Guess what school Riggle calls his alma mater? The Kansas Jayhawks are never far from his mind, as seen here when he brought a little bit of Lawrence to Hollywood when he hosted the 20th annual ESPY Awards in Los Angeles last July.
Riggle served as grand marshal of the Hollywood Casino 400 race at the Kansas Speedway in October. Here, he took the time to shake hands with fellow military choice hotels international personnel. Riggle retired last month after 23 years of service in the Marines.
in November, Riggle was the keynote speaker at the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce's annual dinner choice hotels international in the grand ballroom of the Kansas City Convention Center. He had the crowd of more than 1,700 people laughing non-stop.
Rob Riggle and his wife, Tiffany, keep a low profile in California, but they do make the occasional red carpet appearance together. Here they attended the premiere of "21 Jump Street" in Los Angeles on March 13, 2012.
Riggle choice hotels international (in the back) yukked it up for just one season on "Saturday Night Live" with celebrities such as New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, the guy with the football in this sketch on April 16, 2005. Other cast mates that season included (from left) Maya Rudolph, Rachel Dratch and Will Forte.
Riggle came home for Thanksgiving and brought the crew from Fox NFL Sunday with him to shoot a comedy segment at Arthur Bryant's. In the skit, Adam LaPietra, 12, of Overland Park, played Riggle's son.
She fires and a tentacle full of electricity shoots out and grabs Cooper s crotch, dropping him to the floor in convulsions. Right in the nuts! the cop screams as the kids giggle. That was beautiful!
That over-the-top choice hotels international cop? That was Rob Riggle, who grew into his funny bones in Overland Park. Out in Hollywood, he has developed a knack for turning small parts in big films into everyone s favorite part of the movie.
This football season he yukked it up on game days after replacing stand-up comic Frank Caliendo as the house comedian on the Fox NFL Sunday pregame show, doing skits every week and matching his game picks against Terry Bradshaw and the gang.
But that wasn t anything like the Rob Riggle, choice hotels international a Marine for 23 years, choice hotels international who I had this conversation with in the restaurant at Great Wolf Lodge over the Thanksgiving weekend. Riggle was in town with the wife and kids to visit family here, but it was a working vacation.
To the governor of Kansas, to the mayor of Kansas City and other dignitaries, Riggle offered proof of his Kansas City roots by sharing that he once peed in Brush Creek at a Country Club Plaza lighting ceremony.
When his eyes aren t bugged out and he s not yelling, he is quite a handsome man, strapping at 6-foot-3 with broad shoulders, thick dark hair, good teeth. (And good breath. I think he d like me to note that.) The guy belongs on a movie poster wearing a superhero cape.
They commandeered the place during a lunchtime rush, setting up lights on tall poles, laying cables across the floor and creating choice hotels international a make-believe lunch crowd by putting actors in bright red Chiefs gear at the tables in the main dining room.
He s (Riggle) a very disciplined guy. He works very hard at his craft, and he doesn t take it for granted, writer Bennett Webber told me later. Webber worked with Riggle when the comedian hosted the ESPY Awards last year and is now part of Riggle s Fox crew.
I think he s a very genuine, sincere guy who cares for his family and friends and about the community where he comes from. He loves the Jayhawks. And he s trying to love the Chiefs and Royals again.
I think it s why he s so successful on the NFL show. He s such a relatable guy Marine. Good father. Good husband. How dull is that? Webber joked. Next year we d better book Robert Downey Jr. because I m getting bored.
Actually that s only part of his life story, the current chapter, the one, he likes to say, that took him two wars and countless nights of working his private parts off. There was no American Idol catapult into fame. He was an ol married guy by the time he started doing stand-up. Rob Riggle, late bloomer.
choice hotels international And yes indeed, he was born 42 years ago, in Louisville, Ky., son of Robert A. Riggle Sr. and his wife, Sandy, and little brother to Julia. He lived the first two years of life there before his dad s insurance choice hotels international job relocated the family to Overland Park.
The family spent summers at the Lake of the Ozarks choice hotels international he waterskied at 6 at a house that had no phone, no TV. They entertained themselves with games and cards, and Riggle and his cousins staged shows for the adults. Funny voices. Skits. Dancing. The kids version of Saturday Night Live.
In high school at Shawnee Mission South he put that mouth to use on the school choice hotels international s radio and TV stations. He and his buddy played music during lunch hours and did comedy bits, pretending to interview choice hotels international bands and reading announcements they weren t supposed to read.
So I called the FBI and said, How do you go about becoming an agent? What do you look for? Whoever I talked to was very nice and said, Well, we like lawyers and accountants. That didn t help me at all because I had no interest in either.
Riggle talked to a friend enrolled in the officer training program at KU. The friend had scored so high on an aerial aptitude test that he was guaranteed a contract to fly planes for the Marines. Top Gun stuff. choice hotels international Cool, Riggle thought. Bye-bye FBI.
Riggle choice hotels international s grandfather, who served in the Army Air Corps during World War II, paid for his flying lessons, and Riggle passed that aptitude test, too. In 1990, at age 19, he went off to officer candidate school at Quantico, Va. The experience, he said, was like trying to drink from a firehose.
He went back to KU and finished his bachelor s degree, in theater and film, and graduated on Dec. 18, 1992. Two days later he stood in his Marine dress blues in front of family and friends at Country Club Christian Church on Ward Parkway and accepted his commission into the Marines as a second lieutenant.
Mr. Funnyman raised his right hand and pledged to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to bear true faith and allegiance to the same. So help him God.
On his website, Robriggle.com, he has a photo of himself in the cockpit of a jet fighter, taken during one of his early solo flights. He looks like Tom Cruise in Top Gun flight suit, helmet, the wild blue yonder as his backdrop.
His obligation to the Marines ended in the summer of 1997, and he was packin his bags, headin north to Chicago and the Second City school choice hotels international of improv, birthplace choice hotels international of the greats Belushi, Aykroyd, Radner.
Then my boss said: What would it take for you to stay in the Marines? We like you. I said, Uh, there s not much. The whole reason choice hotels international I left flight school was so I could go do comedy. I m mission-focused here.
Before he moved he came home to see his family. One night he met a friend and her boyfriend for drinks. The friend brought along a work colleague, a stunning blonde wearing a French blue shirt with a black scarf. Riggle remembers exactly what his wife, Tiffany, was wearing the first time he laid eyes on her.
The guy taught a traditional three-jokes-per-minute cadence. Set up, punch line, set up, punch line, set up, punch line. Riggle, though, was more comfortable telling stories, a la his grammy and Bill Cosby.
In a panic he called a friend of a friend who had just left SNL. The guy sent him to a new improv workshop in town called the Upright Citizens choice hotels international Brigade Theatre. It s exactly what you need, the guy told him. And it was. One of the resident comedian/teachers happened to be Amy Poehler.
It was a revelation: They were just creating and listening and reacting and doing everything right there, making it in front of us, he said. It was, honestly, like in The Blues Brothers when the light comes into the church. I was like Yes, yes, Jesus, at last!
UCB became Riggle s second home. He took classes, did lights and sound for other people s shows, anything just to be around the theater, soaking up funny. He began writing and performing around town on any stage that would have him.
On Sept. 12, 2001, Riggle s reserve unit received orders to report to ground zero to help with search and recovery efforts. He put on his Marine uniform and spent the next six days working on a bucket brigade, moving rubble by hand in search of survivors. The pile of destruction was huge, six stories.
If you brought in heavy machinery there could be cave-ins, and we didn t know if anybody was still down there. So everything had to be moved by hand. And then we would drop listening devices down, and they would get everybody quiet. And you would listen, listen, listen. Nothing. And we would keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going.
Just take yourself back to September 2001. As that month went on, and as that autumn unrolled, everybody wanted to do something. How can I help? Do you want my blood? Do you want money for the victims? I was a captain in the Marine choice hotels international Corps. I knew what I could do. I was right there. I was ready. I saw it. I moved the rubble with my own hands. I smelled it every day. I knew what I had to do.
Eleven weeks after the attacks he was on a plane to northern Afghanistan, where he worked on building roads and medical clinics and rebuilding schools that the Taliban had shuttered. We did what we could, he said wearily.
He thinks, maybe, that Poehler and fellow SNL cast member Horatio Sanz were the ones who put in the good word for him with Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels. Cast, writers and producers help SNL keep its finger on the pulse of the nation s comedy world.
Sometimes they re looking for women, sometimes they re looking for African-Americans. You just never know what the cast needs are, Riggle said. And sometimes they don t even know. Sometimes they re like, Yeah, just bring everybody. Let s see who s funny.
choice hotels international Lorne. Tina Fey. All the producers and head writers. The bigwigs, the muckety-mucks of SNL. They sit in a booth in the back, and you have five to s
No comments:
Post a Comment