By early 2004, I had completely immersed myself in the “adult experience,” as I like to call it. By that I mean “I realized that sometimes the things you want to do seem impossible to achieve, so let’s get drunk and be aimless.” I never had a HUGE problem with where I grew up. Suburban western Pennsylvania was pretty devoid of culture, and that forced my friends and I to go out and find it. We would go on journey’s around the tri-state area to find rare movies, see shows, and meet different people. It felt like a safe place to come back to during summers in college. We had a nice house, I had some money in my pocket, and all seemed well because I had friends around me.

The problem with coming back home after college, I quickly realized, is that I was one of very few people that did so. So many of my friends had moved on to different parts of the country, my mom had downgraded to an apartment (from other issues), and now here I was, still at the same job I had in college. The glaring boringness of my area was brought into pretty clear view, and I hated it. My fun came from my friends, not home, and now I didn’t know where I was.

Then I saw an ad in the paper for a theater group looking for people to do improv, and I jumped in.

Here’s a thing about me: every single time I get a new opportunity in comedy, I treat it like some type of massive hurdle, that the Gods of Life and Laughter are preparing to judge me. So I had psyched myself out to the point that I almost hyperventilated before going in front of a very relaxed, very kind group of people that were just looking for others with whom to have fun. I went in for my “audition” with a really stupid idea, that I thankfully changed my mind about, literally, as I had my hand on the door. I had stuffed my pants with tube socks. But I had taken over a dozen pair and stuffed my pants, so it looked like I had a small child in my pants, or the most sever hernia ever. I think I planned on treating it like it wasn’t a big deal, and then acting like a sock promoter that didn’t have any place else to put my giveaways. GUH. I unstuffed my pants, ran back to the car, and threw the socks inside. After meeting and talking with everyone for about 10 minutes, they asked me to start coming around for some improv. That was it. They were just looking for people that would be fun, and I fit the bill. They were a well-known group in western PA, called The Cellar Dwellers, despite performing ABOVE a bowling alley.

On my way home, I realized my crotch itched, because I still had a pair of tube socks in my pants the entire time I was meeting with these people. SIGH.

The Dwellers were (mostly) a good group of guys who were doing some fun stuff, and helped teach me the basic tenants of improv: specifically, YES AND. I took that one to heart. Larry Phyllis, one of the funniest goddamn people I’ve ever met, was kind enough to suffer through some of the most awful things I’ve ever pooped onto a stage. He helped me work up from “disgustipating” to “almost acceptable.” The improv was fun, but what I wanted a piece of was the other thing they were doing: sketch shows. These guys were writing a sketch show every 2 months and touring it around the area, and I really wanted to start working at sketch. I had helped write a sketch show in college that was much more successful than we’d ever expected it to be. Before the first night, we had said we’d be elated if 300 people came over the course of the 3 night run to see it. Well over 900 came out, and we received glowing reviews. It was such an amazing feeling, and I’d wanted to work at sketch since then. After building it up way too much in my own head, I finally asked if I could be a part of that side. Then I hit the type of wall I always expected from one of the members.

This guy, who I’ll call Guy, was horribly insecure, and had actually run off several people from the group with his ego and pompousness. He’s the kind of guy that, if any type of person of notoriety came to the area, he’d be sure to be around them and try to be seen by others being around them. I didn’t know that when I came to the theater one night and pitched a bunch of sketches. Of the dozen I pitched, there were 4 that I thought were really solid, and two that I was really proud of. To this day, the two I liked I think were still great ideas. He dismissed them with an eye roll, going so far as to say they were all terrible, then coming up with a sketch on his own about farting that he thought was hilarious, and I thought was pretty juvenile. Thanks again to Larry, though, I was in on the sketch side, but Guy was immediately on my red flag list.

I want to say here that I have no problem with the collaborative process. Some of my best work has come from collaboration. It’s only helped to strengthen my writing, and how to expand off a single idea. I love bouncing stand up material off other comedians, asking for help about how to push a joke further, where else it can go. What I have a problem with, is people leading with their ego. This felt like that type of situation. I could have been Bob Odenkirk pitching scripts, and he would have shot them down because they weren’t his.

We entered in to our first show with several fun scripts in tow. The show had an incredibly punny title, as was the wont of the group, that I’d never cared for, but the name of the show wasn’t the point. These guys were already more experienced at writing sketch, and I was ready to learn. James Catullo, one of the most quietly, intelligently hilarious people I’ve known, was always great for pointers, as was Little Mike, the guy I THOUGHT I may have problems with when we started. It’s funny; Little Mike and I couldn’t have been more opposite politically, but anytime I was hanging out with him, on or off stage, I had a blast. We’d always just keep our politics on the shelf. At first, I bristled at this because HOW WAS I GOING TO BE ABLE TO MAKE FUN OF BUSH WITH THIS CLOWN AROUND, but we found plenty of other things to make fun of together.

So during the writing process of the show, Guy disappeared with a few of the scripts, luckily none of mine, and rewrote them without any input from the writers, or even informing anyone that he was doing this. For the most part, he made them pretty hacky, and I remember a few tense moments where Guy had to be told what COLLABORATING meant, and even more tenseness when he didn’t want to listen.

Despite our first two sketch productions going well, it was quickly becoming apparent that I couldn’t work with Guy. His attitude, ego, and scene hijacking all completely clashed with what I wanted out of comedy. They were the only game in town, so I kept ignoring things he said or did because I wanted my stuff put up, and I wanted to be in other people’s sketches. I loved it. This baffled me too, because I never understood how someone who liked a lot of the same things I liked, who seemed to want the same things I wanted, could be such a jerkoff. I thought jerks only showed up in day jobs, or as jocks in high school movies? No such luck. I guess that was the lesson I learned there. Eventually, it got to a point for me where I couldn’t separate the person (who was okay…sometimes), and the comedian, who I couldn’t stand. After 3 full productions, and writing scripts for a fourth production, I was out. I withdrew pretty completely from the group because of it, which I still kinda regret. Doing improv on their tiny little theater on Friday nights was so much fun. I used to get genuinely excited at work thinking about performing with them that night. I would probably be a much better improviser at this point if I’d stuck with them, but c’est la vie.

The thing that this group did was pull me out of the funk I had been in for a while. With all the personal issues going on at home preventing me from getting on stage to do stand-up, they were a great outlet for me, keeping my comedy brain flexing instead of going to mush. Despite any crap I went through, I will always be grateful for that.

Thankfully, as I was leaving there, I had gotten a temp job near Pittsburgh, which required a lot of driving, and a shitload of gas money, but it got me back near the city, and jumping in to the most fun part of my journey at that point, hanging out with my friends Lauren and Felicia, doing as much stand-up as possible.

*I didn’t think I was going to be able to say much about The Dwellers without saying TOO much, but here we are 1500 words later. This is another good stopping point, just past year 2. We’ll be back with more next week. Have a great weekend.*