Improv, Musical Sketch, & Rap Improv at Sonoma Laughfest, October 21, 2016
Episode Five airs:
December 12 at 11:00pm
December 13 at 10:00pm
December 14 at 1:00am (dec. 15)
December 15 at midnight (dec. 16)
December 16 at 11:00pm
December 17 at 10:00pm
Hosted by White Women
White Women, is the illest, flyest, most ballerific group of comedians that has EVER LIVED. If you sleep on us, we’ll backflip on your mattress.
SQUEEZE – improv from Los Angeles
Come along as Squeeze takes you on a wild improv adventure, that ends up back where it started. Literally. We’ll end our show in the same place it started, and in between we’ll visit space, prison, the future…pretty much anywhere an improv show can go! It’s called the Slacker. Other improv teams do it, too, I guess. BUT NOT LIKE WE DO!
Mark David Christenson is one of the few men to ever embrace Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs. An actor/improviser/writer originally from Sandy, Utah. He has been training/performing at UCBTLA since 2009. He’s happy to be performing with the Mess Hall team LaserDisc. Other UCB credits: Harold right with Landlord and Mister Town City, Copycat, Seinfeld: The Purge, Squeeze Academy, Spoiler Country, The Space Program, Sketch Cram Quick & Funny Musicals and UCB Cagmatch. When not performing at UCB, you can listen to him on the I Will Watch Anything Once Podcast, catch him every Friday night co-hosting the indie improv show The Manifesto Show, performing for kids with the award winning children’s theatre company Story Pirates and improvising with his beloved teams Penguins on the Playground, Squeeze, Styx Martin around Los Angeles. He has starred in the independent hit White on Rice, the award-winning Feeding Mr. Baldwin, and as been featured on Conan.
Farley Elliott is a freelance food and comedy writer living in Los Angeles. He has performed all over the country with his award- and Cagematch-winning indie team Squeeze, and for years ran the Friday night indie show The Manifesto Show. His UCB credits include Sketch Cram, Cagematch, the UCB 3-on-3 Tournament, various Spank and Variety shows, and the former Harold team Scandal! Off stage, Farley writes about food, beer, travel and more for LA Weekly, Serious Eats, Eater LA, Los Angeles Magazine and beyond. His work can be found at OverOverUnder.com.
Jake has been a student of UCB since 2008, and has had his cat Lemon since 2009. Jake co-created We’re Gross with Gilli Nissim, and it is without a doubt his crowning achievement. He can be seen hosting 4,3,2,1 with Church. He is regularly aghast to find himself playing along his comedy heroes as part of Puddy. He also writes for his comedy team SQUEEZE. Sometimes he gets to play on his favorite team Casey and Jo-Jo. And twice he played with Last Day of School. And so now he is dead and this is his obituary. Written by his ghost.
Brian hails from leafy, invariably pleasant Ridgewood, New Jersey, where he once appeared as Wilbur in a middle school production of Charlotte’s Web. Brian abandoned the theater shortly thereafter. After graduating from Rutgers University, Brian moved to Los Angeles because winter is awful. Brian has appeared on the soap opera Passions (in a dream sequence!), and on the History Channel’s historical reenactment show Days That Shook the World, as well as in numerous national ad campaigns, including that one for Wheat Thins where the yellow van drives around and confronts people who tweeted about Wheat Thins. No Joke. His work on the Wheat Thins campaign resulted numerous awards (none for him), as well as mentions in AdWeek and the New York Times, and a one-time stint as a presenter at the People’s Choice Awards, where he almost met Johnny Depp, who he believes is “dreamy”. Brian began studying at UCB Theater in 2009, and has appeared onstage in shows including Let’s Do This, UCB Cagematch, Starpunch, Take It From Us, The Re-Imaginator, Squeeze Academy: Cops on the Loose, We’re Gross with Gilli Nissim, the Del Close Marathon, and Not Too Shabby, as well as around the country with his improv team Squeeze. He currently writes for We’re Gross with Gilli Nissim and co-hosts Your Favorites with his improv team Treats? in the Inner Sanctum.
Josh Simpson is a comedian, writer, actor and maker of online mischief living in Los Angeles. He’s been studying with the UCB since 2004 and performing on stage since 2007. Josh has been performing on Harold night for over 4 years with Flap Jackson and The Great War. He also performs with The Twitter Show and a group he co-founded Werner Hotdog: The Documentary. He’s done a lot of sketch writing as well, but you’re not really interested in that, are you? Professionally, Josh has found a home on the Internet. He worked for over 2 years at Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s Funny Or Die, where he wrote, produced and directed original comedy videos. He also answered phones and did accounting, but that would be stupid to include here. He left Funny Or Die in the Summer of 2010 after starting the Twitter account @BPGlobalPR in the wake of the BP Oil Spill. Josh used this fake Twitter account to satirize BP’s absurd PR efforts in the wake of the spill. The account gained over 190,000 followers in a month and got write ups in Time Magazine, The New York Times, Fast Company and all the websites that your nerdy friends talk about. He even got to do a TED Talk at TEDxOilSpill in Washington D.C. It was absurd. Buy him (me) a beer sometime, and he’ll (I’ll) tell you all about it. Josh then spent a year and a half writing and producing original content for Conan O’Brien’s website TeamCoco.com. He’s currently freelancing, writing and teaching improv classes in Los Angeles and spending as much time as possible with his dog named Dre.
THIS FACE WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE – musical sketch from Chicago & Los Angeles
The present time is always the perfect time for some sweet singin’ and strummin’, and truly, is life even worth living without music?
Marcy Minton is an actor and writer in LA with a theatre degree from UNC Chapel Hill. She studied improv and sketch writing at The UCB Theatre LA and performs regularly with several improv teams there. She was a writer for the UCB sketch team, The Space Program; a cast member of Boom Chicago in Amsterdam; and performed with The Second City aboard the Gem in fall 2013. She also played the formidable, kickboxing Nurse Barbara on Scrubs.
Rendel is an actor, writer and comedic songstress. After graduating from the Chicago College of Performing Arts, she immersed herself in the vibrant improv and sketch scene at Second City Chicago and the Annoyance Theatre. Upon moving to LA, she seasoned herself in the bubbling vat of improv brine at UCB LA and Mi’s Westside Comedy Theatre. She currently co-hosts Josh and Rendal Present: Sounds!, a bi-monthly musical comedy variety show and performs regularly with Mission Improvable, Myrtle and Panda Dreams. She also has a crock pot and is not afraid to use it.
DOPE TOWN 3000 – rap improv from Los Angeles
Dope Town 3000 gets one dope ass suggestion, and spins it into a non-stop off-the-top sure-to-shock-around-the-block avalanche of improvised hip-hop comedy. Oh yeah we rap the ENTIRE TIME. #DT3K
Zora is a first-generation Ugandan-American raised in Northern California (and hella proud). After graduating from Seattle Pacific University, he moved to LA and studied television writing at UCLA while going through the UCB program for improv and sketch. Zora writes for the UCB Maude team, The New Deal and hosts a dope-ass rap battle in the Inner Sanctum called UC-BEEF!! You can also catch him around town performing with the freestyle rap improv group, 808.
Shaun survived being born in Florida and began taking improv classes at UCB in New York 2010. Though he also pursues standup and sketch, Shaun is probably best known as a freestyle rapper and beatboxer formerly with New York’s North Coast and now as a member of LA’s #1 long form Hip Hop Improv team 808.
Greg Smith is a Los Angeles-based comedian, performer, writer, musician, and songwriter. At UCB, he’s on the Mess Hall team High Five City, is a writer and accompanist for Quick And Funny Musicals, a cohost and musical director for The Hullabaloo, a cast member of Mad Men the Musical, THIS IS NOT A TAN! Presents: Token, Unsigned Hype, and Oddway. He’s a regular performer in the Del Close Marathon, a writer/performer of Spank show, Mudville: The Happiest Songs On Earth, an accompanist for Those Magnificent Moms, a performer in many bit shows, and an accompanist/musical director for many one-off shows. Outside of UCB, he’s a musical director and accompanist for Second City Hollywood, an actor and accompanist for Story Pirates, a co-founder, writer, and performer of musical comedy duo Mudville (whose work has been featured on Funny Or Die and Huffington Post), a performer in indie improv groups Eggs Con Huevo and The Scoop (including slots at the Los Angeles Indie Improv Festival), and an accompanist for about 80000 musical improv teams. Born and raised in Detroit to a pair of music teachers, he graduated from the University of Michigan with a BA in Screen Arts & Cultures. His favorite food is pizza and his favorite movie is the Mortal Kombat adaptation, because he’s actually two ten-year-olds in a trenchcoat attempting to be an adult.
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