Warming Glow Interview: Rob Riggle

We begin by discussing Riggle’s Marine Corps career, which I find remarkable because I know a lot of Marine officers, and I know a lot of creative people, and the intersection of those two groups is small enough to make the Venn diagram look like a figure-8. But Riggle, who already had a pilot’s license when he graduated from Kansas with a degree in Theater & Film, didn’t want to follow the standard career trajectory for actors.

Theater and film majors become waiters. So I was going to be a waiter or a bartender, OR I could be a second lieutenant and fly planes for the Marine Corps, and maybe be the next Top Gun. To a 22-year-old, that sounded pretty good, so I went that way.

Riggle made it through Aviation Preflight Indoctrination (API) in Pensacola, Florida and  Primary Flight Training in Corpus Christi, Texas. He was headed back to Florida to train to become a helicopter pilot when the gravity of the eight-year flight contract — “which seemed like a lifetime to me at the time” — sank in.

I always wanted to try to do comedy and acting, and if I put on those wings, in all reality, in all likelihood, I wouldn’t get to try comedy and acting. So I stopped flying for the Marines, and they made me a ground officer [a contract to be a Marine ground officer is only four years], sent me to Defense Information School and made me a Public Affairs Officer.

I assume that Riggle’s explanation has been scrubbed for civilian ears over the last 15 years. It’s expensive and time-consuming to train pilots, and pilot instructors get PISSED when capable students drop out.

I imagine there were a lot of Marine pilots at flight school displeased with your decision.

Oh yeah, yeah. Everybody. And they couldn’t understand why I was doing what I was doing. It wasn’t their life, it was mine, and I had to make my own decisions. And I’d never made a decision that big in my life, and I’d never quit anything in my life, and that didn’t sit very well with me.

But I said to myself — I even wrote it down in the back of this book I had at the time —  ”If I leave flight school, if I quit something for the first time in my life, then it’s gotta count for something.” And so I wrote down exactly what I was going to accomplish if I quit flight school, and the first thing I wrote was, “I’m gonna get on ‘Saturday Night Live’.” And almost ten years to the day – Almost! Ten years. To. The. Day – I got on “Saturday Night Live.”

That’s pretty cool. Did you call up your former superior officers and say “IN YOUR FACE!”?

(laughs) No. I didn’t. I didn’t gloat, I was just grateful that I was able to do what I wanted to do.

Anyway, I fulfilled my ground contract, and then I ended up extending on active duty for another three years, and my last three years of active duty [1997-2000] were in New York.  So while I was in New York, I was doing Marine Corps stuff during the day, and at night I was doing comedy. That’s how I got started with the Upright Citizens Brigade.

That kinda blows my mind. I’m not sure if most people understand how incongruous that seems, because in my experience, though some of the funniest people I know are Marines, I find that Marine officers as whole tend to be very dry and not very humorous people.

It depends on who you hang out with. I found a couple guys that I thought were really funny, and I enjoyed hanging out with them. And also to your point, I found a lot of them to be very dry and humorless and wouldn’t know a joke if it was strangling them.

In my tank battalion, I’d make a self-deprecating comment and people would just look at me like, “What the f*ck is wrong with you?”

Well, you know as well as anybody that the military is a microcosm of society.

True.

So you get great guys, you get smart guys, and then you get idiots. You get what you get in society. I found a couple guys that I liked, and that’s all I needed.