I will give Thomas credit, he wanted to tour way before I wanted to tour, because it’s another example, there are very few examples of a long-form improv troupe touring big theaters. Schwartz: In the beginning, there was never a piece of us after our performance 12 years ago that was like, “Oh my God, maybe one day we’ll do a special,” because they didn’t really exist specials for long-form improv are few and far between. and then started touring, and then we were booking theaters and we’re like, “Man, wouldn’t it be cool if we could do a special? That’d be crazy.” It was just bit by bit, it was never some Machiavellian plan we just sort of got little bread crumbs that were like, “Wow this might be possible, let’s keep going.” We’ve been doing Largo shows - a theater in L.A. There’s so many different ways to do it, but we’ve fallen into something that really feels like unique to us, and then, let’s cultivate the show a little bit. Improv is a little bit like - you need other people to do it, so both of us had other groups and other people we performed with, but I think in the past four years we started to really double down and think we’ve fallen on a rhythm and a way of executing improv. We would just do eight minutes of really fast-paced, insane improv, and we’re like, “I like this.”
where you could go up and do like eight-minute sets. We were having a fun time, and there was just so happened to be some kind of variety show Wednesday night at 11 p.m. Ben was like, “I think you’re funny, I’ll do it,” and I was like, “I think you’re funny!” We just got Two Boots Pizza one day walking around the city of New York - what a hell of a town! The Big Apple, god dammit, you can do anything there.
When I first moved to New York from Chicago, I had done all of this improv, but I didn’t want to go through a whole other training scheme at UCB. Middleditch: Ben and I have been doing improv on an individual basis each for over 20 years, and I think together it’s been somewhere around 12 years. How and when did you two start doing improv together? Ahead of releasing the trio of shows during a pandemic (“Posting a promo video when there’s far more important and crazy things going on always feels a little silly,” Schwartz says), Middleditch and Schwartz spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about their “really hard pitch” to get the specials made, their approach to performing and their crusade to make improv more accessible.
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