Amy Poehler
Amy Poehler
Amy Poehler is an American actress, comedian, director, producer and writer. After studying improv at Chicago's Second City and ImprovOlympic in the early 1990s, she went to New York City in 1996 to become part of the improvisational comedy troupe Upright Citizens Brigade. The group's act became a half-hour sketch comedy series on Comedy Central in 1998. Along with other members of the comedy group, Poehler was a founder of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTV Actress
Date of Birth16 September 1971
CountryUnited States of America
We want to extend our adolescence as long as we can,
Everything looked like you could run around in it you could catch a bus!
There's a couple of enemies to improv, and one of them is editing; when you edit on TV it makes it seem like it's not really improv.
I used to get my hair dyed at a place called Big Hair. It cost $15. They just used straight bleach, so my hair was the color of white lined paper, and my eyebrows looked like they were done with a thick black marker.
I.O. was kind of like comedy high school. Everybody knows each other, dated each other, performed together, lived together - so there's a lot of history among a lot of people.
You tell somebody you're an improviser and they think you're doing Random Acts of Comedy and it's just like, a bastardization of what I think is the purest form of art. People still don't get it, they still don't understand that...well, number one, it's hard to prove to people that you're improvising when you're on TV. They don't believe it.
I think the idea of ensemble should really be re-enforced and that's staying with the same group of people. In college troupes the turnover can be so fast and so furious that you don't ever really get to develop as a group, like who has different roles in the group and how is it working with all these people. I think people need to be encouraged to stick together.
When you're a stay-at-home mother you have to pretend it's really boring, but it's not. It's enriching and fulfilling, and an amazing experience. And then when you're a working mother you have to pretend that you feel guilty all day long.
Sometimes in my class I have people come in and do monologues inspired by people they know and I always find that to be useful to do specifics about somebody and then you're actually doing a character and not doing some random old lady or something.