The moment was pure Matt Besser. Performing two years ago in the Upright Citizens Brigade’s partly improvised comedy Conference on the Future of Happiness, he was distracted by a gray-haired man in the audience who was quietly taking notes. Still in character, Besser stepped off the stage, waltzed over to the man, and after a brief struggle pulled the notebook out of the man’s hand. He was about to read the notes out loud when he noticed the name on the front cover.
“The audience was like freaking out,” says Besser, snickering.
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Of course it was a put-on. The man was a plant, and the shouting match had been contrived to create that bizarre blurring of reality and fiction that Besser and his brainchild, the Upright Citizens Brigade, live for.
After a while he began doing stand-up comedy in clubs around Amherst, and for six months after he graduated he tried to make it as a stand-up in Colorado. He hated that too.
UCB’s newest show, Millennium Approaches, will twist reality more subtly than previous shows, being based on the premise that the company members are the Illuminati of improv, responsible for every clever thing that happens in improvisational comedy scenes. And for lots that happens in the world at large. “We are the invisible government,” says Besser, snickering. Millennium Approaches refers to “the days ahead of human perfection which the UCB are responsible for. A lot of the Christian sects think it’s God. But no, the fact is that we’ve been planning this for a long time.”
