Upright Citizens Brigade Touring Company

Matt Besser didn't mean to bring his current solo show, "Woo Pig Sooie!," back to San Francisco, where he did a version at the Purple Onion last year. He figured on touring it through the Bible Belt, because preaching secular humanism here is like setting up a cheese shop on the moon.

Based in Los Angeles, Besser is a founding member of the Upright Citizens Brigade, a Chicago foursome that moved to New York, founded its own improv and sketch comedy theater, and had its own cable show on Comedy Central. UCB member Amy Poehler is a current cast member of "Saturday Night Live," and the troupe opened a second theater in Los Angeles last year.

Besser continues to do sketch comedy and improv shows with other UCB members, but his latest stand-up show takes on intelligent design and current excesses of the religious right as well as his own childhood experiences growing up half Jewish in Arkansas. His mother hailed from the Ozarks, and his dad was a Jewish guy from Little Rock, a fact that didn't please his Presbyterian grandmother.

"My grandmother haunted my father and my mother, although she was still alive, wrote these crazy letters about how they were going to hell, about how Jews brainwash and manipulate with their clever minds," Besser says. "I use these letters to draw comparisons between the way so many people thought in the '60s and '50s and people who still think that way.

"Now it's not so much about Jews and Christians marrying as much as gays getting married. But you know, I also want to talk about important things like why does the pope get to wear taller hats than everybody else, and why are Jewish hats so small?"

The show's title refers not to the biblical prohibition against eating pork (though faithful UCB viewers will recall that everything's permitted as long as it's through the hole in the sheet) but to the cheer for the Arkansas Razorbacks.

"Sports is pretty much my religion," Besser says. "I attach it to a sports camp that I went to, where achieving in sports and believing in God went hand in hand. I'd do the rope-climbing exercise, and they would do this chant: 'Climb the rope for Jesus.' And I could not do it, so I'd come down the rope and they'd tell me I really needed to believe in Jesus if I wanted to climb that rope. I think that players who aren't big believers, when they win the game they should make a big deal of how they were able to do it without God's help."

Besser's show is playing for one night next week at the Eureka Theater, courtesy of the San Francisco Improv Cooperative, for which he's in town to teach a sold-out improvisational comedy master class. - San Fransisco Chronicle

Piccolo Spoleto’s Piccolo Fringe Series

Want to know how to get an audience interested before you’ve even walked on stage? As the world-wise (and -weary) Matt Besser must’ve figured, having a gigantic, red plastic hat shaped like a wild hog sitting near the microphone is a fairly good bet.

Besser’s one-man show, Woo Pig Sooie!, was a hilarious and somewhat stream-of-consciousness combination of sharp social criticism disguised as religion jokes, stand-up, and storytelling. The Arkansas native emerged dressed in full U of Ark. Razorbacks regalia in keeping with a theme he used to great effect throughout the show. He began by discussing his religious zealot of a grandmother, who, in her waning years, began sending actual letters to God (complete with return address) that simply contained short messages like “Julie and family” (Julie being Besser’s mother). This segued into a bit where he read some completely ridonkulous prayers he found on the internet about cast members from Punky Brewster and the show just kept rolling from there.

Besser’s laid-back delivery belied a razor(back)-sharp insight into the many inane problems swarming America these days, including (but not limited to): the evolution/”intelligent design” debate, publicly posting the Ten Commandments, gay marriage amendments, the cult of Catholicism (“All a religion is is an old cult”), and, in fairness to his half-Jewish heritage, the absurdity of not driving on the Sabbath.

As a co-founder of the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy troupe, Besser’s command of improvisation shined through in his off-the-cuff interactions with the audience. After a gentleman got up (presumably to go to the bathroom), Besser remarked that it “must’ve been the joke about the Virgin Mary’s clit” that scared him away.

The show hit a bit of a premature climax when Besser presented his “new Ten Commandments,” a list that included such soon-to-be-timeless admonishments as: “#1: Don’t touch me. #4: Don’t bogart that joint!” and the clincher, “#10: Don’t be so uptight about asshole sex.” He then instructed the audience to “go ahead, just give it a try when you get home tonight. And write me an e-mail and tell me all about it. With pictures.”

Woo Pig Sooie! was a fantastic one-man monologue/rant/routine that somehow managed to be vulgar, rip-snortingly hilarious, and touching. Yes, touching. And we guarantee you’ll never say “God bless you” the same way again. - Charelston City Paper

Matt Besser pulls out one of those black-and-white camouflaged "composition notebooks," only this one has "FUCK YOU" written in red ink across the cover. inside are clippings from newspapers, all of which illustrate dick-like behavior on either his part or in others. The title of this new comedy show at the Improv Olympic West is also the plea that comedian Besser delivers to the audience: Don't Be A Dick. But thank god so many of us are (hi, all those people that honk at me the second the light turns green), or Besser wouldn't be able to bring the audience to tears and embarrassed nods every Wednesday night.

"I'm trying to show we're all dicks," the brillo-haired Besser says, "you just have to admit it. i don't think a dick sets off to be a dick, but their natural personality takes them that way. Whatever that checking mechanism makes not say something--as my mom used to say, 'Think before you speak,'--I lost that at some point. I'm sure there's a lot of other people out there that lost it too, and would like to join the dick army."

Examples include a woman who wrote to a newspaper complaining about the poor quality of its children's poetry. Besser sings another from a porn magazine as a hymnal. the act is also peppered with a potpourri of other personal provacations: curing cancer in lab rats instead of people, fortune cookies that compare him to a wilting flower and people who say "You look tired!" when what they really mean is, "You look ugley!"

Besser is probably best known for his television series Upright Citizens Brigade. In Comedy Central's tradition of canceling innovative shows (T.V. Funhouse) and letting others carry on longer than a 12:30 SNL skit (South Park), the channel axed UCB after three seasons. On the series, Besser and his cohorts created all sorts of chaos--much of which could have led someone to declare Don't Be A Dick!

In his present act, however, Besser repeatedly shows what could only be referred to as the opposite of a dick--a nice guy. Searching for lost puppies, anti-hunting and political activism are all woven through his show. He does this, he says, in order to show that "we're all dick," even those who believe we do altruistic acts. Besser claims that his "reaction" to the dickdom is just his way of getting back at fate. "Instead of being nice, which most people would say, you have to get your licks in. If you're going to get smacked by the karma wheel, you have to smakc back."

A few years ago, Besser was K.O.d by the Karma Wheel when he began receiving a plethora (12-20 a day) of calls at this apartment in New York for what people believed was a Tech Support line. After attempting to resolve the problem with the companies involved (it didn't work), Besser decided to pretend that he was indeed Tech Support and recorded the riotous results. he plays these as an "encore" to Don't Be A Dick, and they're also available on his CD, May I Help You (Dumbass)?

Calling someone and "fucking with them" is not inherently funny to Besser, because most of the time the people on the other end don't deserve it. Further, of the prank calls he's heard, most are "an innocent guy being screwed with by some guy doing a foreign voice." Besser's "prank calls" were what he describes as "wrong numbers of stupidity."

"It was people refusing to admit that you put a '1' before an area code. it's just idiotic. If there's a parenthesis around an area code, the '1's' implied. What kind of education does that take?" Callers to Tech Support were greeted by Björk, Jimmy Stewart or Besser pretending he was an automated response, telling the dialer to "press 1 for 2 and press 2 for 1." Besser strung callers along anywhere from 40 seconds to nearly six minutes, telling one gravely serious man that he couldn't help him because he hacked into his computer and found lesbian pornography and another that the the problem was that he didn't enter is CR, or "cock-ring" number. besser calls pranks "a cherry on top of scenes" and as the dessert to his show, it leaves the audience not satiated, but hungry for more.

Another penis-themed shows, Puppetry Of The Penis is currently playing against Besser. Why should one choose his show? "See Don't Be A Dick if you like comedy. See Puppetry of the Penis if you like to see some guy play with his dick," he quips. - Campus Circle

Does it ever seem that tech- support lines are staffed by a bunch of quarter-wit Luddites who take sadistic pleasure in keeping you on the phone? It might be because some of your calls never reached the help line at all. Perhaps you—like so many other New Yorkers—neglected to dial a one before the area code when calling a popular Internet service line, and while you thought you had called a tech-savvy trouble-shooter in Houston, you had actually reached Matt Besser in his Manhattan apartment. "I started getting calls going on a year ago," says Besser, a seasoned comic and founding member of the Upright Citizens Brigade. "It probably went on for two months before it even occurred to me to tape them."

Besser is no stranger to improv, so it was easy for him to create inept characters on the spot to lead the callers on. The hilarious recordings of those conversations are now the focus of Besser's one-man show, May I Help You...Dumbass? He strings the calls together with other elements: monologues that lash out at people who don't understand long-distance dialing, irate letters sent to the editors of various publications that lambaste things like the cheap standards of a local children's poetry contest, videos that show Besser encouraging people in a long line at the post office to revolt. But for most of the show, Besser just plays the calls from a table loaded with stereo equipment. Sitting alone on the UCB theater's tiny stage with Peter Bagge's outrageous cartoons projected on the wall behind him, Besser looks like a DJ spinning rage.

Besser is merciless with his callers, and audiences love it; the theater has been packed for Saturday night showings of Dumbass since it opened in February—maybe because people understand where he's coming from. Besser is just a regular guy who's fed up with everything from voice-activated systems that malfunction to people who can't dial a phone correctly, and the overall effect is a fantastic mix between the venom of Rush Limbaugh and the pranks of the Jerky Boys.

"The thing that makes these different than prank calls are that those are outgoing and these are incoming," says Besser. "It makes the victims a little more deserving of what they get." In one call, Besser plays an all-business operator curtly demanding information: Favorite color? (Green.) Favorite Yankees player? (Jeter.) Cock-ring size? (Um...Excuse me?) In another, Besser flatly explains that it's company policy to make sure that callers have accepted Jesus into their lives before they can receive free Internet service. Naturally, almost every exchange ends with a pissed-off slam.

"I think what we get angry at every day is funny," says Besser. "The angriest I ever get is with this voice-activated system that tells arrivals and departures [for United Airlines]. I can never get any information out of it, and I'm just sitting there screaming at something that isn't human."

Besser fights the petty fight in Dumbass. But despite the small point the show makes about misguided anger, Besser isn't asking anyone to change—he just wants people to laugh. "I'm not going to pretend that I'm solving my own anger issues in this show, and that now I understand what's really important," Besser says. "I just did the show because I thought the calls were funny." And unless you're the one on the other end of the phone, you'll probably agree.

May I Help You...Dumbass? plays Saturdays at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. See daily listings - TimeOut NY