Words from the Wise: Groundling Alums Reflect
Carl Kozlowski

Laraine Newman

I was at CalArts for about a minute when my sister took me to a Gary Austin workshop, and I loved it immediately. So many people I came through there with became [members of] the top writing staffs on sitcoms like Cheers and Just Shoot Me. But most importantly, I learned about being in a company and how to deal with the give and take of other people's time on stage. It didn't help fully when I got to SNL, because the stakes were much higher there, but for any show folks, there is a familial feel, whether you're in summer stock or road tours or Broadway.

For Newman, the character creation encouraged by the Groundlings enabled her to come up with such SNL-worthy individuals as Cheri the Stewardess and a Valley girl who was part of The Godfather's group therapy sessions. It also led to her current voiceover career and a recent lifetime achievement award from the Chicago Improv Festival.

The training really holds up, no matter what you do.

Jon Lovitz

I remember driving there to the theater the first time and crying, because I was really committing my life to being a comedian, and I was wondering, what if it doesn't work out? But I went, and I loved it, and then I met Phil Hartman, and he invited me to understudy his show Chick Hazard: Olympic Trials.

Jesus, it's been 20 years. But I have a career because of it. When I was doing the show with Phil, Laraine came and saw it, and I wound up hired in '85 on SNL. They kept me for the next year and asked who I worked well with, and I said Phil, so they got him on SNL too. Then I told Lisa Kudrow, whom I've known as a little sister since she was six, that the Groundlings were the way to go when she asked me how to get into acting.  It took her 10 years before she got Friends, but look at her now.

The camaraderie was great there. It was like a bunch of class clowns working together. In real school, you get in trouble for goofing off, but here was a school that taught you how to goof off really well. I was a messenger, and we all had day jobs, but people loved it so much that they were paying to be a part of it. I learned how to create characters, how to write and supervise my scenes. I still use everything I learned there.

Julia Sweeney

There's so many memories there because it's like talking about the house you grew up in. It really taught me how people had careers in show business, and that people could cobble together fine livings in showbiz even if they weren't big stars.

The Groundlings was where Sweeney launched her most famous character, Pat -- a drooling, annoying office drone of indeterminate gender, who drove people to squeamish laughter for years both on the Groundlings stage and at SNL. Whether Pat is a male or a female is a question Sweeney has to this day never resolved publicly.

I was working with an accountant, who was a guy, who had some of Pat's mannerisms, like drooling and standing too close. Then there was a woman who was annoying too. I realized I couldn't play a man, so I combined the two.

Edie McClurg

Edie McClurg was a member of the Groundlings' official first cast from 1975 to 1985, having honed her chops with the Pitschel Players' troupe in San Francisco and as a standup at L.A.'s Comedy Store. Her officiousness and prim and proper Midwestern viewpoint helped McClurg launch a career of playing stuffy, upright women who wield a sharp tongue when audiences least expect it -- particularly in Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

When we started, it was more of a commune, and if you came up with some type of material in the workshop, it would get in the show. Improvisation has been the core of my technique, and when I'm presented with a script, I always fill it in with what I call the noise of life -- little comments characters say under their breath -- so it's fuller than a character just talking to another character.

Cheri Oteri

I had never done acting or anything like that before. But then I auditioned, and it was like my world opened up because I had found something that interested me so and excited me and would be so difficult as well. There were so many people I enjoyed watching there, and I would always run up the back stairs to catch my favorite sketches that other people did. I would learn more than I ever had from watching improv games.

For Oteri, who enjoyed a relatively quick journey to stardom on SNL and her own recently announced sitcom deal with ABC, the Groundlings offered a chance to break out of cubicle hell at A&M's publishing company. Although the prospect of standup cowed her, she became immediately intrigued by the moment-to-moment risks of improv.

Kathy Griffin

I had moved here from Chicago at age 18, after getting my first commercial, and didn't know anybody and assumed that the privileged kids like Emilio Estevez were always going to get the breaks. But I went to see a Groundlings show and walked backstage and met Phil Hartman, who took me around and introduced me to people. Soon I was there and found that the people there, no matter how successful they were getting, couldn't get enough improv. It was actually kind of sick.

My favorite sketch was, I did a monologue as a black woman watching Rambo and talking to the screen. It was a really big hit there, got great reviews, and got me a lot of meetings and auditions. But I'd go to a meeting at, say,. 20th Century Fox, only to find out an executive wanted me to crack their friends up, and there was no real audition at all. The ironic thing is that I can't even play the woman watching the screen and yelling anymore, because people are just so uptight now. Times have changed.

Read the history of the Groundlings here.

Carl Kozlowski is a regular Arriviste contributor and the co-author of the satirical self-help guide Life: The Final Frontier. (Pick this up!) He has also performed standup coast to coast and written for the Chicago Tribune, New City Weekly in Chicago, Chicago Reader and Pasadena Weekly.