Chris looked at me and screamed, “I crashed your car! I crashed your car!” Why did he do it? I never quite got a good answer from him. I don’t think he even knows. He wasn’t drunk. He was just a sixteen-year-old doing what sixteen-year-olds sometimes do. They fuck up. The car was totaled and the fireman who arrived first was looking for bodies. We were lucky to be alive and, aside from some small cuts, unharmed.
Five years later, at Colgate, I was cashing in my chit by making him design our poster. He looked up from his sketchbook. “What’s the name of the group?”
I shrugged. “Um, we haven’t come up with one yet. We want to avoid the cliché college sketch group names like ‘Strictly Giggles’ or ‘Funny Business’ or ‘The Kidders.’ We want something unique.”
Chris was an odd dude in the best way. On his sketch pad were drawings of birds of prey ripping flesh with their beaks. After a beat, he looked up. “What about ‘Charred Goosebeak’?”
Charred Goosebeak’s first show (the first of four) was on a snowy Wednesday night in November. We were scared, excited, and wondering what the hell was going to happen. Would we remember our lines? Would the audience laugh? Would there even be an audience? Wednesday was a big party night at Colgate, so we were concerned that people might just hit the bars instead. We built a stage and lined up three hundred folding chairs, hoping for the best. Forty people showed up, which was depressing, but it was showtime, so we put our hands in the middle and chanted, “Uno, dos, tres, no problemos!” (This is our pre-show chant to this day.) And we started the show. Copying SNL, I opened with a monologue, which we followed up with our sketches and videos. And you know what? It went well. The forty people who came laughed, and laughed often. When it was over, our relief was palpable. While it would have been great if more people had come, at least we knew that we weren’t going to be an embarrassment.
On Thursday, as we were getting ready backstage, our producer, Ira Liss, stuck his head in. “There’s a huge line out there! Huge! I’m gonna have to add more chairs!” We peered out to see that every seat was filled. Holy shit! Word of mouth from those forty people had gotten around. When I came out for the monologue, there was an air of expectation in the crowd—it was electric. The monologue and the first sketch killed, and we rolled from there, with big peals of constant laughter. After the show, the cast was giddy. We were on to something here.
Friday brought another sold-out show, with wall-to-wall laughs, where we actually had to turn people away.
We kept our run up, selling out the Saturday finale. Charred Goosebeak had planted a flag at Colgate. We had created something funny, unique, and risky, and we’d done it all on our own. Everyone in that cast felt it—this was going to continue.
We didn’t know it at the time, but two decisions we made that semester led directly to Broken Lizard’s eventual future in film: The switch from improv to sketch taught us how to write jokes, character, and story. Without that ability, we would have never had the confidence to try writing film scripts. Second, our decision to shoot videos allowed us to learn this very specific and technical art out of the broader public eye. And when I graduated, I had a bed of knowledge that made our videos that much more complex, interesting, funny, and technically sound.
In the spring, Charred Goosebeak added four new members: Jay Ward, Lauren Bright, Erik Stolhanske, and Paul Soter.
PAUL SOTER
Paul was a junior whom Heffernan and I first saw in the play Noises Off, and he stood out. We’d also seen Paul perform stand-up on a night when Erik and I also performed. Paul’s act was hilarious and inventive. The highlight was a bit on an Amish UPS service, where Amish guys lined up and passed a package hand to hand until it got to its destination. Paul turned out to be not only a great actor, but also a phenomenal writer. He has a great understanding of both big-picture story progression and minute joke structure. He always knows where the joke is. We also tend to be on the same side of the argument when it comes to rhythm and tone. To borrow a metaphor, we make good music together.
ERIK STOLHANSKE
The story of how I first met Erik Stolhanske is, well, it’s kind of crazy. During my sophomore fall, I was in the Arthur Miller play A Memory of Two Mondays. The theater department required actors to help build sets, so I woke up early on Saturday to do my part. Before I went to the shop, I popped into the kitchen for a little breakfast. While I was buttering an English muffin, our rush chairman, John, walked in. A rush chairman’s job is to recruit freshmen to join our fraternity, a job I didn’t envy. As much as I loved the house, it felt awkward coaxing freshman dudes to join. When John found out where I was going, he asked me to look out for a freshman from Minnesota named Erik Stolhanske. He was an actor and, apparently, cool. I told John okay, but I wasn’t really planning to come through.
In the shop, I was assigned a job staple gunning fabric onto a stage flat. After a while, a lanky, blond kid walked up out of a J.Crew catalog and introduced himself as “Erik Stolhanske from Minneapolis.”
I said, “I’m Jay from Chicago,” and he sat down next to me with his hammer, and we got to work. Erik and I hit it off, cracking jokes that veered quickly toward insult. Wanting to test his mettle a bit, I said, “John said you were cool, but I don’t really see it.” He smiled and then insulted the entire city of Chicago and all of its residents. The back-and-forth quickly devolved into which city was tougher, Chicago or Minneapolis. We traded barbs on the Bears and the Vikings, the Bulls and the Timberwolves, and so on. After I insulted Prince (whom I love), he’d had enough.
“Oh, you think you’re tough, huh? Okay, tough guy, if you’re so tough, can you do this?” And then he lifted his hammer and swung down hard, thwocking himself directly on his right anklebone. “Ahhhh!” Down he went, rolling around on the floor in pain, but smiling through tears.
I had to pause. This wasn’t where I had expected this to go. But I wasn’t going to let Chicago down, so I smirked at him, picked up the hammer, and short-swung down, popping my own right ankle. Ahhh! Holy shit did that hurt! I rolled around on the ground, knowing in my heart that I hadn’t hit myself as hard as he had. But still, ouch!
Erik was just getting started. “Okay, Chicago, let’s see what you’ve got.” Erik ran full speed at a cement wall and kicked it with the tip of his toe, in a way that can only be described as—as hard as you can. The sound was sickening. And down he went—“Ahhhhh!!” He was rolling around on the ground, grabbing his toe in clear agony, and through gritted teeth, he said, “Care to give up?”
Who was this fucking guy? That thought passed, because there was no way I was going to let this freshman from Minneapolis show me up. So I ran toward the same wall and kicked it really hard. Rather than sacrifice my toes, I kicked it with the ball of my foot. It hurt, and I went down holding my foot, again, knowing that his toe kick had been harder.
Erik nodded as if to say, Not bad. But he was already scanning the room . . . looking. Then, he smiled and picked up . . . a power staple gun, its cord snaking menacingly toward the socket.
Now, in your typical game of chicken, this would be your clucking point. Erik had overplayed his hand. Hitting yourself with a hammer? It hurt, but fine. Kicking a wall? Painful, but manageable. But a power staple gun? What the hell was he going to do with that? I didn’t need to call chicken because I knew he would. Erik whipped the cord for dramatic effect and then put the gun to his right calf. “Last chance?” he offered.
“Go for it.” I laughed cockily, knowing he was about to give.
Then Erik widened his eyes and yelled, “How now, Brown Cow!?” Boom! He fired a staple into his leg. “Ahhhhhh!” He dropped to the floor, rolling around in deep agony. I went to my knees to examine where the staple went in, hoping to see that he had pulled away at the last second and that it had only gone through his pants. But, sure enough, not only had the staple gone through his pants, but it was clearly anchored into his flesh beneath. This fuck
ing maniac had just shot a staple into his leg with a power staple gun to prove that he was tougher than me. He hopped around, wincing. “Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it.”
I was full of dread. I could chicken out now, but if I did, it would say something primal about me that could never be unsaid. Before this, I would have said that the human body couldn’t handle getting a staple blown into its flesh. And yet . . . Erik wasn’t a superhero. If he could handle it, so could I. What was the worst that could happen? It would hurt like hell going in and twice as bad coming out, but then it’d be a great story, right?
I slowly picked up the staple gun, looking at him. “How bad is it?”
He smiled with seriousness. “I think I fucked up. I might need to go to the hospital.”
Not seeing a way out, I decided to cheat (again). Instead of shooting the staple into my calf, I would shoot it into the back of my meaty thigh. That had to be less painful, right? I exhaled and pressed the staple gun against my thigh. Looking straight at him, I started to squeeze . . . But then . . .
Erik threw his hands up. “Don’t! Don’t! I have a fake leg! I have a fake leg!” And he grabbed his pants and ripped them up, popping the staple out and revealing his skin-colored polyurethane leg.
Erik was born without a right fibula, so his leg was amputated below his right knee when he was eighteen months old. Clearly, none of that affected his comic mind.
When I went back to our fraternity, I immediately found John. “We’ve gotta get this guy in the house.”
The spring shows were great, and our videos were both funnier and more technically sophisticated. We were quickly realizing how many different, and subtle, jokes you could tell with a camera.
Graduation was looming, which was, frankly, sad. I loved Colgate and knew that life would never again be this dreamy. Where you could drop into one of two bars in town and know a hundred people. Where you could walk down the hall, listening for music, and then smoke bongs and crack jokes with good friends until four in the morning. The four years I spent there were the funniest and most joyful of my life, and the friendships I made have endured well beyond graduation. I often wonder what would have happened if I had taken a different hallway that afternoon back in high school and not run into Lyssa. I wouldn’t have gone to Colgate. I would have never met the guys in Broken Lizard, and I would have never become a filmmaker. And Puddle Cruiser, Super Troopers, Club Dread, Beerfest, and The Slammin’ Salmon would have never happened. Life—is—fucking—random.
Leaving the cocoon of Colgate meant some big decisions were looming. I willed control of the group to Steve and Paul, whose job it would be to keep Charred Goosebeak running. I had decided to give show business a try, but I wasn’t sure from where to start. I could go to Chicago, where I could fall back into the Improv Olympic scene, but I was now such a devotee of sketch that improv no longer felt right.
I could go to Los Angeles, where most of show business was, but where I knew no one. I could move to San Francisco, where my girlfriend, Denise, was moving. There was a good stand-up scene there, and it was close to LA, so maybe I could have the best of both worlds. Or I could go to New York City. Alison, Ursula, and Heffernan had decided to move to New York, where they were all going to pursue non–show business careers. In their minds, performing comedy was over . . . unless I moved there and put a new group together. New York had another benefit. It was the primary destination for Colgate grads. If I went there, I would know literally hundreds of people.
In the end, though my heart was in San Francisco, we had made magic at Colgate, and I wanted to see if we could do it again, in Manhattan.
CHAPTER 6
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New York City: Hacking Our Own Path into Show Business
The summer after we graduated, six friends and I rented a van and drove across the country. We went to baseball games; we hit bars; we camped wherever possible. We even had a beard-growing contest. Used to smoking pot every day, we were flummoxed by the countrywide marijuana shortage that summer. We tried to buy in every town we stopped in, but it was all junk. In Minneapolis, we bought a green pot-like substance that bubbled and smelled of dish soap when we smoked it. We were staying at a friend’s lake house in northern Minnesota when one of my premed pals said he read that nutmeg could get you high. So we headed to the grocery store, where we bought eight tins of . . . nutmeg.
Back at the house, we drank beer and played hearts. Then, at around eleven P.M., we each poured a tin of powdered nutmeg into a glass of water and chugged it. Heffernan immediately threw up, but not wanting to be left behind, he poured another tin into more water and downed that. After a while, nothing happened. So we tried to smoke it, but it wouldn’t light. So we just kept drinking. At four A.M. it was time for bed, and still, no one was feeling anything. So we went to sleep.
When we woke in the morning, no one could move. We were all overcome with intense body fatigue, coupled with an overwhelming thirst. The fatigue was so debilitating that it was hard to even get up to go to the bathroom. Occasionally, someone would muscle up and crawl to the kitchen for a cup of thirst-quenching juice, while the rest looked on jealously. The new catchphrase of the trip became (British accent) “Bring me the juice! I desire the juice!” Fuckin’ nutmeg. Never again.
We kept heading west, taking turns reading the best sellers Bonfire of the Vanities and Silence of the Lambs. We played seemingly endless card games: hearts or deuces. We also never stopped arm-wrestling.
After seeing Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, we took a helicopter ride, flying over the area’s wildlife, which ended up being just a single goat.
Outside Aspen, we went to a place called Devil’s Punchbowl and jumped off forty-foot cliffs into the freezing river below.
In Wyoming, we were camping in the woods near Jackson Hole, drinking beer around a fire, not smoking pot, and arm-wrestling, when two cowboys walked out of the dark woods. One was eighteen and the other twenty, and they asked if they could have a couple of beers. After a couple of nervous minutes of us wondering whether they were two psychos coming to kill and eat us (Silence of the Lambs style), they admitted that they were in the woods stealing trees on protected land. We hit it off with these guys, and when the conversation turned to arm-wrestling, as all of our conversations did, the scrawny eighteen-year-old claimed to be the Wyoming State arm-wrestling champ. Yeah, right! Nobody believed him, so, we each challenged him, and he made quick work of all of us. We got drunk and he said that if we wanted to have some fun, we should ride a bucking bronco tomorrow in the rodeo. I swore that I would, but the next day we opted to go to the Schwarzenegger film Total Recall instead. Cluck, cluck, cluck.
We heard that the Grateful Dead were playing in Eugene, Oregon, in two days, so we drove fifteen hours and camped in the parking lot. We tried to buy pot and again struck out. Yeah, at a fucking Dead show. We did find a guy who had pot brownies, and we all ate one. When nothing happened, I assumed we’d been tricked again, so I ate another. Big mistake. I spent the next twelve hours in a nauseatingly uncomfortable high. I hate edibles. Like nutmeg, never again. The next day, we bought some Dead tickets, dropped some acid, and played a crazy six-hour game of tag during the show. After four great shows, we headed south to San Francisco, to see my girlfriend, Denise.
It was a magical road trip, and also a great way to transition out of Colgate. Afterward, I went back home to Chicago, where I spent the rest of the summer. The big news out of Chicago was that Chris Farley had joined the cast of SNL. That someone I knew had made it through to the Promised Land was cool, and proof that this dream might just be possible.
In the fall, I drove my packed car to New York City, where five friends and I rented a West Village duplex on Bleecker Street between Eleventh and Perry. I got a job at an art gallery as, essentially, muscle. I wore a suit and just kind of hung around, occasionally answering the phones. Kevin got a job as a paralegal
at a place where two of our Colgate friends were lawyers. We went out every night until four A.M., usually in the East Village, or sometimes to a bar called Richter’s, where Colgate grads congregated. If you were a Colgate alum and you walked into Richter’s, you might know between ten and fifty people at any time. Sometimes we’d go dancing with these hot Trinity College girls at Delia’s, a downtown spot. No matter what, we always ended our night either buying gyros at Karavas Place, or at the Corner Bistro, where we’d eat bacon cheeseburgers, smoke Camel Lights, and drink $2 McSorley’s or vodka gimlets. Afterward, we’d go back to our place, smoke grass, drink Bud tallboys, and laugh into the night. In the morning, an exhausted Kevin would go to work at his paralegal job and sometimes nap under the desk of his boss, who, lucky for him, was also a Colgate grad. Sometimes, Kevin would put his back to the door and the phone up to his ear and sleep. His colleagues would walk in with business and say, “Oops, sorry—you’re on the phone?” And they’d leave.
We weren’t doing any sketch because we didn’t have enough people. I was doing stand-up at open mic nights at a place called the Boston Comedy Club. I won an open mic contest one night when Dave Attell was hosting. On any night, you could see Attell, Louis C.K., Marc Maron, or Chris Rock perform. I knew none of them, but it was cool to watch.
That January, Steve Lemme was drunk up at Colgate and put his foot through a window, severing a tendon in his leg. He was on crutches, and that made getting to class, which was up a mile-long hill through the snow, impossible. Steve’s grades plunged and he dropped out and moved back to New York City. His parents were giving him grief, so he moved onto our couch.
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