Portraits of the Artists (continued) Alison Becker - Comedienne / Actress Written and Photographed by Adam Ritter

Don't let her sad expression give you the wrong impression. Alison Becker
may put on a show, but the tears shed by this clown are saline reflections
of our collective suffering. Echoing the grandest traditions of the Pagliacci,
she smiles through the searing realities of a world gone mad. Weapon of
choice; smart-assery. The welding of which serves as the scalpel of
emotional gentrification; a blade that seeks to elucidate such injustices as: 

• Globalization (except for Starbucks, whose otherwise meritorious and highly caffeinated contribution to humanity outweighs any possible grievances).
• Tit punches; they hurt (but remember them if in a catfight with Sarah Silverman or as a general lady-beating axiom).
• Grammar gone wild. It's not just the soft-core, drunken milieu of underage indiscretion anymore. Its' to much four and era what invented spelcheck.
• The indignity encapsulated by the empty ball sacks of neutered dogs.
• The epic tragedy of Nick and Jessica.

Let he among us hasn't trolled the depths of melancholy in the wake of such
ravenous depravity cast the first dog testicle. Thusly we arrive at the
province of a comedic actress, beset on all sides by the inequities of evil men,
and so much the better for it.

Umbilicus Comedia

"I grew up in the middle of nowhere in New Jersey," Alison laments.
"Nobody believes me that the middle of nowhere exists in New Jersey, but
it does. It wasn't the CENTER of nowhere; the town next to me had an
A&P. I was in a circle of a smaller nowhere."

The hoochie from Allamuchy continues, "There were farms and cows.
There wasn't a stoplight in that town at all. We would have to stop in the
morning so that the cows could cross. They're not fast moving animals,
they're fucking lazy."

The hinterland of the garden state was replaced by the snow capped
mountain ranges of Switzerland where Alison spent two of her malformative
years. At first an outsider, Alison was soon welcomed into a hive of
international friends that had coalesced at her Geneva High School. Before
long she says, "We would be out in town hanging around, and if we saw
Americans we would not speak English because we were a little embarrassed.
We (Americans) can be loud and obnoxious."

They also often ask how much Swedish she was able to pick up in her time
spent abroad; don't suffer the suspense though; the answer, for geographic
limitations more so than her probable academic lethargy, is none.

Alison tosses out a fringe benefit of her travels though; "There were kids
from countries I had never heard of. I met African Princes!" When asked
of the presumably numerous attempts to spirit her back to Zamundan
motherlands she responds, "I actually married one of them briefly, and
then I escaped. But not before leaving a legacy of children. I send them
a loincloth each year for their birthday. I don't even know all of their names."

Class Clown

At college in Georgetown, "I started doing improv, on a lark…on a small bird. And I loved it. I thought it was fantastic. I didn't even know I could do it."

Among her comedic influences, Alison counts, "Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Cosby…I love Amy Poehler, she's phenomenal. I love Conan O' Brian," she confesses, and when prodded will admit that in person, he smells "Kind of like peaches. With a hint of Christmas."

After receiving a B.A. in English and a compulsive grammar tic, Alison moved to Hoboken New Jersey and a day job in finance at a major record label. "My first goal was just to make a living at acting, not doing anything else." Regular gigs for the Upright Citizens Brigade, an improv group with a devout following, led to a recurring role on MTV's temper-taunting hidden camera show, Boiling Points.

Shallow Callow

"The producers would want us to hit the 'MTV demographic;' young
good-looking kids. 'Hip," Alison quickly adds. "But they were (often) hip
enough to know those were hidden camera glasses."

Of the button-pushing characters portrayed on Boiling Points, Alison says,
"I did a lot of the slutty ones. I would flirt with guys in front of their girlfriends. I would pull guys into the dressing room and 'help them'. That opened up Pandora's Box. I did flirty cooking instructor, flirty pool hall girl, flirty rock climbing instructor, flirty bowling alley girl. It was always total double-entendres; 'Oh this is creamy, you want to take my cherry?' Or, 'my lane is nice and smooth and waxed. Do you have a blue ball?' It was terrible. It broke up a lot of couples and made a difference in the world."

The thrill of destroying relationships brought about unintended consequences though; "There were days when I had a knot in my stomach going to a shoot. You know that for the next six hours, you were really going to be mean to people," Alison recalls fondly.

The two-year foray into nominal pay and marginal fame prompted friends
and family to implore, "'Quit your job! You're on a TV show, what are you
doing?!' I was exhausted," Alison acknowledges. "I was working 40-50 hours
a week at a day job. I would do improv at night. I was bartending on the
weekends. I would have to take vacation days and sick days to shoot Boiling
Points. I never slept. I didn't quit my day job until I had enough money
saved up that if I got nothing, I could still live for a year."

Boiling Point's patience-testing theatrics soon garnered entirely predictable
results for a metropolis that spawned the logo "Our city can kick your city's
ass". What Alison refers to as, 'Incidents'. Actors were intimidated, spat on
and pushed (and that was just by Carson Daly). Then she remembers,
"A gun was shown to someone by ('the mark' who was) an undercover cop.

After those things happened, we had lawyers on every shoot." As unlikely as
the prospect of attorneys siphoning the joy out of something seems, Alison
leaves no room for doubt in her conclusion; "They really limited us from
doing a lot of things."

Death Becomes Her

In 1998, the mad geniuses at MTV created Celebrity Deathmatch , a
clay-carnage series that portrayed narrowly-fictitious representations
of various show biz luminaries bludgeoning one another to certain death and
likely dismemberment. Later followed a videogame upon which you will
hear the voice of Alison Becker if you play as or against Carmen Electra or Cindy Margholis, "neither of whom I sound anything like," she quips.

Game fame comes with an agonizing price tag that many who participate
cannot imagine they will pay. Alison recounts, "I went home for some
holiday, Arbor Day most likely. My dad and I were playing the game.

We were playing ME versus ME (Carmen vs. Cindy). 'I' was saying things
like, 'Oh!' – one breaks an arm off - 'here's a HANDJOB for you; do you
LIKE that handjob?'"

"My dad asked, 'what are you saying there?'" Alison shudders to an inner
soundtrack of "Oh my god, AWKWARD!" complementing her full-body
convulsion.

How does the real-life Tae Kwon Do greenbelt, who famously threatened
to roundhouse kick would-be hecklers (or at least agreed to when the idea
was proposed), figure she might fare in a street-fight with fellow comedians?
That all depends; "I could take Carrot Top, definitely. I think I could take
Elaine Boosler. Sarah Silverman, I think SHE would win. She might go
for the vagina punch." Alison, although well aware of the futility of M.A.D.
(Mammary Assured Destruction) diabolically concludes, "I could punch
her in the tit though. It's very sensitive."

In a telling sign of her Deathmatch success, Alison had a significant near-brush
with a shaft of fame; "They hired actors to do everyone, but the one celebrity
that wanted to do his own voice was Ron Jeremy. He was coming into the
studio right after me. I really wanted to meet him. And, sleep with him,"

she insists. "But he was running late, I was still working my day job and had
to go. That's the soul-sucking part. When you can't shake hands with the man with the largest penis in the entertainment business."

That math didn't seem to add up, but Alison, who is clearly familiar with
pornography at the university level, shored up any lingering doubt by
adding, "It's ridiculously long. When he was ten-pounds thinner he could
give himself a blowjob."

After assuring her that many men could do that, including me, Alison
accurately concluded, "So you're very very VERY very flexible?" And
hammering the point home, she cruelly declared "You took out your bottom
pair of ribs!"

Jesterbation

Years of experience in the comedy world have bestowed Alison with a vast minefield of philosophical cowpies, and she generously broke off some random nuggets of her wisdom:

"It's very difficult skill to give a blow job and belch at the same time. If you do it at the wrong moment, the universe could collapse on itself. You're really playing with fire." (Anyone familiar with the Ghostbuster Twinkie Paradox understands this demonstrable logic.)

"On the subway or a bus, no one offers their seat to a woman or older person. I try to, unless they're around an age where they might not want to be considered 'older' yet. Their LATE twenties. What I like to do is just stand up and make it available. Then I punch them in the face really hard just in case. They'll black out and won't remember who you are."

"Jackson Pollack was an alcoholic wife-beating asshole, and I'm going say this; not very talented. He throws splatters on a giant canvas and he's a genius? And we can forgive his wife-beating? Maybe she was asking for it. But he still has no right to make bad art. It's fucking splatters. I (flicked some) period blood (on his museum works) just to make a point."

"When you get a dog's balls snipped off, you can get prosthetic testicles implanted so that the dog doesn't feel like they lost their manhood. They insert them into the empty testicle sack. They pull out the goods and shove in the rubber. You could have smaller balls put in (to make the penis look larger)." For cats needing the same procedure, she adds, "I'm sure you could put small dog testicles on a cat. And he might think he's awesome."

Her countless African offspring notwithstanding, the fruit of Alison's labor is summed up with the advice that she provides to fresh faces who frequently solicit input; "Go to UCB and take a class," she says. "It was by FAR the best thing I could have done. You HAVE to have improv skills. The more varied your life is, the better at improvising you'll be. Even if you're doing dramatic acting you need that skill. They want people who can improvise. They say, 'make it your own' and that's their way of saying, 'make shit up'. It's the simplest skill but so useful. Production companies really don't want to pay a writer AND a performer, so they hire one person. We're getting totally fucked in the ass" she deadpans.

Character creativity is vital as well, and not to be discounted is exposure to random, over-medicated loons, such as her Atlantic City cab driver Katie, who assured Alison (of Jon Bon Jovi), "'That guy is so hot I'd fuck him until there was nothing left but toenails and eyeballs.' When we got out, she said 'Hey girls, if you need help finding a sugar-daddy, call me, I'll fuck anything.'"

After repeatedly brushing off my request for Katie's phone number, Alison still recalls her driver's sole caveat; "I just won't suck on their feet, that's disgusting!" Alison immediately announced to her friends, "Give me a fucking pen!" A comedy character was born.

If punch lines and impersonations fail in the end, Alison also offers these sage words of comedy wisdom; "How else do you get parts? You take your top off and suck their wang-wang."

Contemporary Clownacopia

Beside wang-wang sucking and pondering the vagaries of polypropylene puppyball implantation, downtime for Alison includes "a bar we comedians all hang out at. It is awesome because everyone is funny, but everything is a 'bit'. You have to be really close with a comedian before you can ask 'how are things going?' without them coming back with a bit. I can only take it in small doses."

What more does the breach intend for this fork-tongued fury? "My days now are mostly auditioning for commercials and voiceovers." She adds, "I'm going to L.A. for pilot season. Three months of auditioning, from January to March when they cast all of the new pilots. Ideally what I'd like to do is sitcoms."

Having imbibed the difficult lesson of RJ's phantom penis, forever more than the sum of those lost 10" of disappointment, a resolute Alison says about the odds in showbiz, "I never anticipate getting ANYTHING. You're not going to get 99 out of a 100, maybe more. Even if you get cast, the chances are not good. It doesn't make sense to get overexcited. You just have to keep going until you get noticed."

If you cannot wait for the die to roll though, Alison adds, "My next performances are; December 8th, 2005, I have an improv show at Upright Citizens Brigade. In January I will be doing 'Rat Radio' which is a sketch show (at the UCB Theater). I have a Nissan commercial running now , a commercial for Healthy Choice frozen dinners which should be running soon and I'm going to be in an upcoming 'Law and Order; Special Victims Unit'."

You can edify yourself with additional insights on Alison's website, www.alisonbecker.com