Tag: comedy

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Film Features Film/TV

Wild Tales

You know how sometimes, when you’re on top of a building, looking down at the city below and you think, “It would be cool if I just jumped.” It’s not that you’re suicidal. You’re having a lovely day, up there on that building, with that great view. It’s just that you have an inexplicable urge to do the unthinkable. The French have a term for this: l’appel du vide, the “call of the void.” That you don’t act on these passing impulses is a safe assumption to make, because if you did, you wouldn’t be reading this. Wild Tales is about the people
who do.

Argentine director Damián Szifron’s film is an anthology of six short stories of people pushed beyond their breaking points. Its fatalistic atmosphere is reminiscent of Robert Altmans’ 1993 symphony of Los Angeles dysfunction Short Cuts, but it does not share Altman’s signature structure of delicately interwoven storylines. Wild Tales is entirely linear, allowing Szifron’s ruthless narrative instincts to play out quickly and efficiently.

The stories he brings his instincts to bear on weave together class oppression, corporate injustice, government corruption, sexual betrayal, and just plain meanness to create a tapestry of human folly. The stories’ setups are all fairly banal and believable: Two strangers on a plane discover they know the same man, a hack musician named Gabriel Pasternak. A waitress at a roadside diner recognizes a man who wronged her family in the past. A man driving through the desert gets cut off by another car, so he flips him the bird and calls him a “redneck asshole.” A demolition engineer stops by a bakery after a successful implosion to pick up a birthday cake for his daughter, but his car is towed by a corrupt wrecker service, causing him to miss the party. A rich kid, drunk-driving his dad’s BMW, kills a pregnant woman in a hit-and-run accident. A happy newlywed couple is enjoying their huge (and expensive) reception when a flash of jealousy intrudes.

Wild Tales

Revealing more than the barest plot information about the individual segments would spoil the wicked pleasure of watching things quickly escalate into the realm of the absurd. Szifron’s characters don’t just make bad decisions, they make the worst decisions possible. And yet, everything seems reasonable while they’re doing it, right up until the bottom drops out, and the film’s deliciously wicked sense of humor takes over.

Working with cinematographer Javier Julia, Szifron uses his eye for clean, meticulous composition to quickly paint character portraits and impart plot points. When Mauricio (Oscar Martinez), the wealthy father of the drunk driver, finds himself boxed in by corrupt lawyers, prosecutors, police, and his own family, Szifron and Julia frame him ominously in the window of his expensive, modernist home. The filmmakers know how to get light to do their bidding as well. When the wedding reception of Romina (the outstanding Erica Rivas) and Ariel (Diego Gentile) is at its most festive, the room is at its darkest, giving the scene a sense that a Caravaggio painting has come to life. It’s rare, but extremely refreshing, to see such visual craftsmanship brought to bear on a comedy.

The rich, the powerful, the vain, and the corrupt are the particular targets of Wild Tales‘ avenging spirit, but the plucky little guy is not spared his share of the pain, either. Szifron’s tone walks a harrowing tightrope between Black Mirror social commentary and the anarchy of the 2004 Spanish comedy El Crimen Perfecto. Even though it has multiple story lines, it’s not preachy or self-important like Crash. The film has become an international hit after premiering at Canne and becoming Argentina’s top grosser of 2014. It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Feature at this year’s Academy Awards, and it’s not hard to see why. If there’s one shot that sums the whole thing up, it’s when Ariel, the groom, looking out across the horrible mess his wedding reception has become, cuts himself a big slice of wedding cake and shoves it into his mouth with his bare hands. The world is going to hell. All bets are off. Might as well enjoy it.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

What We Do In The Shadows

Written and directed by Jemaine Clement, half of the comedy folk rock duo Flight of the Conchords, and Taika Waititi, director of the 2007 quirk comedy Eagle vs. Shark, What We Do in the Shadows is one of the rare breeds of parody that works on all levels. It is a character-based mockumentary in the vein of This Is Spinal Tap, but it also recalls the 1992 masterpiece of minimalist black comedy Man Bites Dog.

When the film opens, a crew from the New Zealand Documentary Film Board has gained exclusive access to a home where four vampires live as roommates. It’s like if The Real World was a gathering of abominations against nature — even more so than it already is, I mean. Each of the vamps is a type from history. Vladislav (Clement) is an Eastern European medieval aristocrat in the mold of Dracula. Viago (Waititi) is a Romantic French dandy like Lestat. Deacon (Jonathan Brugh), at only 185 years old, is the “young bad boy of the group,” a take on Twilight‘s Edward Cullen. And Petyr, the animalistic Nosferatu (Ben Fransham) who lives in the basement tomb of their overstuffed Victorian mansion, is the elder of the bunch at 8,000 years old. Protected, we are told, by crucifixes and ironclad film contracts, the crew documents the roomies’ day-to-day activities as they prepare for the Unholy Masquerade, an annual gathering of witches, zombies, and vampires.

It’s not easy being a centuries-old vampire in the modern world, and the filmmakers get lots of mileage out of applying the historic rules of vampirism to life in suburban New Zealand. Like every Real World or Big Brother season ever, they argue over who has to wash the dishes. Things were better in the old days, as vampiric hypnosis is no match for the internet and television. Jackie (Jackie van Beek) is a human familiar to Deacon who has been promised the eternal life of a vampire in exchange for years of servitude, which includes doing errands in the sunlight, procuring victims for “dinner parties,” and cleaning up the blood and viscera afterwards. One of the victims she procures is her ex-boyfriend Nick (Cori Gonzalez-Macuer), who Petyr inadvisably turns into a vampire. Nick is a meat-headed bro who is not really clear on the concept of vampirism, like the part about not telling people you’re a vampire. But the guys soon take to him, because he can convince the doormen of swanky clubs to invite them over the threshold.

What We Do in the Shadows doesn’t shy away from a few obvious Twilight jokes, but Clement and Waititi dig considerably deeper into horror film history. Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 Dracula adaptation proves to be a particularly juicy target, and one of the funniest bits is a riff on The Lost Boys. The verité style may look haphazard, but this is a well-constructed film where even the most seemingly offhand remark in the first act is a setup for a later payoff. The Unholy Masquerade, when it finally comes around, resembles not some black mass but a third-rate horror fan convention.

Like Spinal Tap, there’s evident affection for the genre they’re skewering. Clement, Waititi, and Brugh clearly love getting to turn into bats and battling werewolves almost as much as they love poking fun at the absurdity of it all. Their low-key enthusiasm is infectious.

What We Do in the Shadows
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Studio on the Square

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Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

Comic on Comic: An Insider’s Guide to Memphis’ Comedy Scene

Memphis is known around the country for its lip-smacking good BBQ, its toe-tapping Blues and Rock n’ Roll music, and, of course, its knee-slapping hilarious comedians! In honor of the 4th Annual Memphis Comedy Festival this weekend, we’ve compiled a list of the funniest, most recognizable local comedian types working in Memphis right now! 

“My word, I’ve got a rather severe case of the giggles!!!”

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#7) Marquel (2Funny) Parram

Catchphrase:

“I can only tell you what I heard I did…”

Marquel (2Funny) Parram is one of the hardest working comedians on the scene today. You can find this Comedian anywhere there’s an audience in Memphis, and I mean ANYWHERE!

“I wanted to get strong as a performer,” he said, “so I figured I need to practice in as many different venues and in front of as many different audiences as I could.”

Not only has Marquel performed stand-up at Memphis’s top venues, he’s performed on street corners, buses, trolleys, grocery stores, doctor’s offices, carpools, and even at the zoo!

“You know a joke’s not good when you can’t make a hyena laugh.”

Marquel has been on the Memphis Comedy scene for four years now and said he is ready to make the transition to full-time comedian. He has had semi-recent success opening up for the ducks walking at the Peabody. You can see Marquel (2Funny) Parram…well…anywhere!

2funnycomedy.com

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#6) Josh Feveret

Catchphrase: 

“I have a knife on me.”

Our number six pick is the wild Josh Feveret! Josh moved to Memphis from Chattanooga just three years ago. And since then he has shook up the local comedy scene. Josh has often made a habit of riding the lines of appropriateness when it comes to his standup sets.

“Comedians today have to be shocking in order to get any attention,” Josh said. “I may say things that might offend you, but that’s part of the art of standup.”

Josh did make local headlines recently when he briefly set himself on fire during one of his standup sets at the P&H café’s open mic night.

“I wasn’t getting any laughs that night, so I thought well… let’s kick things up a notch. In hindsight it probably wasn’t the best decision, but that’s what open mics are for. The paramedic did laugh a little when I asked her for a light before they took me to the emergency room, so I’d say the night wasn’t a complete waste.”

Josh will be opening for a local punk music band The Mindless Ripoffs this Saturday at Murphy’s bar.

Joshisonfireyall.com

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#5) Thomas J. Freeman 

Catchphrase:

“I thought this was a music open mic not a comedy one, but the host said I could do a few songs before you guys start.”

Thomas J. Freeman has been part-time musician in Memphis for the past 12 years. He doesn’t consider himself a comedian, yet will religiously show up to all the comedy open mics and shows in Memphis asking for stage time.

“Otherlands coffeeshop won’t have me back anymore because apparently you have to order something once in a while, which I am against,” he said. “Also they really only want you performing during the open mics, not to people trying to use the Internet.”

Thomas hopes to soon sell at least 10 of the CD’s he’s made of all originally songs he recorded in his sister’s boyfriend’s bathroom. The album is called “Echos by the Throne.” Buy it online here.

 

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#4) Jessica Talbert

Catchphrase:

“I may not know a lot, but one thing I know for damn sure is that airplane fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to melt steel!”

Young, energetic, and fearless are three worlds that come to mind when you think of this up-and-coming Memphis comedienne. Some comics like to do impressions, others tell stories of their personal life experience, but comics like Jessica like to go more political.

“It’s easy to make people laugh. I mean look at the New World Order!” She said. “Our reptilian shape-shifting lizard overlords have been laughing at our ignorance for years. Wake up people!”

Recently Jessica has taken time off from her full time job as a blogger for ChemtrailsAreBrainControl.com to focus more on her stand-up career. Although she has yet to finish a complete set without the microphone being cutoff, she is releasing her first full-length comedy album called “Live from Hollow Earth.” You can see Jessica perform at the back porch of most bars trying to get you to stop drinking water. Also check out her Podcast, “Tinfoil Hat Thoughts” on the Shut up and Listen Network.

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#3)Tim “The Biff” Johnson
Catchphrase:
“It’s Biffing time!!!”

This comedian has the largest and most loyal fan following in Memphis. His high energy comedy is a force to be reckoned with. It’s hard to find any comedy fan in Memphis that doesn’t enjoy a good “Biffing”. He is one of many headlining comedians working in Memphis, but what sets him apart from the others?

“It’s the Biff-Squad, definitely,” he said. “My fans are come out in full force waiting to get biffed, and what can I say? I always deliver.”

Tim Johnson has been doing comedy for 18 years now and has a career ranging from stand-up to movies to theater.

“The Biff has done Shakespeare before; the Biff can do it all.”

You can see Tim “The Biff” Johnson getting his Biff on at his comedy showcase at the Cooper Penny off Central Avenue the 12th of every month. Click here for official Biff Merchandise.

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#2) DJ Tickle-Cheeks

Catchphrase:

“Goo goo…haaaa HAAA Ppppppffftttt drrrrrppp ma ma ma….”

Who said this list was only featuring stand-up comedians? You may not recognize his face, but you’d definitely recognize his voice! DJ Tickle-Cheeks hosts the #1 podcast in Memphis, “Nap Time; Snap Time” on the OAM Audio Network. DJ Tickle-Cheeks got his start in comedy when he ate spaghetti for the first time. Combined with a deep appreciation for dubstep music, DJ Tickle-Cheeks has built a strong following here in the city of baby blues.

“We cannot wait till he gains more control over his motor skills and is able to actually hold his head up to the microphone, then there is no stopping him,” said audio producer Gil Worth.

Listen to DJ Tickle-Cheeks every Friday on the OAM Audio Network.

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And finally we come to our number choice for best local Memphis Comedian… 

A Horse

Catchphrase: (N/A)

It’s a horse guys, horses can’t talk.

As most of you know there is a horse that appears randomly in Memphis comedy clubs and venues.

“Oh shit, that horse is back” is a common phrases said by host and hostess at open mics and showcases.

“He just keeps to himself most of the time, which is fine when a show isn’t going on. But have you ever tried making an audience laugh when there is a 900lbs thoroughbred horse standing in the middle of the freaking room”, said one Memphis comedian. “He goes to like 80% of the shows in town, and he doesn’t even laugh! He just stands there knocking shit over.”

You can find the Memphis Comedy Horse at a majority of comedy venues in town.

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And there you have it! The undisputed top 7 entirely made up comedians working in Memphis!  If you’d like to see the real, hardworking, and funny local comedians in Memphis, this weekend’s Comedy Festival is the perfect place to start.

For a listing of shows, tickets, and venues go to MemphisComedyFestival.com. All joking aside, Memphis does have a very strong, very funny comedy scene and they deserve to be recognized. Go out and see a show and support local performers and artist. BE A PART OF IT!!!

Mike McCarthy is a standup comedian who is sometimes confused with Mike McCarthy the filmmaker and occasionally mistaken for the Memphis Comedy Horse. He is also a Wiseguy and contributor to Fly on the Wall. 

Comic on Comic: An Insider’s Guide to Memphis’ Comedy Scene (2)

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Cybill Does Atlanta as “Curvy Widow”

If you’re headed down to Hotlanta in the next month, you might want to check out Memphis Belle Cybill Shepherd in the one-woman comedy, Curvy Widow, at the Alliance Theatre.

From the Alliance Theatre’s website: “Golden Globe winner Cybill Shepherd stars in the World Premiere of Bobby Goldman’s autobiographical play Curvy Widow, an intimate and wildly funny one-woman comedy about love, sex, and misadventures in online dating.

“When a strong-willed, successful, seasoned woman finds herself widowed, she assumes new love will just be a point and click away. But dating in the 21st century proves to offer one fresh surprise after another in this exclusive and empowering night of laughter. Wading through the dating pool, she finally finds that in order to be happy, all she needs to be is herself.”

Hmmm… Well, hopefully, the show itself will be better than the promotional copy. For Ticket information and show times, go here.

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We Recommend We Recommend

#1 (With a Bullet)

CREDIT: Antonio Nunes | dreamstime.com

It’s no cliché to describe Assassins, Stephen Sondheim’s dark musical meditation on the men and women who’ve either killed or tried to kill an American president, as history viewed in a funhouse mirror. The fast-paced revue is set in an amusement park shooting gallery where time bends and characters, who never actually knew one another, come face to face. It’s a place where Lincoln’s murderer, John Wilkes Booth, provides inspiration for John F. Kennedy’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald. It’s a melodic dystopia where the dizzy Charles Manson acolyte Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme teaches dizzy and disgruntled former bookkeeper Sara Jane Moore how to shoot by taking potshots at a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket.

Using reconstructed snatches of “Hail to the Chief,” Sousa marches, and 1970s pop songs, Assassins probes the mind of the deranged megalomaniac Charles Guiteau as he marches to the gallows and a self-professed nobody named Giuseppe Zangara whose murderous desires were brought on by severe stomach pains. It allows viewers to slip easily behind John Hinckley’s glasses as he sings about his love for Jodie Foster and his desire to kill Ronald Reagan.

Sondheim’s darkly comic sketch of American history’s most desperate figures, as they pursue the fame they think they deserve, has appeared in Memphis twice before. Both Circuit Playhouse and Rhodes College have staged award-winning productions of this controversial classic. Now the University of Memphis is ready to take its shot. Helmed by third-year MFA candidate David Shouse and performed by a gun-toting ensemble that includes many of the city’s most promising young actors, Assassins promises to be a blast.

“Assassins,” November 8th-10th and 15th-17th, 8 p.m. Department of Theatre & Dance, University of Memphis. $10-$15.

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We Recommend We Recommend

Yuk It Up

It isn’t every day that Memphis gets to experience a genuine groundbreaker within the realm of stand-up comedy. Save for Andy Kaufman, Neil Hamburger has gifted the world with the strangest career ever to grace the genre.

Starting off as a very underground spoof of Borscht Belt/pre-Vietnam-era Vegas stand-up comedians and then the entire history of awful comedians, Hamburger turned flopsweat into something funny, unique, and very strange. Over the past 13 years, he (aka Gregg Turkington) has parlayed an “either you get it or you don’t” cultish following into major motion picture appearances (Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny), a hilarious DVD (The World’s Funnyman), and seven albums (all on Drag City, Hamburger’s home for his entire career). He regularly kills on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Tom Green Live (Green’s very popular Internet show) and riffed supreme on Fox News’ Red Eye program. (Hamburger congratulated Red Eye host Greg Gutfeld on his recent Emmy Award, “even though you won it on eBay.”) Still not biting? Search YouTube for clips of Hamburger’s act.

Depending on your capacity for purposely poor timing, perpetual coughs and throat-clearings (directly into the microphone for a near-deafening impact), truly offensive material, spectacular crowd counter-heckling, and at times, simply amazing jokes, this performance is not to be missed.

Neil Hamburger, Tuesday, June 26th, 9 p.m. at the Hi-Tone Cafe

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Lads on the Loose

British filmmaking duo Edgar Wright (writer/director) and Simon Pegg (writer/actor) don’t make spoofs in the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker (Airplane!) sense. They make genre-targeting comic homages. Their surprise breakthrough hit, 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, was their take on the zombie flick, in which a couple of louts (Pegg and Nick Frost) find their low-key existence complicated by the arrival of the undead.

The follow-up, Hot Fuzz, ostensibly does the same thing for the buddy-cop genre. This time Pegg is Nicholas Angel, a workaholic London cop who is transferred to the sleepy village of Sandford because his superiors think he’s showing up the rest of the force. In Sandford, Angel is reduced to searching for a loose goose and rousting underage drinkers and suffers the indignity of being partnered with Danny Butterman (Frost), the cheerfully incompetent son of the town police chief, who peppers his big-city counterpart with questions about policework gleaned from nights on the couch watching Hollywood blockbusters (particularly Point Break and Bad Boys II) on video.

In Sandford, Angel begins to suspect that an unusually high accident rate might be the result of more than mere accident and sets about attempting to uncover a criminal conspiracy that eventually demands the use of heavy ammo.

Shaun of the Dead was a lovable lark, getting its biggest laughs from having Pegg’s ale-soaked sod so hung over he couldn’t differentiate between the living dead and the everyday worker bees in his neighborhood. If Hot Fuzz is less successful, if there’s less to love beyond the movie’s genial gags, it’s because Hot Fuzz doesn’t seem to be about much other than movies and movie fandom. This can certainly be a topic for a great movie, but Wright and Pegg don’t seem to be up to making it.

Shaun of the Dead, by contrast, didn’t poke fun at zombie movies as much as the lived-in pub-lad lifestyle that the undead invade. In Shaun of the Dead, Pegg and Frost played characters that felt real — recognizable, funny, and frustrating even before their lives are impinged upon by the stuff of movies. In Hot Fuzz, the characters that are supposed to morph into movie creations are movie creations to begin with.

Which doesn’t mean Hot Fuzz isn’t enjoyable. Pegg and Frost maintain a palpable chemistry, and Frost, with his bedhead jocularity, may be one of the most instantly likable sidekicks in memory. And though Hot Fuzz worships at the altar of modern American shoot-’em-ups rather than British thrillers of the James Bond or Get Carter variety, Wright and Pegg stay proudly British, which is one of their central charms.

Parodying blockbusters is increasingly becoming old hat. In this regard, Hot Fuzz rises above the attention-deficit-disorder style of the Scary Movie series but lacks the confrontational appeal of something like Team America World Police. It evokes its sources formally as well as conceptually but in a way that’s more appreciative than mocking. It’s a movie that, like Butterman, seems to side with couch-potato passivity. At the end, I wasn’t sure if the lack of differentiation between the sublime Point Break and the merely noisy Bad Boys II was a comment on the filmmakers or just their characters.

Hot Fuzz

Opens Friday, April 20th

Studio on the Square

Categories
News News Feature

Seriously Funny

Maybe you’ve heard of comedian Tim Northern. Then again, maybe you haven’t. He doesn’t have a sitcom like many comedians do. He doesn’t host a late-night talk show or a program in heavy rotation on Comedy Central. He doesn’t have an outrageous gimmick or hang with the Def Comedy crowd. Northern is a hard-touring funnyman who works the club circuit where he’s known for witty wordplay and smart, language-based comedy.

After Northern’s winning turn on American Idol‘s more diverse precursor Star Search, deadpan actor and former Nixon speech writer Ben Stein said with atypical enthusiasm, “I love the fact that he assumes his audience has a brain!” The obvious question: Is that a good thing?

Flyer: You’re from Nashville. I bet you must have some good lines about the difference between Nashville and Memphis.

Tim Northern: I plead the Fifth. I’m totally neutral.

But the cities are such rivals, surely you’ve got some comparisons.

Hey, I have to perform out there. I need to be at least a little hospitable to the audience.

Every time I turn around somebody’s writing something about the death of comedy. Clubs open and close and reopen again so fast it’s hard to keep up. So what’s the real story?

When I got into the business in the ’90s, comedy was on the wane, and I had to ride out the hard times. But whenever there’s a lot of political turmoil and everything gets bad, that’s when comedy gets better. Whenever we’re faced with challenges, that’s when comedy rises. The ’90s were great. We had fat bellies and were happy. Nobody needed to be entertained. When things get weird, comedy is the perfect outlet and laughter is the great escape.

Some people think these last elections will make things better. Does that mean it’s bad for you if they’re right?

It doesn’t matter because I don’t do political humor. I mean, I don’t hope things are going to be bad. I want to be fat and happy too. But I don’t want it to be at another person’s expense.

You don’t do politics?

No, and I stay away from race and sex. I don’t do observational humor either. I don’t say, “Have you ever noticed when you’re walking down the street … ”

Wait. No politics, no race, no sex — what’s left?

I just want to be funny. I don’t have any big messages because nobody’s going to walk away from my show a better person. You see all these people trying to be inspiring. They say, “I’m doing this for the kids.” But you’re not going to change somebody’s life doing this. I just want to be funny.

But without sex, politics, race, observational …

I don’t know where it comes from, it just comes. I do what I think is funny, and if you don’t think it’s funny, I’m sorry. Some people won’t get it. Look, if you try to reach everybody, you lose everybody. That’s why I love Dennis Miller. I don’t even get a lot of Dennis Miller, and I’m sure even Dennis Miller doesn’t get a lot of Dennis Miller because it’s obscure stuff.

Does an inability to put you into a category make getting work more difficult?

When comedy blew up in the mid-’80s there were only 200 to 300 comedians working. Now there are maybe 15,000. Some types of comics — very good comics — can’t get a foot in the door, because they can’t be easily categorized. That’s how it is with me. They can’t categorize me. But as far as I’m concerned, funny is funny.

Define funny.

There is a fine line between terror and comedy. By that I mean “funny” is something that hits me out of left field that’s totally unexpected — a word out of context, a malapropism, a mistake. Sometimes it’s something weird or something serious. Sometimes things are so serious they’re seriously funny.

How do you think other people see your act?

Some people would look at my act and say, “He’s so clean.” But I’m not clean. I mean, I don’t spew profanity so I might come off as clean, but I didn’t grow up with Bill Cosby.

Who did you grow up with?

I love Richard Pryor. And it’s always seemed to me like so many comedians since have been doing bad Richard Pryor imitations. Like Eddie Murphy. He was essentially doing an imitation of Richard Pryor … Not to wax philosophic, but when Steve Martin got out of stand-up he said, “Once you get famous, people laugh whether you’re funny or not. I didn’t have to work for it anymore, so I got out of the business.” If you ask me, that’s noble.

Well, it’s a lot easier to be noble when you’re as famous as Steve Martin.

I don’t do this because I want to be famous. I don’t want to be famous. I do this because I love it.

Categories
News News Feature

Dear God

To say that Matt Besser has contributed a lot to the world of comedy is an understatement, even if his name results in a resounding “who?” among those who casually graze on Saturday Night Live or prime-time Comedy Central.

In brief, Besser was raised in Little Rock, attended Amherst College in Massachusetts, and then tried stand-up comedy in Boulder, Colorado, for a year. Moving to Chicago in 1989, he studied improv and sketch comedy under legendary Second City improvisational guru Del Close, whose former students have composed at least a fourth of Saturday Night Live‘s cast during any given time period.

In 1991, Besser founded sketch and improv group the Upright Citizens Brigade with Amy Poehler, Matt Walsh, and Ian Roberts. UCB moved to New York City in 1996, where classes were offered, a theater was opened (the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater), and a sketch show was sold to Comedy Central. Besser also created the MTV reality prank show Stung with Method Man and Crossballs: The Debate Show, a parody of topical debate shows which aired in the summer of 2004 until one of its unsuspecting guests threatened to sue Comedy Central.

Outside of TV, Besser is not one to keep his thumbs out of pies. His reverse-prank-call CD, May I Help You (Dumbass)?, came as the result of a tech-support 800 number being accidentally routed to his Manhattan apartment. In 2003, Besser moved to L.A. to launch and develop the second Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, where he now performs several times a week.

“Woo Pig Sooie” is Besser’s latest one-man show, the production that he’s bringing to the Hi-Tone Tuesday night, which focuses on religion in America and carries the tagline “Don’t Miss Your Chance To See Man Talk His Way Into Hell.” In an interview with Besser, he shed some light on the show, unfunny people, the UCB, the “Trapped in the Closet” production, and the power of pranks.

Flyer: What are your goals for the L.A. UCB theater?

Matt Besser: The number-one goal of both UCB Theaters is to give me, Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts, Matt Walsh, and all of our friends a place to perform in a hassle-free environment. The second goal is to provide a venue for good comedians who aren’t necessarily our close friends. The third goal is to provide a nurturing environment where people can feel free to get high in the green room. We’ve always said, “Keep the green room green.”

Tell me about the “Trapped in the Closet” show.

The show is a panel of experts commenting on the opera that is (R. Kelly’s) Trapped in the Closet. The experts change each show, but my favorite example would be David Cross playing the closet door.

How far into your receiving the calls did you decide to do the May I Help You (Dumbass)? CD?

After a month of calls every day, I called the tech-support company and tried to suggest a way that their customers could stop calling my apartment. They were idiots and ignored my suggestions, so I figured, “Fuck them. I will provide tech support for their customers.”

Who are your favorite (most influential) pranksters past and present?

Andy Kaufman, Joey Skaggs, Craig O’Neill, Coyle & Sharpe, Negativeland, and Howard Stern. The most influential book I ever read was an annual journal called Research, which in the ’80s did a whole issue on pranks. That journal turned me on to the world of pranks being a performance.

What is your stance on prank reality-TV shows?

We did 24 episodes of a show called Crossballs where we pranked 48 people. At least 35 of those people wanted to kill me when the shows were done. All those bad vibes have kind of burned me out on the whole genre.

What is your teaching style? You are harsh on students. Expound.

In Chicago, I took every level at every improv school. Out of all that supposed education, I had very few teachers who really taught me anything. Most of them took the “nurturing” approach to teaching, which is okay for a beginner but a waste of time and money down the line. All my improv epiphanies came on the heels of a harsh note, in particular [with] my mentor Del Close, who embarrassed me on many occasions. I only get really harsh if I feel a student ignores a note time after time.

Can an unfunny person be taught to be funny?

No way you can teach someone to be funny. But you can teach them techniques that help them present their funny in the best way. Especially when it comes to working with a group.

Can you give some important differences between long-form improv and short-form?

Short-form is lame, bag-of-tricks crap. It’s not organic. It’s basically watching people play parlor games. Long-form is improvising sketches on the spot.

Tell me about your new show.

Don’t come if you are the religious type.