What got you interested in comedy?

I used to, when I was a kid, would hear laughter coming from the TV and I would sneak up and put my head out and I guess my Dad – because he was allowed to listen to radio and TV way past his bedtime – he saw that love of comedy in me and kind of fostered it. He would let me stay up late for Saturday Night Live and Fernwood Tonight, SCTV and all my favorite shows. I found out all those people were improvisers, so I started studying up on the improv. Improv was kind of my entry in the world of comedy and after that I started doing more comic acting and stand-up, but I guess it was kind of like comedy is a bit of a family tradition.

You trained at Second City with Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell…what was it like learning the ropes with them?

It was pretty exciting because neither Amy nor I ended up on a mainstage, so our touring company was really our mainstage of Second City…it was some of the peak performers. My touring company alone was me, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch, Ali Farahnakian, who went on to form The People’s Improv Theater, Kevin Dorff, who is one of the writers on Conan O’Brien, so it was like a top-notch crew of people…get thrown in there with some of the top professionals and studying under people like Stephen Colbert was my first improv teacher and to be able to go on and work with him on The Dana Carvey Show, that was just amazing.

You had a recurring role on Wizards of Waverly Place, which ended last month. I know you were just at an audition, so do you have any new TV projects in the works right now?

There’s a couple new projects right now, however I can’t talk about all of them. One of the things I’m working on now is a live show called I Love Lucy Live On Stage and I play Fred Mertz. We just wrapped up an incredibly successful small run at a theater in L.A. and it looks like we are going to take it on a national tour or Vegas. It’s getting a lot of great press and critical success and definitely a huge hit with fans. I might be hitting the road with that show for a while or you never know when the world of film is going to suck you in with their promises of a better paycheck. I just did a movie in October that shot right outside of Vancouver that’s part of the Disney Air Bud DVD franchise called Santa Pups and that’ll be coming out next holiday season. I may start working a little bit more with Disney if they’re interested, but in the meantime just focusing on live performance and also teaching.

I was going to get into that next, the I Love Lucy Live On Stage. What was it like winning an award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical for your role as Fred Mertz?

Well, it was the first time I ever won an award for acting. I’ve never really done acting in hopes of getting an award. Of course, it would be nice to someday get an award like Broadway World, and it’d be great to get an Emmy or an Oscar, but I never really worked and like, this is gonna get me an award! I never really was expecting that for I Love Lucy. I kinda just did it because it was fun and I wanted to get back into doing live musicals again. It was really exciting to find out I won and to find out how many people had been rooting for me all along and were so proud of me. That was the real reward I think.

What was it like playing the role of Fred Mertz?

It’s been great. The really cool thing is, the Lucy fans, they are about I Love Lucy the way the sci-fi guys are about Star Trek or Star Wars. People have traveled here from all over the country just to see that show. Then I find out, just like there are people in the Star Trek world who love Spock over Shatner, there are people in that love Fred over Ricky. It’s really cool to meet those people that travel all that way to see Fred or just to see Lucy or Ricky or whatever. I kinda took myself out of the musical theater market, but when that show came along, I was like there’s something I can take on. I knew I could do a Fred Mertz impression and that alone put me in the top tier auditioning for it. When they made the offer, even though it wasn’t for much money at all…at first it was for a chance to see that thing get off the ground…I was blown away.

I also saw you are currently nominated for an INNY Award for Best Improv Coach. You are currently teaching in L.A. then?

Yeah, I teach in L.A., but I also shuttle back to my hometown. Primarily, the award is for my work in St. Louis. For the longest time there was no actual improv scene in St. Louis…there was improv being done, but there wasn’t so much an improv school. After starting Improv Trick, the improv scene has kind of developed in St. Louis. There’s my school, Improv Trick, there’s Improv Shop…there’s all kinds of college teams that have sparked up. I’m happy to see that much improv happening in my hometown.

I’ve interviewed Kurt Braunohler before and you’ve also done an episode of Inside The Actor’s Studio Apartment…it was a great episode. Did you enjoy doing that?

Yeah, I’ve known Dan (Bowers) for a while now. He and I worked on a screenplay years ago called The House Sitter. I was really happy when he moved out to New York…I toured with Ali Farahnakian who started the People’s Improv Theater, so I hooked him up with Ali and that’s how he wound up meeting a lot of the actors that he started doing Inside The Actor’s Studio with. When he said he was coming out to L.A. and would I want to do it, I was like absolutely! Of course, Dan has a wonderful way of purposefully making the interview as uncomfortable as possible and I kinda enjoy that sense of humor. I did the best to make it as uncomfortable as possible for everyone.

That’s great. On a different note, you seem to be doing a ton of stuff professionally, always some kind of role going on. Do you ever have any free time and what do you like to do in that time?

You know what I really love doing most? Improvising and teaching improv. That’s something I see myself doing until I am no longer able to move around or mentally can’t do it. There’s only one other thing I’d rather be doing than what I am doing professionally and that’s teaching more. I love getting new people interested in improv…I love watching people get inspired. Of course, I love performing cause there’s that instant gratification of working with an ensemble, getting things done as an ensemble and not worrying about a network or a studio and their input and what’s acceptable and what’s in a demographic and all that.

Where can people go to find out more information on you?

Best way to get in touch with me and see my upcoming projects is my website, which is billchott.wordpress.com.

Anything to add?

I’m glad there’s organizations out there focused on comedy…I think the whole world could use a lot more comedy right now. I’m always floored when there are places like AmericasComedy.Com and in Jamestown, NY, The Lucy Desi Center…dedicated to starting a comedy college. I’m really touched when people recognize the impact comedy has on people on a daily basis. People tend to understand that about music…you turn on your radio and there’s your music, but how comedy is just something that happens between two people on the street…a laugh that’s shared. I love that it is being recognized more and more by websites, blogs, magazines, newspapers…it’s an exciting time for comedy.

For more comedy news and exclusive interviews visit our AmericasComedy Facebook fan page and follow us on Twitter @AmericasComedy!

“I was sitting all the way in the back, in the car, because they didn’t let me sit with them,” recalls Helbig. “And I started doing an impression of Cartman… and my older step brother started cracking up hysterically and kept asking me to do it again and again. And I thought that was the best moment ever. So from there I just wanted to make them laugh all the time.”

As a young adult, Helbig attended Ramapo College and began interning at various places throughout New York City. She reached out to the People’s Improv Theater (PIT), in order to take classes at significantly cheaper rates. Although Helbig has been on a house improv team for over 3 years now, her original intentions didn’t lie in performing.

“When I originally went to the PIT, I never wanted to be a performer. I went to take sketch writing classes, because I wanted to be the next Tina Fey. I interned for the theater, and because I was interning I was able to take classes really cheaply and they had a level one improv class that didn’t have a full roster on it, so they asked if I wanted to take it. I said no for a while then I finally agreed. After a couple classes I just fell in love with it. I loved it so, so much, and I became really addicted to the spontaneity of it.”

After a summer of falling in love with improv, Helbig came back to her school with a new goal: to start her own improv team.

“It was pretty dumbly ambitious to be like, ‘I know everything about improv now, lets start a team!’” explains Helbig. “I came back and I was actually friends with a couple of older students who had taken improv classes themselves and wanted to do improv, and a bunch of other actor/comedy friends who wanted to learn about it. We all basically understood the principles, but we created an episodic improv team called ‘The B.C.’ which was a play on ‘The O.C.’ because we lived in Bergen County. We each played characters and we would do one hour episodes once a week on campus. We would play characters but the entire episode was improvised. We would get an event that would happen throughout the episode from the audience and then we knew at the end of the show where we wanted to end up. So we would improvise all of our dialogue throughout the show. It was really fun. It was a nice, easy way to do long form improv without doing actual long form improv.”

Starting one new project on campus wasn’t enough though. Helbig still had aspirations as a sketch writer, and pursued them in the form of making a sketch TV show with a few friends. It turned out to be a big undertaking with which they had a lot of help.

“It was like closed circuit campus television, and it was so bad but it was so great at the same time,” remembers Helbig. “We luckily had a professor that really liked our ambition, and dedicated an entire TV production course semester to creating our television show. So he sort of forced this entire TV production class to work on our show for a semester, which was a very awkward feeling, but we got a lot done.”

After school, Helbig was working in New York and needed a place to live. What she found was not only a place to live, but a way to make more money, and an idea that significantly helped shaped her life, bringing her to where she is today.

“I got hired to house sit…in New Jersey for a month,” said Helbig. “And it was a great way to have a place to live and to be making money, because I was working for Viacom at the time. The house was big and empty so I had (my friend) Michelle come over and stay with me. We both had saved up and bought iMacs. We wanted to use our newfound editing knowledge – we took like two editing classes in college and thought we were pros. We had watched a couple of girls do vlogs online and we thought we could do this, and we’re in a transitional state, so lets make a vlog series about our transition from New Jersey to Brooklyn.”

The vlogs caught on fairly well, and helped Helbig move from being a girl just posting videos to the web for fun, to a girl posting videos to the web for an actual paycheck.

“From there I got hired by…MyDamnChannel.com to host their website, to basically transition these vlogs I was doing with Michelle into v-logs about things on their website…They hired me basically as a way to interact with their audience, to ask them how they thought about different shows, what they wanted to see more of…From there it grew into DailyGrace that lives today, which has nothing to do with MyDamnChannel, and it gives me complete creative control now to do whatever comedy things I want to do.”

DailyGrace is Helbig’s current vlog project where she posts videos of herself online discussing random situations and happenings. Check out the Facebook fan page for it here.

While all this was occurring, Grace was still doing sketch and improv, had picked up agents and managers, and was auditioning for different TV jobs. One of these auditions was to replace Olivia Munn as cohost on Attack of  the Show. While it didn’t pan out exactly that way, she still ended up having a significant role.

“I was in L.A. for other reasons and I met with Attack of the Show and pitched them concepts for correspondent pieces. They said ‘Oh, well you’re on the east coast, we don’t have an official east coast correspondent, so what would you say to us sending you out on stuff on the east coast?’”

Helbig accepted the job immediately, and found herself deeper in the celebrity pool than she was expecting.

“The first interview I did for them was with Lonely Island, which was so overwhelming, because the first thing I’m doing, I’m sitting down with three comedic geniuses and I’m just like ‘Uh, I make internet videos, too!’”

When asked if she had any other Lonely Island experiences, where she felt overly nervous before an interview. She explained that while a lot of topics she does pieces on aren’t really part of her everyday life, the interviews she did for Harry Potter were nerve-wracking because she was in love the cast and story.

“Going in during those auditions, I had to really check myself before I went into the room because I was older than all these boys that I was interviewing, but I was fan-girling like a twelve year old, and I had to contain myself, it was insane.”

For now, Helbig has complete creative freedom and control of her career. She explained that while it has been fantastic, there are also some unforeseen drawbacks.

“I’m in LA now, to audition for shows and films for a pilot season out here, and it has been somewhat of a wakeup call that I have so much creative freedom that sometimes I forget how to audition for other people’s things. You definitely don’t want to offend a writer by not reading their dialogue in the audition, but I do have this improv hair in my body that doesn’t go away when I want to make up my own stuff. So its been, actually, an exercise in classic auditioning out here, which is something I’ve gotten away from so much because someone’s been giving me too much creative freedom.”

When asked what advice, if any, she would give to someone trying to begin their own career in show business, Grace was nice enough to lend this advice.

“Make sure you’re always having fun, no matter what you’re doing,” she said. “Because if its not fun, why are you doing it? Its like eating food. If you don’t like a piece of pizza, don’t eat it. Also, create content. Thats really why I wanted to do Dan Bower’s Inside the Actor’s Studio Apartment, because I really admired his ambition for just wanting to create content. And create content that you would want to watch yourself. And start creating content now, because it evolves, and it gets better as time goes on. I’ve been vlogging for four years now, and I look back to the first year of vlogging, and they were bad, they were so bad and I thought they were awesome. Let it evolve and find a voice.”

Check out Grace Helbig on Twitter @GraceHelbig. For more comedy news and exclusive interviews visit our AmericasComedy.com Facebook fan page and follow us on Twitter @AmericasComedy!

The festival will take course over four days in twelve different venues starting April 23-28. So far the line-up features twenty-four comedians including Parks and Recreation’s Aziz Ansari, Saturday Night Live’s Seth Meyers, and actor/comedian Steven Wright. Comedy fans and locals are already buzzing about the event, aiming to “claim recognition as the best comedy fest in the country.”  Badges will go on sale February 1st, with options of VIP or standard, online through Paramount box office, or by phone (512) 474-1221. Single performance tickets will go on sale February 23.

Confirmed acts: Amazing Johnathan, Aziz Ansari, Maria Bamford, Matt Bearden, Bob Biggerstaff, Hannibal Buress, Chase Durousseau, Rachel Feinstein, Erin Foley, Erin Jackson, Jackie Kashian, Mike MacRae, Joe Mande, Seth Meyers, Sean Patton, John Ramsey, Brody Stevens, Chris Trew, Duncan Trussell, Paul Varghese, Brendon Walsh, Brent Weinbach and Steven Wright.

For more comedy news and exclusive interviews visit our AmericasComedy.com Facebook fan page and follow us on Twitter @AmericasComedy!

Do you have time today…are you ready?

Sure I can do it. I mean, I’m at Costco, but I think I can totally do it at Costco, man.

That sounds great…I appreciate it so much. Sorry, I have a cold also, so I’m a little stuffed up.

Dude, if you’re going to make this interview really difficult with you having a cold. I don’t know if I want to do it anymore.

I hope the germs don’t go through the phone.

(Laughs) Well, I’m sorry that you’re sick and you should never apologize for being sick, but I’m sorry that you are.

I guess we’ll get started. How did you get your start in comedy?

I started improvising at Upright Citizens Brigade Theater when it first opened in 1998. I had moved to New York from Baltimore where I went to school and just saw a show there and started improvising there. I improvised there for about four years and then about six or seven years ago I met Kristen (Schaal) and started writing…writing stuff for the both of us to perform and maybe three or four years ago really got serious about doing stand-up on my own.

Alright, like you said you started out improvising. What drew you to that? Were you in theater before or did something draw you to that aspect of comedy?

Yeah, I had done theater before…I did theater in high school and college and I never liked improv. I always thought improv was short-form stuff, which always grossed me out…I hated it. Then I came and saw a long-form piece that was done by the group The Swarm, and they were legendary New Yorkers back in the day and it kinda blew my mind that is wasn’t cokesy and it wasn’t dorky like all the other short-form stuff I had seen and it really was just very, very funny and I took a class and I walked off stage and I was like ‘I want to do this for the rest of my life’ and I had never had that feeling about anything. I kinda have been one of those people who is kinda good at a lot of stuff, but not great at anything…didn’t have a passion for anything and I didn’t know what I wanted to do and truly the second I walked off the stage after my first scene I was like, this is it…I knew.

You do have a lot of things in the works right now for TV and you have a new improv, anti-game show you are working on for IFC called Pointless. What does that consist of?

We actually had to change the name of it, because there is another show called Pointless. It’s actually called BUNK! now. It’s not really improv as much as it is like a parody of a game show where comedians compete. And so, none of the questions make sense…they don’t have real answers and it just kind of gives the comedians an opportunity to be funny…an opportunity to just fuck around. It’s (a) very cool, kind of chaotic show…that’s what I love about because I can barely control the chaos really. Everyone’s playing for non-charitable causes…I’m really excited about it. I think it’s going to be a great show…we shoot in two weeks.

Do you know when people can start looking for it?

It’ll be airing in June, but I don’t have a specific air date yet.

I will keep an eye out for it, that does sound very cool. 

I’m not allowed to say who we have booked on the show yet, because they haven’t released that information but we have some really big names of comedians as well.

Very awesome. You also have your web series, Penelope: Princess of Pets that was picked up for a Channel 4 pilot in the UK. Do you have any updates on that?

Yeah, they’re not going forward with a series on that, but we did make a pilot that did air over there. I’m actually heading out tomorrow to London for a few days to do a spot on Morgan Spurlock’s new show for the BBC.

You mentioned Kristen Schaal and that you met her a few years ago. Where did you guys meet?

We met at an improv theater in New York City called The Pit, probably about six or seven years ago. We had not performed together or really done anything together…we really didn’t even know each other, but I wanted to do a variety show and I remember going to the artistic director of the theater and being like, ‘Hey, I want to host a variety show’ and he said Kristen Schaal just asked me the same thing. I literally walked backstage, because I knew she was backstage, and I was like ‘Okay, you want to do a variety show together?’ and she was like, ‘Okay’  (laughs). That proves how we really get along because we never really spoke with each other before that.

You also have Hot Tub with Kurt and Kristen, which was voted “Best New Variety Show” by Time Out New York‘s readers…Tell our readers a little bit about what you guys do with that.

Hot Tub‘s been a weekly show we’ve been doing for the past six years…we’ve taken a few hiatuses here and there, but for the most part it’s been pretty consistent for the past two years. It’s really just a place…without Hot Tub, I don’t think Kristen and I would be able to create the material that we created together that we kinda like toured with and (have) taken to Australia and to the Edinburgh Comedy Festival and stuff like that and of course for my stand-up. Essentially what we force each other to do is to write ten new minutes of standup a week and also ten new minutes of material for the two of us every week. So, of course a lot of it’s horrible, but we do find the stuff that does work and that’s how we’ve been building our act for the past few years and really for the past six years.

You are doing stand-up now, besides the improv. Which do you enjoy more, the stand-up aspect of it or improv?

Right now, it’s definitely stand-up 100%. I’m not really improvising, just because I don’t have enough time…I’m working on the TV show and traveling to do stand-up and because stand-up is just so much newer for me. I’m really digging this…I’m really excited about it right now and I think I’m going to be getting some of my stand-up on television on a John Oliver special…I think we’re shooting that in March. First time I’ll have like eight minutes on TV.

Do you have any upcoming tour dates?

I’ll be in South by Southwest (SXSW) in March doing some stand-up shows. On March 13th, we’re doing a live version of BUNK! at SXSW and then I’m going to be doing a show with some kids from Montreal on the 16th in Austin and then it looks like I might – there’s just an offer, so who knows if it’ll happen or not – but it looks like I might be going to Australia in May and then otherwise I’m just going to be touring and doing shows in New York until then.

We posted the episode of you on Inside The Actor’s Studio Apartment, which was hilarious. What was it like doing that and are you friends with Daniel Bowers?

Thanks. I didn’t know Daniel until I saw the first one that he shot with Justin Akin, who’s a friend of mine. I thought it was great and a lot of fun…I thought it turned out really well. I like it.

It seems like you are always working and doing stuff with the TV shows and the stand-up and everything, so is there anything, if you have free time, that you enjoy doing?

Yeah, I mean I’m a big surfer, but I live in New York City year-round and that is something that if I’m not having to be writing for a television show or something like that, that is something I would like to do when there’s waves. That’s what I’m going to do in Australia if I go there.

For more information on Braunohler, you can visit his website www.kurtbraunohler.com or find him on Facebook and Twitter @kurtbraunohler. Don’t forget to also check him out on Inside the Actor’s Studio Apartment. 

For more comedy news and exclusive interviews visit our AmericasComedy.Com Facebook fan page and follow us on Twitter @AmericasComedy!

“When I first saw her come off the elevator…my first thought was, ‘What do you want?’” said Improv owner Tony Vicich. “I had never seen her or heard of her. Then, she said she wanted to do a stand-up show.”

After Schuster told an off-color joke that had Vicich rolling with laughter, he happily agreed.  “Laughter is the most important thing, I think, ” said Schuster. “I don’t try to force people to laugh. I just tell my stories … Luckily, I get a good reception.”

Schuster has fought her way through some battles in life, and not just World War II. In 2004 she entered and eventually came out of a coma. It was at that time she decided to focus her life on the positive things – like making people laugh. According to the East Valley Tribune, which first covered the story, Schuster has been practicing her craft over the years in preparation for her Improv debut.

“She has performed for private groups, passengers on various cruise lines and also at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts. Thus, she became known as ‘Gert the Joke Lady,’” the paper reported.

Schuster, who talks about some of the highlights of her life in the article, told of an amazing story about her job washing windows at a Nazi barracks in the late 1930′s. Schuster washed the third floor windows from a scaffolding, and every now and then would squeeze the sponge out, letting dirty water hit the soldiers walking around below her.

“I had a lot of guts,” Schuster said. “When they’d get hit with the water, they’d scream and tell me to stop, but I’d act like I didn’t hear them. I shouldn’t have done it because I could’ve gotten in trouble, but I always acted like it was an accident.”

The following clip is of Gert talking to ABC15 news about her life and comedy:

The “Harvard of Humor” served as a springboard to names like Alan Arkin, Joan Rivers, Bill Murray, John Belushi, Tina Fey and Stephen Colbert, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Bonnie Hunt, Steve Carell.

The Golden State will have an opportunity to have Second City experience on March 3 at 7:30 p.m. at the World Theater at California State University, Monterey Bay. The troupe will perform a show called “Fair and Unbalanced,” which pokes fun of today’s politics and celebrity scandals through sketch comedy and improv.

“This is definitely an evening to enjoy and to laugh out loud,” Cardinalli said. “Everyone tells us that laughter is the best medicine, so enjoy a dose of laughter,” said World Theater executive director Joe Cardinalli.

Check out this video from Second City, courtesy of YouTube.com!

The host of the show, Gethard, “harassed” Diddy about being a guest on the show.

“I didn’t know how to take it. I didn’t know if it was a sexual thing,” Diddy said about the campaign. “I was like what the f– is all this ‘Get Hard’ stuff?”

PopEater.com said that Diddy did well on staged with the other comics and showed off his improvisational skills for an hour.

Check out Diddy with Chris Gethard backstage at Saturday Night Live!

North Carolina DSI Comedy Theater is starting the year of 2011 with a new improv show Retweeted. It begins Friday, January 7th at 9:30 p.m and will run throughout the month.  This innovative one-of-a-kind show promises to be hilarious, and will feature a special guest each week.

The performance will be based on what’s trending on Twitter at the moment of the show, making it unique every time. Eight performers would constantly check the feed, and that could lead to some unexpected quips.

“I’m thrilled with Retweeted,” says Executive Producer Zach Ward, “I wanted DSIcomedy to offer a new comedy show for our online fans, and one that moved at their pace – 140 laughs per scene!”

It seems like a new formula has been discovered: twitter + improve = dynamite comedy!

Check out some improv with 321 comedy!

Purchase your favorites at Amazon!

TVGuide has reported that Jim Carrey will host the first show of the year with The Black Keys as the show’s musical guest. He will also be promoting his newest film “I Love You, Phillip Morris.” This will be Carrey’s second time hosting the show. The 14 year gap filled with scripted films has left some people thinking if Carrey could own the stage as he did it once before in 1996. It would be safe to say that there’s no need to worry. Carrey is an outstanding comedic actor with improv running through his veins.

The sketch comedy show has fingers crossed with this choice, hoping for a strong start, and Carrey has what it takes to not leave anyone disappointed.

The episode airs January 8 on NBC.

Check out Jim Carrey with other SNL Alumni in Presidential Reunion courtesy of funnyordie.com!

Purchase your favorites on Amazon!

“We have always wanted to be in business with Drew,” said Kelly Goode, GSN’s senior vice president of programming. “He is a huge talent who is beloved by audiences, and this series will be a perfect fit with our mission to bring fun, lively entertainment to our viewers.”

The show will be taped at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas on weekends in front of a live audience. Even though the cast isn’t finalized yet, Carey said it would likely include Ryan Stiles, Chip Esten and Kathy Kinney, who starred alongside him on “The Drew Carey Show.”  The series will also feature comedians that appeared with Carey on the ABC series “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”

“I’m thrilled to be working with GSN. This is a real passion project for me,” said Carey. “My cast and the live audience and I will be having more fun than probably should be legal and, thanks to GSN, fans across the country will get to be a part of the fun.”

Instead of producers’ suggestions,  the show will rely on the ideas provided by the audience.

Carey will continue hosting “The Price Is Right,” which airs Monday through Friday on CBS.

Check out the fun of improv on “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”

Purchase your favorites on Amazon!

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