Zach’s UCB Days

improv then, and way back when

On an early Sunday evening in Hollywood, a crowd of nearly 100 twenty- and thirtysomethings—half male, half female, though the amount of hoodies makes it hard to know for sure—has bunched up near the entrance of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre on Sunset Boulevard. Tonight’s big show is ASSSSCAT, a long-running, all-improvised joke-gumbo in which Woods frequently performs. For more than an hour he’ll tag in and out of various scenarios and characters; one minute he’s a selfish suicide-hotline employee, the next he’s fending off a knife-throwing rabbit. As with all good improv shows, the whole thing is hypnotic in the moment and thoroughly asinine in the retelling.

Woods, 31, has performed in hundreds of shows like these—maybe even thousands. In the early 2000s, he was an unlikely comedy prodigy, riding the train from his suburban Pennsylvania home to take improv classes at UCB’s New York theater while he was still in high school. One night, early on, he and a fellow performer started discussing their futures. “I remember saying, ‘I just want to temp and do improv at night,’” Woods says. He was 16 years old.

from “Get Busy, Stay Busy: Inside the New Comedy Economy” by Brian Raftery for Wired