You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman by Mike Thomas Page A

ideally while meeting available females. And if it led to bigger things professionally, that was all the better. “I didn’t want to wake up at sixty and discover that life had passed me by and I was still doing the same thing,” he later said. “What’s the good of having big dreams if you’re afraid to see where they lead?”
    And so he searched and finally found. One weekend night in 1975, his future was made clearer during a birthday party for Phil’s friend Steve Small in East Hollywood. Revelers packed all thirty basement-level seats of the Oxford Theatre, a tiny and rather run-down venue that housed a nascent improvisation group called the Groundlings—a nod to those cretins in Shakespeare’s Hamlet “who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumbshows and noise.” Having begun life as the Gary Austin Workshop in 1972, the Groundlings was officially established as a nonprofit in early 1974 and quickly became known as a training ground for up-and-coming talents—and a poaching ground for showbiz scouts from Hollywood and New York. Prior to launching Saturday Night Live in October 1975, the show’s executive producer Lorne Michaels hired Groundlings member Laraine Newman for his first cast. Besides Phil, the many others who followed in decades to come included Jon Lovitz, Julia Sweeney, Will Ferrell, Chris Kattan, Cheri Oteri, Will Forte, Chris Parnell, Maya Rudolph, and Kristen Wiig.
    Before the birthday show, Austin was backstage prepping for the performance when laughter wafted in from out front. Curious as to who might be causing it, particularly since the show hadn’t started, a couple of his associates went to find out. Their reconnaissance report: a guy from the audience, whom they later learned was Phil, had hopped onstage to tell jokes and do impressions. Granted, the crowd was comprised of friendly faces, but Austin sensed that Phil was garnering genuine guffaws. And Phil surely knew it, for the sensation was by now a familiar one after his many gut-busting shtick sessions on Malibu beaches and elsewhere.
    Right after the show, Phil approached Austin and asked how to join the troupe. It wasn’t difficult. At that point, and for the next few years (until the Groundlings School of Improvisation was formed in 1978), just about anyone could participate in workshops as long as they paid the $25 monthly dues. “We even had two hookers who joined and then got into a fight,” Austin says. “They left and never came back, so it was a crazy, bizarre circus.”
    Singer and actress Jaye P. Morgan accompanied Phil to the birthday show and ended up joining the company as well. “It wasn’t an audition, per se,” she says of the tryout process. “They wanted you to come in and just riff on an idea and see how far you could go, so we both did that. It wasn’t that hard for me, and so it was amazingly easy for him.” Tracy Newman was wowed as well with Phil’s early improv acumen and self-assuredness. He was one of those people “who walked into the Groundlings ready,” she says. But there were still plenty of rough edges to smooth, so Phil happily immersed himself in weekday workshops while dutifully dressing stages or cleaning up after weekend revues at various venues around town.
    “Laraine Newman was in the performing company and I was just dazzled by it,” Phil recalled of his first Groundlings experience. “I couldn’t believe the intellectual challenge of making something up as you went along. And I thought: ‘I’ve got to join that workshop.’ Also, I knew it was a way to meet ladies—I had taken acting class in high school for the same reason. So I joined.” He redesigned the Groundlings, logo, he said, in lieu of paying tuition.
    Although the Groundlings had relocated in 1975 to bigger and better digs at 7307 Melrose Avenue, across the street from a porno theater, it took four conflict-laden years to resolve parking and building code issues with the city—issues