I moved to Chicago when I was 28, and I wasn't completely idealistic about going to Second City and making a living from comedy, but I knew it would be great for the resume.
I did a lot of commercial and theater work when I got out of school and was living in Dallas, and I moved to Chicago to go through the Second City Conservatory Program.
When I graduated from college, I moved to New York and started doing improv because I read all about the early 'Saturday Night Live' guys having come through Second City and learning how to improvise, so I wanted to get immediately into that.
I'm a bug on acting, which distinguishes Second City from a lot of other revues. It comes from the character, the behavior, and not from the jokes. I don't think jokes are funny. Humor comes out of character and out of situations the character is in.
I was at Second City L.A., going through the conservatory, and I graduated in 2004 and I got 'SNL' in 2005.
I took Second City out of desperation, and that's what ended up working out. It shows that you should be doing a lot of different stuff, taking whatever opportunities are there, to see what works.
I'm crazy lucky. I was trying to be a filmmaker. I was doing Second City classes as a way to be creative. I was a PA for a long time. I was working as an assistant editor on 'Iron Chef America' when I got 'SNL.' It was one of those situations where you're concentrating in one thing and the peripheral thing popped.
I came out of the old Second City in Chicago. Chicago actors are more hard-nosed. They're tough on themselves and their fellow actors. They're self-demanding.
I went to Second City, where you learned to make the other actor look good so you looked good and National Lampoon, where you had to create everything out of nothing, and SNL, where you couldn't make any mistakes, and you learned what collaboration was.
I went down to Chicago to try to go into a place called Second City. I auditioned for that and got in pretty quickly, but I couldn't stop partying. They gave me a warning: 'If you do it again, we're gonna kick you off the main stage.'
