The Internet is jam-packed with comedy. Some videos go viral because a cat does something funny, but scripted comedy videos are a booming industry, and everyone from A-list celebrities to grassroots comedians are churning out digital laughs for sites like FunnyorDie, CollegeHumor, and YouTube.
The Upright Citizens Brigade, or UCB, is an established comic presence in New York and Los Angeles, but they’re mostly known for their live improv and sketch shows. Now they’re hoping to conquer the Internet with their newly revamped digital wing: UCB Comedy.
“I feel like I got in at a good time, when video was just a few people working on it,” says Todd Bieber, creative director at UCB Comedy. “And now everybody wants to be doing video work, because it leads to film and television quicker.”
UCB has always been an incubator for talent — Aziz Ansari, Ed Helms, Ben Schwartz and Kate McKinnon all have roots there — but the emphasis has primarily been on classes and the live stage shows. Ten years ago they launched UCBComedy.com for their videos, but content was produced sporadically and without much direction. Within the past year, though, UCB has upped their online game.
“Things like 'Broad City,' and 'Fat Guy Stuck in the Internet,' and 'The [Chris] Gethard Show' ... there’s these projects that are not officially UCB projects, but they are only filled with UCB people,” Bieber says. “And I think we saw that as an opportunity, to say, What if we gave them the resources to do things beyond the theater?”
Death of a Content Creator, UCB Comedy
“There’s so many people that are so funny on our stages, but at the end of the day, we can’t get more than a hundred people or so in our audiences,” says Mike Still, artistic director for UCB Los Angeles. “So UCB Comedy really lets people get a larger audience.”
A Fast Company article recently compared Still to "Saturday Night Live" mogul and comedy kingmaker Lorne Michaels — and there’s something to the comparison. Still not only builds the show calendar for both L.A. theaters, deciding which performers gets primetime slots, but he also works with casting agents for film and TV productions to vet talent at UCB for gigs. (He even selected a few UCB’ers to audition for a role in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens.")
“UCB Comedy much more is an incubator of that talent,” Still says. “It’s a lot of peoples’ first experience in video production and video writing. The goal with UCB Comedy is to let people kind of interact, collide in that space. The challenge is figuring out a way to balance out this sort of do-it-yourself mentality that we have on our theater stages in the realm of video production."
UCB Comedy now has 24 digital teams, made up of about 100 people, and they release a new video every weekday. They don’t necessarily have the celebrity star power of Funny or Die, and only a handful of UCB videos have more than a million views on YouTube. But Bieber believes they’re building a farm team of top comedic actors, writers and producers.
“'Broad City,' which is UCB people, is now on Comedy Central,” he points out. “'High Maintenance,' which wasn’t a UCB project but featured a ton of UCB people in it, got bought by HBO. And so I think that not only the industry, but press are seeing that cool stuff is being made by interesting people, and it’s happening outside of traditional systems. And that’s an exciting place for us to be.”
One of the nontraditional systems UCB is now involved with is the upcoming online subscription service SeeSo, recently announced by NBC Universal, which will be loaded with a mix of original and archival comedy programming.
Comedian Amy Poehler — one of the original “UCB Four” who founded the improv troupe — is producing an original program for SeeSo, aptly named "The UCB Show." It’s not technically a production of UCB Comedy, but it is filled with talent from the theater and there’s some post-production crossover. (The monthly live stage show where material for "The UCB Show" is workshopped, called "Starpunch," is hosted by Mike Still.)
With the success of other web series and original comedy programming from Netflix, Amazon and Hulu — not to mention the daily output of hugely viral videos from people like Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel — the folks at UCB have a ton of competition online. Is it possible to find laughs in an ocean of other laugh-makers?
“Our demographic is comedy nerds and people who want to make good comedy come first, before we decide who the audience is,” Bieber says. “And it’s a place to find your voice, a place to fail. We also don’t always base our success off of number of views, 'cause stuff that’s really funny and might get you a lot of jobs aren’t always the clickbait things.”
“We’re not trying to just create something that’s so broadly, like, Everyone will like this!,” adds Still. "Usually, when you do that, you have something that’s boring and not interesting.”
Still admits UCB Comedy isn’t exactly valuable as a revenue source for UCB, but they don’t really care about that. “If we’re looking at external indicators of success, it becomes empty," he says. "As long as we’re able to give people a space to create, then UCB Comedy is successful.”