From The Comic's Comic

The founders of the once-heralded (Harolded?) Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre have sold out to a talent manager, an administrator and venture capitalists. Yes, and now what?

The UCB’s lone remaining theater on Franklin Avenue in Los Angeles, now under new ownership.

The disciples of Del Close, who took his radical “Harold” style of improv comedy from Chicago to New York City, scored a Comedy Central series, opened a theater, became famous and taught hundreds more to become famous comedians and actors, have finally fled their own flock for good.

The UCB4 (the nickname co-founders Amy Poehler, Matt Besser, Matt Walsh and Ian Roberts adopted from students) sold both their brand and their theater. The new owners? Longtime comedy/talent manager Jimmy Miller, former CEO of The Onion Mike McAvoy, and Elysian Park Ventures, a private investment firm. News of the sale broke late Friday, not from the UCB4, but from a post in industry trade site Deadline and a mass email sent by McAvoy to former UCB students and performers.

But McAvoy’s email to “the UCB community” only identified him as Mike. Which prompted more than a few joke replies on social media last night.

So we interrupt your emails with this Piffany bonus breaking news dispatch…

I received a different email:

LOS ANGELES, March 25, 2022 – Jimmy Miller, founder of talent management company Mosaic and Mike McAvoy, former CEO/Owner of The Onion, with financial support from Elysian Park Ventures, have acquired Upright Citizens Brigade, one of the most well-known comedy brands in the entertainment business. As part of the acquisition, they plan on reopening theaters in the coming months as well as completely rebuilding the business, including providing additional support and opportunities for comedic talent and continuing UCB’s efforts to create a more diverse and inclusive environment. 

“We are pleased to be handing over the reins to Jimmy and Mike in the hopes the theater and school will continue to be a thriving environment for all who want to learn and perform comedy.” said the UCB 4’s Amy Poehler, Matt Besser, Ian Roberts and Matt Walsh. “We look forward to the ways they will commit to increasing diversity and ensure the continued existence of an organization we have loved and dedicated ourselves to for over 20 years.”

“We are very excited to reopen theaters and get back to putting improvisers of all walks of life on stage,” said Jimmy Miller. “I look forward to helping Mike and the team with their efforts – I look at the UCB theater and school as another great client. To be clear about my interest in this – I love comedy, I love improv, and I love UCB. I want to be sure that this business continues and thrives for 20 more years, and beyond. While this will be a separate business from Mosaic, it is my hope that synergies will be found that provide overall value, support and stage time to as many performers as possible, regardless of representation.”

“I’m thankful for the opportunity to help lead one of the most respected and influential comedy institutions through its next set of challenges and opportunities,” said Mike McAvoy. “We have many great plans we can’t yet talk about in detail, but our first priority is to reopen theaters and training centers in Los Angeles and New York with diversity, equality and inclusion front and center. The additional resources at our disposal will enable us to pay performers for stage time and enhance The UCB 4 Scholarship Program which will continue to aid underprivileged students.”

Miller will serve as chairman and McAvoy will serve as CEO, with Miller bringing a long history of success in the comedy world, having represented some of the biggest names in comedy.

New management of UCB will also work with Arts Consulting Group, a third party firm that has been in consultation with members of the UCB community on a variety of diversity initiatives, including HR department creation and the formation of a special committee to oversee and execute clear, ongoing and actionable diversity, equity and inclusion plans.

Further details around what this acquisition means for the UCB community will be shared in the coming months, as well as general updates. For more information, please visit https://ucbcomedy.com/

OK, let’s break this down and get into it.

Who are the new owners of the UCB?

Jimmy Miller: Younger brother of Dennis and Rich. Even casual comedy fans recognize Dennis Miller, who became a star behind the Weekend Update desk for Saturday Night Live in 1985, then broke off with his own weekly talker for HBO, then became more of a conservative firebrand in this 21st century. Rich and Jimmy first followed Dennis into the comedy business a year before SNL came calling; they got jobs at the Improv on Melrose, working the door and later booking comics. Rich still does that now, most prominently through the Helium comedy clubs and was a formative part of the Moontower festival in Austin. Jimmy became a big-time talent manager, repping the likes of Jim Carrey and Jennifer Lopez. He later founded his own management group, Mosaic.

Here was a billboard he took out back in 2011, just for funsies, and captured for posterity by comedy writer Alex Blagg:

Mike McAvoy: According to his LinkedIn profile, McAvoy worked with The Onion for 14 years, starting as the humor paper’s controller in February 2005, becoming chief financial officer in 2007, then chief controlling officer in 2008, and serving as both president and CEO in Chicago from 2015 until July 2019 (also holding an executive vice president of sales title for Fusion Media Group). So he lasted a few months after The Onion’s ownership also changed hands in April 2019 from G/O Media, which took over the Gizmodo Media Group. McAvoy had overseen layoffs and restructuring of The Onion in 2015, before Univision (Fusion) purchased a 40 percent stake in the paper in 2016.

Elysian Park Ventures: A private investment arm of the ownership group for the L.A. Dodgers baseball team. Their other companies that may ring bells for you include dot.LA, Draft Kings, Rawlings, and Seat Geek.

But wait. Wasn’t The UCB, which infamously never paid performers (not exactly citing Mitzi Shore’s defense of The Comedy Store of club as community campus, but close enough, while definitely claiming a DIY meets Fugazi punk vibe of keeping costs low for the audience), which also didn’t offer health insurance to employees, closed its East Village theater in 2019, then shuttered its remaining NYC and LA theaters and training centers in March 2020 due to the pandemic, then declared it’d go nonprofit a few months later, then declared it’d do better by minority students and performers, received a bunch of federal pandemic bailout funds (how much, though?) without apparently using them to rehire or subsidize laid-off employees, only to….checks email above…sell out to a talent manager, a number-cruncher, and a VC firm?

Apparently so.

I’ve personally had multiple face-to-face conversations/debates with the UCB4 (most prominently Besser) over the years, and was arguing the case for them to go nonprofit even before the pandemic. Some of these talks were informal, like over meals at SXSW.

You can listen to some of our formal chats from over the years, recorded for my podcast, Last Things First.

If you go to the UCB’s website now, then you’ll see that they’ve continued to sell improv, sketch and other comedy classes online throughout the pandemic, regardless of their previous sell-off of brick-and-mortar training centers. You can sign up for a UCB class now if you want!

They’ll reopen the Franklin theater soon enough, most probably.

Then what?

Michael Hartney, laid off along with other UCB employees as the “last” NYC-based artistic director for the theater, quipped yesterday that he wasn’t the Mike who emailed everyone the news.

Predictably, comedians had a field day as they heightened “the game” of the sudden news development regarding the UCB.

Here are some of the replies that really caught my eye.

Shaun Diston, a longtime UCB performer and teacher, shared this statement from Project Rethink, where he and other comedians pushed for diversity and progress, calling an end to those efforts.

Ashley Ray, a writer for Adult Swim’s Alabama Jackson and host of the “TV I Say” podcast, laid out a devastating Twitter thread about McAvoy:

“mike mcavoy ruins everything he touches

you know why you can’t get print editions of the onion even tho people were willing to pay for print editions of the onion but no one goes to the site because social media? that was mike mcavoy’s idea

you know how jezebel and gizmodo and the root and the av club are all going to hell? that’s cuz of mike mcavoy’s gross mismanagement under univision that forced them to sell all those sites to whomever they could for a profit

he’s racist, bad at his job, doesn’t give a shit about sexual harassment, sold the onion and all those sites, took a payout and ran while people got laid off in the sale to great hill partners

lmao but none of this matters cuz they know all of this and people are always gonna take the money. i look forward to mike mcavoy trying to figure out a way to plug midroll ads into an improv show

show me one success from mcavoy’s time leading FMG!!! lmao show me one person who remembers what FMG even was!!

show me one person who is like “i loved working at the onion/clickhole when mike mcavoy was paying writing fellows peanuts and overspending on bullshit parties to the point where payroll couldn’t even pay out bonuses to the sales team on time”

anyway i hope my friends who do improv drain as much of this man’s money as they can i guess”

Pat Baer, longtime UCB-NY tech overlord who kept the Chelsea and East Village shows running as smoothly as possible, zinged:

He continued opining in a thread:

“This is the thing I’ve been saying for years: the thing holding back UCB was it’s lack of investment from VENTURE CAPITALISTS.

less Truth in Comedy and more “strategic, operational, and management resources for companies operating at the intersection of sports, technology, and entertainment”.

The punk-as-hell vibes wore off years ago, but holy shit this still sucks.

They finally figured out a way to pay UCB performers: get money from the Dodgers investment arm.

Happy future performers are going to be paid, hope they’re being honest about working with the LA community on the diversity issues presented in 2020, and I’m happy for my friends who hopefully will be able to continue / return to teaching.

But when you take money from venture, they want to see results. They want to see immediate growth. This isn’t an angel investment from someone who loves comedy. The real bonus for the VC is that all UCB employees were already laid off in 2020.

who knows, maybe they’ll give artistic directors plenty of freedom and let the money be handled by people who know how to handle finances?”

From Adam Conover, host of Adam Ruins Everything:

Some more ripe replies…

A couple of current UCB teachers offered mixed emotions:

And from Henry Gilbert, cohost/producer of the “Talking Simpsons” podcast:

Gilbert continued in a thread:

“UCB was already in a crummy situation the last five years, with tons of former students & associated acts taking issue with their business practices and more. I can’t imagine a venture capital firm buying it is going to improve things

I was siding with the many UCB vets pushing the theater group to go non-profit. Instead the UCB founders headed in the WAY opposite direction selling out to a venture capital firm that owns stake in Draft Kings and Seat Geeks. Billionaire investors owning theater space sounds bad

Gotta hand it to the UCB founders though. After a couple decades of not paying coaches or performers on their stages, they ultimately sell it to a bunch of VC corporate executives for surely a big payday. Their posturing about art over paying performers paid off big time for them

Turning out your empty pockets at the Del Close marathon, telling folks they should feel lucky to even get to use this stage to learn improv games or do their new stand up material in Sunset, all to sell the whole fucking thing to corporate vampires. An amazing decades-long scam

Having worked in places sold to VC vampires, I’m certain that things will only get worse for UCB, but I suppose the extreme exploitation of the performers will be more in the open instead of with some Gen X posture that it’s actually not taking unpaid labor from desperate people”

But what’s really going to happen? What do I think?

The UCB had already sold their Sunset Boulevard theater and training campus in December. Their longtime Manhattan venue, the basement black box beneath a Gristedes supermarket, already has a new occupant — an extension of Boston’s Improv Asylum called Asylum NYC. You can find more than a few UCB alums performing improv, sketch, stand-up and character showcases there.

Hartney and some other UCB stalwarts, meanwhile, already have reformed as their own nonprofit improv/sketch collective, the Squirrel Comedy Theatre. Some of these Squirrels also perform in the cast of what has evolved out of the UCB’s popular weekly improv showcase ASSSSCAT, now known as RaaatScraps on Sundays at Caveat.

In Los Angeles, a similar regrouping has taken place at The Comedy Co-op.

Undoubtedly, people will come back to the UCB Franklin. They may not be the same people. New, younger aspiring comedians and actors will sign up for classes and form improv and sketch groups.

But it likely will never be the same.

More likely, the UCB will join other storied comedy brands — The National Lampoon and The Onion among them — as legendary markers in our comedy history that comedians and comedy fans of my Generation X, Millennials, and OK, Boomers, too, will reminisce about and wonder whatever happened…