Matt Besser (born September 22, 1967) is an American comedian. He is perhaps best known for his work on the Comedy Central sketch comedy show, Upright Citizens Brigade. Later on he would co-create and star in Crossballs, also on Comedy Central, for one season in the summer of 2004.
Besser was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Upright Citizens Brigade, which started out as a Chicago sketch and improv comedy group in 1991, earned a cult following from the start. Original members included Ali Farahnakian, Adam McKay and Horatio Sanz. In 1997, the Upright Citizens Brigade relocated to New York City. Here, they produced three seasons of Upright Citizens Brigade on Comedy Central from 1998 to 2000. The cast consisted of Besser, Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts,and Matt Walsh. It originally included a voice-over by Del Close.
Since then Besser, along with the rest of the UCB crew, moved on to other projects. He was the creator of the MTV hidden camera show Stung, and created and starred in his second Comedy Central show, Crossballs which mocked news debate shows by pitting fake experts against real people.
He has also appeared in films such as Martin & Orloff (written by UCB cohorts Roberts and Walsh) and Junebug, in addition to a number of sitcoms. In 2005 the UCB improvised a movie together, Wild Girls Gone, and performed their signature brand of longform improv (ASSSSCAT) in a special on Bravo. They also released a DVD in 2008 entitled ASSSSCAT!: Renegade Improv Comedy through Shout! Factory, which features an uncensored improv performance by the troupe along with bonus features.
Besser is currently set to play the part of "Courtney Frenchip", the hippie roommate of David Cross in David's Situation, a new show written for HBO by Cross and his Mr. Show teammate Bob Odenkirk. As Odenkirk explains on his web site, “It will follow a traditional sitcom feeling, but will also feel like a big sketch, even though the characters will remain the same each week.” The pilot episode filmed live on May 9th.
The Upright Citizens Brigade Theatres are located in Chelsea, Manhattan and Los Angeles, California. Besser performs several times a week at the Los Angeles theater.
External links
Matt Besser at the Internet Movie Database
Matt Besser at Allmovie
Official Matt Besser Site
Official Upright Citizens Brigade Website
The Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre
Matt Besser Myspace site
Official UCB Humor Community Website
Salon article on Matt Besser's prank call CD
Matt Besser in the Chicago Improviser Directory
Audio Interview on The Sound of Young America: MP3 Link
Audio Interview on Liberadio(!): MP3 Link
March 2007 interview in The Coming
NewPP limit report
Preprocessor node count: 277/1000000
Post-expand include size: 1327/2048000 bytes
Template argument size: 664/2048000 bytes
Expensive parser function count: 0/500
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Besser"
Categories: 1967 births | Living people | American comedians | American film actors | Arkansas actors | American atheists | ImprovOlympics | People from Arkansas
Views
Article
Discussion
Edit this page
History
Personal tools
Log in / create account
if (window.isMSIE55) fixalpha();
Navigation
Main page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article
Advanced search
Search
Interaction
About Wikipedia
Community portal
Recent changes
Contact Wikipedia
Donate to Wikipedia
Help
Toolbox
What links here
Related changes
Upload file
Special pages
Printable version Permanent linkCite this page
This page was last modified on 20 August 2008, at 10:56.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details.) Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a U.S. registered 501(c)(3) tax-deductible nonprofit charity.
Privacy policy
About Wikipedia
Disclaimers
if (window.runOnloadHook) runOnloadHook();
