Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  Had Bernie looked out one particular night in January he would have seen one. Joe Flaherty, a six-foot mustachioed string bean with wild eyes and a heh heh heh laugh, watching the show, transfixed. At twenty-seven, he had never seen improvisation before. Flaherty, an actor, had come to Second City via the Pittsburgh Playhouse drama school, brimming with the catalogue of high theater, Arthur Miller to Shakespeare. In search of work, Flaherty wrote just about every prospective employer he could think of. A lone reply from Second City’s current director, Mike Miller, came back with an offer. “I don’t need an actor,” Miller wrote, “but do you know anything about lights?” With zero experience and no alternatives, Flaherty became Second City’s new stage manager. But instead of giving him a tutorial, the exiting stage manager—whose appetite for acid made him slow on the light board—directed his successor to a table in the house and told him to “take a look” at the show, and he did. Improvisational comedy, Flaherty saw, was the nexus of you and world. You could speak and be heard. “[This is] a chance to use all the comedic information that you’ve stored up in your head,” Flaherty observed, “all the satiric takes on things, viewpoints that you had, things that irritated, bugged you, you could bring them out, you could do it right onstage. You could make it happen.”

  Flaherty raced into Jo Forsberg’s improvisational workshops. Afternoons, Forsberg’s class took to the empty theater for a steady diet of Viola’s games, and absorbed the secrets of collaboration. “Just play the game,” Forsberg advised her students, bead-wearing longhairs uncommonly open to communal give-and-take. Jim Fisher, one of Flaherty’s classmates, learned to survey the stage for signs of ready improvisers, and then “pass to the open man,” he said. “If Flaherty was on a run, then you fed him, and if you were on a run, you got fed.”

  Though Harold Ramis was new to improvisation, by virtue of his day job as Playboy’s jokes editor he was the most experienced comic in Forsberg’s class. They looked to his reaction for an instant evaluation of a joke. Was Harold laughing? Or just smiling? “I would say in the first month [at Playboy], I already knew 95 percent of the jokes in current circulation in America,” he said. “I could not hear a joke I didn’t know.” But—contrary to Bernie Sahlins’s emphasis on learning and sophistication—intelligence is mostly at odds with spontaneous flow. To improvise, Ramis had to get out of his head; he could not write; he could not whisper suggestions to the others. But Ramis had trouble switching off his critical instinct. Why weren’t they doing x? Didn’t they see the problem with y? And yet Ramis proffered his insight only when asked, and with a self-deprecatory smile, and they loved him for it. “Everybody fought to be in a scene with Harold,” Flaherty said, coming to admire, beyond Harold’s skill with a line, his generosity in first polishing and then handing them out. They were handy in a pinch.

  Flaherty and Ramis froze during one improv.

  “Why don’t you do that joke?” Ramis whispered.

  Flaherty immediately knew what he meant: the doctor’s office. “What are you here for?” he asked.

  “Well, because my penis is red.”

  “That’s ’cause someone’s talking about it.”

  Flaherty got the laugh.

  Others would guard their gold, their ticket to attention. Harold Ramis was the company’s Giver.

  Flaherty, the purest, oldest, most experienced of the group, became its Older Brother, responsible for elevating the level of play both on and off the stage—“adjusting egos,” he said, to hold the scene, not its players, in the foreground and perpetuate a spirit of chaos that complemented Ramis’s inclination to control. Where another improviser—a Mike Nichols, for instance—might favor his audience, Flaherty played to the other improvisers, provoking them, personally, with funny choices intended to flip them backward into the unknown. He might grab an invisible book off the shelf, toss it to Harold or Jim, and say, “I can’t read this. It’s in Latin.” From out of left field came Flaherty’s reminders that real life is not made of setups and payoffs, but accidents any improviser must arrange into a coherent pattern. “I guess I’m pretty much a structuralist,” he conceded.

  As a team, Flaherty’s gang were promoted from Forsberg’s class and her Children’s Theater to the Second City touring company, playing engagements around and out of town that consisted mostly of classic Second City scenes like “Football Comes to the University of Chicago” and “Amateur Hour,” and whenever they could, improvising in public, like at the Earl of Old Town, a saloon across from the theater, taking suggestions, adding improvised dialogue tracks to old industrial films, and developing a sensibility of their own. Jim Fisher—their stage manager and director and a part of the ensemble—filmed the improvisations for future study; until then, improvisations were recorded on audio only. Now they could actually see what they were doing. After a show at the Earl of Old Town, they would regroup at Fisher’s apartment for a look and learn. What were their tricks, their bad habits? How could they break them? “We worked so well together as a group,” Fisher said. No wonder they developed full company scenes so easily; they all wanted to improvise together. “Everybody would just fill in the background of a scene,” he added. “It got to the point where all we had was group scenes.” A look at the footage, and they understood the different responsibilities of a background versus a foreground improviser, and learned what choices paid off with their fans—drug-related and explicitly political material, and robust physicality. Beyond merely topical, “we were radical,” Ramis said. “Our company was born out of the Chicago convention.” Monday nights at the Earl of Old Town were selling out—to a college crowd distantly aware that what Abbie Hoffman brought to Lincoln Park, they were bringing to comedy.

  From across the street, Bernie Sahlins took note. No, this was not his long-defended brand of intellectual satire plus exceptional acting, but unlike his current mainstage company—riddled with infighting, shtick, and culturally disconnected from its (aging) audience—the Old Town improvisers showed a refreshing optimism. It was in the way they felt about each other. “The previous bunch was always nipping at each other onstage,” Fisher said. “They had no background in improvisation. We had a very different ‘Yes, and’ way of working.” Never before had an unprofessional ensemble been so thoroughly trained and, inhaling the same political fumes, so thoroughly united by principle. Wiping his stage clean—Second City had never done this before—Bernie graciously escorted his current company to New York, installed them in an off-Broadway theater, and moved the Earl of Old Town punks back home. He called them the Next Generation. The youngest cast ever.

  Alan Arkin was directing the 1969 revival of Jules Feiffer’s lunatic postassassination satire Little Murders, which had had a short, unsuccessful Broadway run two years earlier, off-Broadway at the Circle in the Square. It was Feiffer’s first full-length play; his first work for the stage, The Explainers, was a revue Paul Sills had commissioned in 1961 to inaugurate Second City’s legit (and short-lived) theater, Playwrights at Second City, in a space adjacent to the mainstage. “In Jules’s cartoons,” Sheldon Patinkin said, “Paul saw the makings of a playwright with Second City values. We all thought he was one of us.” The Explainers featured Del Close, Barbara Harris, and Paul Sand, and much like the Broadway run of Little Murders, didn’t work.

  “This is a great show,” Arkin assured the cast of the new, off-Broadway Little Murders, “fuck the critics,” but he was nevertheless struggling, in rehearsal, to get them through the first scene of Feiffer’s play, which begins as Patsy Newquist (played by Compass Player Linda Lavin) brings her boyfriend, Alfred (Second City’s Fred Willard), home to meet her parents. The Newquists go to ludicrous extremes trying to ingratiate themselves to Alfred, a depressive, whose persistent catatonia, rather than deter the family, elevates their gooey all-American kindness to a painful fever pitch. Where Murders’s Broadway director smoothed the comedy’s semiabsurdist mishmash of styles and tones—almost like a full evening at Second City—Arkin, in rehearsal, h
ad his actors improvise their way to a deeper emotional understanding, a “paraphrase,” he called it, in which Fred Willard, improvising as President Johnson, appeared as the Newquists’ dinner guest. After five exhausting minutes of desperately trying, and failing, to entertain LBJ, the ensemble achieved the desired effect—hysteria. “They got the paraphrase completely,” Arkin recalled, “and through the many months that they performed the play they never lost it.” The rehearsal improv went out, but the manic intensity remained.

  Arkin’s handpicked company of trained improvisers built themselves, by virtue of their training, into a functioning stage family, “a real ensemble up there on stage,” Feiffer said. “On Broadway, there was never a real family up there, even though the production was far more realistic, far less stylized. There was a lot of talk about having a family, but it never happened. This time, when I did look in at a rehearsal, I was amazed to see how much Alan had immediately solved by creating the feeling of a real family.” And this time, under Arkin, the critics got Little Murders. Arkin had simultaneously tightened and loosened the production, and the play’s harsh view of the new despair, in the years since its premiere, had expanded from prophetic to proven. The darkest, funniest, most clinically percipient comedy of midcentury America, Little Murders pulled all the cadavers from the morgue for a two-hour autopsy of the national character, born and killed in violence. Fired by improvisation and the erratic Second City–style gearshifts of cabaret comedy, the play fulfilled Paul Sills’s expectation of Feiffer’s dramatic abilities, and heralded Feiffer as the theater’s leading satirist. “If you have ever experienced the unpleasant feeling that someone was watching you,” wrote Clive Barnes in the New York Times, “I must tell you someone is. It is Feiffer.”

  Somewhere into the run, the cast changed, replacement auditions were held, and New York University graduate student Christopher Guest, while finishing his degree, won a part in the production. Guest’s comedy, even then, showed the delicate, almost invisibly ironic sangfroid of Peter Sellers, a tightrope walker’s control of any flamboyant personality, but it was Guest’s meeting with Fred Willard, sui generis in any context, that marked his first flash of professional improvisation. Guest had improvised in college, forming “what we thought was an improv group” with Tom Leopold and fellow NYU classmate Jeannie Berlin, daughter of Elaine May (“We went up to see her, Elaine May,” Guest said, “and did something in front of her that we thought was funny. So we did something—and I don’t remember what it was—and she looked at us like this [blankly] and I don’t know if there was any comment at all . . . and then we left”), and there was the everyday inventing he did automatically, riding the bus with his roommate, actor Michael McKean, doing characters, fooling around.

  During that run of Little Murders, Guest, for the first time, was flipped head over heels into the improvisational deep, in front of a paying audience. “I knew something was off,” Guest said, “when Fred [Willard] actually started doing lines that weren’t in the play. To me.” Guest was sitting onstage, following the script, during a performance, when “I heard these words that weren’t familiar and I looked over and there was Fred of course . . . And I didn’t really know what to make of it other than I just looked to him and nodded, and I said to myself, You’re different.”

  “If I’m in the room and there’s no one funnier than me,” Harold Ramis would say, “I figure it’s my job to lighten it up.” He came by comedy and social consciousness—the humanitarian impulse channeled through laughter—as a boy in his mother’s kitchen, playing whack-a-mole with her depression, using stolen jokes for a mallet, acting, absurdly, the role of grown-up to his own parent. “We tell kids that the world is a safe place,” Ramis said, “that our leaders know what they’re doing, that policemen are good, that your priest would never molest you. We know that the world is terrifying but we don’t want them to be terrified, so we give them a false picture, which, as the kid gets older—it works when they’re little—but when they get old enough to see what’s really going on this cognitive dissonance develops.” It’s a sense of humor.

  Even as a kid he had rescuer’s dreams. TV and movies gave myths to the Robin Hood in him, burgeoning and converging Ramis’s great goodwill and his political awareness. He had to “stand up for the little guy and save the village, save the woman, save the nation, whatever. It was always about saving somebody.” At five, absorbing the newsreels, he decided he would be a fighter pilot, an American hero. At ten, watching civil rights disturbances on television, his mission grew more complicated. “Suddenly,” he said, “television started introducing this nightmare into my life, and I began to see our culture for what it was, not all bad, certainly, but clearly not what was portrayed in the movies I had grown up on.” As a teenager, he learned to play guitar, wore blue denim, and sang protest songs. He lived in middle-class Chicago but identified with the migrant farmworkers—and Groucho Marx. Ramis’s father, a grocer, led him to A Night at the Opera and Duck Soup, which became “a great lesson in comedy and an actual political point of view,” the triumph of the common lunatic over the pretensions and sterility of the ruling elite.

  What does it mean to be crazy? The question interested him. To live outside the system, was that crazy? How different were the manic-depressives, the compulsives, the paranoids, the rebels, from the so-called sane? Or was it living within the system—you know, America, 1969—that made you crazy? “I could see elements of it all in myself,” Ramis concluded. “To some extent, it showed me how my own feelings and experiences were on a continuum with what it is to be alive.”

  After college, he took a job in a psych ward. At some point, most of us would have flipped out, probably, working the locked unit of the Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, where psychotics painted the walls in their own shit, and one patient, a June Cleaver type, told of spreading out on the lawn and masturbating in front of her family, but Ramis, a twenty-one-year-old English major just out of college (he had no medical training) was fine—better than fine, he was happy. Wherever he went, he showed a Buddha’s talent for patience and empathetic flow. In a hurricane, Ramis could make himself comfortable; as the plane fell from the sky, he would set down his crossword puzzle, help himself to the oxygen mask, then turn to you and, in his Kermit the Frog voice, say, “This is going to be hard, but if you’re open to it, it could also be really interesting. My name’s Harold, by the way. How long will you be in Chicago?” Acceptance gave him serenity, the look of inner peace.

  In coming to Second City, Harold Ramis had no plan, no urgent purpose. He liked to get high more than he liked to work. At $137.50 a week, Second City was a convenient way to conscientiously object—to “real” work, long hours, and, well, conscientious objection. (Flaherty said Ramis made Bob Dylan look like a GI.) So it was by default that Ramis became Second City’s revolutionary-in-residence. Flaherty, grumbling or snickering, was born to play the Dad in the armchair; Brian Murray, the Neighborhood Bigmouth, you would find pouring himself another beer at the end of the bar; cute Judy Morgan was definitely the Girl; Jim Fisher, the Boy; Roberta Maguire, the Mom; and tough David Blum ideal for the Cop, or any variation thereof. That left the Hippie to Harold Ramis. Between his shaggy Jewfro, John Lennon glasses, and aw-shucks chuckle, he conveyed the sort of endearing antiestablishment good boy far too Mickey Rooney for the Committee, but perfect for Second City.

  Accordingly, it was Ramis who opened The Next Generation, Second City’s thirty-seventh revue, in October 1969—and with a blackout, the most efficient way to deliver a message. As the lights went down, the piano played on the full company, shouting together in generic protest (“Rah! Rah!” “Power to the people!”). Harold pushed his way through and took the floor. “Brothers! Sisters! The fact that we are standing in the White House represents the people’s triumph over the repressive forces of the imperialist power!” (Shouts of agreement.) “The streets now belong to the people!” Hooray! The people! “We must face the monumental task ahead!” Yeah! Yay! “Th
e people’s streets need to be cleaned!” Confused silence. Blackout.

  “We bombed,” Harold said. “It was terrible.”

  The conviction the Next Generation summoned for the alternative audiences of the Earl of Old Town seemed forced in their mainstage debut. Critics dismissed them. Certain nights, improvisers outnumbered their audiences two to one. Maybe it was the snow piling up outside the theater. Or the snark piling up inside: you could feel a little of that in the detached air of We’re only kidding here, folks; it undercut the seriousness of the material. And there was a better show in town: the sustained, months-long improvisational innovations of the Chicago Seven. Their trial for conspiracy to cross state lines and incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention was drawing standing-room-only crowds to Judge Julius Hoffman’s kangaroo courtroom. There, the “totally authoritarian, dictatorially oppressive atmosphere of wrongful persecution,” to quote audience member Jules Feiffer, present on assignment for the New York Review of Books, played so absurd that Judge Hoffman’s unabating perversions of First Amendment rights, which climaxed in the gagging of Black Panther Bobby Seale, provoked both cries of pain and sobs of laughter from the defendants, one of whom, Abbie Hoffman, had been known to spend his nights with Second City’s Roberta Maguire.