Ian Gomez Quotes

I'd taken some classes at UCB in New York and again at the Magnet Theater and the PIT Theater. I definitely never advanced to where I was on a team or anything like that.

I actually studied with The Groundlings.

I did Second City, and Nia Vardalos also did Second City, so I knew her from there.

I had, like, two goals in my career: One was to try to get into 'Second City.' When I moved to Chicago, my goal was to try to work at 'Second City.' And beyond that, my goal was to make enough money as an actor to not do anything else but act, not have to go and wait tables again.

River City Improv set the stage for my career.

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.

If it weren't for The Groundlings, I would never be on Saturday Night Live.

Comedy is really my passion. I started out way before television doing sketch comedy with other women. Very much along the lines of, at the time it was 'Sensible Footwear', but now it's 'Smack The Pony', 'French And Saunders', that kind of thing. That's how I started out.

I was at Second City L.A., going through the conservatory, and I graduated in 2004 and I got 'SNL' in 2005.

I did nothing but dramas for seven years in New York. I didn't really start anything comedic until I moved out to L.A. and found The Groundlings.

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 joined an improv group in college, which was a lot of fun. After I graduated, I moved to Chicago to try to get into the Second City.

I ended up going to college for visual arts but moved up to New York after I graduated from college in 2006 and started going gung ho to the Upright Citizens Brigade, and I realized that that was what I was really interested in and what I really wanted to do.

The Second City

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

I started in action, and then I went to comedy school.

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.

I always enjoyed writing. I did playlets in high school, I did radio shows in college. That's one of the reasons I went down to Second City, because you could do acting and writing.

'Saturday Night Live' was actually started with a show that Lorne Michaels and I did at a summer camp called Timberlane in Ontario when we were 14 and 15. We would do an improvisational show with music, comedy and acting.

I had a teacher who recommended I take improv classes in Chicago - I'm from Evanston, Illinois - so I did improv classes at Improv Olympic, and that kind of opened me up.

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.

If you work in Chicago in the improv scene, anyone is happy for you if you get a job.

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

When I was in high school I was a really huge 'SNL' fan. I remember the cast around the time I started watching it - Will Ferrell, Ana Gasteyer, Molly Shannon, Cheri O'Teri, Tracy Morgan. I did research to find out how people got on the show. Their bios always said they came from an improv team, so I started taking classes.