Matt Walsh was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1964. He attended Northern Illinois University. Walsh studied with Del Close at the Improv Olympic and was a member of Second City’s Comedy Troupe in Chicago. He is a founding member of the famed Upright Citizens Brigade improv group and has appeared in numerous films including Old School, Road Trip, School For Scoundrels, Role Models, Semi-Pro, and The Hangover.
WALSH: When I was in high school I was your typical goofball. I was a class clown. I got the trophy. I went to Northern Illinois University for college. I only took one acting class, which was one of my few good grades in college. My senior year of college a friend of mine had seen a show at Second City in Chicago. And at the end of the show they mentioned that Second City offered improv classes. This was 1986 or so. My second senior year, which was my junior year of college, I spent a year in Europe just trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I lived in Salsberg, Austria for a year and I traveled a lot. I went to Morocco for a month and Turkey for a few weeks. I lived with a Japanese guy from Tokyo for the year. It was a really enlightening, educational year for me. I picked up a little German over the course of the year after living with an Austrian family and just reading the European version of Time or Newsweek. I got a new view on the press. I met a lot of people who were really well traveled and had lived around the world. It gave me a different perspective on things. At that time Regan was President and there was a lot of Anti-Americanism.
I was put in the position of kinda defending my country, although I did not vote for Regan. So I often would take different stances just to hear people’s different perspectives. I really enjoyed it. I also enjoyed the way that people would sit at a picnic bench and would meet people they didn’t know and just talk about the world. They were very open. It was all very educational for me. I remember sitting with these British people at a bed and breakfast in Normandy, France and they were talking about how when the old leaders die the old grudges will go away. So people who’s parents were bombed die, their grandchildren will no longer have the same grudges. Their point was eventually that the wall will eventually fall down. And then literally two months later, the Berlin Wall fell down. So I was sitting in France and had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.
During my last year in college [in Illinois], I would drive to Chicago to take improv classes. At the time it felt like it was the only thing I was good at. I was a psychology major and thought I might become a counselor. So when I got out of college I worked at a hospital on the psych ward as a counselor. Working on a psych floor was terribly depressing and terribly difficult. It was kids between the ages of 12 and 20 who were suicidal, anorexic, and pre-schizophrenic. At nights I did comedy. I moved in with four guys who were in my sketch group. So it was psychology at day, comedy at night.
We did sketch shows and had minor success in the north side of Chicago. We put together a run. And then I took a break and went back to Europe for three or four months and just knocked around. I went back to psychology because I thought I was going to quit comedy. At that time our sketch group, which was called “Department of Works,” had broken up. When we broke up I started to do stand up.
Two things had happened when I got back from Europe in 1990. One was I stopped doing this sketch show and started doing stand up. The second was I started taking classes at the Improv Olympic. My brother, Pat, had taken classes at Improv Olympic with Del Close. Del Close had just returned from L.A., where he had tried being an actor again. I think at that time he had been trying to go to daily auditions and trying to catch a break for himself. He had just gotten back and was a little disillusioned from his experience.
Del was extremely interesting, brilliant, and mean. Unfortunately he spent a lot of time being really mean to people. But he was really brilliant. He was the champion of improv. He spent his life championing improv, carrying the torch, and keeping it alive.
So I started doing stand up, and that was when everyone was doing stand up comedy. And I was doing the Improv Olympic at the same time. At that time Matt Besser came to Chicago from Colorado. We had just met at this stand up club called The Roxy. And he had given me some sketches to read, which I never did read. He got pissed off at me. We didn’t really make friends right away, but I told him about Improv Olympic and he came there and saw it and started doing shows. So we met people like Adam McKay, Horatio Sanz, and Armando Diaz. I was still doing stand up. Matt Besser was still doing stand up too. And we started at that point what became the beginnings of Upright Citizens Brigade. It was me, Matt Besser, McKaye, Horatio, Amando and this guy Rick Roman, who has since passed away.
So we did shows. We did shows at the Roxy, Sheffield’s, and Cafe Voltaire. At the time I personally had a lot of anger. We did a lot of really in your face, aspiring to be punk rock, what we saw to be visionary comedy. I’m sure a lot of it was not funny to the audience. A lot of it was us getting a case of beer, going down in some basement and getting a little liquored up, and just having scenes turn into fights over the Constitution of the United States. And it would get really absurd. We had a scene where it was a planet where everything was Phil Collins. So everything on the planet was made up of Phil Collins songs.
I don’t think I drank too much during the shows, but afterward… Chicago is a very drinking friendly town. It’s a very social thing to do. I can remember drinking all night, till seven in the morning, with McKay and Besser. We drove up to a hotel by O’Hare Airport because I remembered they had a free breakfast buffet. So we drove up there all drunk and hungover and they were opening the breakfast buffet. The three of us, haggard comedians walked in. And [the hotel management] was like, “Do you have your ticket?” And we were like, “Oh he’s got it.” So we’d eat free Embassy Suites breakfasts.
We did this one thing when we tried to storm into a radio station at five in the morning at the Hancock Building pretending we were “A Flock of Seagulls” trying to get on the air, while doing terrible British accents.
HYLTON: Without the hair?
WALSH: Besser had the hair. I was in the background. Adam was probably our manager or something.
HYLTON: Several other comics said to me that in improv there is a common goal to avoid performing characters more than one time. So, once the performance was done, that was it. If that’s true, in a sense improv is a rather romantic art form.
WALSH: Yeah, the snobbery of it is to never recreate something from the past. It really is about staying in the moment and really challenging yourself. And that was the etiquette of those who really respected it and got esteem in that group of improvisers, which we all wanted. We all wanted to be respected by our peers. There were so many really funny people around then. But if they saw you always doing your cop character or fireman, or something like that, they would be like, “Oh he’s coasting.” It’s almost like selling out or commercializing the art form. And it’s silly because a lot of those things should have been written down and could have been turned into many other things. Yes, it’s true that the goal and the instincts of what you learned in that environment was to challenge yourself and really be in the moment. “Don’t apply your bag of tricks to what is happening on stage.” Instead you’re supposed to look for something that is authentic, something that is happening between you and this person, and see where it can go. And it is sort of a selfish thing. It’s like in jazz when you’re playing with somebody and you’re riffing away and you’re in the groove and then you walk off stage and you’re like, “Man, we had it.” And that is what you’re learning. That’s what you’re chasing, what they call a “Harold.” When you’re doing long form structured improv shows, the joke was, “Did you see Harold? Did he appear?” “No, he didn’t appear.”
And the funniest person always won out with the audience. But people always respected really funny, smart, game playing moves where you would bring a character back from three scenes ago and you’d realize that the character was related to someone in the present scene. That’s the kind of stuff we would see and say, “Man, that was really smart.”
So, after I ran into Matt Besser we started doing Upright Citizens Brigade. I would do stuff at UCB and then I’d do stuff at a place called “The Annoyance Theater” too. And Matt Besser did stuff there as well. We would improvise parody musicals there. I spent three years doing that. The Real Life Brady Bunch show came out of there. That was back in the early 1990s. I went to L.A. to do the Brady Bunch and we also traveled to do it in New York for a few weeks. That was great. New York was such a different, exciting place back in the 1990s.
HYLTON: And when did Amy Poheler enter the picture?
WALSH: Amy came into the group when I was doing work with the Annoyance Theater. She had seen me do a show called Brain Warp, which was a late night comic action adventure show. It was one of the first shows she’d seen in Chicago. And then she got pulled into the Improv Olympic. She started dating Matt Besser and doing UCB. In the mean time I got hired over at Second City, from the work I was doing at the Annoyance. I had met Ian Roberts once before, but I got to know him at Second City. He had started doing UCB full time with Matt Besser. The cast was a floaty collective that Matt and Ian kept going for a long time. When I got into Second City I officially met Amy. She had recently been hired by Second City. I got back into UCB full time then. Matt, Ian, and Amy were looking to do another show and they asked me to do it again. So we all agreed to do a few shows in Chicago. We decided that we would give it six months to go to New York. So we packed it up, with three shows that we had run in Chicago. It was 1996.
We came to New York. I drove out in my VW Van with Horatio [Sanz] and the van kept breaking down. We broke down in Pennsylvania. There was a snowstorm in the spring of 1996. New York had gotten three feet of snow. And the heater broke, so I kept pouring antifreeze into the heater but nothing would work. We pulled into some diner at six in the morning where we slept for three hours sitting up. We were so frozen from the cold. But we drove out in March of 1996 and we started doing shows in May. We had two shows up in a place called Tribecca Lab and another place called Red Room.
We wanted to do an improv show that was basically what we had experienced in Chicago, which was a place where our funny friends could get together and do improv together and do whatever we wanted. It was low manitence with anything goes. That’s how “Asscatt” came about. Asscat is basically equivalent to Jackass, really. We were on a stage and would be yelling back and forth to one another “Asscat!” We would completely alienate the audience. Matt [Besser] was stressed out because the owner of the Club, was like, “This better be good.” So the minute that happened Horatio and Ian both just started fucking around. That’s where Asscat comes from. And we almost instantly found this audience, from our friends including McKay, and Andy Richter. And before we knew it, we had lines waiting to see us. And we couldn’t believe it.
A guy named Kent Alterman liked our show. We did shows at Luna Lounge where Todd Barry, Sarah Silverman, and others did comedy. We did it every Monday. So we started building a crowd. And at the same time we were teaching classes [in improv]. Once we started teaching classes we got a few working gigs. We did the first comedy show for Microsoft on the Internet. Eventually, we got a pilot for comedy central, made a pilot and went to Aspen Colorado in 1998 for the Comedy Festival. Shortly after the Aspen Fest our pilot got picked up. Simultaneously with that, we started to open our own theater. It was really hectic. We were filming a TV show, teaching classes, opening a theater, and doing two shows over the weekend.
We all had our own responsibilities [in the group.] Ian literally had the UCB bank in a white envelope in his wallet. So if we needed petty cash he would pull out the envelope and hand it out. We would store props in our apartments. Matt Besser was really good at creating the fliers and organizing the visual aspects of shows. And we all wrote. We would go to the [parks in New York ] with a bullhorn and try to get people to come to the shows. Really, you didn’t have an option if you wanted people to come to your shows.
Once the theater was open, we hired someone to run the theater. I think Ian’s wife was the first person who ran the theater. It was a really nasty, awful, old strip club. We tore it up and helped build the stage. The people who were taking classes loved the theater, and what it meant to their lives, so much that they actually came in and built and hammered the theater together with us. They were people we had not known months or a year earlier and they helped create it. It was amazing.
And initially it was really hard. With five dollar ticket prices we struggled to keep it going. It took a long time, and eventually it came about.
HYLTON: And how did your series Dog Bites Man come about?
WALSH: Well, I had worked on The Daily Show for some time so they knew me. And the project actually came from NBC. They wanted to do a show with Dan Mazer, the guy who did Ali G. I think my manager sent them footage of me on The Daily Show. I had three meetings with Dan and we eventually auditioned in front of Dreamworks executives. We did scenes in front of them. It was really hard to perform in those circumstances. It was hard to know what was going to play in that room.
HYLTON: And did the Studio give you pretty free reign to improvise material for the show?
WALSH: With Dog Bites Man we did have room to improvise. I went in with a list of serious questions and a list of joke questions. And then if the [interviewee] gave me something I didn’t expect, then I’d explore that in the same way that Charlie Rose might do in an interview. And also, because there were four of us, one of the other actors might come in with their own material and reactions to the interviews. So there was a lot of improvisation, but it was very structured at the same time. We did write a ton of jokes and story lines that were happening in the background. There was a lot of improv based upon the stories and ideas of each show. But we didn’t use every joke, because we use hundreds of jokes. Sometimes it’s just too out of the blue to introduce some of these jokes that we’re aiming to use.
HYLTON: How much control did you have over the content of the show?
WALSH: It would be easy to say the Network is such a nightmare, they change everything, and they are so stupid. But, in reality, [Comedy Central] was great. They had concerns over things like, “Are we going too far?” They have arbitrary standard lines. They can get away with more than they choose to get away with. But frequently they have some really good story notes. They would look at something and say, “Yeah, it’s funny but we need more story in this place between these two characters.” So they actually were helpful in the process at times.
HYLTON: Can you tell me about the improvisational work you’ve done with Todd Phillips on movies like Old School, School For Scoundrels, and The Hangover?
WALSH: I’ve worked on a lot of Todd Phillips movies and he has a very improv-friendly approach. Every time we film he takes a look at the script and is like, “I don’t like this. What else can we say?” And it never goes in as written. So I might have an idea and I’d be like, “Can I say this, or what if we did this?” Like when I did Old School we talked about the Owen Wilson slap scene. That wasn’t in the script but we sort of worked it out on set. I’m really happy about being a part of [Todd's] movies like The Hangover.
