Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  Released in 1996, Waiting for Guffman was immediately recognized, in comedy circles, as a benchmark film, if not one of the funniest movies ever made, then the most impactful comedy of the 1990s. If the equally beloved Spinal Tap didn’t inform, as Guffman would, the future of film and television comedy, it was because Tap’s use of the improvised “mockumentary”—a term Guest despises—came before its time. In the 1980s, before the entire culture became camera-conscious, the formal epiphanies of Spinal Tap or The Larry Sanders Show or Albert Brooks’s ingenious Real Life were celebrated, mainly, as inside jokes. Unpracticed in metafictional storytelling, many of Spinal Tap’s first audiences had been confused out of their laughter, but by the time Guffman hit, “the Real World” and the unscripted ordeals of O.J. Simpson (not to mention Piñata Full of Bees) had already made “reality” a question, and the cultural fascination with “Is this really happening?”—i.e., is Guffman a “real” documentary?—primed general reaction for the Guest ensemble. Wellspring of all other mock-documentary creations to come, Waiting for Guffman did to film and television comedy what The Graduate and then Animal House had done before. It created the next template.

  In March of 1996, the latest incarnation of the Upright Citizens Brigade decided to leave Chicago for New York. Their purpose was clear: to get their own TV show.

  Never an improv town, New York, UCB decided, was open for impact and presumably offered a safer landing than L.A., where Hollywood made it impossible for improvisers to fail the way they had to. And the UCB had allies formerly of iO and Second City, already stationed at Late Night with Conan O’Brien and SNL, like McKay, Dave Koechner, and Tina Fey, whom Adam McKay had brought to Lorne Michaels’s attention. New York could be like coming home again.

  Charna Halpern hosted a send-off fundraiser, and with only a dream for a plan, UCB filled two cars with every prop they had, and headed out. Matt Besser and Amy Poehler, turning down her shot at Second City’s mainstage, clunked along in their rented U-Haul; Matt Walsh and Horatio Sanz barely managed in their old van. They agreed that if after six months in New York they hadn’t made significant steps toward that TV deal, they would ­reevaluate.

  It didn’t take long to find their audience. Despite the prevalence of stand-up venues, New York’s punk attitude had no comedy correlate until UCB appeared on the scene, passing out flyers and yelling at passersby through megaphones. Pop-up shows on busy street corners and open-mic nights at KGB Bar, Rebar, or Luna Lounge (where they got the audience high) won UCB a following they led, eventually, to their own space, Solo Arts, a forty-seat hole in Chelsea.

  To pay the rent, the UCB began teaching classes. They quoted Del Close and Charna Halpern, focused students on the “game” of the scene, discovering its comedic premise, how to heighten it, and then heighten it again. “It just developed unintentionally,” Walsh said. Soon their students were putting on their own shows three or four nights a week. Sunday nights the UCB four—Besser, Walsh, Roberts, Poehler—reserved for their own concoction, a derivation of the Armando they called ASSSSCAT 3000; it was New York’s first exposure to the mind of Del Close and longform Chicago-style improv. ASSSSCAT was free. “We kept it free because we wanted that vibe,” Poehler said. “We wanted it to be an event rather than something we could make money off of.”

  It worked. Conan O’Brien put the UCB four on his talk show and more opportunities followed. In 1998 Comedy Central gave them their television show, which featured an opening title voice-over from Del Close and showcased sketches adapted from ASSSSCAT improvs. Walsh said, “In essence, in improv terminology, the theme of the show was our suggestion, and we would take existing scenes or write scenes that related to that topic or explored that idea, then we would start to weave it together, like the Harold does.” They upgraded to a new theater, a five-floor walkup in a former strip club/secret brothel in Chelsea. Said one improviser, “The ladies would bring dudes up from the back and take the fire escape to the apartment directly above the theater, which had mattresses on the floor.” They could handle it. The UCB’s comfort with the ad hoc ethic of guerilla comedy inured them to squalor, almost. The UCB came together to clean the place up, chopping down the strippers’ runway, breaking mirrors off the walls, and in Poehler’s case, dropping to the bathroom floor to fish used condoms out of the toilet. “The women’s locker room was all Prince mixtapes and bikinis,” she said. “It was as if there’d been a nuclear disaster and everyone had just turned into dust and left all their shit behind.” Even after they opened, sailors in town for Fleet Week would turn up looking for hookers. Some Hasidic Jews, too.

  The publicity garnered from ASSSSCAT’s famous and up-and-coming guest monologists, comedy celebrities and friends of friends, drew significant audiences. “I was like a cousin of the [UCB] family,” Tina Fey said. “When I moved to New York to write for SNL that would be my whole Sunday. I would sleep till two and then go down there and do those ASSCATTTs [sic] then eat a whole pizza solo.” Jeff Richmond, Fey’s other half, was directing Second City back in Chicago.

  “One night they asked me to do the monologue,” Conan O’Brien recalled, “and I said, ‘What happens?’ Because I’m a guy who likes to prepare. And they said, ‘Don’t prepare—just take a word from the audience, start talking, and see what happens.’ So someone shouted out ‘Dog!’ and I started telling this story about a night that I pissed my dad off because I refused to take the dog out, and how he blew up—how I could hear him running down the stairs to get me. I told it in this comedic way, and people were really laughing, but I realized that I had, like, a sense memory of this big conflict I’d had with my dad in 1979. It was actually therapeutic.” ASSSSCAT Sundays were old home week, a Chicago reunion, meeting place for initiates Ed Helms, Jack McBrayer, Jenny Slate, Ellie Kemper, Aziz Ansari, Julie Klausner . . . and a way for SNL employees to burn off steam on Sunday nights away from the pressures of the writer’s room.

  “The Dirtiest Sketch Show Ever” was exactly what it sounds like. “Me and my boyfriend at the time,” said one improviser, “did this disgusting, disturbing sketch of a brother and a sister that can’t find anyone on Valentine’s Day, and they decided to fuck each other. And while they’re having sex, they’re talking about putting their grandma in a nursing home.” The show’s host, Adam Pally, remembered, “I saw someone have sex with a chicken. I saw two people vomit into a bucket and then drink each other’s vomit.” (Yes, it’s true.) The UCB never said no.

  To go to an ASSSSCAT show in those early years was to join a sick family of fun-loving derelicts undivided by the standard show business pecking orders. Everyone, no matter their experience level, could improvise. The same was not true of iO or Second City, where an improviser had to prove himself to earn stage time. To accommodate everyone, the UCB had shows of nearly every kind at nearly every hour. Walsh, who lived upstairs, felt like Peter Pan to the Lost Boys when he emerged from his bedroom at two in the morning to the smell of marijuana and beheld the strange picture of a couple of kids giving each other haircuts. Yes, and there was nerd sex under the stage and in the bathroom; for some, it was their first time.

  Chris Farley, late of Saturday Night Live and his hit movie, Tommy Boy, had left Chicago a prodigal son and returned a comedy king, liable to drop in at Second City or iO, swoop up the players and pied piper them around the corner for a steak breakfast and a beer, as Belushi had, as John Candy had. Or Farley could pile into a cab with them and head downtown, back to his apartment at the Hancock Center, for pizza and heroin as the sun came up.

  Farley knew heroin was bad; he said he felt the devil in it. Each time, he said, it took a piece of his soul away.

  None of his stints in rehab had worked, and with each failure Farley lost a little more faith, not so much in God but in himself. He could temporarily recover a rush of good feeling getting laughs turning cartwheels upon request, or letting the kids ice-cream his fat face. But those humiliations cost him too. Reflecting on his SNL work, he said, “I’ve still got sor
es on my back and aches in my body from going out a window or falling down steps or landing on a coffee table. I dislocated my shoulder. I broke my leg.” But he could not stop. If comedy was its own devotion, as he had confided in Father Joe Kelly, of St. Malachy’s in New York, then getting laughs was his penance, and any club or restaurant, his church.

  Early in 1997 Farley was spotted having dinner on the North Side. “Unable to sit still,” one witness wrote, “he worked the room as if his life depended on it, going from table to table in an effort to elicit laughs from strangers—some of whom were more amused than others. Finally someone from the restaurant’s management told Farley he’d have to stay at his table and behave himself—but as soon as the manager exited the room, Farley bounced back up and was back at it.”

  In December, Charna Halpern was visiting Farley when a couple of filthy guys walked into his apartment clutching a strange object she almost didn’t recognize.

  “Is that a crack pipe?”

  “Yeah.”

  Charna threw the lowlifes out.

  “You should be hanging out with people who love you!” she railed. “Not guys who are going to say ‘I got high with Farley before he died’!”

  They fought and she left.

  He overdosed in his apartment two weeks later, the morning of December 18, 1997. Farley was thirty-three years old, the same age as John Belushi.

  Del was hallucinating. Colors.

  “It might be best,” he told Charna by phone, “if you drove me to class.”

  There was no way she was letting him come to class. The previous summer, over half a year earlier, they had been warned: it was emphysema. Del had a year, the doctor said, at the very best.

  In the months that followed, Close continued teaching at iO, undaunted, even driven to develop new improvisational structures like the Wake, a longform set at a funeral home. But the physical signs of Close’s deterioration were undeniable, at least to everyone other than Close. They saw he no longer breathed freely. He struggled walking to the theater. He had difficulty standing. Students came to class prepared for coughing attacks, waiting at the ready with cups of water. Del knocked them to the floor. “Why the hell does everyone bring me water every time I start coughing?” he roared. “I don’t breathe water. Just for once, I’d like for someone to get me a fucking tracheotomy tube.”

  Now the hallucination, February 27, 1999. Charna, on the phone with Del, put an end to the game playing. These hallucinations weren’t drug-related; they told her, as the doctor predicted, his brain was asphyxiating. He was going to the hospital.

  “No, no,” he commanded. “I don’t mind the colors. It’s fine. I have a class to teach.”

  Soon after arriving at Illinois Masonic Hospital, Del was restored, with the aid of inhalation therapy, basically, to his normal abnormal self, but in a matter of hours, the Reaper tagged in and he had to be resuscitated. Charna found him with a tube down his throat. “He was crying,” Halpern remembered. He wanted the tube out.

  If they took him off the ventilator, the doctors warned Close, he would die. Did he understand that?

  Yes, he nodded. He understood.

  Unable to talk, Close reached for a pen, and as they switched off the machines, he wrote to Charna, joking mostly (“Get me a big stack of our books unsigned—price goes up!”), and also semiserious. He wrote that Charna was now allowed to have a boyfriend (“like me but younger”), and Charna encouraged him to hang in there, at least to March 9, his sixty-fifth birthday, so they could throw him a party.

  Then again, why wait? This was it.

  Charna called Bill Murray and told him all; they wanted to have the birthday, possibly his last, the very next day. Murray insisted he foot the bill.

  Phone call invites went out around the country, nurses scoured Del’s arms for usable veins (“Sorry! I got there first!”) and local friends and colleagues appeared to say goodbye, entertain, and receive Del’s freshest wisdoms on death and comedy. Barbara Harris came. It was too much for her, so she busied herself cleaning and reordering the hospital room and frantically tending to Del’s requests. When she finished Del’s hospital room, Barbara took off for his apartment, and with Charna’s help, began scrubbing, washing, tidying up. (“I told Barbara,” Close explained to Mina Kolb by phone, “that if the choice was whether to stay with her or die, I’d rather die.”) Halpern drove Harris home, and by the time she returned to Del’s bedside, she found Harris, too nervous to be on her own, sitting there as if she had never left. David Shepherd was sitting beside her.

  Alan Myerson called. They spoke for quite a while before Myerson got around to it: “How do you feel about dying?”

  “There’s nothing to be done really. I just want to be as conscious as I can possibly be.”

  For a guy who had spent his life getting loaded, Myerson thought, that sounded like a leap into the last unknown.

  On the day of the party, Del’s current and former students—forty years’ worth of fear-loving high divers—gathered in the hospital dining room for a living wake of balloons, flowers, cake, two saxophone players, a coven of nurses, two pagan priests, and a camera crew dispatched by the Upright Citizens Brigade. They were filming in New York and couldn’t make it.

  “You know,” he told UCB, through an oxygen mask, by phone, “as I leave it, I begin to realize that we really haven’t done such a bad job.” It was not immediately clear if Close was speaking about the human race, or his effort—their effort—to legitimize improvisation. “And I think that we need, oh my fellow Conspiratorians, to recognize this, and, yeah, we’re not doing such a bad job for the world. And if maybe a few more conspirators out there would realize that we’re—what is this conspiracy? It’s a conspiracy of geniality, of hope.”

  Close, in his wheelchair, wore a high-collared robe of red, yellow, and black stripes.

  Bill Murray asked Del if there was anything he could get him. Close asked for a drink—his first in ages—a white chocolate martini.

  Harold Ramis was there.

  Joyce Sloane and Bernie Sahlins were there.

  “It’s an art form!” Del called out to Bernie.

  “Del,” Bernie replied, kissing him, “for tonight, it is an art form.”

  At the designated hour, they all drew together in the center of the dining room and fell silent, waiting for a word from Del.

  “But as I said before,” he said, after a sip of his martini, “there’s no reason to burn it out tonight. We might get lucky . . .”

  There followed a short pagan ritual, beginning with a blessing, an invocation of the deity. “We invoke you, goddess, the goddess we call by many names, Astarte, Hecate, Diana, Penelope, Earth Mother. Please come with us tonight. Send your blessing over all these people, and most of all, our guest of honor here, celebrating his birthday and celebrating his journey through life.”

  Del hung his head, his hands clasped.

  Friends read poetry and prose.

  “Blessed be,” Del said.

  “Blessed be.”

  Another blessing was read.

  “Blessed be.”

  The room grew quiet again.

  Gravely serious, Close said, “In the words of a wise woman from a foreign land who is often misunderstood, ‘Death is not important. Life is important. And life is eternal, and life is now.’ Leni Riefenstahl.”

  Early the next morning, around 3:00 a.m., the pain had become unbearable. Charna took his hand.

  “No matter what,” he told her, “you’ll give the skull to the theater.” He had already asked her to leave his skull to Robert Falls, director of Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, so Del could play Yorick for eternity.

  “Yes . . .”

  “You’ll put my ashes in the theater”—their theater, iO—“where I can affect the work.”

  “I will.”

  “You’ll tell them”—the students—“we succeeded. We created the Theater of the Heart, where everyone takes care of each other, where everyone treats eac
h other like a genius.”

  Then, Del Close’s final experiment: morphine.

  March 4, 1999.

  Gary Austin, returning to the Groundlings some years after his resignation in 1979, stepped into the greenroom and noted, with disappointment, actors typing up their sketches as if they were in the writer’s room of a television show. “That’s completely backward from what we did [originally],” he said. “We were doing theater. It was alive; it came out of living, living on our feet on the stage.” Though many of sketch and improv’s funniest performers—Jennifer Coolidge, Will Ferrell, Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Lisa Kudrow, Melissa McCarthy, Maya Rudolph, Kristen Wiig—developed here, at Los Angeles’s premier comedy theater, the Groundlings, they had all but abandoned their roots in improvisation. “We were actors who wrote,” original Groundling Victoria Carroll would remind Austin. “These are writers who act.” Many at Second City were guilty of the same, but under the artistic direction of Kelly Leonard, the temerity of new-blood directors like Mick Napier, and the everlasting aegis of Del Close, Second City was rethinking the so-called rules of improvisational form. The Groundlings were like sitcom sidekicks, regarded for the outrageousness of their kooky characters. “They still produce a lot of good work,” Austin reflected. “But I hate the process.” One is sketch, he thought, the other theater. One improv comedy, the other improvisation. “Even if it’s exaggerated,” he said, “comedy has to represent truthful human behavior. We have to see you. We have to see ourselves.”

  When ABC canceled The Dana Carvey Show in 1996, leaving Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell (along with a legendary assemblage of comedy talent including Robert Smigel, Charlie Kaufman, and Louis C.K.) out of work, Colbert was hired by ABC’s Good Morning America, he said, “because I kind of looked straight but they wanted somebody to be funny—but like a weatherman is funny.” At the time, Colbert’s wife was also unemployed, and they had a baby girl, so Colbert, with no journalism experience, took the job. He said, “I did exactly two reports.” They were barely amusing. One, in which Colbert (“Steve Colbert”) interviewed contestants from the Ninth Annual National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, showed him a mere shadow of his future self. Colbert, playing straight man to the kooks, looked out of place, like some rich network uncle got him the job. Apparently, ABC felt the same; after Colbert’s piece aired, they rejected all thirty of his next story ideas.