Rob Huebel Quotes

I started doing improv in college, and I met Mike Birbiglia and John Mulaney and a bunch of other very funny, talented people who I'm still friends with and work with.

When I started, there was no comedy community, no comedy industry; there were comedians.

I grew up in Chicago and was a huge fan of 'The Second City', so when I moved to L.A., I was looking for anything that resembled that... then I started 'The Groundlings', so I went to a show and it was very much like 'Second City'. I was so impressed that that same night I went backstage and I went up to the funniest person there.

Comedy people like other comedy people. People hang out and are friends and do shows together, and when you get something going like a TV show or a movie, you want your friends to be in it and make it funnier. That's just the way it should be.

When you get started in comedy, you're at the bottom of the totem pole. Not only are you not getting paid at these open mics. You're actually paying to do them.

When I started, I was very deliberate about making friends with people like John Mulaney who were really funny and wanted to go up and do as many open mics as I did.

The Comedy Store - all three rooms were filled with 800 people in the room. And during that time, all these guys and some women, but mostly guys who weren't funny were doing stand up for a living; they weren't accountants, they were making $30-$50 grand a year on the road, or more.

I'm looking to be the next comedy mogul.

I have to make good things so good comedians want to talk to me.

I know Dave [Attel] and we're friendly, and I have nothing but respect for him.

Then you had people who wanted to get into comedy just to get a TV deal.

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 find that working with friends is always the goal, even if it's just one person. Because the comedy community is kind of insular, it's easy to run into people you've worked with, even if you worked with someone on something for a day, or whatever.

Maybe it's because I come from a very utopian world of being a comedian, but I'm used to many live comedy performances going on in any city I'm in, and each of us is trying to be the best at what we do. I don't think of it as a competition so much as a thriving comedy economy.

By the time I started doing stand-up, the club scene had died.

Performing comedy in San Francisco to begin with is pretty wild. You've got to - you've got the human game preserve to play off of. And it's a lot of great characters everywhere. You work off that, and then you play the rooms, and eventually you get to a point where you're playing a club that is a comedy club, with other comics.

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.

'S.N.L.' is the comedy establishment. Of course you want to go through that, because you want that stamp of approval. But it has its own identity, and our voices didn't mesh for whatever reason - or they decided we didn't belong.

My first improv was Second City in Chicago. Before that, I worked at - with a partner, doing comedy sketches.

Nick Kroll, A.D. Miles, Chelsea Peretti - those were the people I was always doing open mics with.

There was no Groundlings or Upright Citizens Brigade where I was from. Looking back on it, I was trying to do sketch comedy in my stand-up, which is still kind of what I am doing now. To go full-circle here, it's kind of like one-man sketch.

In comedy, you work with people so often that they just become familiar faces - it's like a fraternity.

I can't think of another place other than TV where a five-person sketch comedy group could make a living.

When we left university, in the late '80s, one of the guys had been to the Comedy Store in London, came back very excited and suggested we set up something like it. And so we did.

I started working full time as a comedian in 2005, shortly after we did the Vince Vaughn 'Wild West Comedy Show.' I worked at the Four Seasons hotel from 1998 to 2005, so about seven years, just trying to put some food on the table and pay the rent while I went out to the open mics and got my feet wet with stand-up comedy.