Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  Born in Chicago’s Humboldt Park, and growing up funny in suburban Wheaton, it was inevitable that John Belushi would make the pilgrimage, sooner or later, to Second City. It finally came in 1967 in the form of a graduation present from Dan Payne, his high school drama teacher. John brought his girlfriend, Judy. Until then, John had seen himself as a traditional theater actor. Neither knew anything about their native art form, improvisational comedy. But that night they learned. In the hourlong car ride from Wheaton to Wells Street, Payne told them the story of Paul Sills, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, the Compass Players, Alan Arkin, and Barbara Harris, and inside the theater, John and Judy enjoyed the next chapter—Steinberg, Willard, and Klein—for themselves. Leaving Second City a little dazed, somewhat blindsided by the sudden contact with his certain future, John turned to Judy. “This,” he said. “This is what I want to do.”

  At the College of DuPage, some twenty miles west of Chicago, he and his pals Tino Insana and Steve Beshekas started messing around, creating bits, and improvising comedy at the Student Center. They called themselves the West Compass Players. And they played original Compass games, like the Nichols and May classic First Line/Last Line. The night John’s ensemble got the Last Line, “She came in through the bathroom window,” he came out with a perfect Joe Cocker, honed to second nature by long drives with Judy in his busted Volvo, windows down, stereo up, crying out with Cocker on the radio. “As much as John loved being an actor and a comedian,” Judy said, “at heart his fantasy was to be a rock and roll star.” This was no caricature. Belushi was Cocker, all emotion, a wrecking ball. It was scary, his volatility, the constant threat that, lost in flow, gone from consciousness, he might impale himself on a mic stand or another human being. They more than laughed: the completeness of his immersion was so convincing that his audiences felt, through him, a communion with mysteries.

  Joyce Sloane, Bernie Sahlins’s right hand, caught the West Compass Players at DuPage and arranged for them to audition for Second City, and Sahlins, railroaded by John’s magnetism, rushed him directly into the main company. Here Bernie felt his world begin to change. Against his heart, he was in awe of Belushi’s obvious ability; to Bernie, Belushi was every day a bride, perennially commanding, because he knew he always was. The kid was as bold as Elaine May, Joe Cocker to her Miles Davis, but even then, Bernie could guess Belushi’s blue-collar persona, his penchant for rough types and physical comedy, would not convey Bernie’s own long-guarded investment in satire, intellectual or otherwise. “Television and rock ’n’ roll,” Belushi said. “The two greatest influences on my life.” But Second City was not a sitcom. It was a theater. At least it always had been. “From our beginnings,” Sahlins wrote, “we had tiptoed the boundary line where the classical spirit ends and the realm of commercial, popular entertainment begins.” With Belushi’s audition, a right turn appeared on the horizon. Second City, Bernie saw, would be saved from obsolescence, but at a cost.

  At twenty-two, John Belushi, the only improviser of his generation to skip over workshops and the touring company, became the youngest Second City performer in history.

  The current company let him right in. As experts in the rules of agreement, they accepted Belushi as swiftly as an audience suggestion. John loved being part of a family, especially this fun and happy one, but initially his inexperience with the “Yes, ands” of improvisation and his increasing awareness of his own stardom, the wedding-day shine Bernie so admired, kept him outside the synergy. Give or take an improviser, the Next Generation had been playing together for years now: Flaherty, Ramis, Fisher, Morgan, Brian Murray, Eugenie Ross-Leming—they could all toss the ball, but John didn’t yet know how to throw it back. He stole focus. The coarse jokes and attention-grabbing tricks that got him big laughs with the college crowd—like upstaging a scene in progress with a pantomimed heroin injection and overdose—pulled the rug out from under them. After one too many steals, it fell to Flaherty to teach the new guy improv’s golden rule. When the time came, he took him aside for a private lesson, and to Flaherty’s surprise, John humbled. “I’m just having so much fun,” he apologized. “I just get carried away. I’m sorry.” More than anything, he wanted to join them. “Flaherty,” Belushi would say, “taught me subtlety”—John’s word for cooperation.

  Thematic subtlety was another thing entirely. Unencumbered by Second City’s roots in intellectual material, Belushi trampled through good taste like a pig at a garden party. Farts, burps, crotch grabs—you name it. One such character, the World’s Most Obnoxious Houseguest, aka the World’s Most Obnoxious Date, would saunter out with a self-satisfied grin, and to his host or the girl’s parents—anyone ripe for offense—declare, “Wow, you won’t believe this. I just took a shit a foot long!” John used his hands like a fisherman describing his catch. “I’m not kidding,” he’d persist, awed at his own creation, “this thing really was a full foot. You ever seen that? And not in pieces! You know how hard that is to evacuate?” Cheap, you say? Easy? Do not mistake the content for the form. In Belushi’s hands, the lowbrow laugh, elevated by his unqualified commitment to character and endless improvised elaborations, rose to something like shock art. “He made a fugue of the foot-long shit,” said Ross-Leming. “If people didn’t run for their lives, they died laughing.” How Bernie squirmed! “We respected the rule that you say ‘shit’ maybe only once in a show,” Jim Fisher said. He was backstage when he heard John, once again Mr. Obnoxious, tell another improviser to “eat a bowl of fuck.” No one had any idea what he meant. But they laughed anyway.

  Belushi’s image alone gave him carte blanche. It was his flat nose. Those stump legs under his barrel torso. “John looked funny,” explained Flaherty. “They laughed before he opened his mouth.” And inside he burned. Making a six-course meal of his containment, slowly turning the crank of his own jack-in-the-box, he became a time bomb. They laughed at that too—the anticipation. Incredibly, he could set himself up. When they said Belushi was funny doing “nothing,” this is what they meant; how, drawing out those silences, he tickled the air around him. This—despite the coarseness of his material—was all nuance and self-control. Flaherty called it Brando meets Lou Costello, inner heat and slapstick working as one. John would ram his body into walls if he had to, and when he did, he ran at them full force.

  So Harold Ramis had to step back. Once the Crazy Hippie, he put up a white flag, ceded wacko duty to Belushi, and took up the role of Nerdy Sidekick, Kissinger, he said, to Belushi’s Nixon. Thinking, getting stuck in his head, had always been Ramis’s improvisational Achilles’ heel. He could never fully observe the scene and experience it at the same time. But in his new incarnation as the smart guy, thinking became an essential part of Ramis’s persona. From the class clown to the class clown’s writer, he learned patience and relaxation. Where Ramis once twisted a scene, or an idea, to suit his incubating joke, he now watched and waited. Sharing the stage with Belushi, he had to. To Jim Fisher’s astonishment, Ramis’s jokes—seemingly prepared—“always fit. That was the rare talent. It didn’t feel like when you were working with him, uh-oh, here comes a joke. Harold wasn’t lying in wait for his setup; the setup would appear and the joke would well up in him.” Others sweated out their jokes; Ramis merely shrugged and opened his mouth. His mastery was the company puppy dog they all wanted to play with.

  During one rehearsal, Flaherty asked Ramis to do Rabbi Dithers, a favorite character. Typical of Flaherty, he decided to break an unwritten rule and, putting Ramis on the spot and in his head, interrogate his scene partner’s character. The setting: deli.

  “Are you Jewish?” Flaherty asked.

  “Yes, yes, I am.”

  “What is Judaism exactly? Is it a religion?”

  “Well,” the rabbi considered, “it’s more than that.”

  “Is it a way of life?”

  “Well . . . it’s less than that.”

  “What is it?”

  Beat. “It’s a way of eating.”

  Fla
herty got such a kick out of Dithers, he convinced Harold to do the character, questions and all, in the improv set after the show. The audience loved it, and for several nights of sets, Ramis complied.

  “You all set, Harold?” Flaherty asked before his entrance one night.

  Standing in the wings, Ramis moaned a little, like Benjamin in The Graduate. That’s when Flaherty realized, “The whole thing consisted of us just asking Harold to be brilliant! Say something brilliant! Say something brilliant!” But that was Ramis: they asked and, like a rabbi, he answered. He gave. Gaining strength, he found a home upstage, another power spot behind the other improvisers at the end of the audience’s roaming eye line, where he could plant himself, glove ready, a catcher at the plate. Later, looking back, he would remember the psych ward as his first rehearsal, proof against luck that he really could keep his head—open an imaginary office, and think—while the crazies ran screaming around him. By their individual differences, balanced in antithetical accord like the counterarguments of a great debate, they matured into a protean marketplace of ideas, the perfect comedy democracy. In purely functional terms, variation encouraged cooperation—no one tried to be as silly as Joe Flaherty, for instance, because no one could be. As with Second City’s first company, their diversity was an apt cross-section of types, a young mirror to the world outside. Sahlins had always peopled his teams with current sociology in mind, but here, with a group of “normal,” everyday people, in some cases brought into Second City with a shrug and a Why not? (as opposed to the rarefied subsets of U of C or the William Morris office), the early 1970s set came closer than any ensemble to proving Viola Spolin’s claim that anyone can improvise, to affirming Shepherd and Sills’s efforts to create a nonexclusive community theater of the American Now. These improvisers were in some cases literally brought in off the streets. Look around; they were their audience as never before. Chicago—indeed, the changing world—was growing with angry young Belushis, wavering Ramises, working-woman Ross-Lemings, blue-collar Brian Murrays . . . Art? They just wanted to have fun.

  9

  1972

  Anticipating contention with Elaine May, director of The Heartbreak Kid, Neil Simon preemptively guarded his script, adapted from a short story by Bruce Jay Friedman, against the likelihood of involuntary coauthorship. He’d put a provision in his contract stipulating that she could change none of the dialogue without his prior approval. If they agreed to a particular modification, Simon asked that May shoot the scene in question both ways, once his way and once hers. It is not customary in Hollywood for the screenwriter to be setting terms for the production, to, in effect, direct the director, but Neil Simon, the most successful playwright in Broadway history—thanks in part to his collaborations with Mike Nichols—had the clout to insist, and Elaine May wisely kept her mouth shut. She was still on movie probation from the overages of A New Leaf, which she’d held in editing for nearly ten months until Paramount’s Bob Evans, anxious for a finished picture, pried the film from her hands and recut it his way, changing the story, thereby violating her contractual right (she argued) to script approval, and incurring a lawsuit May filed against the studio and lost. Her sights set on Mikey and Nicky, May had to first play nice on Heartbreak, or at least pretend to. At least at first.

  In rehearsals, which Simon attended, May asked her leads—Charles Grodin and Jeannie Berlin, Elaine’s daughter (who addressed the director as “Miss Mother”)—to sing songs their characters might sing together, happily newlywed, in the car ride down to their honeymoon hotel (where Grodin’s character will fall, forgivably and unforgivably, for Cybill Shepherd’s). At this, Simon called halt. “Where does it say they sing?” (Ultimately, the songs appeared in the film.) Shepherd noted that rather than use the term “improvise” in rehearsals, May “spoke about the exploration of subtext, the meaning beneath the lines,” which she allowed the actors to discover, first by rehearsing the scene as written, then throwing out the dialogue and playing the situation again with their own words.

  Simon, meanwhile, was catching on. By the time the production began filming in Miami, May had her actors improvising in front of rolling cameras with and without Simon’s approval. (Grodin was confused. “Didn’t they have a conversation before they started, to let Neil Simon know Elaine May’s intentions?” he said. “I found that odd.”) In one scene, Grodin had to leap from a yacht onto a moving dock. To keep him improvising, May, take after take, kept increasing the distance between the two. Shooting on the yacht, she had those playing the yacht’s owners call for a waiter, but secretly directed the waiter not to respond; then, on the retake, she instructed not one but four waiters to appear and turn their backs to the yachtsmen, capturing the improvised frustration of all. “She would hide [Grodin’s] key prop on the set and his task would be in the take to find it,” Nichols recalled. “She actually did do those things. And the fucking operator would have to find him.” That operator, Enrique Bravo, had been well trained for this approach. He had cut his teeth in documentary before turning to features, shooting, before Heartbreak, loads of improvised material for director William Friedkin on The French Connection, a filmmaking style Friedkin designated “induced documentary.”

  In frustration, Simon took off for Barbados. “He wasn’t around very much,” Grodin remembered. “So there’s a lot of improvisation in that movie.” Elaine seized on her new freedom, and in time, producer Michael Hausman said, “that phone call [to ask Simon for approval] never got made,” adding, “There was no yesterday and tomorrow for Elaine, it was all happening now, in the moment.” So intense was her focus, abetted by the equally intense focus of her improvisers, and handfuls of NoDoz, that May, shooting in the freezing snow of Minnesota, didn’t know her toes were frostbitten until Cybill Shepherd pointed out to her that she was limping. Improvisational opportunities proliferated—Grodin and Berlin in their hotel room bed (she’s chomping on a candy bar, cooing, “We’re going to be married forever . . .”); a conversation with Grodin, Shepherd, and her character’s college boyfriend outside the University of Minnesota (where Jeannie led improv workshops during the off-hours); scenes with Cybill Shepherd and her parents, played by Eddie Albert and Audra Lindley; and the ending of the film, Grodin’s melancholy encounter with a carefree, innocent boy. These and others were largely or partially improvised. But like the best works of Samuel Beckett, The Heartbreak Kid was only funny in disguise. In Elaine May’s hands, the security of genre conventions—the clichés taken for truth—are themselves a kind of betrayal she systematically disassembles until she finally arrives at bottommost reality where, surprise, there is nothing funny left.

  “When I was little, and alone,” said Brian Murray’s kid brother Bill, “I used to sing songs to God.”

  There are two worlds. Even as a boy, he knew that. In one, you have to wake up early and go to school. You must do your homework. You must do what they tell you to do. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you want; you have to follow the rules. In the other, you can be a cloud.

  Boy Scouts and Little League kicked him out. In Catholic grade school—of course, he didn’t tell the nuns he wrote poetry—Billy got bad marks and spoke out of turn. “It seemed as though everything we did broke one rule or another,” Murray said. “So I figured I might as well be funny doing it. I thought if the person laughed, I might not get in trouble.” Getting laughs was the unintended though pleasant result of standing up for himself, saying no. “Rather than the class clown,” he said, “I was the kid who didn’t buy the program.” Grown-ups had ways of handling punk kids, but they couldn’t figure out how, time and again, Murray could take the consequences without flinching, like it was part of the plan. Incredibly, he had courage—they never anticipated that in one so young. “I got plenty of punishment at home,” he said, “and I got in enough fights with my brothers. So I wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody . . .” The nuns of St. Joseph’s called in his parents, Ed, a lumber salesman, and Lucille. They had six boys, three girls,
never enough money, and in their middle son Bill, a mixed-up case of intelligence and idiocy, sensitivity and callousness—a problem the nuns could not solve.

  He went to Loyola Academy, an all-boys Jesuit high school where they made fun of him for dressing in brightly paneled, ill-fitting golf shirts, not knowing, and in some cases knowing, that these clothes, passed down to Bill from his older brothers, were all he could afford. Wandering by the theater one afternoon, he heard music, peeked inside, and discovered all to himself a stage full of glittering dancing girls wearing next to nothing, auditioning for the school production of The Music Man. Murray, enchanted, took a seat out of view and watched them move. These were the fabled beings of Sacred Heart, the Rich Pretty Girls from downtown Chicago, as strange and exciting to a square-faced lumberman’s son as a purple planet seen through a telescope.

  “Now, who’s going to audition to be a dancer?”

  Billy jumped out of his seat. “I’m a dancer.”

  Later, when he told his friends he got the part—just by clowning around, he said—they furrowed their brows. A dancer?

  “I’m a dancer now,” he explained.

  “What? Why?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just an instinct.”

  Show business, he could see now, was the way to get in trouble without getting in trouble. Since rehearsal began at seven, Murray had the perfect excuse to leave home after dinner, “which was even better than leaving school,” he said, and get next to these girls who turned out to be, like him, misfits, slightly nuts, and intellectually engaging in all kinds of surprising ways, and sipped gin they snuck into rehearsal in Coke bottles passed to Murray when their director left early. Flirting was the best kind of troublemaking, a way to let loose kindly, to play in the sandbox without doing damage. The opposition, those who told him to sit down and stay quiet, saw a goof-off and a jerk, but they were half-wrong; Murray had the courtly graces of a knight. Girls knew that. “We were inculcated with some sort of manners,” he said, from his mother. “Her definition of a gentleman is someone who never makes anyone feel uncomfortable. I remember that sometimes. When I’m not making people uncomfortable.”