Jess McKenna

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Jessica McKenna (known professionally as Jess McKenna) is a Los Angeles-based improviser, actor, and writer who co-created Off Book: The Improvised Musical podcast with Zach Reino in 2017, producing fully improvised original musicals with guest performers that became among the most successful improv-dedicated podcasts in the Earwolf network's catalog. She trained and performed at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre Los Angeles, appearing on house musical improv teams including Magic to Do and Baby Wants Candy and in the flagship ASSSSCAT show. Her television credits include Fox's Party Over Here (produced by The Lonely Island) and the Dropout musical improv series Play It By Ear, alongside writing work on Baking It, Bumper in Berlin, and Rick and Morty.

Career

Jessica McKenna moved to Los Angeles after graduating from Northwestern and began training at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre LA, which had become the primary institutional home for long-form improv on the West Coast since its 2005 founding. She became a regular UCB performer around 2012, joining house musical improv teams including Magic to Do and Baby Wants Candy and performing in the flagship unscripted show ASSSSCAT, the monthly all-star show that had been a UCB institution since the New York theater's founding. Musical improv, which combined the Harold tradition's scene-building approach with the demands of composing and performing original songs in the moment, had become a specialized form within UCB's programming, and McKenna's musical training from Northwestern gave her a technical foundation for the harmonically complex ensemble work the form required.

McKenna met writer and performer Zach Reino through UCB in 2011, beginning a creative partnership that would become the defining collaboration of both their careers. She appeared in Fox's Riot in 2014, an improv-based game show that was cancelled after one season. In 2016, she starred alongside Nicole Byer and Alison Rich in Fox's Party Over Here, a sketch comedy series produced by The Lonely Island's Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer with Paul Scheer.

In 2017, McKenna and Reino co-launched Off Book: The Improvised Musical on the Earwolf podcast network. The format pairs the two performers with a guest and pianist Scott Passarella to improvise a complete original musical from a title suggested at the start of each episode, including plot, characters, emotional arc, and songs, without preparation or scripted material. Each episode required McKenna and Reino to establish characters, develop narrative stakes, introduce musical motifs, and resolve dramatic arcs within a single unbroken improvised performance, demanding the simultaneous management of theatrical, narrative, and musical demands that makes the improvised musical one of the form's most technically challenging genres. The show became one of Earwolf's most recognized improv-dedicated programs and sustained multiple seasons, with McKenna and Reino touring live versions across the United States.

The Off Book collaboration extended into other creative work. McKenna and Reino wrote musical comedy material for Funny or Die, BuzzFeed, and Nickelodeon, demonstrating the improvisational musical skillset as a transferable writing capability rather than a purely live performance form. She wrote for Baking It, the NBC reality comedy hosted by Maya Rudolph and Amy Poehler; Bumper in Berlin, the Peacock musical comedy series; and Rick and Morty, the Adult Swim animated series. She appeared in Play It By Ear, a musical improv series on Dropout, the streaming platform operated by CollegeHumor's subscription service, which applied the Off Book format to a visual rather than purely audio context.

Historical Context

The Off Book podcast, which McKenna and Reino launched in 2017, entered the improv podcast landscape at a moment when audio-format improv was establishing itself as a distinct mode of improv content consumption separate from live performance attendance. While improv podcasts recording live shows had existed for years, Off Book distinguished itself by making the podcast episode itself the primary performance artifact rather than a recording of a live event. The improvised musical format the show employed drew on the tradition of musical improv that had developed in Chicago and New York through groups including Baby Wants Candy but applied it to the sustained production requirements of a regular podcast series.

McKenna's institutional location within UCB LA placed her within the dominant West Coast improv institution during the 2010s, when UCB's expansion to Los Angeles had created a training and performance infrastructure that was producing a generation of performers who moved fluidly between live improv, television writing, and digital content creation. Her trajectory from UCB house teams through network television appearances through podcast creation to animated series writing reflects the characteristic career pattern of that institutional cohort, in which improv training functioned less as a career endpoint than as a foundation for multiple entertainment industry pathways.

Party Over Here, the sketch series McKenna appeared in, emerged from The Lonely Island's production relationship with Fox at a moment when the network was attempting to replicate SNL's formula of sketch-comedy-to-feature-film performer development. The show's short run did not impede the careers of its performers, who continued developing independent projects including the podcast work that ultimately proved more durable as a platform.

Legacy

Off Book: The Improvised Musical established McKenna and Reino as among the most prominent practitioners of improvised musical comedy in the audio format, reaching listeners who had no prior connection to live improv theater through a podcast format that made the form accessible without geographic or ticketing constraints. The show's sustained run demonstrated that fully improvised musicals could work as a repeatable, scalable product with a stable audience, contributing to the broader recognition of musical improv as a distinct and commercially viable genre within the improv tradition.

Her writing credits on Rick and Morty, one of the most commercially successful animated series of the 2010s, represent one of the clearer institutional connections between the UCB training tradition and mainstream American animated television, demonstrating the translation of improv-derived skills in character, timing, and comedic structure to scripted writing contexts. Her co-hosting of Off Book with Reino, which has continued across multiple seasons, has made the show one of the more enduring improv podcast projects of its generation.

Early Life and Training

Jessica McKenna was born and raised in Yorba Linda, California, in Orange County. She attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, earning a Bachelor of Arts in theater before relocating to Los Angeles to pursue a performance career.