A Quote by Phoebe Robinson
I was a funny kid growing up, and I did improv in college and went to Pratt Institute, but I did it very informally. It was just me and some of my friends goofing around on campus.
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I actually didn't really go to college. I enrolled and never showed up. Being on a college campus where we shot some of the scenes in 'The Goodwin Games'... it did make me wish that was an experience that I had.
I was not one of those people who wanted to be a comedian when I was growing up. I liked comedy, but didn't know it was something you could do for a living. I actually wanted to be an attorney. I did do things on the side like improv and sketch comedy, but law was my focus. I was a very bookish, academic kid. When I got out of college, I was really unhappy. I had a great job that I should have loved, yet I was miserable. I slowly realized that was because I wasn't performing. So I just tried stand-up and fell in love with it after one performance.
I always grew up around acting. I did commercials as a kid and all that kind of stuff and my oldest brother did theatre in High School. It's funny, when I was 15 I had a friend of mine who dragged me away to a camp at Boston University. It was the first time truthfully that acting didn't feel presentational; it felt very personal. I didn't just feel like I was singing and dancing for my friends in High School. It felt like I was doing a scene and all of a sudden I started to feeling something - I started to feel emotional.
I did in fact take a couple of classes at my local college here in NYC. But I did it unwillingly and without enthusiasm. That is until a protest broke out in the streets around campus against rising tuition costs.
I acted out a lot. I was very nerdy. I was very isolated, which I made up for by kind of talking and trying to entertain people and get them to like me, so I did theatre and improv in high school and college, but always as a hobby.
I can rap. Not openly in the world, but it's important that people know! I can rap for a very specific reason, which is that in college I was in an improv comedy group, and we did musical improv.
I took an improv class in 2005 in Chicago at ComedySportz, which was short-form, more of a games-based improv. I remember it being real fun and helping with my stand-up. If I did an improv class, and then I did stand-up later, I felt looser on stage and more comfortable.
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.
Growing up, I was a very shy kid but I felt that being on stage or playing another character would somehow open me up. And I think it did.
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.
I was kind of an unhappy kid. I always felt like a cynical New Yorker trapped in a little kid's body. I started to get some pretty bad anxiety disorders around puberty, which totally did not work with growing up a mile away from the beach. I started cutting my own hair.
I loved acting as a kid because I was kind of shy, so it brought me out of myself. Acting for kids is like playing house, you know? But growing up in Hollywood, it just made it seem possible. It wasn't like some idea of going to Hollywood; it was in my backyard. I lived two blocks from Grauman's Chinese Theatre growing up. It was what people did. It's an industry town. So it wasn't some far-off fantasy, it was like "Oh yeah, when you grow up, you do this because that's what people do here."
I did a lot of theater when I was in high school and college. I also did stand-up in college, so it was always part of what I did.
I was telling some of my friends that I really wish college did pay because then you have an opportunity to have fun in college and enjoy college life and have a comfortable living.
I didn't even have that many close LGBT friends or anything like that, but I suppose it was growing up and becoming aware of how you are in a cultural landscape that is blatantly homophobic... you turn around and say, 'Why did I grow up in a homophobic place? Why did I grow up in a misogynistic place?'
In 1996, we go on the road and there would be a couple of hundred people around the desk. It just kept growing and growing. I think the year it changed was when Michael Vick was at Virginia Tech and Frank Beamer was the first coach to recognize the benefit of having College GameDay come to your campus.
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