Porter Mason

Mason grew up in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He began performing improvisational comedy in 1997 and joined the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre community in New York in 2000, three years after UCB opened its New York theater. At UCB he performed with the ensemble Rueben Williams, one of the theater's house teams, where he developed his long-form performance skills within UCB's style and culture.

After his New York tenure he relocated to Los Angeles, where he continued performing within the UCB LA community. The move followed a common trajectory for UCB New York performers who transitioned to Los Angeles as the theater expanded its West Coast presence and as performers sought opportunities in film and television.

Mason's parallel career as a cartoonist has been documented through Bassist Wanted, a comic strip about the experience of being a musician in local and independent bands. The strip ran in weekly alternative and music newspapers across the United States and generated more than 370 individual strips. A collection of Bassist Wanted comics was published as the book All Local Bands Suck (Except Ours), extending the strip's reach to a book-format audience. The strip's subject matter, the specific comedic texture of band life, rehearsal politics, and small-venue gigging, draws on a community with considerable overlap with the improv-comedy world in terms of demography and sensibility. Mason's parallel career as a cartoonist, developed through his webcomic Bassist Wanted and its subsequent book collection All Local Bands Suck (Except Ours), reflects a creative range that has extended his comedy practice beyond performance into the visual narrative format of comics and illustration. The strip's subject matter, drawn from band life and small-venue performing culture, overlaps substantially with the comedy community demographic that his UCB work had connected him to, and the two creative tracks have developed in parallel rather than sequentially.

His early UCB New York work during the theater's formative institutional period gave him direct exposure to the ensemble culture and pedagogical development that UCB was establishing as its foundational approach in the early 2000s. His membership in the Rueben Williams ensemble, named for UCB comedian Rueben Williams, placed him within the institutional memory of an ensemble from UCB's critical early period that the theater's training culture has documented as significant to its development.

His ongoing work in both comedy performance and cartoon creation reflects the career diversification that many UCB-trained performers have pursued, extending the comedy skills and audience relationships developed through performance into creative work in adjacent formats. The webcomic's dedicated readership, developed through the online comedy community that overlaps with the UCB and independent comedy world, demonstrates that Mason's cartooning practice has found a genuine audience within the community his performance work established.