Mike Sacks is a humor writer and part of the editorial staff of Vanity Fair. He got his start writing for Cracked and Mad Magazine, and since then has written for everyone from GQ to Esquire to The New Yorker, many of those pieces being collected in his book Your Wildest Dreams, Within Reason. He co-wrote the book Sex: Our Bodies, Our Junk, and his first book, And Here’s the Kicker is an anthology of his interviews with famous humorists from Paul Feig to Bob Odenkirk. A few weeks ago, Mike sat d...
Sep 29, 2011•53 min
Last week on Beginnings we talked to stand-up and Letterman writer Jena Friedman about the creative spark found within the scary children's game Bloody Mary. This week on Beginnings: Field Guide , we have an in-depth discussion on serial killers, as we talk with Jena about her webseries Ted and Gracie , which you can see on our website and at www.jenafriedman.com. And hey, why not drop us a line at jokes@wrestlingteam.org? Tell us your favorite smell!
Sep 22, 2011•20 min
Jena Friedman is a comedian and actor based in New York City. As a stand-up, she has performed all around the world, including at The Glasgow International Comedy Festival and SXSW. She was the female lead in the independent film American Florence, and her play The Refugee Girls Revue: A Musical Parody had a successful run off-Broadway. Also, in July, she became one of the newest writers on the Late Show with David Letterman. A few weeks ago, Jena came over to the Wrestling team apartment and ch...
Sep 15, 2011•59 min
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!
Sep 08, 2011•18 min
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 the Comedy Central show Crossballs and writing and directing the forthcoming film Freak Dance, base...
Sep 01, 2011•1 hr 4 min
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!
Aug 25, 2011•19 min
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 Saturday Night Live and has been responsible for sketches like Snooki, Wikileaks and more. Last week, we s...
Aug 18, 2011•53 min
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 recently, he co-starred with Michael Cera in the webseries Bad Dads . Will sat down with us last week...
Aug 11, 2011•26 min
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’s also one of the newest writers on the Adult Swim show Delocated. A few weeks ago, we sat down with...
Aug 04, 2011•45 min
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 numerous TV commercials. A few weeks ago, he came over to the (always hot) Wrestling Team apartment, a...
Aug 03, 2011•49 min
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 also has academic roots and earned his Masters in Human Rights from the London School of Economics. A...
Aug 01, 2011•1 hr
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 iO Theater, the Chicago Sketchfest and the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. A few weeks ago, Nick c...
Jul 31, 2011•1 hr 9 min
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 videos. Pete also is a voice actor on many things including the great cartoon Ugly Americans. He also ...
Jul 31, 2011•1 hr 4 min
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 also co-hosts a fantastically funny bad movie podcast called The Flophouse. The bad movie conceit is u...
Jul 31, 2011•1 hr 2 min
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 stage shows and videos, garnering the People’s Choice Award at 2010's New York Television Festival for ...
Jul 30, 2011•1 hr 23 min
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 won the MacArthur Genius Award for his work. Ben's work is both surreal and grounded - odd worlds, ...
Jul 30, 2011•47 min
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 Colbert was getting his own show, Opus knew he immediately wanted to write for him. Five writing packet...
Jul 30, 2011•1 hr 23 min
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 fictional facade on stage, and he began true storytelling, starting The Risk! podcast and live show. U...
Jul 30, 2011•1 hr 7 min
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, and it is that person's job to make the audience laugh. There is no other excuse. And this approac...
Jul 30, 2011•1 hr 25 min
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 talent coordinator, as well as a frequent guest on The Late Show with David Letterman. In 2008, he re...
Jul 30, 2011•1 hr 21 min
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 and jocularly on any subject put before him. In mid-March, Greg was nice enough to sit down with us ...
Jul 30, 2011•59 min
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 number of sketches on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. The two stopped by the Wrestling Team apartment ...
Jul 30, 2011•58 min
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 and Beautiful Cop, moving from improv to sketch to eventually stand-up and produces the shows Turtle...
Jul 29, 2011•1 hr 12 min
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 different characters, from unabashed Philly fan Philly Boy Roy to geriatric Fonzie-inspiration The Gorch and...
Jul 29, 2011•44 min
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-year lists. McCarthy sat down with us mid-December to discuss comedy as recapturing childhood, music...
Jul 29, 2011•1 hr 18 min
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. "My Year of Flops" started running regularly in The A.V. Club in 2007, and Rabin's wit and genuinen...
Jul 29, 2011•31 min
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 variety show Hot Tub, have written and starred in an award-winning Edinburgh Fringe Festival show, and c...
Jul 29, 2011•53 min
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 human being, many people may know her as nice to talk to. We sat down with Andrea last week to talk...
Jul 29, 2011•58 min
Elliott Kalan is an Emmy-award winning writer for The Daily Show and co-host of the amazing bad movie podcast The Flophouse (which is worth listening to regardless of whether you like bad movies or not, as the effortless riffing and chemistry between Elliott, Dan and Stuart is delightful). Simply put, Kalan is a funny guy. Quick-witted, amiable and hard-working, he has progressed from intern to PA to writer at The Daily Show, and in this episode we sit down to discuss that journey as well as Kaf...
Jul 28, 2011•1 hr 20 min
Rue Brutalia is Jason Kalter and Jon Pack, a sketch duo that's been performing here in New York since 2006/2007. The duo met in one of Kevin Allison's sketch classes at The PIT and struck up a fast friendship and writing/performing relationship. Rue Brutalia's sketches are delightful and absurd and fun and playful, and the two have been picking up steam lately. They not only performed at NYC Sketchfest for their third year in 2010, but they also helped to produce the festival. Kalter and Pack ar...
Jul 28, 2011•1 hr 6 min
