Upright Improv

The Upright Citizens Brigade is the premier sketch and improv theater in New York, with alums crowding the roster of SNL, the Comedy Channel and HBO. So you might expect their performance space to be sleek and well-tended. Instead, the west side Chelsea venue is a dim, somewhat shabby basement with four or five rungs of ramshackle seating surrounding a bare floor that serves as the stage. What's lacking in theatrical infrastructure, however, is made up for by audience enthusiasm, which was brimming over at last night's performance by Tami Sagher and Chris Gethard, two veteran comedy writers who also do improv.

The audience was clearly there to laugh, which they began to do almost before the first word was spoken onstage. From that point on, every phrase out of the performers' mouths -- whether setup, punchline, or random murmur -- was greeted with the same raucous outbursts. Perhaps, this was the audience's fine-tuned sensitivity to improvisation, feeling the performers reach for the next line, squealing with delight at what they managed to come up with.  Or perhaps it was an as-yet-unnamed phenomenon I've been noticing among certain comedy goers -- their habit of indiscriminately laughing at everything. A laughter which is more about showing (to themselves as much as others) that they Get It, than about the humor of the joke that they get.

In any case, the laughter was misplaced, as the first part of Sagher & Gethard's performance was not very funny.  The promising comic premise -- a couple's dissection of an incident in which the wife was "forced" to sodomize her husband's ass -- meandered into a long, drawn-out relationship melodrama. Along the way there were references to twitter and hashtags, all met with loud guffaws, the word "hashtag" having become for white millennial audiences what the word "motherfucker" was to a '90s Def Jam one -- a punchline without the need of joke.

The second half of their show, however, was pure brilliance! A Groundhog's Day like repetition of the same scene, each time more elaborate with a new and ingenious twist. A woman rouses a napping man to eat the pie she has just baked. The man compares napping to time travel.  A metaphysical dispute ensues, and the man retreats.  The scene repeats -- now the man has built an actual time machine and wanders the spacetime continuum in search of "a fucking piece of pie". The scene repeats -- the woman has discovered the time machine and has replicated herself....

As the performers spurred each other to greater heights of improvisational invention, the manic laughter subsided. The audience watched in rapt attention, ensnared in the crazed logic of the story emerging before them, laughing only at those points where things suddenly came together in a fit of comic genius. The Game was on, and we were all in the Zone.