Yes Please by Amy Poehler

Elaine May. He was a respected Chicago theater actor who believed improvisation was not an acting tool but a genuine performance form on its own. Del was also a Wiccan and a drug addict, and I was catching him in the last ten years of his too-short life. His story could fill many books. He is the most famous guy in comedy whom nobody knows. They weren’t married, but Charna was Del’s wife and emotional surrogate who encouraged his genius while running ImprovOlympic and keeping the lights on.
    I took a class from a member of the Family, Matt Besser, and we started dating soon after. Matt was a talented Jewish boy from Arkansas who was effortlessly cool. He dressed like a punk rock soccer player. He had a fierceness about him that was exhilarating. He truly didn’t care what people thought. He was also an artist and big thinker. I first saw him onstage playing a Southern female waitress in an improv scene. He paid such fine attention to detail. He played this woman with total grace, while still being really funny. Matt was the first of many men I’ve been attracted to because they know how to play women. He was antsy and cranky and had big plans. He encouraged me to write, create, and take risks. He introduced me to artists like Big Black and GG Allin and helped me film my first “reel,” or excerpts of my best stuff for talent agents. Matt asked me to join the Upright Citizens Brigade, a relatively young sketch group. They needed a girl. I had heard of their shows around town, which seemed like a mixture of improvisation and performance art. They had done a show where each member sat on a street corner and had a Thanksgiving dinner. They did a show where they pretended a member was committing suicide. They did a show where they took an audience member for a virtual-reality tour out into the streets of Chicago. Most of their stuff was about getting the audience out of their chairs and out of their comfort zone. The Upright Citizens Brigade name came from a fake big bad corporation that was mentioned in one of their shows. The idea was this group had co-opted the name and was causing chaos on purpose—picture Occupy Wall Street if they renamed themselves “Halliburton Inc.” Like I said, Matt had big ideas. He had a big plan for the UCB and I wanted to be part of it. I grabbed his coattails and held on tight.
    Besser turned me on to Fugazi. He talked about the spirit of Ian MacKaye and how Fugazi never charged a lot for their shows. He wanted the Upright Citizens Brigade to feel like that—owned by the people. We had no plans for a school or theater or television show, but we all felt an itch. I scratched mine reading Daniel Clowes comic books and shopping at thrift stores for old Doc Martens. I went to bars and saw Liz Phair. I lived in a scary part of Chicago and watched police shoot a dog in our backyard. I started improvising with people better than me and got better myself. I started to call myself an artist.
    The audience was staring at me as veteran improviser and all-around captain Dave Koechner pointed and yelled, “Sell it!” I had bailed on a scene. That meant I had started a scene with someone and either failed to commit, laughed, or negated that person’s choice. Improvisation is like the military. You leave no man behind. It’s your job to make your partner look good and if you are afraid to look stupid you should probably go home. Improvisation was about not being cool. Nobody stood outside of improv theaters in tiny leather jackets smoking cigarettes. Being “clever” wasn’t rewarded. It was about being in the moment and listening and not being afraid. I had let my partner down and I was being told to “sell it!” This was a way to shame young improvisers. It was a rolled-up-newspaper-swat approach. When Dave Koechner told you to “sell it,” it meant you had to do the monkey dance. The monkey dance was really embarrassing.
    I was part of an improv team called Inside Vladimir. We’d named