Bossypants (9 page)

Enough was enough. I was going to have to steal that office job from Donna. And that’s where my college education finally gave me the unfair advantage I’d been waiting for. I wore jeans to my interview with Vicky. It was easy. Did I have basic computer skills? Sure, I was twenty-two. Did I have a good temperament on the phone? Sure. What were my career goals? “Do this job to pay for improv classes.” Good enough. I went back downstairs to relieve Donna on the phones. “You’re up,” I told her.

As I watched her nervously trundle up the steps to her interview, I knew it was no contest. Poor Donna had been at the front desk too long. You could smell other people’s grimness on her, like my roommate’s BO wafting out of the blue suit.

Donna would have thrown herself into that office job with deep commitment for the rest of her life. I stayed less than a year and bailed when I got a job with The Second City Touring Company.

That makes me sound like a jerk, I know. But remember the beginning of the story where I was the underdog? No? Me neither.

The Windy City, Full of Meat

The most fun job I ever had was working at a theater in Chicago called The Second City. If you’ve never heard of The Second City, it is an improvisation and sketch comedy theater in Chicago, founded in 1959 by some University of Chicago brainiacs. There’s a Second City theater in Chicago and one in Toronto, and between the two they have turned out some mind-blowing alumni, including John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, Chris Farley, John Candy, Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Steve Carell, Amy Sedaris, Amy Poehler, and Stephen Colbert. I could go on, but my editor told me that was a cheap way to flesh out the book.

I moved to Chicago in 1992 to study improv and it was everything I wanted it to be. It was like a cult. People ate, slept, and definitely drank improv. They worked at crappy day jobs just to hand over their money for improv classes. Eager young people in khakis and polo shirts were willing to do whatever teachers like Del Close and Martin de Maat told them to. In retrospect, it may actually have been a cult.

I had studied legit acting methods in college—Stanislavsky, Meisner, Cicely Berry’s
The Actor and
His Text
—but any TV critic will tell you that I never mastered any of them. Improvisation as a way of working made sense to me. I love the idea of two actors on stage with nothing—no costumes, no sets, no dialogue—who make up something together that is then completely real to everyone in the room.

The rules of improvisation appealed to me not only as a way of creating comedy, but as a worldview.

Studying improvisation literally changed my life. It set me on a career path toward
Saturday Night Live.
It changed the way I look at the world, and it’s where I met my husband. What has your cult done for you lately?

When I first started working at The Second City, there were two resident companies and three touring companies. The resident companies would write and perform original sketch comedy shows for packed houses in Chicago. The touring companies would take the best pieces from these shows and perform them in church basements and community centers around the country. We traveled by van to all kinds of destinations, from upstate New York to St. Paul, Minnesota, to Waco, Texas.

In the touring company we were paid seventy-five dollars per show and a twenty-five-dollar per diem. Of course, sometimes you’d have a show in Kansas followed by a show in Texas followed by another show in Kansas, so you’d have to ride in the van for two days to get to your seventy-five-dollar gig. It wasn’t lucrative, but it was show business!

There were three touring companies: Red Company, Green Company, and Blue Company. I was in the Blue Company, or BlueCo as we called it to be unbelievably cool. I still feel affection for the members of BlueCo like we served in the military together. Specifically the French military, because we were lazy and a little bit sneaky. For example, they once sent us on a tour of Texas and the Midwest, and the moment the van pulled away from the theater, we all agreed to throw out the “best of” sketches we had been directed to perform and replace them with our own original material. Amy Poehler in particular was tired of being handed dated old blond-girl roles where all her lines were things like

“Here’s your coffee, honey,” or “Mr. Johnson will see you now,” or “Whattaya mean a blind date?!”

Each night we’d pull out an old sketch and replace it with something of our own. My friend Ali Farahnakian, who is a genius in many ways, wrote a very funny monologue about the McDonald’s Big Mac. During the course of the monologue he would eat an entire Big Mac Extra Value Meal onstage.

Because the meal was technically a prop, he made the stage manager buy it for him every night and he kept his twenty-five dollars. These were the kinds of skills you learned touring for The Second City. By the time we returned to Chicago ten days later, the “best of” show was completely gone and we were in big trouble, except we didn’t really care.

The Rules of Improvisation That Will Change Your Life and Reduce Belly

Fat
*

The first rule of improvisation is
AGREE
.
Always agree and SAY YES. When you’re improvising,
this means you are required to agree with whatever your partner has created. So if we’re improvising
and I say, “Freeze, I have a gun,” and you say, “That’s not a gun. It’s your finger. You’re pointing your
finger at me,” our improvised scene has ground to a halt. But if I say, “Freeze, I have a gun!” and you say,

“The gun I gave you for Christmas! You bastard!” then we have started a scene because we have
AGREED that my finger is in fact a Christmas gun.

Now, obviously in real life you’re not always going to agree with everything everyone says. But
the Rule of Agreement reminds you to “respect what your partner has created” and to at least start from
an open-minded place. Start with a YES and see where that takes you.

As an improviser, I always find it jarring when I meet someone in real life whose first answer is
no. “No, we can’t do that.” “No, that’s not in the budget.” “No, I will not hold your hand for a dollar.”

What kind of way is that to live?

The second rule of improvisation is not only to say yes, but
YES, AND
.
You are supposed to agree
and then
add something of your own.
If I start a scene with “I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,” and you
just say, “Yeah…” we’re kind of at a standstill. But if I say, “I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,” and you say,

“What did you expect? We’re in hell.” Or if I say, “I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,” and you say, “Yes,
this can’t be good for the wax figures.” Or if I say, “I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,” and you say, “I told
you we shouldn’t have crawled into this dog’s mouth,” now we’re getting somewhere.

To me YES, AND means don’t be afraid to contribute. It’s your responsibility to contribute. Always
make sure you’re adding something to the discussion. Your initiations are worthwhile.

The next rule is
MAKE STATEMENTS.
This is a positive way of saying “Don’t ask questions all the
time.” If we’re in a scene and I say, “Who are you? Where are we? What are we doing here? What’s in
that box?” I’m putting pressure on you to come up with all the answers.

In other words: Whatever the problem, be part of the solution. Don’t just sit around raising
questions and pointing out obstacles. We’ve all worked with that person. That person is a drag. It’s
usually the same person around the office who says things like “There’s no calories in it if you eat it
standing up!” and “I felt menaced when Terry raised her voice.”

MAKE STATEMENTS
also applies to us women: Speak in statements instead of apologetic
questions. No one wants to go to a doctor who says, “I’m going to be your surgeon? I’m here to talk to
you about your procedure? I was first in my class at Johns Hopkins, so?” Make statements, with your
actions and your voice.

Instead of saying “Where are we?” make a statement like “Here we are in Spain, Dracula.” Okay,

“Here we are in Spain, Dracula” may seem like a terrible start to a scene, but this leads us to the best
rule:

THERE ARE NO MISTAKES,
only opportunities. If I start a scene as what I think is very clearly a
cop riding a bicycle, but you think I am a hamster in a hamster wheel, guess what? Now I’m a hamster in
a hamster wheel. I’m not going to stop everything to explain that it was really supposed to be a bike.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll end up being a police hamster who’s been put on “hamster wheel” duty because
I’m “too much of a loose cannon” in the field. In improv there are no mistakes, only beautiful happy
accidents. And many of the world’s greatest discoveries have been by accident. I mean, look at the
Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, or Botox.

Bossypants Lesson #183: You Can’t Boss People Around If They Don’t

Really Care

The producers tried to punish BlueCo by giving us the worst gigs. Prom shows were held at one A.M. after a high school prom, and attendance was mandatory. It was basically a way to keep kids from drinking or having sex on prom night, and the performers hated doing these shows almost as much as the kids hated watching them. Imagine how mad you would be if you were missing out on a toothy knob job to watch some cult members make up a song about the 1996 election.

There were other terrible shows. Brightly lit hotel ballrooms with broken microphones. College shows where the kids were all drunk. Charity buyouts where the audience was very, very sober.

Corporate gigs at eight A.M. for employees who were there to be told about reductions in their health care benefits. Basically, any time you were performing for an audience that was not there voluntarily, it was a rough show.

After seven or eight months of touring, we started to wonder which of us actors would get promoted to one of the main companies. The Mainstage cast and the “Second City e.t.c.” cast got to stay in Chicago and earn a unionized living wage. They would develop their own sketches by improvising in front of an audience, then keeping the ideas that had worked until they had a full two-hour show. It was the dream job. However, of all the places I’ve worked that were supposedly boys’ clubs, The Second City was the only one where I experienced institutionalized gender nonsense. For example, a director of one of the main companies once justified cutting a scene by saying, “The audience doesn’t want to see a scene between two women.” Whaaa? More on that later.

In 1995, each cast at The Second City was made up of four men and two women. When it was suggested that they switch one of the companies to three men and three women, the producers and directors had the same panicked reaction. “You can’t do that. There won’t be enough parts to go around. There won’t be enough for the girls.” This made no sense to me, probably because I speak English and have never had a head injury. We weren’t doing
Death of a Salesman. We were making up
the show ourselves. How could there not be enough parts?
Where was the “Yes, and”? If everyone had something to contribute, there would be enough. The insulting implication, of course, was that the women wouldn’t have any ideas.

I’m happy to say the producers did jump into the twentieth century and switch to a cast of

“three and three,” and I got to be that third woman in the first gender-equal cast. However, I must say, as a point of pride, that I didn’t get the job
because I was a woman
. I got the job because Amy Poehler had moved to New York with the Upright Citizens Brigade and I was the next best thing.

But this was the first time I experienced what I like to call “The Myth of Not Enough.”

When I worked at
Saturday Night Live,
I had a five A.M. argument with one of our most intelligent actresses. It was rumored that Lorne was adding another woman to the cast, and she was irate. (In fairness, she was also exhausted. It was five A.M. after writing all night.) She felt there wouldn’t be enough for the girls and that this girl was too similar to her. There wouldn’t be enough screen time to go around.

I revived my old argument: How could this be true if
we made up the show?
A bunch of us suggested that they collaborate instead of compete. And, of course, that’s what they did, with great success, once they were actually in a room together. But where does that initial panic come from?

This is what I tell young women who ask me for career advice. People are going to try to trick you. To make you feel that you are in competition with one another. “You’re up for a promotion. If they go with a woman, it’ll be between you and Barbara.” Don’t be fooled. You’re not in competition with other women. You’re in competition with
everyone
.