No. I did not get into the touring company on my first try. I did get in the following year, on the second try. This became my pattern—again and again. Ol’ Two-Time Dratch, they used to call me. No, they didn’t.

The touring company of Second City was certainly not a glamorous gig, but everyone in it was excited because it was the first step to getting onto the mainstage someday. Well, I shouldn’t say everyone was excited, because there was always someone in the tourco who’d been touring for several years and was waiting for their break and was embittered and had had it with the road. Eventually, that could be you. But for now, freshly hired, you are excited. Occasionally, you would get to go somewhere really desirable: Alaska, New Orleans, and the coveted “ski tour,” on which you perform in all these ski resort towns in Colorado and Utah. More often, though, the tour entailed a seven-hour drive in a van to go to Upper Michigan
or Lower Bumdiddle, Indiana. We’d perform at colleges (fun), town events (could be fun), and corporate gigs, where we’d change the lines of the scenes to accommodate the company: “Why, that’s almost as funny as
Jerry Harrison’s
golf game
!” (Thunderous inside-joke-recognition applause.) We got paid sixty-five bucks a show back then. I ended up touring for two and a half years. Finally, after being passed over the first time to move up out of tourco (another “second try”), I got on the mainstage, where I performed eight shows a week for almost four years.

The Second City started up in Chicago in 1959 and, in the early days, produced such esteemed alumni as Fred Willard, Joan Rivers, Alan Arkin, and Peter Boyle. Second City eventually became a feeder to
SNL
: John Belushi, Bill Murray, and Chris Farley all came out of Second City Chicago. Out of the Toronto branch of SC came Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, and Martin Short. The shows at Second City are mainly sketch comedy, like
SNL
sketches, with some improv thrown in. After the show every night but Friday, there’s an improv set in which the cast gets suggestions from the audience and just makes stuff up for about a half hour. If an improv scene happens to go really well, the actors in it might make a mental note and remember it for later, to incorporate it into the next written show.

I was there in the early to mid nineties, which felt like a special time to be in Chicago. So many people there ended up being on your TV or movie screens today. While I was in the touring company, on the mainstage were Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, and Amy Sedaris, all in the same cast. Even back
then, Amy Sedaris was this pretty little girl who would screw her face up into the ugliest expressions. I learned a lot from just watching her perform, because she was so fearless and bold in her choices. She wasn’t content to be the girly-girl who would play the “Honey!” parts—the trap it was easy for women improvisers to fall into. As in “Honeeyyyyy! I told you to take out the trash!” “Honeeyyyyy! I thought we were going out tonight!!” “Honeeyyyyy! Were you flirting with the waitress?!” (I had learned early on at Improvolympic that it was easy to “cast” yourself into these roles in an improvised scene and let the guys have all the fun. All of the really good women improvisers I knew avoided the “Honey!” parts because it meant they would be relegated to the sidelines of a scene, occasionally stepping in to pour imaginary coffee.) Amy Sedaris would play these little squirrel-like characters and goofy oddballs. Stephen Colbert was the twinkly-eyed, good-looking smarty-pants who actually performed a song about the conflict in the Balkans and managed to make it hilarious. (“We’re talkin’! We’re talkin’! We’re talkin’ ’bout the Balkans!”) And Steve Carell could make anything funny. I don’t think I ever saw him die onstage. In one scene, a couple had a ton of kids, and the cast kept running through the stage, each one playing a different unruly child. Steve Carell simply walked through, holding up a piece of foam mat and said, “I found foam!” and could bring the house down with just that line. Adam McKay, later the head writer of
SNL
and Will Ferrell’s writing partner, was with me the whole time from Improvolympic to the mainstage and was always thinking of new ways to do sketch, to screw with the audience and to mess with their heads, or to
use comedy to challenge corporate America. I was there just to get some yucks, but he was always thinking with a higher goal in mind. Also on the mainstage with me for two shows: Tina Fey. Amy Poehler was my understudy for the touring company. Horatio Sanz, Nia Vardalos, and many of the eventual writers for Conan O’Brien were at Second City when I was there, as well as a bunch more people you may never have heard of but you should have because there was so much talent going on there in that time. I mention a lot of the people who became famous because you know who they are, but I learned something about comedy from every person I worked with at Second City. Everyone brought their own self to the work, so I was always delighted by my cast mates and laughing along with the audience, wondering, “How’d they think of that?!” Improvising every night after the show, I would sometimes forget I was supposed to go out and participate too because I was so busy laughing at what my fellow performers were doing.

My first year on the mainstage, I remember feeling tentative. The stage was so big, the room was so vast, I was new up there, and it felt like someone else’s turf. It took almost a whole year until I felt truly comfortable on that stage, but after that year, I lost much of my fear and hit a whole other zone of improvising. The nightly improvising eventually improved my skills in ways I couldn’t imagine. I was able to channel that intangible thing, when you get out of your head, with far greater frequency. Mind you, we’d still bomb occasionally in the improv set, usually when I had a visitor from out of town in the audience. Afterward, I’d sheepishly say, “No, this is
usually really funny! I swear!” That was just your run-of-the-mill, every-once-in-a-while, audience-not-laughing-at-all set. Oh, that was child’s play, because occasionally there were also the looking-into-your-fellow-performer’s-eyes, what-the-hell-is-happening moments. There was the drunk lady wandering onto the stage from the side stage door, just walking right into a scene, trying to participate with her own “lines.” We ushered her off the stage only to hear her crashing down the stairs with the sound effect you’d hear in a movie. Then there was the time we were performing a special show for a foundation, and Adam McKay and Scott Adsit were doing a scene called “Gump,” wherein Adsit had taken an exam to enter a corporate job and it was discovered that he was legally retarded. The word
retarded
was said about twenty times in this scene. We didn’t know it, but the foundation was for developmentally disabled kids, and the poor person who had booked the event had to stand up at intermission and give a speech about how “many people still don’t know that the word
retarded
is offensive!” Oh, Lord, and then there was the time when Adam and our director Tom Gianas’ “messing with the audience” kick went way out of my comfort zone: Adam and Adsit walked out during the improv set to tell the audience that then-President Clinton had been shot. A gasp rose up from the crowd. Adam and Adsit then wheeled a TV onstage and said we were going to check in on the latest news, and proceeded to play sports bloopers and laugh at them and just wait for the dazed audience to mill out of the room. That was probably my most uncomfortable moment ever on a stage—a time when “Yes And” was stretched to its breaking point for me. But that’s risk taking.
Screwing with the audience was never my thing, but those who didn’t mind the discomfort became masters and turned it into their own art form. Of course, now that I see the bit in print and I’m not having to live it, it actually sounds kind of funny.

We’d go out pretty much every night after the show to one of two completely smoke-filled bars. We’d often start at the Last Act and then, if it was a really late night, move on to the Old Town Alehouse, which closed at four
A.M.
… five
A.M.
on Saturdays. We were in our twenties or early thirties and there was no reason not to go out almost every night. On weekends we’d stay until last call, when the bartender, a woman whose name I knew only as Yoyo, would start yelling, “Let’s GOOOO, people! Let’s GOOOO!” One of the actors, Jerry Minor, became particularly adept at imitating her and could fool people into thinking the bar was closing. People drank and drank, smoked and smoked, and laughed and laughed. You could look around the room and every improviser in the bar was somehow connected to you, because at some point, you’d all shared that unique terror of standing in front of three hundred people and not knowing what you were going to say next.

A lot of people
move out to Chicago thinking, “I’ll do Second City, and then on to
Saturday Night Live
!” You soon lose your singular
SNL
ambition when you realize
everyone
has this same dream and the odds of actually getting on
SNL
are too slim to hold on to such a specific vision. You also realize that there are many other pathways to make a career in comedy after Second City besides
SNL
.
SNL
would come scouting once
in a while but not on any predictable basis. They happened to come right when I had gotten onto the mainstage, but that time, they picked almost every one of the actors to audition (from the mainstage, the E.T.C. stage next door, and the annex stage in the burbs) and I wasn’t one of them. By my third and fourth shows on the mainstage, I started to be mentioned in reviews, and I went on to win two Jeff Awards. (That’s the Chicago equivalent of the Tonys, so if having a Tony impresses you, dial that reaction down by about 50 percent and bask in my half-glow.) Three years later, I was still on the mainstage, about to leave in two months, and lo and behold,
SNL
came out to scout again. This time, I was picked to go audition for
Saturday Night Live
!

For the
SNL
audition, you create all your own material. The basic guideline is to do three characters and three celebrity impressions. I remember I did my Boston teen character; and a character that never made it onto
SNL
, a former Broadway child star now an adult but still wearing her child-star dress and talking in her child-star voice; and an Eastern European cleaning woman who had been through all these atrocities and now worked in an office where people complained about piddly stuff like bad coffee. I hadn’t really done any impressions at Second City—for the audition, I did Calista Flockhart because that’s an impression I had randomly come up with while watching
Ally McBeal
in the comfort of my living room. I also did Christiane Amanpour, and as sort of a cheat, I did Madeleine Albright addressing the Teletubbies. I just made a Madeleine Albright face and threw on a Teletubbies voice.

Here’s the thing about the audition. They tell you your audition is at three. You get there on time. You can’t believe it—you are AUDITIONING FOR
SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE
!!! You are sent to a dressing room. You wait. You wait some more. You wait more. It’s now six o’clock. You are finally called in to audition. When you walk into the audition, there are no pleasantries. No “Hi! And what are YOU going to be doing for us? Greeeeat.” You just get up on the stage, and a stage manager says, “Five, four, three, two, go.” I had been warned that Lorne Michaels and the producers probably wouldn’t laugh but not to let that throw me. It happened that because I was the last one of the day, a bunch of people from the office had milled in and were standing in back and they were laughing a lot, which of course helped. When the audition was over, I remembered the whole thing, always a good sign for me. When an audition is a blur afterward, I knew I wasn’t good. There was one thing I didn’t remember, though. Later I realized, “Oh my God! My audition was on
that stage
! The stage where the host does the monologue! I was standing on the
SNL
stage!”