Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  The great Second City migration, courtesy of Belushi, began with one of Belushi’s mentors, Brian Doyle-Murray. By the end of 1973, Murray was sleeping on the floor of John and Judy’s Bleecker Street apartment. He’d be there for three months. “When Brian moved to town,” Judy said, “it was the beginning of a new era.” In no time they were back to the Second City rhythm of late breakfasts and open newspapers spread out like comedy maps. Soon after, Harold and Anne Ramis answered Belushi’s call. Then Joe and Judith Flaherty sublet Christopher Guest’s former apartment on Bank Street, not far from the Belushis; Gilda Radner moved nearby; Brian, falling in love with Gilda, got his own place a few blocks away. “John,” Ramis said, “lifted us all and took us with him.” Chez Belushi became Second City’s makeshift New York outpost, the site of holiday gatherings, the improvisers’ island on the island. When they moved uptown, into the Lampoon recording studio on Madison Avenue, to begin work on Radio Hour, a weekly broadcast Ramis described as “a fusion of the Second City working style with the Lampoon attitude,” they were a rehearsed ensemble. Only the venue had changed.

  Previously overseen by Michael O’Donoghue, the Lampoon’s mad priest of grisly laughs, the second iteration of Radio Hour flourished under the influence of its new creative director, John Belushi. Under O’Donoghue, one of the organization’s star writers, the program was mostly scripted; Belushi turned Radio Hour into an improvisation. He didn’t direct so much as lead by example, conveying the Lampoon edge “just by participating in those ‘Yes, and . . .’ discussions,” Ramis said, and rolling tape on everything. Having their very own recording studio permitted a lot of improvisational experiment and discovery that Belushi’s troupe never could have achieved on a rental basis. “Like Second City,” Ramis said, “the Lampoon gave us an empty stage. They trusted our process and said, ‘Here’s the studio. Get in there.’” For the most part, the Lampoon writers stayed on their own floor, at their typewriters, whipping out manicured, pointed prose for the Lampoon magazine. With the notable exception of Doug Kenney, who made regular appearances in the eleventh-floor studio, the writers were as unsure of naturalistic comedy as the improvisers were of their “sophisticated” literary roots. As such, paper and pen were strange objects in the studio, equal parts organizational necessity and creative threat. They had to be handled responsibly, waiting nearby but at a distance, and by someone with one foot out of the ensemble, who knew structure but at the same time was friendly to freedom, a writer without ego, abounding with the Zen-like gift of letting go. That person was Harold Ramis. For some time he had been feeling outclassed as a performer, that he had been lucky to fall in with such talent. But it was not until Radio Hour, engulfed in personalities he had been assimilating almost every night for years, that Ramis realized he could think in their voices, just as Buck Henry, sitting down with Mike Nichols, realized he could “do” Benjamin Braddock. Radner, Belushi, Flaherty: their voices, even to Ramis, were stronger than his own. At a critical distance, he could join Belushi in thinking as Belushi, inciting him, like the kid sitting behind the class clown, to outrageous extremes. Seeing moves ahead, Ramis’s imagination allowed the other Radio Hour improvisers to live in the moment; he held the straight line so they could zigzag. They trusted him to come up with ideas and write them down, with some narrative order, on actual paper.

  The best of Radio Hour succeeded in bridging the contrary styles of Second City and the Lampoon. The intimacy of the radio format simultaneously restrained the Second Citizens’ more theatrical instincts as it enhanced the level of cooperation among the Lampooners, forcing both sides to meet halfway out of their comfort zones. Downplaying Lampoon grotesquery to radio size, normalizing violence and political incorrectness, the hybrid style actually bolstered the effects of the satire, as in Chevy Chase’s naturalistic reading of: “How can I really know if I’m a humorous person or an average, run-of-the-mill, I Don’t Get It type? Quickly, slit your left wrist, taking care not to cut the tendons. Repeat with your right wrist. Okay? Now, if you thought I was serious about slitting your wrists, clearly you don’t have a sense of humor at all.”

  By night, the Second City contingent was back at Belushi’s place, or at Sandolino’s, a twenty-four-hour Village café, assembling a set list that would become The National Lampoon Show, a touring sketch venture intended to duplicate the success of Lemmings, a show that, for all its misanthropy, had a clear target—hippie culture. The current targets were less tangible. “We’re going to tell the audience they’re assholes,” Belushi told the group. “We’re gonna shoot them the finger. No prisoners.” A refreshing divergence, Flaherty thought, from Second City’s tradition of liberal pandering, but wasn’t indiscriminate satire, in its own way, just as easy as satirizing the right wing? “Harold and I would kinda look at each other,” Flaherty said, “like ‘John’s running the show? What’s this gonna be like?’” Amassing offensive material for the page or radio, Ramis understood and enjoyed, but antagonizing a live audience could embarrass everyone. Comedy had to have a point; otherwise it was just hostility. Flaherty agreed. “It wasn’t like we were exploring black humor,” Flaherty said. “A lot of the stuff we were working on was mean and crude.” For openers, Belushi perverted “You’re the Top” to “You’re the Pits,” to be sung with underwear on their heads. Gilda would do her Barbara Walters, a voice gag pretending to be a character. Then there was “The Rhoda Tyler Moore Show,” in which she played a blind girl, with Belushi as her abusive boyfriend. (Belushi humps her leg. “What’s that?” Gilda asks. “Just the dog, honey.”) Sticking to Second City, Ramis improvised as the Swami, taking questions from the audience, and in “First Blow Job,” a Second City–style people scene crossed with Lampoon humor, Flaherty and Gilda played father and daughter on the eve of her first date (“Do me one favor tonight, honey.” “What’s that, Dad?” “Don’t give him a blow job. You know, that’s how your mother died.”).

  There wasn’t much of a point to this, Ramis lamented, but the Lampoon Show’s very pointlessness, the We don’t give a shit attitude personified by Belushi, would be—not now, but soon—its secret weapon. In the meantime, as they set out in the fall of 1974, the conceptual division in the group rendered their set list an outrageous mishmash.

  Partway into the tour, the elders were vindicated. “It had no real shape,” Ramis said. “It was just a bad sketch show.” Times two: most nights, they played an early and a late show, and never to interested audiences. On a budget, the Lampoon booked them into dive bars all the way to Canada. “We got dirty looks from motorcycle gangs,” Flaherty said. “They came to hear rock ’n’ roll and they got comedy.” There were no tomatoes; the bikers threw beer bottles. Before one hostile audience, Ramis dropped a dollar bill and announced, “Partial refund.” Some shows devolved into chug-a-lug contests between Belushi and the audience. “That’s when I really started to miss Second City,” Flaherty said. Radner, true to form, did all she could to keep the company buoyant backstage, but crowd control was out of her hands. Their show in London, Ontario, was miserable. Toronto was worse, a low point for the tour. Sales were dismal. An early close was likely. “I was getting tired of it,” Flaherty said. “I wanted to go back to Second City.”

  Sitting with Eugene Levy at Toronto’s El Mocambo was his college comrade, Ivan Reitman, a twenty-eight-year-old roll-with-the-punches Czech refugee, a director/producer and entrepreneur with basset hound eyes and the hustle of a fox. His inaugural short, Orientation, and second feature, 1973’s Cannibal Girls, starring Levy and Andrea Martin, were pieced together, pragmatically, he said, with improvisation instead of a script. Made fast and on the fly, his first films rudely awakened him to the battles Elaine May—that very moment struggling through Mikey and Nicky—was only sometimes winning. “Cannibal Girls was a hundred percent improvised on a nine-page treatment and you can see it,” Reitman reflected. “It taught me that you need a script if you want to go off script.” From directing, Reit­man had turned to producing—films, a
children’s television show with Dan Aykroyd, and The Magic Show, a successful Broadway musical—but he wanted to get back behind the camera. The Harvard-born Lampoon, he decided, was his ticket—“I thought these Harvard guys,” he said, “really had a handle on where comedy was going”—and with characteristic self-sufficiency, he picked up the phone and cold-called Matty Simmons, the big name on the Lampoon’s masthead.

  “Hey, I’ve got this hit show on Broadway,” Reitman began. “Let’s make a movie together.”

  “Everybody’s calling me to do a movie, but I’ve got these really talented kids and I want to do some kind of a sketch comedy show off-Broadway. Do you want to produce it?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re coming to El Mocambo with a version of the show,” Simmons explained. “Why don’t you go see it, then you can bring it to New York.”

  That night at El Mocambo, Reitman laughed at the jokes, but above and beyond the sketch work he was knocked out by the cast, Belushi’s handpicked bouquet of Radner, Flaherty, Brian Doyle-Murray, and Harold Ramis. For all the show’s cynicism, the fluidity of their give-and-take, their reciprocal amusement and support allowed a splinter of compassion to shine through the bitterness of the comedy. “The great skill of the people who come out of mostly Second City,” Reitman understood, “was they’re really trained to listen, which is the basis of all good acting. Not how you emote the line, [but] how you react to the line.” They were connected.

  Meeting them for the first time, “backstage”—really some dank closet behind the bar—after the show, Reitman sensed that that compassion did not extend to him, or to any outside authority figures. He was getting ready to explain he came in peace, that he was going to take them all to Broadway, when someone rushed in and announced: “No one’s leaving.”

  Meaning everyone was staying for the second show. What? The company panicked. They couldn’t just repeat the early show. Could they?

  Reitman watched as the Lampooners, in the remaining moments before curtain, strategized next moves as if they were backstage at Second City, planning the improv set.

  “Well,” Harold Ramis, beacon of sober judgment, suggested, “let’s do the same show over again and just change all the punch lines.”

  Back in the audience, Reitman, who could not believe the confidence he had witnessed backstage, watched the results in amazement; he would call it “the greatest example of comedic improvisational brilliance that I have yet to see.” Each scene of the second set, beginning much as it had in the early show, the improvisers developed, sometimes, into completely new scenes, transforming, along with their material, the audience’s mood. “Hey, what the fuck?! You just did that one!” became “Oh my god . . . What’s going to happen?” Reitman was blown away. “If you weren’t drunk,” he said, “and a lot of the audience was, the show was funnier the second time around because you have the new joke and the spin on the old joke being retold. That’s when I realized, ‘Fuck, these are the most talented comedic minds I have ever seen.’” Reitman was overcome with their discipline, the right brain/left brain synthesis of cycling old material into new and back to old. “It just opened my eyes in terms of what the possibilities were in film, and I immediately knew I would have to make movies with them, that they would all be famous, that this was where comedy was going.”

  He would produce the Lampoon Show off-Broadway, and behind the scenes keep thinking Hollywood. “There didn’t seem to be anyone making comedy movies for my generation,” he said, “not antiestablishment movies.” In an age of Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Peter Bogdanovich, Elaine May, Paul Mazursky, and Mike Nichols comedies—“serious” comedies for mature adults—there seemed no precedent for the filmed equivalent of the Lampoon’s “First Blow Job.”

  Whatever that antiestablishment Lampoon movie looked like, to get it going Reitman needed a story and a script. And the stage show needed an organizational overhaul. Assessing the possibilities, Reitman observed in Harold Ramis the “secret weapon,” the seer of bigger pictures where other improvisers saw only scenes—theirs. Though Belushi acted as curator, selecting scenes to suit his taste, it was Ramis who, in lieu of an actual director, impressed Reitman with his gentle leadership, and he enlisted him to restructure the show for New York.

  On their way, Flaherty dropped out, and in his place Belushi hired Bill Murray, by then practiced in the Radio Hour and innately primed for what lay ahead: grass, (free) beer, and the contentious barroom atmosphere he never got at Second City. “That was the closest it ever got to the carnival life for me,” Murray said. “I was rooming with Belushi, because it was two to a room. He was like my big brother.” (Especially now that a romantic triangle of both Murrays and one Radner spelled the end for Brian Doyle-Murray’s continued involvement in the Lampoon Show.) Offstage and on-, Belushi and the younger Murray shared the Lampoon’s bias for provocation. “[Belushi] wanted to see what they were like when they were uncomfortable,” Murray said. They craved genuine intuition from the audience, even berating them, as Sills had his improvisers, out of their false selves. “Talk about an explosion,” Murray said. “We did a show that was like a brawl. It wasn’t theater; it was crowd control. Belushi would come out with a bullhorn and do his stuff. We killed people.” There—Del’s influence. Get them, change them, anyway you can.

  Valri Bromfield was out in L.A., per producer Lorne Michaels’s invitation, to do some writing and performing on The Lily Tomlin Special.

  He mentioned an upcoming variety program he’d be producing on NBC. “It’s the show I’ve always wanted,” he said to her. “I’ve got it.”

  Gary Austin moved his new company, the Groundlings, into the minuscule thirty-seat Oxford Theater in East Hollywood, a part of Los Angeles Laraine Newman described as “a good place to give up,” and gradually, the scripted segments of their repertoire faded away. With an ensemble evolved from two years of workshops dozens of actors deep—even, at one time, reaching a total of ninety performers, about thirty-five of whom became a part of the shows—the Groundlings seemed predestined to improvise. How else to include all those people (if you paid your tuition you were in) creating their own material, scenes suited to their specific and unusual circumstances? “Everything we ever performed,” Austin said, “came from improvising a scene over and over until we got it. We never said, ‘What’s the story? What happens here?’ We just did it. And if it worked, it worked; if it didn’t, it didn’t.” Unlike Second City and the Committee, the Groundlings allowed for elaborate costumes and makeup and never worked with scripts. No one spoke of doing comedy. No one spoke of sketches. What did the scene need? “Nichols and May, Severn Darden, all those people, they weren’t doing comedy,” Austin said. “They were doing theater.”

  Days before their opening night, early in 1974, Austin realized Laraine needed more to do in the show, so he called a special meeting of the giant cast of fifty.

  For four hours they improvised, to mediocre results. And none of it good for Laraine.

  “All right, Laraine,” Austin said as the group looked on, “there are times when we have to change the set in front of the audience—each one a minute or two each. Come back with three monologues, each a different character.”

  The next day, Laraine returned, as directed, with three delectable monologues for three different characters. They went right into the show between scene changes, and for being irregular solo pieces amid group scenes, stood out. Particularly memorable was Sheri, Newman’s Valley Girl character, who caught the attention of audience members Lorne Michaels and Lily Tomlin, then casting, with Jane Wagner, Tomlin’s upcoming TV special. Newman’s Valley Girl, they could see, was practically made to order for the show’s “Suzie Sorority” sketch, and from the theater off Oxford, she, Austin, and a handful of Groundlings were delivered to ABC, into the company of Valri Bromfield, Christopher Guest, and the other creators of The Lily Tomlin Special.

  Michaels, meanwhile, kept returning to the Groundlings, his mind very much on findi
ng the right kind of talent for his new venture, Saturday Night, a TV show tailor-made for his generation, the people who grew up watching TV. “I felt that American kids knew TV as well as French kids knew wine and that there was such a thing as good TV,” Michaels said. “The problem was that no one in TV was accurately expressing what was going on. Carol Burnett sketches were dealing with the problems of another generation—divorce, Valium, crabgrass, adultery.” Michaels imagined a revue-style program of film parodies, specialty acts, stand-ups, rock music, and infused with the Monty Python, Beyond the Fringe, and Second City stylings he craved since his first taste of Nichols and May. (“They proved you could be smart and funny,” Michaels said of improv’s first stars, “that being smart and funny wasn’t punished the way it was at school.” The simplicity of Nichols and May’s presentation also impressed Michaels. They didn’t beg for laughs. Nichols and May were just two people sitting on stools, talking.) The idea to do the show live, and in New York, originated with NBC president Herbert Schlosser. “It should be young and bright,” Schlosser wrote in February 1975. “It should have a distinctive look, a distinctive set and a distinctive sound. We should attempt to use the show to develop new television personalities.”