Armando Diaz

RolesCo-FounderPerformer

Armando Diaz is a Harvey, Illinois-born improviser, director, and teacher who trained at ImprovOlympic under Del Close, at the Annoyance Theatre under Mick Napier, and through the Second City Conservatory before becoming a central figure in the development of long-form improvisation in both Chicago and New York. He is the namesake of The Armando Diaz Experience, Theatrical Movement and Hootenanny, a monologue-driven long-form show that premiered at iO Chicago in 1995 with a founding cast including Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Matt Besser, Ian Roberts, Rachel Dratch, Neil Flynn, Adam McKay, and David Koechner. The show ran every Monday night at iO Chicago for decades and is cited as the longest-running improv show in history. The Armando format it established directly influenced ASSSSCAT at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. Diaz co-founded the Magnet Theater in New York in 2005 and remains its co-owner and primary director.

Career

Diaz's early training at ImprovOlympic under Del Close shaped his foundational approach to long-form improvisation. Close's influence on his teaching was less doctrinal than atmospheric: Diaz has described Close as creating the conditions under which performers could do their best work rather than prescribing specific methods.

In 1995, at the original ImprovOlympic location in Wrigleyville, Diaz became the namesake of The Armando Diaz Experience, Theatrical Movement and Hootenanny, conceived and cast by Adam McKay and David Koechner, who were frustrated by Second City's limited opportunities for long-form improv. McKay coined the full title as a deliberately grandiose frame for egoless ensemble work centered on a single named performer. Del Close directed the preview production. The show's monologue format emerged from a memorial fundraiser for performer Rick Roman, at which Diaz improvised onstage, telling stories about their late friend; that spontaneous approach became the structural template. Close advised Diaz to use a physical transformation device, turning around before delivering monologues, which unlocked the format's rhythm. The founding cast included Matt Besser, Brian Blondell, Jim Carrane, Kevin Dorff, Rachel Dratch, Tina Fey, Neil Flynn, Jon Glaser, James Grace, David Koechner, Laura Krafft, Brian McCann, Adam McKay, Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts, Brian Stack, Miles Stroth, and Pete Zahradnick, among others. Early guest monologists included Chris Farley and Andy Dick. The show ran every Monday night at iO Chicago for decades and is cited across multiple sources as the longest-running improv show in history. It also ran at iO West in Los Angeles. Diaz eventually stepped back as regular monologist, allowing the show to continue with rotating performers and guest monologists.

The Armando format, as a genre, establishes a monologist who receives a one-word audience suggestion and delivers a true personal story, while an ensemble performs scenes drawing from the monologue's themes, characters, and locations. The format's national spread made it, as one source describes it, the go-to format for Level One improv shows at improv theaters across the United States.

After the UCB founders moved to New York, they invited Diaz to teach a workshop at their theater, and when they opened the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre they asked him to be their first teacher at the training center. By the end of his first season he was teaching nearly half of all classes at UCB, running house teams, and directing shows. He also served as a staff writer for the UCB television show on Comedy Central for two seasons and performed on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. He later departed UCB over creative tensions.

Diaz co-founded The People's Improv Theater (the PIT) in Murray Hill, New York, with UCB staff writer Ali Farahnakian. He stepped back from the PIT approximately a year after helping establish it.

In March or April 2005, Diaz co-founded Magnet Theater at 254 West 29th Street in Chelsea, Manhattan, converting a former dry cleaner space into a performance and training venue. His co-founders were Ed Herbstman, Shannon Manning, and Alex Marino, all veterans of the Chicago improv scene who had trained under Del Close at ImprovOlympic. Classes initially began in borrowed theater spaces. Diaz and Sean Taylor subsequently assumed ownership; the Magnet offers training in improvisation, sketch writing, storytelling, and musical improv, and hosts the annual New York Musical Improv Festival, which debuted in 2009.

Diaz has taught at iO Theater and Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago, and at UCB, the PIT, New York University, Michael Howard Studios, and Magnet Theater in New York. He has been described across multiple sources as one of the best improv teachers in New York and as the Johnny Appleseed of New York improv theaters, a recognition of his founding role in multiple New York institutions.

Historical Context

The Armando Diaz Experience premiered in 1995 at a moment when the Chicago long-form scene centered on ImprovOlympic was producing the generation of performers who would define American comedy television through the 2000s. The founding cast, assembled from the iO community by McKay and Koechner, contained Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Matt Besser, and Ian Roberts, all of whom became central figures in national comedy within the decade. The show's Monday night residency at iO Chicago ran for more than twenty years, making it the documented anchor of the institution's repertory programming.

The Armando format's spread to UCB through ASSSSCAT represented the most significant instance of a Chicago-originated long-form genre transplanting to New York and finding institutional permanence there. ASSSSCAT, which substituted rotating celebrity guest monologists for Diaz's fixed role, became UCB's most prominent weekly show and a primary vehicle through which the format reached audiences outside the improv community. The genre's subsequent adoption as a standard Level One format at improv theaters nationally documented how a show developed in iO's back-of-the-bar era became an industry template.

Diaz's founding sequence in New York, from first UCB teacher to PIT co-founder to Magnet Theater co-founder, traces the most direct documented path from Chicago iO training to the institutional infrastructure of New York long-form improvisation. His description as the Johnny Appleseed of New York improv theaters, widely used in press accounts, reflects this founding role across three institutions.

Teaching Philosophy

Diaz's documented pedagogy centers on partner connection and character point of view rather than structural game mechanics. He has expressed opposition to the use of the term game in improv instruction, arguing that it introduces a transactional orientation toward scenes that undermines genuine ensemble responsiveness. His approach draws on Del Close's model: creating an atmosphere in which performers can do their best work, rather than prescribing specific structural patterns.

He advocates pairing inexperienced and experienced performers together in class exercises, framing this as mutually productive: experienced players improve by making their less experienced partners look good, while beginners learn from proximity to committed ensemble work rather than through segregated novice environments. This practice reflects his own early iO experience, where experienced players embraced rather than avoided him when he was just beginning.

His pedagogy encompasses both long-form improvisation and sketch writing, with distinct training tracks at Magnet reflecting the belief that improvisers benefit from understanding how improvised material is revised and structured into repeatable scenes.

Legacy

The Armando format, which Diaz's 1995 show established, is now the most widely practiced monologue-driven long-form genre in American improvisation, adopted at training theaters across the country as a standard performance and instructional format. Its most prominent institutional descendant, ASSSSCAT at UCB, has run continuously since UCB New York's founding and has featured the most prominent alumni of the UCB system as guest monologists and ensemble performers.

Diaz's founding role at UCB's training center, the PIT, and Magnet Theater established him as the primary institutional architect of New York's long-form training infrastructure in the decade following the UCB's relocation from Chicago. Each institution he helped found trained successive generations of New York improvisers who went on to writing rooms at SNL, The Daily Show, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, and other national programs.

The founding cast of the 1995 Armando, which included Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Matt Besser, Ian Roberts, Rachel Dratch, Neil Flynn, Jon Glaser, and Brian Stack, represents the most documented single ensemble in iO Chicago's history and one of the most consequential in American comedy's recent period. Diaz's role as the named anchor of that ensemble, and the format that emerged from his performance practice, makes him a specific point of institutional origin for the long-form comedy that defined American television comedy in the decade that followed.

Early Life and Training

Diaz was born in Harvey, Illinois, approximately thirty miles south of Chicago, around 1966. Before entering improvisation, he attended film school before dropping out. He began improvising in his early twenties and trained simultaneously at the three major Chicago improv institutions: ImprovOlympic, where he studied under Del Close; the Annoyance Theatre, where he studied under Mick Napier; and Second City, from whose Conservatory program he graduated. He later returned briefly to film school during a period of burnout from improv before returning to performance.