by Sam Wasson
Judd Apatow could remember back to his teenage years on Long Island, how he went to see Ghostbusters opening day with his mother, and how the theater was completely packed, and the audience’s laughter, during the library scene, was the biggest his sixteen-year-old ears had ever heard.
“In the beginning,” Tina Fey said, “I was probably more motivated by SCTV and Saturday Night Live than anything else.” She couldn’t put her finger on it, but even then, as a girl, getting to stay up late, after SNL, and watch SCTV, Fey felt something different—different than Saturday Night Live. She didn’t get all of it (“My brother was eight years older and he was into it”), but it made her laugh (“I knew Edith Prickley was funny”), and its complexity, what she didn’t fully get, the way SCTV interwove its backstage stories with the “on air” shows within the show, made her aware of SCTV’s writers. Comedy writers. She followed them back. To Toronto, to Chicago. “I knew that most of the actors on those shows had come from Second City,” she said, “and that at least inspired me to get to Chicago.”
Viola Spolin, mother of improvisation, 1946. She smelled sweetly of chicken broth, herbs, and cigarettes.
Courtesy of the Viola Spolin Estate
Viola rehearsing the children—children of all cultures—of Chicago’s Hull House. “Everyone can improvise,” she would write. (Note her son, Paul Sills, center, grimacing in short pants.)
Courtesy of the Viola Spolin Estate
The Compass Players, circa 1955: Severn Darden, Larry Arrick, Elaine May, Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols, Rose Arrick, and Barbara Harris (napping?).
From the collection of David Shepherd, courtesy of Michael Golding
From her seat in the front row, Elaine May sizes up a Compass performance. She was universally feared and admired, rarely on time, artistically ambidextrous, never wrong, and would rise to prominence without resorting to the kind of burlesque, airheaded, or regressed personae of her predecessors, Fanny Brice, Gracie Allen, Phyllis Diller, and Lucille Ball. Every comedienne who eschews type and leads with her intellect follows suit, in May’s footsteps. Thus there are two kinds of comediennes in America: Before Elaine and After.
From the collection of David Shepherd, courtesy of Michael Golding
Mike Nichols and Elaine May, before they were Nichols and May, in an early Compass version of “Teenagers.”
From the collection of David Shepherd, courtesy of Michael Golding
Young Bernie Sahlins outside his theater, 1959.
Courtesy of the Second City Archive
Paul Sills, looking characteristically intense with an uncharacteristic mustache, inside the Second City, 1960.
Courtesy of the Viola Spolin Estate
The Second City company, December 1960: Eugene Troobnick, Barbara Harris, Alan Arkin, Paul Sand, Bill Mathieu (musical director), Mina Kolb, Severn Darden, and Andrew Duncan.
Courtesy of the Second City Archive
Backstage at Second City with Barbara Harris (at the mirror), Andrew Duncan (in the center mirror), and Bill Mathieu.
Courtesy of the Second City Archive
In January 1962, before the theater we call “improv” or “improvisational” was known to the public, the Premise, which Ted Flicker (pictured with Tom Aldredge) termed “Instant Drama,” played Washington, D.C.—for a crowd that included Vice President and Lady Bird Johnson.
From the collection of Theodore Flicker, courtesy of Barbara Flicker
The Committee, soon after director Alan Myerson established the group in San Francisco, May 1963. Top row: Garry Goodrow, Larry Hankin, Ellsworth Milburn. Middle: Irene Riordan, Scott Beach, Kathryn Ish. Bottom: Bob Camp.
Courtesy of Alan Myerson
Joe Flaherty was captain of Second City’s Next Generation, keeper of John Belushi, curator/guiding force of Second City’s first Toronto company, and the unofficial artistic director of SCTV.
Courtesy of the Second City Archive
For all of his friends, improvising at Second City was an accident. For John Belushi, in a Second City portrait from 1971, it was a calling. He was the first of his generation to arrive at Second City with previous improv experience. His West Compass Players incubated many of Belushi’s best characters and impersonations, most memorably his Joe Cocker.
Courtesy of the Second City Archive
Circa 1972. “That river always makes me sad,” Harold Ramis improvised. “Yeah? Why?” asked Joe Flaherty. “It’s called the Crimea River.”
Courtesy of the Second City Archive
Elaine May, the director, takes over from Elaine May, the actor, on the set of A New Leaf, written by Elaine May, the writer. According to all who were lucky enough to see her play Chicago, St. Louis, and New York, May’s tripartite skill fed her improvisational genius (and vice versa).
© Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved.
In April 1972, Martin Short, like his friends at 1063 Avenue Road (not to mention every other fledgling performer in Toronto), had no vision of himself as a comic actor.
Courtesy of Martin Short
Gilda Radner, Brian Doyle-Murray, Gerry Salsberg, Dan Aykroyd, Joe Flaherty, Jayne Eastwood, and Valri Bromfield in Second City’s first Toronto company, June 1973.
Courtesy of the Second City Archive
Del Close in Toronto, 1976. When asked about this photo, improviser Steven Kampmann wrote, “My guess was Del was about to go insane or just was coming out of a breakdown or was actually still in it. Keyword is breakdown.”
Courtesy of Steven Kampmann
The original cast of SCTV, 1976: Andrea Martin, Catherine O’Hara, Joe Flaherty, John Candy, Dave Thomas, Eugene Levy, and Harold Ramis.
Courtesy of the Second City Archive
In the summer of 1978, with Saturday Night Live and its ancillary triumphs at their peak, Andrew Alexander rented the cast of SCTV a house in Bel-Air where writer Harold Ramis, then in L.A., would be close at hand. Most days they wrote in the morning, hung out together at night.
Courtesy of the Second City Archive
The SCTV house party pictured marked their informal initiation into the Hollywood big time: (top) Eugene Levy and Chevy Chase; (middle) John Candy, Joe Flaherty, and Christopher Guest; (bottom) Steven Spielberg and Dave Thomas. (Not pictured but also in attendance were improvisers Fred Willard, Bill and Brian Doyle-Murray, and Laraine Newman.)
Chris Farley, Chicago improviser. “I’ll never forget that first laugh,” he said a year before his death. “The nun came over to my desk to yell at me for something and I said, ‘Gee, your hair smells terrific,’ like in that commercial. Well, all the kids laughed hysterically and it was like a revelation.”
Courtesy of the Second City Archive
The Beatles, clockwise from top left, are Steve Carell (as Paul), Scott Allman (George), Dave Razowsky (Ringo), and Stephen Colbert (John), circa 1994. Gradually, they reveal repressed memories: Ed Sullivan, it seems, fondled each of them before the show. Except Ringo.
Courtesy of the Second City Archive
Improviser Amy Poehler, pictured here around the time she met Tina Fey in Chicago, 1993. “I heard about Tina on the streets before I met her,” Poehler said. “We were both new improvisers who had moved from where we were going to college to study improv, and we performed together on an ImprovOlympic team named after a bad porn movie called Inside Vladimir.”
Courtesy of the Second City Archive
Tina Fey, Scott Allman, and Rachel Dratch in a scene from Mick Napier’s 1996 Citizen Gates, which featured Second City Chicago’s first original gender-equal cast, three men and three women. “What’s made me laugh through the years,” Napier said, “is stuff that doesn’t make any fucking sense at all.”
Courtesy of the Second City Archive
The cast of Piñata Full of Bees, summer 1995: Scott Allman, Jon Glaser, Scott Adsit, Rachel Dratch, Jenna Jolovitz, and Adam McKay.
Courtesy of the Second City Archive
Scott Adsit, as a gargoyle on his first day of school, terrori
zes Jenna Jolovitz, Tina Fey, and Kevin Dorff. Andrew Alexander called the sketch, from Paradigm Lost (2000), one of the funniest he had ever seen.
Courtesy of the Second City Archive
2001. Second City’s response to 9/11: Holy War, Batman! or The Yellow Cab of Courage. The cast from left to right: Keegan-Michael Key, Samantha Albert, Andy Cobb, Abby Sher, and Jack McBrayer.
Courtesy of the Second City Archive
Amy Poehler, Matt Walsh, Ian Roberts, and Matt Besser. Here, the four founding members of the Upright Citizens Brigade perform at a live taping for The UCB Show at the UCB Theatre Sunset, August 2015.
Courtesy of Upright Citizens Brigade / Photo by Liezl Estipona
We the Nerds
1984–
15
1984–1987
On Halloween of 1982, Del Close had appeared, wand in hand and cocooned in a floor-length robe, at a candle-lit art gallery in downtown Chicago. This getup was no costume; in pagan solemnity, Del was to lead a cast of ten improvisers through an Invocation, first by calling forth gods, good and evil, from the four corners of the earth, then by asking the audience to suggest a common object and summoning its essence, a four-phase process wherein the players address the object first as object, then as people, gods, and finally, as themselves, newly imbued with the object’s spirit, scenes are improvised.
Around one thirty in the morning Del began his conjuring of spirits. Among his players that night was Charna Halpern, a fiery improviser proficient in Spolin and ImprovOlympic, David Shepherd’s latest effort to return improvisation to the nonprofessionals. Halpern came that night in search of deeper, bigger modes of improvisation, but recoiled at what she saw as Close’s recklessness. Her own training in Transcendental Meditation mandated a ritual “white-lighting” against danger, which Close had brazenly omitted.
She approached him after the performance. “You had a lot of nerve invoking demons,” she admonished him. “People weren’t protected.”
“I protected the building.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Yes, I can.”
Early the next year, Halpern spotted Close outside Crosscurrents’ cabaret, temporary home to Halpern’s own branch of ImprovOlympic, apart from Shepherd. In the months since she and Close had last met, and clashed, Close had cut ties with Second City yet again. This time, the feeling was mutual: Del’s suicide attempts had finally gotten the better of Sahlins, and Sahlins’s retrograde views of improvisation had become intolerable to Del. “In reality,” Close concluded, “if it were not such a sound business proposition, Second City probably should have closed . . . because we’ve done nothing but repeat ourselves for the last six or seven years. So long as the shows are not so much worse than television, [audiences] won’t be disappointed.” A victim of its own success, the former temple of satire had at last ceded to the tastes of tourists, who came en masse, looking for live versions of their favorite TV shows and movies. This, Halpern knew, left an artistic and perhaps even commercial opening in the improvisational marketplace.
“Hey,” she said to Close outside Crosscurrents. “How’d you like to make two hundred bucks and some pot?”
“What do I gotta do?”
“Just teach one three-hour class.”
“Can I do anything I want?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I invoke demons?”
“Yeah,” she conceded. “What the hell.”
At that workshop, Halpern said, Close opened up for the students the secrets of the universe. He taught Invocation, a version of which Halpern had seen at the art gallery the Halloween before. The results were staggering. “He just embarrassed all of us,” Halpern recalled.
Afterward, Halpern confessed to Close that ImprovOlympic, with its reliance on shortform games, had stopped satisfying her long ago. “I know there has to be something for improvisation beyond what I’m doing,” she told Del.
“Well,” he returned, “then you’re not a twit after all.”
Close suggested Halpern put aside her “little game theater” and, with her students as test cases, help him remake the Harold into a sustainable, teachable means of producing longform improvisations.
“If we made a structure . . .” Del said to Charna, “if we plugged some of your games into the Harold, maybe we could come up with something . . .”
They joined forces. At Crosscurrents, a black box theater squeezed into a skeevy row of pawnshops and liquor stores, Halpern took over the beginners classes, freeing Close to run wild with his experimental cadre of advanced students. “You never knew what he was going to do in class,” Halpern said. Freshly fascinated with Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards’s 1979 text on enhancing creativity, Del played with reversing the book’s paradigm: he had his students hum aloud to dampen their right lobes to see what effects the ersatz lobotomy had on their left. “You gave me your money,” he would say to the hesitant. “You’ve paid me to fuck with you, so I’m doing my job.” Whereas an ambitious Second City student would, and often did, resist such techniques, his acolytes came to Crosscurrents open, for the most part, to following him, and the Harold, wherever it took them.
That Del Close had cleaned up his act gave his muse a new credibility. He no longer came to workshops high on anything weirder than weed or Valium, he had stopped drinking entirely, and he had virtually no veins left for needles. You could say Close didn’t need the hard stuff anymore: a steady supply of his favorite drug—artistic freedom—he got at Crosscurrents. Aiding in his recovery, Halpern remade Del’s derelict apartment—a Grey Gardens of comic books, unread mail, cockroaches, and cat shit—into an inhabitable living space. She convinced him to abandon his cashbox for an actual bank account, use tea bags only once before throwing them away, and get a telephone. Until then, Close was convinced merely owning a phone would lead to his arrest.
“Why would you be arrested?” Charna asked.
“When the president would come on TV to give his state of the union speech, I’d get mad, and I’d call and threaten his life and they’d come and arrest me, so no phone.”
It was Close who turned down sex, because “(a) I might gross you out,” he told Halpern, “and (b) I might end up killing you, and I want us to stay together for a long time.”
“Then we’ll be like family,” Charna said.
Still, he was jealous. Del asked Charna to keep her romances away from him, and she complied, but as Charna got serious with one man, Del picked up the scent and tried to revise their arrangement. No, Del would not share her. There were only two women he ever loved, he pleaded: Elaine and her. But Halpern, if she imagined it, could see how that would end. The best thing for both of them, and for improvisation, would be to keep their relationship familial.
Where they came together, heart and mind, was in the Harold. Experimenting with the Time Dash, one of the shortform ImprovOlympic games Halpern taught in her beginners workshops, Close foresaw a structure. If Charna’s Time Dash—a scene sequence that followed a suggestion through three jumps in time—formed the basis for three separate storylines (that’s nine scenes total) and was set in motion, at the beginning of the improvisation, by an audience suggestion, the Harold could build, scene by scene, to a satisfying ending to all storylines. Ideally, in the final scene of the final Time Dash—the point of the story pyramid—character and narrative elements of previous scenes, the foundation of the pyramid, would coalesce. For Close, that interconnectedness was the artistic by-product of his great metaphysical adventure—not to make comedy per se, but to join together human beings, as Paul Sills tried to, in an act of communal creation. Hence “slow comedy,” a strategy Close introduced to discourage the manic, laugh-oriented atmosphere of Second City improvisation, and attune the Harold’s six or eight improvisers to what was really happening now. Act on your third thought. Your fourth thought. And rather than react, he would say, Think. Feel. It will fasten you to yourself and the thinking, feeling selves of others.
And so it was that, at Crosscurrents’ cabaret, Baron’s Barracudas, the first-ever Harold team, figured out how to Harold. They thought of themselves as Close’s guinea pigs. Halpern dubbed them the pioneers.
They would tell Bill Murray, star of Ghostbusters, the highest-grossing comedy up to that time, that he could now do anything he wanted. Now even Clint Eastwood pitched him a movie idea. But what, Murray asked himself, did he want to do? He wasn’t sure. “I didn’t have a plan,” he said.
Having taken possession of the blockbuster audience, Murray realized that if he wasn’t careful, they would take possession of him. If he were to play into their expectations, reteaming with his Second City ensemble for a sequel to Ghostbusters, Murray would become the comedian they, the audience, wanted him to be. It would curb his freedom. And yet, if he were to turn his back on the heat, he could lose the power—and with it, a certain kind of freedom—that came with superstardom.