Kay Cannon Quotes

I took one class at Second City called Improv for Actors, and that was it, and that was only because my agent told me I had to.

I take class at the Groundlings, and my personal coach is Lesley Kahn.

I thought of Second City as just the greatest therapeutic job anybody could ever dream of having.

I always honestly dreamed of coming to Second City in Chicago, although I've never even been there to see a show. But I did a ton of sketch comedy at the Second City in LA, which (at the time, in a different location) wasn't really a theater, it was just a space where you took some classes.

Well, actually, the Second City thing came about because I was taking a few improv classes there. I thought that the improv classes would help with my wrestling career, which it has.

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 came from the Groundlings Theatre in L.A., and there, you're guaranteed to at least try something out in front of an audience. At 'SNL,' only the best stuff gets picked, and it's taught me a very defined language of comedy. You learn the structure of a joke, which is not something I was very good at beforehand.

I actually studied with The Groundlings.

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 took an improv class in 2005 in Chicago at ComedySportz, which was short-form, more of a games-based improv. I remember it being real fun and helping with my stand-up. If I did an improv class, and then I did stand-up later, I felt looser on stage and more comfortable.

I took a Groundlings class in my 20s, and I was terrible. They didn't even pass me to the next level.

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 don't have any type of sketch-comedy or stand-up background.

The Second City

That was a huge part of my training, doing improv in Chicago.

All the guys that entered The Groundlings, like Will Ferrell, already had incredible confidence, but I watched shut down women that didn't even have a personality completely become different human beings because of the training.

For the first actual comedy-comedy I did, I took a comedy class in New York, which was full of slightly unhinged people. It was a pretty depressing crowd, very angry and strange people. But then I took a class at the Upright Citizens Brigade, and I loved those people.

Because I started my career in improv, performing with Second City and the Ace Trucking Company, I always enjoy being in situations where - as an actor - you have to think fast & be light on your feet.

I joined an improv comedy group. Ours was named 'Quick Fire!' with an exclamation point. It was when I auditioned for that team and got on it and felt like... I'll just say I felt like I was good at it.

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.'

I came up through Second City, so I'm used to playing 20 characters every night who are very different from each other. I wouldn't want my career to be any different.

If you pay attention, stand-up can be great improv training ground. But one of the things that helped me the most was doing warm-up for the 'Mr. Show' tapings way back when.

I moved to New York and went to a performing arts college, but it wasn't until UCB that I started performing on the regular, figuring out how I'm funny, why I'm funny, and how to play with an audience.

We tried to do a show once every three weeks to a month. We'd always do a new show. It was not successful. It did not become the Matt & Ben show, but it taught me what I like to do as an actor and what I like to do comedically.

I had seen some shows at the Groundlings [legendary L.A. improvisational and sketch comedy troupe] and thought, "If I could ever do that, that would really mean something, that I have arrived." So I went through the program and said to myself, "I'm going to stay here until they kick me out." Seriously, they can ask you to leave at any point. Luckily, they never did that to me.