Beginnings

Last week on Beginnings we talked to UCB founder Matt Besser about how punk rock and Andy Kaufman helped influence his love of pranks and playing with reality. This week on Beginnings Field Guide, we have an in-depth discussion about teaching, as we discuss his recent web series Inside the Master Class , which you can see in its entirety on mattbesser.com!

Matt Besser is one of the founding members of the Upright Citizens Brigade, whose sketch show, along with other programs like Mr. Show, helped define comedy in the 1990s. Since then, the UCB have founded two schools in NY and LA, which are renowned as the training grounds for the next generation of comedians. Since the end of the UCB show, Matt has worked on a number of projects including creating...

Last week on Beginnings we talked to Saturday Night Live staff writer Christine Nangle about how growing up in Philadelphia and how attending Catholic School helped make her a creative person. This week on Beginnings Field Guide, we have an in-depth discussion of her web video "Surrogate Mother for Hire", which will be debuting as a web series this September!

Hailing from Pennsylvania, Christine Nangle began her comedy career in Pittsburgh, performing with improv group Hustlebot. In 2007, Christine moved to New York where she began taking classes at The Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, eventually working her way up to writing and performing on a number of different house sketch and improv teams. In 2009, Christine was hired as a staff writer on Saturd...

Will Hines is the Associate Academic Supervisor and a teacher at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre and a performer on the house team The Stepfathers, the winners of the Friars Club 2010 Improv Competition. He’s written and directed a number of stage shows and videos, and his acting work includes parts in the Adult Swim series Fat Guy Stuck in Internet and the Derrick movie Mystery Team . Most r...

Joe Mande is a nationally touring stand-up who’s been on Best Week Ever and Live at Gotham. He’s also the man behind the blog and book Look at This Fucking Hipster. Along with his co-host Noah Garfinkel, he hosts a monthly comedy show at UCB called Totally J/K, and he’s written and performed in a number of stage shows including most recently, his adaptation of Glenn Beck’s The Overton Window. Joe’...

David Cope is a super-funny and absurdist comic based in New York City. Rather than some put-on stage persona, however, his weirdness is an honest extension of his personality. He curates the weekly stand-up show Hot Soup at O’Hanlon’s Bar alongside Andy Haynes, Mark Normand and Matt Ruby, and he’s been featured at the Bumbershoot festival, on the last season of NBC’s Last Comic Standing and in nu...

Hari Kondabolu is a highly-accomplished stand-up who discusses race and class in a manner that is both funny and enlightening. He’s performed on numerous shows including Jimmy Kimmel, Live at Gotham and John Oliver’s New York Standup Show. He has his own Comedy Central Presents special and hosts a live monthly talk show with his younger brother Ashok, a member of the hip hop group Das Racist. He a...

As a stand-up, improviser and sketch writer, comedian Nick Vatterott is a triple threat. And a triple treat! His stand-up has been featured on Jimmy Fallon and in the Montreal Just for Laughs Festival. He’s understudied for Second City, and his sketch group HEAVYWEIGHT (including Cloverfield’s TJ Miller) has performed all around the country. Nick’s also performed his one man show No Outlet at the...

Welcome everyone to the first episode of a new era for Beginnings! This episode’s guest is Pete Holmes. Pete’s a stand-up who has been featured on Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Fallon, John Oliver's New York Stand Up Show and his own Comedy Central Presents special. With stand-up Matt McCarthy (episode 12) and Daily Show field producer Oren Brimer, he started Front Page Films, which makes very funny web vi...

Dan McCoy has been writing and performing stand-up, sketch and improv in New York for over a decade. His webseries 9am Meeting, co-written with Matt Koff, placed 1st seven times at Channel 101 NY. The series joined the Writer's Guild of America, East as one of the very first new media signatories and was also awarded a development deal with MTV at the New York Television and Video Festival. Dan al...

Continuing our pattern of interviewing funny and nice comedians, this episode we talk to Matt Fisher, a hilarious and gracious improviser, actor and writer. His improv team The Law Firm is a house team that performs every week at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York. Matt has also written for ESPN's The Pretty Good Sports Show, and with his former sketch group Sidecar, has produced sta...

For our first foray outside the world of comedy, we talked to Ben Katchor, the super-thoughtful, world-weary cartoonist, author of such comics as Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. Running in publications like The New Yorker and The Village Voice, among many others, his comics have also been collected in books including The Jew of New York and his latest, The Cardboard Valise, and in 2000, he...

Opus Moreschi is a tall, pale son of Italy and an improviser, formerly a house performer at Improv Olympic West and currently at The Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York. He’s also written for shows such as Lil’ Bush and The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn. Opus is an inspiring figure, for his talent, of course, but especially for his determination. When it was announced that Stephen Col...

Kevin Allison is the funny and kind founder of the Risk! podcast and member of the sketch group The State, who tore through comedy in the mid-90s, becoming a seminal humor moment for many teenagers of the day. When The State ended, Kevin was unsure of his direction, and spent a number of years pursuing different paths. Some problematic performing experiences eventually led him into dropping his fi...

Mike Lawrence is a good example of what to do if you are serious about having a career in comedy and in working on your craft. Dedicated, thoughtful, opinionated and above all funny, he has spent the last five and half years, first in Florida, and then here in New York, going up night after night and working his material. Mike puts the responsibility for comedy solely in the hands of the performer...

Eddie Brill is an incredibly friendly and thoughtful guy, in addition to being a beloved veteran of the stand-up stage in America and abroad. We met Eddie briefly at this year's ECNY awards, and even with the frenzied pace of the red carpet he managed to draw us in and make us feel like old pals having a liesurely conversation. For the last thirteen years, Eddie has been the warm-up comedian and t...

Listing all of Greg Proops' credits would be a Herculean task. As the closest Wrestling Team gets to a Greek demigod is Stinkor from He-Man, we shall just list a few: Greg is one of the stars of the British and American Whose Line Is It Anyway?, he's an incredible stand-up with an album on AST Records, and he hosts of his own podcast The Smartest Man in the World, where he speaks extemporaneously...

Part three of our tour through the prominent sketch groups in New York City brings us to Arthur Meyer and John Haskell AKA Two Fun Men. After meeting in an improv class in 2008, the duo decided to start working together, and since then have appeared at numerous sketch festivals around the country, have a show running at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York City, and have appeared in a...

Claudia Cogan is an immensely funny person and has the accolades to prove it. Not only was she named one of the “10 Comics Funny People Find Funny" in New York Magazine and was winner of Time Out New York's first ever Joke of the Year, but Cogan was also on the last season of Last Comic Standing, making it to the semi-final round. She began her comedic career on the UCB Harold teams Pole Position...

Episode thirteen, our almost-anniversary, features Wrestling Team favorite Jon Wurster. When he's not drumming for Superchunk or A.C. Newman or The Mountain Goats or any other number of acts, he is one-half of the comedy duo Scharpling and Wurster. Along with producer and director Tom Scharpling, host of The Best Show on WFMU, the two create partly-scripted phone calls where Wurster plays differen...

Matt McCarthy is a stand-up, writer and actor based out of New York. McCarthy's television work includes his stint as the continually-flummoxed cable guy in the Verizon commercials and as co-host of AMC's Action Pack. Along with Oren Brimer and Pete Holmes, he makes web videos as Front Page Films. His stand-up is fierce, silly and dynamic, and his 2010 album Come Clean made a number of end-of-the-...

Nathan Rabin is the head writer for The A.V. Club, the sister-publication to The Onion that focuses on columns, articles and reviews of television, films, and other media. Rabin is also the author of two books - The Big Rewind, a memoir filtered through pop culture, and My Year of Flops, a collection of columns where Rabin focuses on revisiting failed movies to see if they deserved their ignominy....

Kurt Braunohler is a writer, stand-up, improviser and actor living in New York City. A fearless improviser, he got his start at UCB, and as part of his Harold team Neutrino created the Neutrino Video Project, a fully improvised movie in Harold form filmed and edited for a live audience. Kurt is also one-half of Kurt and Kristen, his comedy duo with Kristen Schaal. Together, they host the live vari...

Andrea Rosen is a stand-up, actress, and writer living in New York City. As a commercial actress, many people may know her from the Yoplait commercials (Why, we ask, is Key Lime Pie the topper and not Boston Creme Pie?). As an amazing comedian, many people may know her from her recurring role on Stella or from any number of sketch shows and films or her group Variety Shac. As a cool and personable...