“They were filling some kind of void,” remembers Conan O’Brien, an early booster and occasional guest star. Above all, it was highly collaborative, built around tightly bonded teams of improv comics, especially as the best students in the classes began to graduate and form teams of their own. The UCB Four’s comedic style was distinctively absurdist, marked by an understanding that being gross and being smart were not mutually exclusive. It was more than just a talent mill, though.
The performers who took over that strip club-and, later, the UCB’s current main stage on 26th Street-would go on to populate Saturday Night Live, Late Night With Conan O’Brienn, The Daily Show, Human Giant, The Hangover, The Other Guys,, and about three-fourths of NBC’s Thursday-night-sitcom roles. But along the way they fomented a slow-burn pop-culture coup.
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When the UCB Four came to town, their goals were to get a TV deal (which they did, two years later) and maybe pay the rent by teaching improv classes. Their style was free-form and deliberately unslick, and almost by accident, they fashioned a movement, one that would be given the vague tag of “alternative comedy.” But in downtown Manhattan, scruffy young comics were coalescing around venues like Luna Lounge, Surf Reality, and KGB’s Red Room. On TV, Saturday Night Live was at the tail end of a weak period Seinfeld and Friends, though set in New York, were strictly Los Angeles products. The city’s stand-up scene was thriving, but many of its nervier sketch troupes-most prominently Exit 57 and the State-were winding down, and long-form improv was all but nonexistent. “the UCB Four”) had moved to New York from Chicago in 1996, a time when Manhattan’s comedy scene was in the first stages of gentrification. Poehler, Besser, Walsh, and Roberts (a.k.a. “It was as if there’d been a nuclear disaster and everyone had just turned into dust and left all their shit behind.” “The women’s locker room was all Prince mix tapes and bikinis,” Poehler remembers. Now, thanks to Rudy Giuliani’s anti-porn crusade, they had their own theater in a defunct strip club.
For three years, the 28-year-old Poehler and her fellow members of the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy troupe-Matt Besser, Matt Walsh, and Ian Roberts-had been performing sketch and improv anywhere they could. It was the winter of 1999, and Amy Poehler was in a grimy bathroom on West 22nd Street, pulling used condoms out of a toilet.
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