Tami Sagher and the comedy equation

Funny story — Tami Sagher was supposed to be a mathematician, not an actress and certainly not a comedy writer.

“For the longest time, I was training to be a mathematician,” she says, noting that her father taught mathematics. “That changed at the end of college. I found that I didn’t have the passion and that’s not a field you can do that without.”

Instead, Sagher found improv comedy — a field that not only launched her into show business but serves as the subject of her new film, Don’t Think Twice, which opens Friday in limited release.

Written and directed by comic Mike Birbiglia, Don’t Think Twice focuses on an improv group in New York whose members — including Birbiglia, Sagher, Keegan-Michael Key, Gillian Jacobs, Chris Gethard and Kate Micucci — all work day-jobs while waiting for their big break. When that break comes — a shot on a “Saturday Night Live”-type show — it only comes for one member of the group, causing envy, tension and career reassessment for the rest.

Sagher, who grew up in Chicago, knew Birbiglia from — what else? — doing an improv show together for an event. When Birbiglia started doing a regular improv show, Sagher became a part of it for a couple of years.

“That’s where I think he got the idea and wrote the screenplay,” Sagher says. “From the beginning, Mike would say after the show, ‘Let’s go eat,’ so we all got close.”

To meld his cast for this film, Birbiglia tried something similar, Sagher notes: “I think it was Frank Oz who told him that, to build cast unity, he should take his cast bowling. So we rehearsed by going bowling and hanging out as friends. And that sense of community extended to the production itself.”

Sagher was a math major at the University of Chicago, when she did her first improv show with a student group: “In fact, I was in denial,” she says. “I thought I was going to keep doing math and maybe do improv on the side. My father, however, is a big believer in focus. He said, ‘Whatever you pursue, focus is important.’

“So I auditioned for (improv company) Boom Chicago and got it — at 21! I was fortunate enough to get my first job in improv while I was still in college. I mean, wow — it was this paying gig. The company went to Europe; I was living in Amsterdam. Our picture was in the KLM airline magazine. Then I came back to Chicago — and graduated into a touring company for Second City. I just knew I wanted to pursue it.

“My dad was always very funny. There was a lot of humor around the house. It was highly valued. But I never felt funny with other people until I plugged into an improv group. I thought, Wow, this is fun. It felt like a new way to talk to people. I mean, I was in math.”

From Second City, Sagher was hired as a writer for MadTV — which led to work writing for shows as varied as “Psych, How I Met Your Mother, 30 Rock, Girls and Inside Amy Schumer, among others, working her way up to producer credits on several of those shows.

“Producing is a senior title that means you’ve been a writer on the show for a while,” she says with a shrug. “I can’t imagine being a producer and not a writer. I can see where it would look like I’ve been steadily employed, but usually it’s terrifying.”

And the connection between comedy and mathematics? Well, neither of them is known for its plentiful employment opportunities: “Math is as hard as acting, in terms of the job search.

“With both math and comedy, when you’re in the flow, there will be these magic moments. I’m sure it happens with anything you’re deeply concentrating on. In improv, there are times when it goes deep and becomes something holy. Math is the same way. Math is a big universe of truth trying to be discovered. And that’s my approach to improv: There’s a scene there and we’re trying to discover it.

And where, on a Venn diagram, do they overlap? “At Second City, I had a bit where I proved that the square root of 2 is irrational — and what made it funny was what everyone else was doing,” Sagher says. “The scene idea was that I said I was going to give this proof and they should interrupt me with any questions they had. Everyone was so funny that it turned into a scene that I’m still proud of to this day. We did it at a math teacher’s conference and the place went insane. All of the things that usually got laughs didn’t — and all this other stuff did. Call it revenge of the nerds. I had one crazy anight of being a math-comedy rock star.”

She’s at work writing a movie script and a couple of TV projects. While she never expected to be an actress in films, she seldom goes long without getting up on an improv stage.

“It’s a gift to get to act; it’s wholly unexpected,” Sagher says. “It’s beyond a pleasure; it’s joyful. I’d love to keep performing. Improv? Improv is play. I learn stuff by improvising.”