(In which I take the UCB Sketch teams very, very seriously.)
Ancestor worship is horseshit.
Just like its brethren The Good O’l Days and the Golden Age, it’s a weak-sauce hovel built by a limp willed and fearful people, in which they may cower and meow, “How could anyone expect us to be good, to make good works, to do good deeds, when the best of us have come and gone? Of course you find us lacking, for our world has lapsed and left us here!”
It’s an uncomfortable and seldom said truth, but no secret, that the culture and conversation of the creatives and converts of the Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theater bears more than a whiff of this pathetic lapsarianism. ”It ain’t like it used to be.” ”Things have changed.” “Remember the old theater?”
What a bunch of retards.
The sketch comedy currently being done at and around the UCB Theater is on par with the historical best of the form. In a handful of brief apogees, it arguably exceeds it. You’ll be hearing soon about Fambly’s show “Brand New Day” and the half hour Onassis pilot. Know that together they announce and signify something more fundamental and transformational than either project or team could in solitude. There’s a renaissance going on.
My patience is exhausted in hearing my peers remember improv shows as if they were there helping tear down the Berlin Wall. Recalling classic “moves.” Lamenting the LA migration. Building an ever higher pedestal for long dead titans-in-teacups. Love what you love and let your memory be long, by all means. But while you’re trying harder and harder to shove your head further and further up Yesterday’s ass, there’s a hungry platoon of hard working geniuses around a conference table in the room next door. And they are whispering this: the past is prologue.
