Chris Gethard is a New York based actor, author and improvisor at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre that has appeared on Late Night With Conan O’Brien and the ABC sitcoms Hope & Faith and the Knights of Prosperity. He starred in the Comedy Central sitcom, Big Lake, and assisted the writing staff of the show Crossballs. In 2007, Chris served as a guest writer for Saturday Night Live and also contributed writing to the Onion News Network, the Fuse Network, and more. Gethard is the author of Weird NY, as well as the upcoming title A Bad Idea I’m About to Do, which has been highlighted on This American Life. He has appeared at both the Montreal and Chicago branches of the Just for Laughs comedy festival, and has taken his stage show, The Chris Gethard Show, to public access televison.  It airs Wednesdays at 11pm on MNN and at www.thechrisgethardshow.com.

I interviewed Chris Gethard in Classroom 3 at the UCB Training Center on Monday, December 19th.  Chris was one of the first people to believe in me at the UCB Theater and has provided me with all sorts of opportunities to help me develop my craft.  I’ve been lucky enough to have him as a teacher, coach, teammate, friend, and mentor.  I was excited to interview him for Need To Fail, as he is a master of storytelling.

I know it might seem long, but the story is powerful and inspiring. Thank you for sharing, Chris.  Enjoy.

BACKGROUND

I always wanted to do comedy but didn’t think it was a possibility.  I did a bit of acting in high school, but not much, and improvised a little in both high school and at college.  When I was 19, still in college, I discovered the UCB theater and just threw myself in 100% and started taking classes there.  I didn’t really believe it could be my career but kind of always had that in sight and was sort of lucky enough to be there when I was real young and driven and the theater was still kind of small too.  I was also working at a magazine called Weird NJ, which was just a company that two guys started out of their bedroom and made work.  They were two guys that said ‘this is what we want to do, so we’re going to do it’, and it exploded.   So right when I was really dedicating myself to comedy I was also very exposed to an organization that did it themselves and a theater that was growing exponentially.  So luckily the sort of possibility of making comedy my career became more of a reality.  Everything just kind of matched up.

I was on a bunch of Harold Teams at the UCB: The Joe Ross Tribe, Optimist International, Van Buren, Arsenal.  I also did a show called the Sunshine Gang with Billy Merritt, Brian Huskey, and Chad Carter.  The Stepfathers was a group I was invited to help found and that was really good time.  I also started doing Asssscat around 2007 and it probably took me like six or seven years to like feel like I was totally on top of my game in that world.  I also started to do the storytelling, which opened me up to stand-up, and eventually I branched further out with my talk show, The Chris Gethard Show. I’ve just been around long enough. I think people who know me will tell you that I just have a lot of drive to try everything out of necessity.  The more things I do, the more chances I have to live how I want.  So I just do it all.

FAILURE

Well the first thing I’ll say is there’s been many times I have felt like calling it quits up until recent times.  I think everybody you talk to feels that way sometimes and that doesn’t go away, which is something that I learned and that’s helped me get a lot better at what I do.  But the worst it ever got: I was working at Weird NJ until 2004 and then I got hired as a writers’ assistant on Matt Besser’s show out in LA, and then I came back to start working on Weird NY, had done some commercials, had done a ton of bits on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and even within all of that, I still didn’t really believe I could have a career in comedy.  I look back on it now, and all I ever was doing was writing and performing and had a lot of opportunities and a lot of people looking after me, but I had so much self-doubt.  I had sort of a part-time position helping to run the UCB school, which was in the sphere of comedy but wasn’t really pointing me 100% towards the career I wanted.

That all built to a head where in 2007, early in the year, I got asked to be a guest writer at Saturday Night Live, which was awesome.  For every kid in the improv/sketch world, you grow up watching that.  That was huge to me, and it came out of nowhere.  I never submitted to write there.  It was just by doing a lot of shows.  I started getting to do Asssscat here and there, the premier show at the UCB.  I got asked on Super Bowl Sunday and on Oscar Night and that happened two years in a row.  I knew I was low man on the totem pole, but that’s a great place to be, and that was the era where people hadn’t moved to LA yet. Amy [Poehler] was there, [Jack] McBrayer, [Jason] Sudeikis, Kevin Dorff, Horatio [Sanz], Brian Stack, all these badasses.  It was also at a time that I was doing a lot of storytelling, and Asssscat has a storyteller as part of the show and on weeks when someone bailed or they didn’t have anybody, a lot of the times I was kind of the fill-in guy for that. The crowd was really responding and Seth Meyers had been doing the show a bunch around then, and he really loved the stories.  He was very supportive of me and is just a really good guy. So we hit it off and he asked me to come write, so I went and worked at SNL for two weeks.

It was like the dream, two of the greatest weeks of my life.  The guest hosts when I was there were Shia LaBeouf and Scarlett Johansson.  I went in and thought I was going to be a fly on the wall and sort of look and see how it works, but when I went in everyone was really supportive.  You hear all this stuff with SNL being cutthroat but everyone had my back.  So many of the people I looked up to who worked there, and some people who I never met before, had seen me on stage and were like, ‘You’re really good man, we’re glad you’re here,’ and I was like, wow, I didn’t know I was on any body’s radar.  Then in my second week there, I got this sketch to dress rehearsal, which you are not suppose to do as a guest writer.  It was my idea, and Will Forte liked it, so he helped me write it, and we got it all the way to dress rehearsal.  It didn’t make the air but it got pretty close, and I was feeling really, really good.

So I think it was April 2007, and they accept writer submissions at the end of the summer and I emailed Seth like, ‘Hey should I submit?’ And he was like, ‘Yea, we were psyched to have you and we’d be psyched to read your stuff’.  But I kind of had tunnel vision because I had gotten this previous opportunity and got a sketch to dress and knew that they all liked me, so I thought maybe they’ll hire me.  So I wrote my packet and dropped it off.  I didn’t have an agent or manager at the time; I just went to 30 Rock and dropped it off in the mail room.  But my packet was really shitty, and l look back on it now and I was over-thinking it so, so hard, and just wrote what I thought they would want to read.  I wound up writing really shitty, watered down versions of all this stuff they already have people writing, and who are writing it because they are really good at it.  So instead of showing them what I can do, which I think is probably weirder and maybe more dark than some of the stuff they had, instead of showing them that this is the area of comedy I want to dwell in and this was what I have to offer, I was like, ‘Let me write some raps.’  But Lonely Island is already doing raps.  I just overthought it and turned it in and didn’t hear anything and really, really started to panic.  I seriously had a lot of anxiety, panic attacks, and depression, because, in my mind, someone finally gave me a shot and I blew it.  I thought it’s the one shot I am going to get, I’ve already been working for 7 years, and I blew it.

That all built to the writers strike, because all the shows on strike decided to do live shows at the UCB Theatre.  The night of SNL at UCB was a big deal and it was being written up in all these news outlets and everyone knew it was going to be packed so the people that ran the theater emailed all the performers saying that you couldn’t enter the theatre like you usually do and anyone trying to sneak in will be kicked out.  So I emailed some of the guys at the UCB and was like, ‘I would like to go to the show and I also worked for these guys, but they didn’t hire me. Is there any way I could sneak in?’ And they were like, ‘No, nothing we can do for this one.’  But I wanted to try to go to the show anyway.

Here I am standing on line outside of the theater where I had performed at least once a week for 7 years, and I start fuckin’ crying while all these people who didn’t hire me, who I feel like I kind of failed in front of, walked by me and saw me in this line, and all these other peers of mine who I performed with are watching me wondering why I am breaking down.  That one put me back in therapy.  It was really bad. I felt like such a piece of shit feeling like I had blown it so hard, ya know, just seeing such a clear division between them and me. There are lot of jobs I haven’t gotten, but that was an experience where it was just so clear how much I hadn’t gotten that job, if that makes sense.

That year was such a rough year and that experience was such a rough experience, that I started having all these anxiety attacks.  I wouldn’t say because of it, but triggered by it.  I had a lot of confidence issues, life issues, and lot of feeling that I sort of wasted time doing stuff that I knew in my heart was not going to get me where I wanted to go.  All that stuff got brought to the surface.  And shortly after that I did a commercial audition, where you didn’t have to say anything, it was just a guy filming me while he threw cheerios at my face.  I was just like, ‘Man, I came so, so, so close to getting out, and now I am letting this guy throw garbage at my face.’

Read More

Every single one of us is chasing a dream. But let’s be honest, big or small, we all know that the pursuit of our dreams comes with a healthy dose of struggle, rejection, and failure.  Whether you’re a young comedian hustling to get discovered or a middle manager who hopes to one day rise to CEO, one thing is for sure: failure will be littered throughout your journey.  While it’s helpful to remain positive and focus on the moments of success and triumph, the fact remains that from time to time we all feel alone, frustrated, self-conscious, and talentless.  However, I firmly believe that there are some profound lessons to be learned from our darkest moments. This blog will be a collection of stories, anecdotes, quotes, and audio clips documenting these moments of failure from people we respect and admire in myriad fields at different stages on their path to achieving their dreams. I want this blog to serve as a reminder that failure is not only necessary when pursuing one’s goals but ultimately the inspiration that keeps us moving uncompromisingly forward.

I originally wanted to write a book called The Shit, with the sole purpose of humanizing those we idolize, in order to instill hope in those who are still in the midst pursuing a dream. At many points throughout my personal journey, I felt discouraged and helpless, and I would always gravitate towards stories of those that had to “claw their way to the top” as inspiration to keep moving forward.

Andrew Carnegie had Napoleon Hill interview 500 of the most influential people of the 1920’s to try and find out what successful people had in common.  Eventually, Hill used that information to write my favorite book, Think and Grow Rich. In the same vein, I thought that I could interview 500 of the most influential people of the twenty-first century, but for the sole purpose of hearing not a story of triumph but rather of heartbreaking failure—a particular moment when his or her spirit was most broken and his or her dream most elusive.  I figured if everyday people knew that someone they admired struggled greatly at one point in time, then it might make their path seem a little less daunting.  A “Chicken Soup for the Broke/Struggling/Frustrated Soul” so to speak.  Even more importantly, this book would isolate the essential idea that for one to be truly successful, they will need to face a situation that will make them want to give up on their dreams.   When we can understand that these failures are part of the overall process to becoming successful, we can stop being afraid to fail. We can fail miserably; brilliantly, even, knowing that someone else has been there and has turned that failure into inspiring success.

I thought instead of pursuing this lofty goal of interviewing 500 of the most influential people in the world and writing a book, I could still dream big, but start small.  This blog is the answer.  I truly believe that this might be a great place to visit when you are feeling down and want to give up.  Just know that we are all going through this shit, and we can all collectively push forward and reach our goals together.  Know that we need to fail before we are ready to succeed.  I hope this blog provides the hope you need to keep moving forward.

-Don Fanelli