The UCBTLA's Cagematch has a blog!

Harrison Brown, host of the UCBTLA's weekly cagematch, has posted a blog with recaps, photos, and I must assume all manner of gossip regarding the UCBTLA's cagematch. Check it out at ucbcagematch.blogspot.com!

Our Multi-Talented Ms. Feldman

Not many people know this, but there's more to Becky Feldman than just a blogger and sassy waitress archetype. That's right, Becky's an aspiring singer, and I've uncovered this music video of hers for all to see. Apparently in the studio they were going for the recorded-in-the-back-office-of-a-theatre sound.



Also, don't worry folks, I AM planning on getting a restraining order.

Our Struggle!

Our Struggle is one of the newest Maude Teams at UCBTLA and they've posted some of their newest videos online.

Check it out.

Newest. It sounds weird when you say aloud a few times. Newest.

Fun Friday Videos Fun

Amey Goerlich is a UCBNY performer and teacher, and also teaches a five-year old film class and uploads the videos they make to UCBComedy.com.

Matty and I are absolutely obsessed with these videos. We probably watch like five a day whenever we're "hardly working". They embrace the imaginative thought patterns of children. They have such an innocence to them. Also, there is one video with cats. Le video exemplaire.

I watched one today that I feel really tells the story about my life and I'm sure all of yours. There are no cats in it, but take a look at the Beautiful Butterfly.

Finally, The Midnight Show peeps uploaded Milkyrie, which for the non-cinephiles out there, is a combination of Valkyrie and Milk. Sure, you're probably thinking, "I get it: a parody about assassinating people!" Well, guess what? That's exactly what it's about and it's totally worth watching, especially for James Pumphrey's Emile Hirsch, Josh Fadem's Sean Penn, and Ryan Perez's heartfelt Hitler.

We're Featured in LAist!

Always OnStar, created by Jason Horton, is featured on LAist.

Check it out here.

I just shit my pants.

One Great Sketch for Monday

Happy President's Day! Which president is your favorite? Mine's Teddy Roosevelt. Becky likes Taft. All I'll say is, one of those fought bears and won, and one fought a bath tub and lost. You decide which is superior.

More important than our nation's history are celebrities, who'll all be on full display this Sunday at the Academy Awards, which are like the Oscars but for movies. To celebrate, here's a great sketch from Up, Up, Up!, one of the UCB maude teams from LA that I'm heavily biased toward because I'm on it. Enjoy!

Memorable Movie Quotes

This Doesn't Really Have an Overall Theme, Per Se...

A few stores down from UCBTLA, there's a coffee shop known as the Bourgeois Pig. There's a lot of controversy over this place because around 5 pm, the slow motion shift takes place.

Needless to say, since it's East Coast weather out today, I'm freezing and went to buy myself a cup of tea. Every time you buy tea there, the barista always warns you that it's "really hot".

Cut to me, two seconds later, knocking the lid off of the cup and scalding hot water splattering over my innocent baby hands. This is the worst burn I ever felt. And I got a second degree burn from an Easy Bake Oven before. (That was the day I learned that Easy Bake Ovens aren't kilns and year-old rubber cement isn't clay.)

That's not what I was going to write about today. Yesterday was my birthday and I'm still a little drunk and I've been having weird thoughts all morning. As I was walking to work, I saw the fattest pigeons huddling outside a grocery store. There's an epidemic of obese pigeons and that makes me sad.

You know what else makes me sad? Kids on drugs. I loved every moment of Cannibal Holocaust except for the part when that guy blows cocaine into that boy's nose. That's wrong. I also am not a fan of David After the Dentist. That kid is freaking out. Put the camera down and give him a hug. I think anyone who has ever had a bad high before knows what it's like to freak out and the last thing you need is for your own parent to tape you. Instead, they should pour peanut M&M's into a bag of Sun Chips and feed it to you in the form of two M&M's to every Sun Chip.

However, UCB's own Chris Kula uploaded this video to UCBComedy and suddenly I've found myself being very forgiving of most cases of child abuse.

Watch it. Or I'll pour scalding hot water on you really slowly.

Christian Bale Video Parody Number 1001

It is pretty ridiculous that the NYC wing of ucbcomedy has made two Christian Bale parodies in a row. Are we that hack? Yes. But that repetitive? Surely. But that PROLIFIC? Rarely.

Actually, we're not really that pop culture of the moment oriented. We probably SHOULD be, what with our desires to become rich and powerful manipulators of the media and all of its disciples. But we usually don't know enough about what's going on.

Nonetheless, we have a SECOND and dare I say even funnier take on the Christian Bale thing. This one brought to you by Curtis Gwinn and Adam Pally of the NYC group Death By Roo Roo. It is their recreation of the rant. Pally as the offending DP, Curtis as the annoyingly named though probably nice guy director McG.

Bale Rant: The Dramatization!



Matty, I tried your love life advice and got arrested.

World Awareness, 2/10/09

We Americans are often accused of a total lack of ignorance when it comes to what's going on in the rest of the world. Fear not, because I'm gonna prove that notion wrong through an intelligent and informed discussion of one of the day's world events. I'm also going to assume that you're American (or Canadian at the very least), because I'm pretty sure they don't have internet in the rest of the world.

Looking at the aptly titled "/world" section of CNN.com, it seems that the most significant story concerns a group of Amazon Indians who ate a farmer in Brazil. We all know the long story of the Kulina tribe, and as Americans we all have a strong grasp on the socio-political climate of rural Brazil, so I'm not going into that. And it goes without saying that we all feel the villagers have a right to be disappointed in the lack of response from FUNAI. Also, every American knows that there are "460,000 Indians in Brazil and 1,300 indian languages. There are 55 groups considered to live in isolation." So I see no reason for CNN.com to have felt the need to conclude their article with that.

The more pressing concern is that of the eight people named specifically in the article, five are cannibals. From this, it's pretty safe to conclude that 5 out of 8 non-Americans are cannibals. There's a man-eat-man outbreak of zombapocalyptic proportions out there, and we're doing very little to prepare for that day when some bird with a strain of the zombie virus in its blood makes its way to south Florida and bites a retiree, thereby setting off a wave of destruction, living dead, and mall inhabitance all across the continental United States. The United States needs to strengthen its immigration policies, now, especially when it concerns zombism. I'm not here to offer a solution-- there are smarter men than I for that. I just think that maybe we do need to be a little more aware of what's going on in the world around us. Because what's going on in the world around us, is zombies.

One Great Sketch for Monday

For those of you who don't know, Maude Night is the best night of the year. And since it actually happens twelve times a year, a big metaphysical paradox is formed when the competing nights are all individually the best night of the year but must not be in order for the stipulation to be true for any of the other nights. In case you're wondering, yes, I woke up today trying to think of the dumbest most confusing thing I could say on this site.

But if you happen to be in the New York area tonight, or the Los Angeles area on Thursday night (or, if you're lucky, both), you really should come check out Maude Night, when the UCB's best in-house writing teams put up shows that will make you laugh, chortle, chuckle, and maybe* even rethink your worldview a bit. Check out ucbtheatre.com for details! And to hold you over, here's a video from one of the LA teams, Hot Mess!

Blacked Out


Enjoy! And lemme know if you're hittin' up LA's Maude Night-- we can totally hang out! Yay friendship!


*(but probably not)

Love Advice to a 7th Grader

Hey, you. Yeah, you, 7th Grade Matty. How's it goin', little fella? It's me, the 23-year-old version of you. That's true, that's true, Valentine's Day is comin' up. Oh, yeah, and I know you have a crush on that girl over there. That's cool. She's very nice. The way she let you hold her hand when you went to see Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery? Wow, you two are destined to be together forever. Just like Austin Powers will always be remembered as one of the funniest movies of all time. There's nothing Mike Myers can do to tarnish that. Yeah, baby!

No, no, I think it's a great idea that you've decided that this girl is your one and only. No, you're definitely not too young, and this is not horribly irrational thinking. I agree, taking her out on dates would be "tight." Granted, you're in 7th grade so your mom would have to drive, but she'd probably let you ride in the back of the minivan together, so it's almost like having a chauffeur! Just be sure to borrow some money from mom while you're at it, so you can afford pre-movie Taco Bell and PG-13 movie tickets for two. And don't worry, I won't tell about your awesome plan to buy PG-13 tickets but actually sneak into an R-rated movie. That's freakin' brilliant, man. No wonder she's that into you.

You're almost there, really. Stay together for ten more years or so and you can get married, and be set for life. It'll be easy, because the high school and college years tend to be pretty uneventful and non-formative. You can fill time by quoting Austin Powers (I promise, it'll never get old) and talking about the latest episode of Friends (just wait 'til you see episode #184, "The One Where Chandler Takes a Bath"). So don't worry, dude. You won't have to worry about being lonely on any Valentine's Days from here on out. You're way different from all those other 7th graders with their childish crushes rooted in puppy love. Your love's for reals, totes. Totes? Oh, that's a popular thing we future-people say in the future. Oh, and real quick, before you work up the courage to talk to Mrs. Matty Smith-to-be for the first time in weeks, you've got a little somethin' stuck in your braces. There you go, got it. Now go have fun being perfectly romantically stable for the rest of your life. What should you say? Well, you can start by impressing her with your mad rollerblade skills. Yeah, it was a great idea to go with rollerblading over skateboarding. You're never gonna regret that one.

Huggles,
Future You

Christian Bale Video Parody Number 1000

Greetings folks. Will Hines here from the NYC wing of UCBComedy. I've been quiet on this blog because, being from NYC, I'm fucking cold. Who wants to blog, when you could be scouring the streets of Brooklyn for firewood? Not me!

So anyway we did our take on the Christian Bale audio rant thing. The one where he is swearing at his DP for apparently walking on the set during a shot. Here is our take where you see the DP walk into every shot of the trailer:



Gil Ozeri (the guy in the video) emailed me the morning thing the Bale thing was breaking and said "It'd be funny to see that Bale was right, and to see the DP walking into like every shot of the trailer?" And I said "Yes, it would be funny." And then Gil said "So let's film that, then?" And I said okay.

I was at my day job where I do video stuff so I brought Gil in and set up green screen paper in my friend's office and shot him for about 15 minutes, then grabbed the HD trailer from Apple in a completely illegal way and then got everything done by about 9pm. That sounds like a boring story to YOU but to me it was an exciting day of racing against imaginary hordes of YouTube who I knew were at that very moment remixing the audio with all possible Bale footage. I felt like a secret agent, but for videos.

By now, the Bale thing is already passing. But watch that video, would you? Gil is a ridiculous human being and very funny.

I might post pictures of me in the NYC UCB office looking at pictures of Becky and Matty in the LA office. It'll be a merging of two similar but different worlds -- like when the Flash from the 1940s met the Flash from the 1960s. That sentence was for Ian Roberts only, even though it's entirely possible Ian has never even heard of the Internet, much less this blog.

See you soon!

Liveblogging of Me Liveblogging

1:30 PM: There's a golden owl in the office and I'm thinking of creating a blog post that is from the owl's point of view and it would make fun of me as an intern. But then I decide that topic is a little too self-deprecating and would feed into my fear of turning into Joy Behar.

1:32 PM: I finish writing the previous sentence and I read some Jezebel to watch the 80th video they posted this morning from The View. Joy Behar talks about not knowing what a blowjob was until she was 25. Oh shit. I am turning into Joy Behar.

1:33 PM: I decide I should focus on this blog again because I'm afraid I'm getting adult ADHD. I take a sip of echinacea tea and turn my chair 15 degrees to stare at rolled up architectural plans and a pile of W2 forms.

1:35 PM: I realize that I spelled echinacea incorrectly in the previous post but it's not in my spellcheck on my computer so I decide to google it and correct it in the previous sentence.

1:36 PM: I realize I did spell echinacea correctly. Hm. I'm smarter than I think I am or at least more holistic than my computer.

1:38 PM: I go through what I've written so far and correct some minor grammatical errors. Then, I think about the time my mom fixed a bunch of grammatical errors when I was in sixth grade on my report on scarlet fever. I chose scarlet fever because I thought it sounded pretty because scarlet is a pretty word, don't you agree? Scarlet. I love the way it sounds.

1:42 PM: I've been saying the word "scarlet" aloud, by myself, for the past four minutes.

1:44 PM: Marlene comes into the office to make some copies and I tell her I'm liveblogging of me liveblogging. She's doesn't think it's as clever as I do. She makes some copies. Emily walks by and pushes the papers out of Marlene's hands. Emily tells me it's "Haze Marlene Day". I choose not to partake because...

1:47 PM: ...I click on facebook and see someone I went to high school with wrote 25 things about himself. In the title of his note he writes, "25 Things... I didn't want to do this, but everyone said I should." I think, "Shut up. You wanted to write 25 things about yourself since the day it first came around. Don't pretend that you don't like writing about yourself. You've been wanting to tell people your anecdote about your grandma going to secondary school with J.D. Salinger since you woke up one day and realized that was an anecdote."

1:50 PM: I decide now is a good stopping point for my liveblog. Marlene comes into the office to sit with me while she eats her lunch. I make a joke about giving her boyfriend a blow job.

1:51 PM: I ask Marlene if i can make a joke about giving her boyfriend a blow job in this blog post. She's cool with it.

1:53 PM: Holy shit. I realize that I'm no way like Joy Behar. My day gets better.

1:59 PM: I hit "post."

Hooray! Boo!

Note: I originally wrote this post with a hopeful Arizonan heart on the morning of Sunday, February 1st, before the Super Bowl took place. Because of these hard economic times in which nothing should be wasted (not to mention, my resourceful green-centric lifestyle), I'm gonna try to salvage the post, with a few alterations for accuracy (original text is stricken through and replaced).

Heck yeah Durnit! After fifty-one long years, the Arizona Cardinals are finally Super Bowl champions! still crummy loserfaces. As the great Kurt Warner a-hole Ben Roethlisberger stepped up to claim the majestic totally pointless Super Bowl trophy, I couldn't help but feel a song in my heart the horrible sting of realizing that all existence is pointless. It's as if this heavy weight has been lifted off the chest of every Arizona sports fan the man with the world's largest hand slapped every Arizona sports fan right in the face. Simply put, I'm elated plunging into the depths of depression. I wanna call my mom dad, and tell them how glad angry I am at them for raising me in the wonderful subpar city of Phoenix Buttfart, Arizona.

Seriously, everyone. I haven't been this excited for a while. As a team with such a shameful history of losing year in and year out, for the Arizona Cardinals to have won the Super Bowl is huge. Only Cubs fans have had it worse than Cardinals fans in terms of waiting forever for a championship, and for the first time in my life I can say I'm proud to be a Cardinals fan. The rush of joy that came with watching the Cardinals finally claim the Super Bowl title was something I thought I'd never feel, and in a way it almost made all those long losing years worth it. Hooray! The Steelers can bite my wiener.