Del Close taught a long-form improvisation style called the Harold, in which a five- to ten-person team gets a suggestion from the audience and then performs a thirty-minute, entirely improvised show inspired by the suggestion. For example, if the suggestion was “hot dog,” you might see sketches where the actors played hot dogs in a package or were hot-dog vendors at a Cubs game. When performed by an experienced team, the Harold is an almost religious experience, where the players form a “group mind” and communicate wordlessly, anticipating where the joke is going. But when performed by rank beginners, like my team, the results were usually thirty minutes of grinding hell for the audience.
My time in Chicago was fun. We drank a lot, smoked a ton of grass, and occasionally went harder. I was twenty years old and I was a bit of a wild animal, taking real pride in the volume of my substance intake. One night, I dropped acid with some guys from one of the top improv teams, which included Farley. We were flying, barhopping, and nearly breaking ribs from laughter. Eventually, we stopped in to At the Tracks, the bar where our performance stage was, to have a drink. We were parked at the bar, drinking it dry, when I noticed some of the guys making their way toward the stage. Soon enough, they were all onstage, tripping their faces off, asking for a suggestion. A suggestion was thrown out, and Farley and the rest of the team performed a forty-five-minute, fully improvised show that was one of the funniest I’ve ever seen.
The relationship between drugs, alcohol, and comedy is complicated. Certainly, the great unlocking agent is marijuana and some of the funniest stuff ever was written in that altered state of mind. Broken Lizard has written our fair share of jokes that way, including the “meow” joke and the resurrection of Landfill as his twin brother, Landfill 2. Yes, the vast majority of writing is done sober, but smoke with the right group of people who are all vibing on the same idea, and magic can happen. But let me be clear. Smoking pot every day won’t get you my job. The heavy lifting in scriptwriting requires an immense amount of structural outlining—work you simply can’t do in anything but a clear state of mind.
When I listen to old-timers lecture us on how it was okay for them to smoke grass and do coke and write comedy, but no one else should, I cringe. So I’m not going to judge my twenty-year-old self. He was fun and loved the nightlife.
And certainly there are people, like Chris, who went off the rails with alcohol, coke, and the harder stuff. And while it’s sad to have lost him, it doesn’t diminish how fun it was to party with him. Chris, in a bar, was a blazing ball of fun who was so full of life. I remember, fondly, spending a Saturday afternoon doing lines, drinking beers, and cracking hours and hours of jokes with him. We actually videotaped the whole thing. I have no idea where that tape is—it’s probably in some dusty box in a basement in the Midwest. On reflection, while Chris’s death was not entirely shocking, it was quite sad.
It’s a complicated topic. I’ve been close to some people who have had serious substance abuse issues, people who seemed to be wired that way by their genes. But if I’m being honest, the vast majority of people have no trouble with alcohol and drugs at all, which is hard to tell because the public conversation seems to be only about addiction.
I heard a Saturday Night Live original cast member talk about cocaine use at the show, and he said, “We didn’t know that cocaine was addictive. Addiction wasn’t a thing back then. We just knew it was fun, it helped you stay up late, and you wanted more.”
Eventually people did get addicted, though, and the eighties addiction/recovery culture was born. When my friends and I first got into it, we had heard about addiction, so we looked at alcohol and drugs with a wary eye—we knew the dangers of overdoing it.
Look, if you’re young and reading this, me telling you not to try alcohol and drugs is fine and responsible, but you’re probably gonna do what you want to do anyway. So what I will say to you that you should listen to is: Take these substances very seriously, because if you have the addictive gene(s), recognizing it early may save you from a life of hardship, seclusion, and possibly early death. And listen to your body. If your body is telling you that something doesn’t agree with you, don’t do it. Your friends may give you shit, but trust me, they’ll move on when they realize you don’t care. Don’t drive, fight, or go to work or school high. Go to school, learn, do your homework, and become as smart as you can. The most successful comedians and writers are well-read and learned how to write. Acting like a stoned goofball is fun and sometimes funny, but it won’t help you make it in show business long term.
Okay, enough of the lectures. Back in Chicago . . . My experience performing improv with my newbie team wasn’t paying off. We weren’t getting laughs, and it didn’t look like they’d come before I had to head back to Colgate. I decided sketch might be a better idea for me, so I went to The Second City to see if I could take classes there. But The Second City required an audition to take classes, and since I was in town for only a few more months, they wouldn’t grant me an audition. It became clear that if I was going to pass my “career test,” which was to get laughs from strangers, I was going to have to go it alone. I was going to have to do stand-up.
Damn it.
—
The first stand-up I remember seeing was Bill Cosby on The Tonight Show. (Sigh.) After that, I became obsessed with Steve Martin’s album Let’s Get Small, which I listened to on repeat. When I saw the film Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, a show he did in Long Beach, California, I remember thinking, This feels real. That one performance is the best recorded stand-up act of all time, because it captured Pryor’s immense charisma, his crackling brainpower, his perfect timing, and his courage to be dead honest about topics no one else was willing to tackle. That Pryor was black meant something to me, even if it was in a subconscious way. Sure, there were no Indians doing this job, but Pryor and I shared the same skin color, so maybe . . . ?
His riff on taking acid manages to simultaneously be honest, emotional, bizarre, and hilarious. Later, Pryor talks about being so high on coke that he went outside to his driveway and pulled a gun on his car. He shot the engine and the car said, “Fuck it.” When the cops came, Pryor went inside because, as he said, “They don’t kill cars. They kill nig-gars!” If you aspire to be a stand-up, watch that film.
In 1980, Eddie Murphy joined Saturday Night Live and broke the country’s mental chains to the original cast. In 1982, I saw the tough and hilarious film 48 Hrs. The film starred Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte and is still my favorite film of all time. When I heard Eddie Murphy was coming to Chicago with his Delirious tour, I begged my dad to take me. We sat in the back row of the balcony of the Chicago Theater, and it was otherworldly. That show had a massive impact on my young brain. Was this really a job?
What makes someone think they can step onto a stage and make a room full of strangers laugh? I’d always gotten laughs from my pals, so I thought I was funny, but standing on a stage with a microphone and a light in my face sounded like a nightmare. But my test was my test, so I had to either make strangers laugh, or start applying to law school.
I looked through my journals, which Del had asked us to keep, and found a couple of ideas I thought I could turn into a stand-up act. After a week of writing, I grabbed a copy of the Chicago Reader and found an open mic at a dive bar in Lincoln Park called the Matchstick. I had ten minutes of material, which I rehearsed until it was rote.
On Tuesday, I drove to the club and put my name on the list. The MC told me I was going up fifth, and my stomach started to churn. I went to the bar and ordered a Tom Collins, which inexplicably was my drink at the time. I downed that and hit the bathroom, where I took a liquid nerve shit. For the next fifteen years, I would take one of those before every stand-up show I’d ever perform.
Afterward, I went back to the bar, drank another Tom Collins, and lit a Camel Light—bars were fun back then! I rolled through my act one more time as the fourth comic wrapped up his set. It was
time for my stand-up debut. I pressed record on my cassette player and exhaled as the MC grabbed the mic. “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage . . . Jake Chandler!”
Okay. I admit it. I had a stage name—actually I had a couple of stage names. After I’d gone up a couple of times as Jake Chandler, a woman in the audience approached me and told me she thought I should just be myself. So I changed my stage name to Jay Chandras. I was convinced that I wouldn’t make it in show business with my thirteen-letter Indian name. Sure, Schwarzenegger had fourteen letters, but he was already famous from weight lifting when he started acting, so he had no choice. Krishna Pandit Bhanji changed his name to Ben Kingsley. Even Fisher Stevens’s name isn’t Fisher Stevens—it’s Steven Fisher. Not a big revelation, but vaguely interesting, right?
That night, when I took the stage, I was so nervous that I raced through all ten minutes of my material in five minutes. The jokes weren’t brilliant—I did something about how you could tell what car someone drove by their race. Meh. The performance wasn’t brilliant either, but it wasn’t bad, and I didn’t bomb. There were silences, but there were also laughs—strangers’ laughs. Enough that I became hungry for more. Over the next four months, I went up several more times, which resulted in a mix of great shows, good shows, and some outright bombs. The strange thing was that the act was exactly the same each time. It was the same jokes, but with wildly different responses. What the hell? How could I eliminate the crushing bombs, where an audience stared at you with seeming hatred, refusing to make any noise beyond a bored sigh? I looked for patterns. And then I found one.
Open mics usually have about ten comics, with each performing for about five to seven minutes. The MC makes a list and tells you exactly when in the night you’re going to go up. If he told me I was going up ninth, I’d hit the bar, and when the sixth comic would take the stage, I’d go outside and start pacing around, running through my jokes, looking like a madman. Then I would slip back in, with my set fully memorized, and take the stage. When I did this, the result would usually be either an average show or an outright bomb. However, when the MC told me I was going up ninth but then accidentally called me up fourth, I had to scramble. I knew my act, but I hadn’t had time to fully memorize it. I’d take the stage and perform my jokes, but because my jokes weren’t fully memorized, my performance had a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants spontaneity to it, which usually resulted in big, constant laughs.
So wait. The better prepared I was, the worse I did? And the less prepared I was, the better I did? What kind of fucking business was this?
When I told my mother about my discovery, she had some advice.
“Stop memorizing your act. Just be confident in your jokes and let ’em fly!” I told her that felt like skydiving without a chute and she said, “What’s the worst that can happen? They don’t laugh? Embrace it. You need to love the good and the bad equally, because life is full of both. If you can love standing onstage with a mic in your hand and a light in your face, in front of an audience of people who hate you, then you’ll be bulletproof.” This from the woman who forbade the use of umbrellas in our family because “the rain is as good as the sun.” (To this day, I still don’t use them.)
The next time I went up, I was bombing. Desperate, I tried to create some fake excitement by telling the crowd that I would improvise some jokes on any topic they threw out. “Any topic that begins with the letter A.” I already had three minutes on automobiles, so when someone said something like, “Armadillo,” I planned to say, “Okay, ‘armadillo’ begins with A and so does ‘automobile,’ so here are some jokes about automobiles.” It was lame, I know. When I asked the crowd for an A word, a woman yelled out, “Asshole!” It was the first laugh of the night, and it was at me—only seven more minutes of this nightmare to go. With nowhere else to turn, I decided to try out Mom’s advice. I smiled, acknowledging the heckler’s line.
“That was the best joke we’ve heard tonight.” The crowd laughed again, this time at least partly with me. From there, I pulled out of the nosedive and salvaged the rest of my act with more of a loose, spontaneous feel.
Stand-up, done right, should feel like you’re in a bar telling funny stories to your friends. Over-memorizing doesn’t work because it makes the story feel canned, which the audience can sense. A skilled storyteller can take a good story and make it great with a relaxed attitude. A bad storyteller can tell the same story, word for word, but if it’s over-rehearsed or if the storyteller seems nervous, the story will fall flat. In other words, it’s great to rehearse, but it’s just as important to make it seem like it’s the first time you’ve ever told this story. Today, one of my favorite things to do is to go on a stage with newly written, untested material. Are these jokes funny? We’re about to find out. It’s an adrenaline-soaked high-wire act—it’s a feeling you can only get from walking onstage without an exact plan.
After seven months in Chicago, I had made a decision. I was going to try this. Not as a stand-up, necessarily. I would continue to do some of that, but I wanted to try to make it as a comic actor. Maybe I’d try to get on . . . Saturday Night Live? I didn’t know, but that could be figured out later, because it was time to go back to my favorite place on earth—Colgate.
CHAPTER 5
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Colgate Part 2: The Seeds of Broken Lizard
In the spring of 1989, I was back at Colgate, excited to see my old pals and finish my junior year. While I was gone, a sophomore named Jonathan Glatzer founded the Kinetic Theater Group, a student-run outfit devoted to staging avant-garde plays. Glatzer adapted an edgy version of the biblical story The Book of Job and cast me as Job. During rehearsals, Jon and I talked about my experiences in the real world of the Chicago comedy scene, and I’m sure I exaggerated my improv prowess. I know I did. I also lamented the fact that Colgate had no improv group. It would be so nice to introduce Colgate to improv. Chicago was 720 miles away. Who was gonna call me on my bullshit?
In June of that year, Glatzer was invited to study at the British American Drama Academy (BADA) in London, which would take him away from Colgate for the fall semester. He wanted to go, but he was afraid that leaving would doom his fledgling theater group. So he decided to ask four people to direct one-act plays under the Kinetic Theater banner. When he called me he dove right in.
“Hey, bud, how about starting that improv group you’re always talking about?”
Look, I was flattered. But what I knew that Jon did not was that I was not qualified to start an improv group. I was a beginner and I sucked at improv. But Jon said that he needed me, and since everyone is a sucker for being needed, I was willing to consider going against my gut and just winging it.
There was another problem. Having earned four AP college credits in high school, I was in a position where I needed only two more credits to graduate. So I signed up for two history seminars, one of which met on Tuesday at seven thirty P.M. and the other on Thursday at seven thirty P.M. I was free the rest of the time—free to go out every night and drink, smoke, and joke my way through a fucking epic senior year. Frankly, I wasn’t sure how starting an improv group fit into this schedule.
I was also worried about the embarrassment factor. Colgate is a phenomenal school, but it didn’t have the richest tradition of support for the school’s theater program. If we went to the trouble of creating an improv group, would anyone even come? And if they did, and we sucked, wouldn’t that just be humiliating? I had a great thing going at Colgate, so why take the risk? So, I told Jon no and forgot about it.
In July, a couple of friends and I camped out in the parking lot of Alpine Valley, where we saw four Grateful Dead shows. We dropped acid, danced in circles, and had a lot of good fun . . . in relative moderation. When I returned home, a message was waiting. It was Glatzer. “I’ve got three directors doing one-act plays for me this fall. I need a fourth. Will you reconsider and do the improv show?”
Since
I was feeling a little jelly headed, I told him I’d think about it. So, after we hung up, I called my pal Kevin Heffernan, who was at his house in Connecticut.
KEVIN HEFFERNAN
I first met Kevin in the foyer of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity house at Colgate, in the fall of our freshman year. We were eighteen and part of the new pledge class. At that moment, we were standing in a semicircle, being yelled at by our pledge masters, who were informing us that we were certainly the worst pledge class in the history of the house. It was all good fun and it was meant to bond us, which it did. In case you’re wondering, we never got hazed at Beta. I was never punched, I never sat in urine, I was never branded, I never grabbed anyone’s dick, nor did I fuck a sheep. As I’ve said, our house was devoted to drinking, telling jokes, and insulting one another, and I couldn’t have had a better time.
Heffernan was funny and smart and had a ton of charisma, and we hit it off. We spent a lot of hours together, cracking jokes and watching the three VHS tapes that had been randomly left in my room—Fletch; Vernon, Florida; and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. I also gave him his nickname, “Queen.” It was in the winter of our junior year. Kevin had just showered and was coming out of the bathroom as I was going in. His hair was tousled, his skin was winter white, and he was wearing his royal blue towel, above his nipples, which made him look like the queen of England might look if she came out of our bathroom. I started calling him “Queen,” and since he didn’t love the nickname, it stuck. There are probably a hundred people who call him “Queen,” or derivations of, like, “Queeno” or “Queen Bee.” For a while, his mother called him “Queenie.” At his parents’ barbecue, his father took me aside. “You know there’s a certain connotation to the name ‘Queen,’ right?”
I laughed. “Yeah, but this is royal.”
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