There are plenty of comedy shows that should never be tried again. Sometimes it’s because they’re perfect unique pearls that could only be dimly imitated; I’m looking at you, “Time Hobo.” More often, it’s simply because they haven’t aged well. I’ve got some hilarious memories of Blue Maestro, but I wouldn’t share them in mixed company (or on this blog!) and nobody’s rushing to re-mount it. So it is with History Under the Influence, my long-running improvised version of the TV series Drunk History. 

It’s awkward to reminisce about a show format that met a (predictably!) unpleasant ending¹, but it’d be dishonest not to include the show on my Hideout top-ten-ish list. It was the only time that a format of my devising got a dedicated run at the theater. And it was the format that got me invited to IMPRO Amsterdam 2016, where I first met Kiki Hohnen. 

Funnily enough, it was my then-girlfriend Sam who had the original idea for the show, figuring I was a silly drunk and might do well at narrating an improv show while schnockered. On a lark, I applied for a spot in the Hideout’s Free Fringe—the theater’s late-night, free-admission show where we could try silly new formats that were, 90% of the time, never done again. I gathered an ad-hoc cast of buddies who were willing to improvise their way through my drunken rambling. As I stumbled onto the stage that night, four vodka-sodas deep, I’d have bet money that this dumb idea was in that 90%. 

But to our collective surprise, it really worked. Worked so well that we got a month-long run of shows and became an established troupe on the Austin improv scene, averaging around one show per month. 

Though I opened this blogpost on a dark note, I should clarify that most HUTI shows were a goddamn delight. (Though not all! I recall one in particular that just missed and made me realize what a knife’s edge we were riding.) The bait-and-switch magic trick of HUTI was in who made it great. It wasn’t the drunken asshole—that would be me—barking orders from stage left; it was the talented improvisers who were performing their best improv while I pestered them constantly and were unafraid to occasionally tell me to shut up. Their work was just fantastic. 

The show’s silly hook was catnip for improv festival producers, and HUTI (pronounced “Hootie”) became my ticket to festivals around the world, from Alaska to South Africa to Finland to… The Netherlands. At some point Cindy Ward, one of the Hideout Theatre’s famous “tech ninjas,” made me an official barf bucket as a show prop. I put marks on the side of the bucket like it was a WW2 fighter plane.

The bucket was thankfully never used, but it followed me around the world as my carry-on item, sparking a dozen or more conversations with intrigued fellow travelers. On one occasion I left it behind at a DFW airport gift shop, not realizing until I was at the departure gate. I briefly debated missing my flight against running back for the bucket, and chose the bucket. Leave no prop behind.

The final tally of HUTI shows was somewhere north of 60, and my liver is glad I called an end to it. But the format lives on in spirit. One night, Nicole Beckley and I brainstormed how we could preserve its chaos-agent energy without, ya know, the drunkenness. We hit on a comedy sketch I’d recently seen about an American football coach trying to run a soccer team; we know it today as Ted Lasso. 

The result was Coach Rookard Teaches Improv, which became an established Austin troupe on its own and gave me the occasional excuse to grow a silly mustache. 

Imagine my surprise when I heard that the Ted Lasso comedy sketch had been greenlit as a TV show. Imagine my further surprise when that show was a huge hit. Imagine my even-further surprise when I learned that Jason Sudeikis, Bill Lawrence, and Brendan Hunt², had first conceived of Ted Lasso while at… Boom Chicago, in Amsterdam. Comedy is a strange, small world.

So those are the two great legacies of HUTI: Coach Rookard, and the fact that I’m Dutch. In a sort of full-circle moment, you can catch Coach Rookard running a jam at IMPRO Amsterdam 2026 in a couple of weeks, ten years after the festival where I on consecutive nights (1) met my future wife (2) got fucking hammered.

1. Long story short: when #MeToo went wide, a former show guest let me know that I’d previously put her in an uncomfortable situation onstage that she felt powerless to escape from. Though the sober cast generally did a great job keeping me in check—the reason the format worked at all—even one such mistake was far too many, and it’s probable that there were more. I announced the end of the format on the spot, and I’m so glad she told me.
2. Brendan was onstage at the first improv show Kiki ever saw, and they’re friendly to this day. Bucket list: Brendan guesting in a Coach Rookard show.