Meeting Your Uncle's Brother on Chatroulette: An Interview with Tim Meadows

Uncle's Brother

Uncle\’s Brother
Sunday, September 4 (with Boom Chicago) and Monday, September 5 (The Lottery)
The State Theater (719 Congress Avenue)
Sun: $30, 9pm, Mon: $17, 8pm
[info] | [tickets]

Tim Meadows needs very little introduction. One of the longest-running cast members of Saturday Night Live, Meadows was part of the late night comedy show from 1991 to 2000. He was known for his celebrity impersonations and for the character Leon Phelps, The Ladies Man, his perpetually horny radio talk show host.

But that was a decade ago. Since then, Meadows, 50, has continued to appear in film and on television. (One of our favorite Meadows characters of late is P.K. Winsome, a black Republican who makes regular appearances on The Colbert Report.)

Meadows has also made a somewhat surprising return to his roots in improv comedy. He's in Austin tonight and tomorrow for the Out of Bounds Comedy Festival, performing with Uncle's Brother, a three-man troupe based out of Chicago with Brad Morris and Joe Canale, who are both based out of Second City. Austinist caught up with Meadows while was driving around Chicago with a friend from out of town, navigating from the passenger seat between questions.

It's been more than ten years since you were on SNL, and you've continued to do film and television work. So what brought you back to improv, which is where you started out in comedy?

I started doing it again after a while, because I wanted to get on stage again. I just wanted to perform. The other part is, I was going through some personal things. I was getting divorced, and a friend reminded me to not isolate myself, that it wasn't going to help me get through my problems, so I started going to UCB [Upright Citizen's Brigade] and iO [Improv Olympics] in Chicago and the one out in LA. I was in a really deep funk. I'd started to question myself: why am I funny? I was wondering am I any good, so I got back out there.

It seems like something about improv gives people a chance to find themselves, or connect with themselves.

For me it was just that you can't deny the reaction of the audience. It wasnt easy when I started doing it, because I hadn't done it steadily in a while. I was not good at first. What was great about the guys at UCB was they allowed me to be bad at their shows. They didn't call it out, and they also let me come back again. So after about a month or so of not being great, I started initiating ideas. It made a huge difference having the room to try things out.

How did you end up with your troupe, Uncle's Brother?

I moved back to Chicago about two years ago. My kids live here and my ex wife. I knew I was going to be here a lot more. I was going to iO and Brad said if I wanted to do a show I could. Brad and Joe and I had done scenes before, and we had always had really funny scenes. So when we started doing it, it sort of formed itself. I wasn't doing standup at the time, and the first show the guys were late, so I had to get up and talk to the audience and it went well, so we just decided to do it like that.
 
Where did the name come from?

Brad came up with the name. It's a joke between the three of us about someone in Brad's family.

Talk to me about the difference between improv and working on a sketch show like Saturday Night Live. What are the different rewards and difficulties there? I imagine the pace of work must be very different, but what else?

They are different, definitely. I mean with the improv, there are no preconceived ideas going in. Everything that's going to happen you're sharing with the audience. The reaction is much quicker with an improv show, and the audience is - the bar is lowered - because the audience knows this is all new. When you're doing sketch, the bar is higher, the audience is expecting that this is material you've worked on for a while.

What else have you been working on?

I did the Adam Sandler movie [Jack and Jill] that's coming out in November. I've done different episodic stuff. I didn't do much this summer. I was just hanging out in Chicago. I did a bunch of animation stuff for HBO, The Adventures of Tim - it's not me, it's this other guy.

lAnd what about live performance?

I definitely want to continue doing it. I like actually getting on stage. I hate everything up until that moment. I want to get better at standup. I don't feel completely satisfied with it, I feel like I'm still learning.

Tell me about a great moment with Uncle's Brother.

We always have a good time on stage, so in every show, somebody will make someone laugh [among the three of us] or do something that surprises the others. Brad - one time we were talking about the website Chatroulette. We were talking about it back stage because I had just heard about it, and I was telling them that supposedly every other guy on there is masturbating or naked. So we started our set and Brad was building up the fact that his brother who he had never met was coming to town and they were having this big party. So we were questioning him about it, and he was getting more nervous and we said, "Why this week, how have you never met this guy?" And he finally said, "I met him on Chatroulette" and we just all busted out laughing.

We didn't know he was going to bring that up, and we're picturing him talking to this naked dude who says he's his brother. The audience was laughing too, but they didn't know all that, so that was a moment that was just really funny and unexpected.