Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  In his anxiety—or so he claimed—Aykroyd begged his friend John Candy to please join him and Valri at the audition, if only to lend support. Candy, who could never deny a pal—his big body was mostly heart—showed up as requested and waited outside the church for Danny and Val to finish their audition. Second City was not for him. He lacked the musical ability and old-fashioned show business purview of Marty, Andrea, and the other Godspell players, and unacquainted with the writer’s side of his brain, he disqualified himself from engaging in the sort of verbal antics Danny and Val improvised at Global Village. John Candy was an actor, plays mostly. To see that big Wallace Beery smile was to land in the center of a giant pillow fort, and though he was twice your size and strong as a castle, you still somehow felt Candy was the one who needed protecting. It was innocence, the ingenuous good manners of a Boy Scout. He gleamed with kindness. Candy was so instantly likable he made friends without trying, just by leaving the house. He didn’t even have to open his mouth or look in their direction; that man-in-the-moon face pied-pipered the citizens of Toronto out from their daily routines to join him at whatever he was doing, and then on to whatever they wanted to do next. That’s why Candy was so often late for his appointments. Hey, who’s hungry? A second after meeting them, he would be buying another round for two dozen strangers before driving them back home for an all-night dinner of lobster and pizza and whatever else he had in the fridge. What he didn’t have, he’d pick up on the way. For his local celebrity and peerless generosity, Aykroyd called Candy Johnny Toronto—and it stuck.

  He only found out that Aykroyd had written “John Candy” on the audition sheet after they called his name and asked him to take the stage.

  “What have you got to lose?” Aykroyd grinned as he bounded from the church.

  “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you for doing this to me.”

  Inside, Candy was given a partner and a crash course in “Five Through the Door.” He made an immediate impression on Del. It was one of his characters—a gay boxer. For a guy with zero experience, going against type and against camp, Candy showed himself to be a risk taker of consequence. He did not need gimmicks or even laughs. He was real. As long as he stayed himself in an improvisation, that meant Candy couldn’t fail.

  “I want that guy,” Del whispered to Bernie. “That guy’s got it.”

  Then Candy and his scene partner switched roles. As directed, Candy took the stage behind his invisible desk and aimed his concentration at the other guy with the care and focus that had already made him a local hero. Listening to his partner monologue at him through one annoying character after the next, Candy did not angle for a way in, or interrupt his partner’s speech. All support, he asked for no one’s attention. Watching from his seat out front, Flaherty was amazed. Candy had intuited and applied the principle of give-and-take. “John was so good at listening,” Flaherty said, “that he stole the scene almost by doing nothing.” There was no question: this guy, in his own way, was as compelling as Aykroyd and Bromfield.

  “I want that fat guy,” repeated Del to Bernie. “I want that fat kid.”

  The skinny girl, Gilda Radner—also coerced by Aykroyd into auditioning that day—was a bundle of need in paper-doll form, a nervous toy person practiced, brilliant even, in failing herself before you could fail her. So she didn’t want to audition. If she didn’t get into Second City, Gilda knew she would hate herself forever. But if she just stayed home alone with her magazines and three-legged cat, she would never be loved like one of those beautiful skinny girls whose hair moved when they moved their heads. “I’d move my head,” she said, “and my hair would just stand there.” Her mother—her perfect mother—was forever telling Gilda to comb her hair, cover her blemishes, eat slower, eat less. Her father—who took her to the theater to see the beautiful dancing girls—Gilda lost at fourteen. A brain tumor. “Show business is about families, series of families,” she understood. “You get to be born in them, and to get all new parents and siblings.” If this family—Bernie, Del, Flaherty, Brian Doyle-Murray—rejected her, she would die. So Gilda rushed through her audition, improvising as standard types—the Young Girl, the Old Woman—which she played as she perceived herself, with all the embarrassing, snot-nosed, donkey-laughing nerdiness of a six-year-old girl singing too loud in the shower. “I’ve just never let go of my child self,” she said, “seeing things clean and clear like when I was just born. Being a child is being impulsive. Knowing hangs you up. You get inhibited. Keeping that part of me alive is very useful—in comedy, I can walk into a wall because I don’t think ahead of time, ‘Oh, there’s a wall there, I might hurt myself.’ I just go into that wall with abandon.” Some comedians love their characters and hate the audience; some love the audience and hate their characters; some, like Gilda, loved both.

  Bernie’s team agreed, easily, on Aykroyd and Bromfield. “The Second City tradition was two women and a bunch of guys,” Bromfield said, “but Jayne Eastwood, Gilda, and I would not leave each other’s sides. So we made sure they couldn’t get us apart. I think we forced Bernie into it.” So three women this time, and instead of Eugene Levy, whom Del and Flaherty wanted, Bernie made a push for Gerry Salsberg. He had come on pretty strong in Godspell. Candy, Bernie thought, was too young, too shy, for the improvisational stage.

  “Okay,” Flaherty said. “We’ll give you Gerry if you give us Candy.”

  Del piped up. “I want Candy in Chicago.”

  That settled it.

  “Wow,” Flaherty said at the end of their second day of auditions. “We have a cast.”

  Charged with leading the new company, Flaherty and Doyle-Murray gave the beginning improvisers basic Spolin technique and mixed in a little Del Close, but mostly they just hung out with them. It was the summer of 1973; Flaherty and Aykroyd tossed a football around an empty lot near the theater and stretched out in the park. “These guys had no artistic pretensions,” Flaherty recalled. “They weren’t that interested in politics and they weren’t that interested in satire.” To Flaherty’s astonishment, some bungled the very word “improvisation”—“improvisions,” they called it. In Toronto, Second City wasn’t an art; it was a job. (Bernie appeared for one rehearsal, called out “Commedia dell’arte!,” and Jayne Eastwood rolled her eyes.) Without Sahlins’s continual supervision, enforcing topical, intellectual material, or Del, demanding they bare their souls onstage, the first Toronto company, in their first workshops, had the freedom to redefine the criteria for successful improvisational comedy. When their captain, Joe Flaherty, asked them to “just play, just improvise,” he really meant just have fun and be funny. “I just loved comedy,” he said, though he could have been speaking for his ensemble. “It was always most important to make the audience laugh. After that you could make social comments, or make a point, anything, but first and most important make sure it’s funny.”

  Oh, yeah: they needed somewhere to rehearse. Under the gun, Joyce Sloane reached out to the St. Lawrence Centre, a regional theater a short ways from Second City’s future digs on Adelaide Street, to see what might be available, and the venue’s man in public relations, Andrew Alexander, an easygoing twenty-nine-year-old show business entrepreneur (and after-hours speakeasy manager), directed Joyce to an open space. As for the theater on Adelaide—a cramped and sweaty black box evocative of the early Compass—it opened, without a liquor license, in June 1973 with a best-of-Second-City show, Tippecanoe and Déjà Vu, and was an instant hit. At least, the improvisations were. The old imported material fared all right, but when it came time for suggestion taking, Flaherty said, “half the city would show up.” Danny and Valri were the draw. The insider following they had amassed playing the likes of Global Village and the gay bars of Toronto turned up in full force to watch them work, solidifying Second City’s hipster reputation and virtually guaranteeing its immediate future. Gilda, as predicted, couldn’t be matched for loopy vulnerability, the disarming mastery she had over her own inelegance—when she lost hold of an impro
visation, they actually seemed to love her more—but for the late-night improv-hungry audiences of Adelaide Street, already versed in the verbal harmonies of Aykroyd and Bromfield, no one else compared. Desperate to win, Gilda got competitive; Jayne Eastwood recoiled from the pressure; and Gerry Salsberg struggled to keep up. “Danny and Valri raised everyone’s level of work,” Flaherty said. “That company was like horses chomping at the bit.” In fact, the laugh-centric, me-me-me athleticism of the Adelaide improv sets—as opposed to the Chicago emphasis on scenes and teamwork—was so compelling, audiences didn’t seem to care how stifling it was in that beat-up theater beset with no ventilation during one of Toronto’s hottest summers on record, or that they weren’t drinking, because they, the young people of Toronto, were laughing, hard, at Canadians, for the first time in their lives. Before Second City came to Adelaide Street, the nascent generation merely chuckled at Canadian television with its geriatric Canadian Broadcasting Corporation programming and politely groovy variety shows, like Lorne Michaels and Hart Pomerantz’s Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour—in which Pomerantz got huge laughs playing a beaver. Though it was apolitical and largely oblivious to the world outside, the frenzy they felt in Danny, Valri, and Gilda, the size and unnatural speed of their characters, conveyed the madness of the profoundly free. Had they been there, Spolin and Sills would have been horrified at all the showboating, but one could argue that Flaherty’s ensemble, in throwing out Viola’s rules and eschewing the high bars of Bernie Sahlins, achieved improvisation’s most emancipated state yet. “Improv is human, but it’s goofy,” Bromfield said. “I think there’s forgiveness in it. I think that’s what an audience perceives. ‘I’m seeing my weaknesses and everyone’s laughing. It’s okay.’”

  Catherine O’Hara, waitressing at Adelaide with her sister, singer Mary Margaret, was “fascinated by Danny and Valri. They were freaky together,” she said. “They were so good at knowing one or two facts about a subject and then sounding like experts.” Serving up crepes, a Second City specialty, in that stifling hot room—Doyle-Murray would come out and do grumbling tirades against the heat, and Bernie—O’Hara came to see, for all the fun she was having watching the show, she could have more fun in it. Please, oh please, she thought, please, let me be up there, so she auditioned for Joe Flaherty, for the touring company—and didn’t get in. “Keep up the good work,” Flaherty told her. “Waitressing, I mean!”

  Eugene Levy had never seen anything like it—the speed, the intelligence, the direct interface with the performers. He wanted to be up there, too; he wanted to invent and inhabit characters of his own creation, but improvising scared the hell out of him. And yet there was something in Brian Doyle-Murray’s approach to the work that soothed the tension Levy, imagining himself improvising, had already begun to feel. In the whirl of language and scene stealing, Doyle-Murray, Levy recalled, “had a very economical way of performing. He mainly sat, always had a coffee, and didn’t do a lot of moving around. He just waited for the right opportunity, then came out with a line.”

  Martin Short also came to Adelaide to watch his friends work. Practically all of Godspell had auditioned for Second City, except him. “I had zero agenda,” he said, “of being a comedian.” Of course, Short knew he was dependably funny, funny in college plays and party funny, the funniest guy in the room if that room were 1063 Avenue Road, he had Paul Shaffer on piano, and the audience members were his friends, but the future he had dreamed up for himself—born of Donald O’Connor, Sinatra, and all those American entertainers he had grown up watching on his parents’ television—was absurdly far-fetched, comically obsolete. But it was also a fact. Martin Short, in his variety-show heart, was a song-and-dance man. The idea of improvising under pressure? “I couldn’t imagine getting up there and trying to be funny without a script,” he said. Until that show at Adelaide, the first time Short had ever seen Second City, his idea of comedy came mainly through the emotionally uninvolving “Take my wife, please” stripe of variety-show humor, but at Flaherty and Doyle-Murray’s performance of the classic “Brest-Litovsk,” a sketch about a college student bullshitting his way through an oral exam, Short was “gobsmacked. I was like, ‘I get what this is now.’ Because it was such a hilarious, true, sincere scenario, which we had all done. We had all gone to the professor with excuses. I was already laughing just from the expression on Joe’s face because I knew he knew nothing.”

  “Greg,” Doyle-Murray, as the professor, began. “I want you to explain and amplify the ramifications of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.”

  Flaherty goes blank. He says and does nothing for an incredibly long time. Then: “Is this multiple choice?”

  It was Flaherty’s pauses, the suppressed terror on his face. So much of the behavior, Short saw—the choices of when to smoke, when to sip coffee, subtle and hilarious displays of anxiety—deepened the scene beyond whatever laughs Flaherty and Doyle-Murray won with punch lines. The human realness of Second City comedy was to Short the revelation it had been to the audiences of the early Compass. He said, “To trust the power of sincerity and the power of knowing that if you get within in the way people think and operate and not try to be funny, you can do anything.” The lesson he absorbed instantly and never forgot. “Laughter,” Short said, “engulfed the whole audience.”

  For lack of a liquor license, the Adelaide theater closed six months later.

  It was Bill Murray who, somewhere between Willy Wonka and the Artful Dodger, welcomed John Candy to improvisation, and his hometown, Chicago, with a Cubs game and insider’s tour of Wrigley Field, visits to the original McDonald’s, the first International House of Pancakes, and some of Chicago’s seediest corners, which Murray admired as if they were the great monuments of Europe. “This is my town,” he was always saying to Candy, a little brother twice his size, “and this can be your town too!” Candy could feel in his guide the dark tingle of profanity, a sense of the unpredictable, of social exemption wholly unfamiliar to him. “He’s the kind of guy,” Candy reminisced in 1986, “who’d call me at 4 a.m. when the [Iran-Contra] hostages were freed and say, ‘Thanks for being a Canadian.’” Candy, a bashful mountain, would never think of disturbing anyone, let alone at such a late hour. Not Bill Murray. He looked into placid eyes, into their ideas, with the calm clarity of a sniper. It was why he improvised, to quarrel with the rules. John Candy didn’t know why he improvised. So, sharing the stage with Murray at Second City, he mostly hung back, as he had in his audition, and gave warmth. “He still had a ways to go,” Flaherty said. “For a while there John would just disappear into the scene.” If there is such a thing as too much of a team player, John Candy, in learning to be free in Chicago, might have been it.

  Satirically upstaged by the ongoing soap opera that was Watergate, and generally bored of lampooning such easy targets as Richard Nixon and his gang of incompetents, Murray’s group conscientiously put the whole enterprise of political commentary behind them. Washington, in effect, was turning out the best improv comedy in America; Second City had to do something different. “I think that what we try to do now is we don’t go after the obvious targets,” said improviser Jim Staahl. “You can sit at home and watch Sonny and Cher, and you can see the obvious targets get it.” They subtitled their first show Watergate Tomorrow, Comedy Tonight.

  Present in the audience one evening was Andrew Alexander, the bootlegger producer who had helped Flaherty’s Toronto company find a rehearsal space only months earlier. “But this was my first time,” he said, “seeing Second City.” That Alexander, stifled by anxiety, had even made it out of his Canadian bed and bedroom was a miracle, but how he had managed to then leave his house and board a plane (thank you, Valium and vodka) for several hours of uninterrupted airborne claustrophobia only to get to his interview at Chicago’s Ivanhoe Theater, and then actually put on a healthy face for the job of public relations director—which he got—even he couldn’t tell you how. (Maybe, he reflected, it was his new white suit.) Most neurotics can at least att
empt to stabilize their panic with practiced self-soothing or the sure knowledge that they have survived worse or comparable in the past. Not this guy; he was new to dread. He could remember a time, pre-anxiety, when he would call himself fancy-free, an adventurer, even, like that summer he and a friend, inspired by their favorite movie, Lawrence of Arabia, decided they had to see the sand, and from Canada thumbed it down to Ensenada, where, sitting on a beach drenched in a tie-dyed sunset, Alexander spotted a sailboat out there on the water—Omar Sharif flickering on the horizon—and years before he would ever hear of “Yes, and”—turned to his friend and mused, “I wonder where that sailboat is going?” One rowboat later, they had befriended the captain. “Do you have experience?” he asked. “Of course,” they lied. Thus began their trip to France by way of the Panama Canal, which ended a week later with a mini-major storm that shipwrecked the sailors around Baja, marooning them for a week before they thumbed it back up north again. “My parents,” Alexander said, “were kind of freaked out.” Freaked out. Alexander didn’t know the meaning of the phrase until later, in college, when he dropped acid for the first (and last) time and looked into the mirror, “which is probably the worst thing you could ever do,” he said. “All of a sudden there were two or three of me and I was in a state of panic for about twenty hours. My life changed from that moment on in terms of anxiety, claustrophobia. I was a different person overnight. So the thought of ever getting on a plane or traveling anywhere within five miles of my bed . . .” And here on the Second City stage were Tino Insana and Jim Staahl, doing a scene about group therapy, wherein the therapist attempts to “enlighten” his patients with the satirical logic that “group therapy is not designed so much to solve your problems,” as he explains, “as it is to convince you that you have them.” Andrew Alexander loved the sketch; more even than that, he loved improvisation. It was like the lost version of himself: anarchic, ill-advised, impulsive, punk. Improvisation gave no time for nerves, no time for plans. It blessedly ruined every thought. He said, “The whole idea of the spirit of improvisation I had a visceral connection to.”