It's OK to get angry

Upright Citizens Brigade comedian Matt Besser wants your cock-ring number.

By T. Wright Townsend

Aug. 2, 2001 | NEW YORK -- Matt Besser is angry about some things. "People take toasting way too seriously," says Besser, "especially the clinking glasses part. There are always a few people who are seated too far away from each other to easily clink. I say just raising the glass suffices, but some people need to make sure that everyone clinks everyone else's glass -- like it's some NASA 'go/no go' situation, as if there is some rule that if everyone doesn't clink then the toast isn't true. It's not like we're trying to trick a genie."

Besser is sitting on the arm of a couch in the green room after a performance of his first one-man show, "May I Help You ... Dumbass?" at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Manhattan. Besser, a founding member of the theater's eponymous improv comedy troupe, has built his show around the idea of irrational anger in our society.

"Don't invite me to a surprise birthday party," he says. "I don't have room for that secret. I've got enough real secrets I have to keep: dark, life-destroying secrets. Adultery, man-boy love, true hair color -- real serious shit. I don't need to carry around your stupid birthday secret for two weeks. I've got enough real lying and covering up to do."

Besser, a tall, skinny 33-year-old with a mop of curly brown hair suggesting a mad scientist, saunters onto the stage of the UCB Theatre wearing a black T-shirt. He sits at a desk piled high with electronic equipment and starts the show by playing a cut from the album "Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy," the cover of which features two opposing profiles of the "Star Trek" actor. Besser stares out at the crowd as Nimoy's voice recites a monotonous New Age chant about nature.

The crowd is younger than most that pack this theater -- the hippest of New York's comedy rooms, and home to the highest-quality improv in the city. It has been said that the UCB Theatre has done for New York what the Second City did for Chicago and the Groundlings did for Los Angeles. New York had never been a serious player in the world of improv, but Besser and his fellow Brigadiers -- Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts and Matt Walsh -- have changed that.

The Upright Citizens came to New York from Chicago in 1995, where they'd worked together at the Improv Olympic and Second City, some under the tutelage of Del Close, one of improvisational comedy's founding fathers. The foursome opened the theater in Manhattan and quickly got a deal to do a sketch show on Comedy Central; it ran for three seasons before being canceled last year. They're now concentrating on individual projects and working together on a movie script.

After a minute of Nimoy's soothing voice, Besser jumps out, screaming, from behind his desk. "That's what it's like to be cold-cocked," he tells his startled audience.

A little over a year ago, Besser explains, he was cold-cocked by life. One day, he and his girlfriend began getting phone calls from people asking for technical assistance with software they'd been given for free Internet connections. After interviewing some of the wrong numbers, Besser figured out that they (all fellow New Yorkers) were attempting to call a tech-support line based in Houston, and had all failed to dial a "1" before the area code.

Besser called the telephone company for help, but was told that it couldn't do anything about it and that he should change his number. ("Five years paying Manhattan rent prices has earned me my 212," Besser rants. "There's no way I was giving that up for a 646.") So he tried to reason with the Internet company that gave out the phone number. "They told me they'd put a bracket around the area code, but they wouldn't put a '1' in front of the number," he says.

So Besser did what any self-respecting comedian would do: He began fucking with people. "I would tell someone that they had the wrong number, but because [the Internet offer] was free, they wouldn't believe me," says Besser after the show. "They'd insist, 'But it says to call this number.' So I'd say, 'OK, you're right, give me your EPL number and your P8 code.'"

Next page: Cock-ring number, please