A very long time ago, in a city called New York, there was an improv group called the Upright Citizens Brigade. The group had four members. They brought an improv style called the Harold (developed by Del Close) to New York in the ’90s, where they also founded an improv training center and theater. They got themselves a TV show, and one episode from 1998 featured a sketch that took place in a theater. They gathered about 25 students from their school to play theatergoers, moving them around at various points to give the illusion that the theater was full. But little did this small band of extras know that this grouping would become something of a Where’s Waldo? for comedy fans years later. Two of the most prominently featured students are comedians Paul Scheer and Rob Corddry, who reminisced about that fateful day on the most recent installment of our Instagram Live series “Two Friends: A Nice Time Hanging Out With People Who Know Each Other Well.â€
Their stint as extras was supposedly in exchange for class credit at UCB. And while sitting in a theater sounds like an easy gig, it was apparently a long shoot with little food (Scheer remembers scrounging for a banana after being there for six hours). Luckily the gigs got much better, and now this day lives forever in their hearts as the time they first got to know each other, as well as Rob Riggle, Ed Helms, and Nick Kroll, to name a few. Not too shabby!
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