Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  “You know what intimacy is?” master teacher Martin de Maat would say to his advanced Conservatory students, “It’s into-me-you-see . . . it’s allowing someone to know who you are when you have all these defenses to keep them from knowing.”

  And: “I think many of us go through our life not fully having permission to be who we are and what we’re going to become.”

  And: “I’m way out in theory here; it’s the study of what the power is, the power in improvisation and why it changes lives . . . The power is love, if you want to know the truth. It’s love and unconditional acceptance.”

  Love was de Maat’s workshop. Love for self, for the other, for the work, a love that settled the ego and freed the intuition. Wholly opposed to the Del Close model of teaching by stick, not carrot, de Maat’s sermons had the urgency of a man talking to himself. He believed in what he called “pure potential.” Comedy was merely an outgrowth of the transformation. “Humor is simply the lubricant that makes our points of view palatable,” he wrote. “It is necessary and honorable but not the entire entertainment.” That—for de Maat, as it was for Spolin—was you.

  On probation from Marquette University, Chris Farley would squeeze out the rest of his academic burden at the University of Wisconsin, performing, wherever the opportunity arose, stand-up comedy and his own fall-down brand of gregarious bar theater, but it wasn’t until the summer of 1986, after he launched himself, one night, into a sprint of audience participation at Madison’s Ark Improvisational Theater, that he discovered his destiny was improvisation. Farley stumbled back into the theater a night or two later, and stammered to Dennis Kern, the Ark’s director, a dribble of pleas and garbles so unintelligible, Kern took the twenty-two-year-old Farley for brain-damaged.

  “Wanna do . . . comedy . . . improv, I wanna—gotta do this . . .”

  “Look,” Kern said. “We’re having a rehearsal tomorrow. Why don’t you come by and join us then?”

  Kern didn’t think he would actually show up to audition, but Farley did. With a case of beer.

  Farley’s audition was so powerfully, dangerously physical, those present had good reason to question his and their own safety. When Farley fell, and he fell hard, like someone with a grudge against the floor, he didn’t throw out his hands to brace himself or twist shoulder-down at the last split second to protect his face from impact. There was no sleight of hand to a Farley fall. He just dove. “The total commitment Farley had,” explained Ark improviser Brian Stack, “was amazing. Taking those falls, anyone else would be in the hospital. But Farley wasn’t anyone else. I remember thinking, seriously thinking, Is it just me, or is this the funniest guy who ever lived?”

  Farley’s go-to fat shtick was his fail-safe. It could bail him out of any jam, in life or onstage, but where even the best improviser’s bag o’ tricks gets old with use, Farley infused his physical life with the emotional urgency of a great actor, elevating the lowest-brow maneuver with the highest in personal stakes. If he was on his way to becoming the most powerful slapstick improviser of all time, it was because, like his idol Belushi, Farley conveyed a vulnerability as real as those falls. “Some of the funniest stuff Farley would do would have nothing to do with his size,” Stack said. “Like I remember he did this hilarious and heartbreaking character who was a local weatherman who had gotten a letter from a little girl because he had predicted sun and her picnic had been ruined by a rainstorm. You could see how much it hurt him to have messed up her picnic.”

  Improvising, Farley seemed to say, Hurting me is fine, even good, the way to a laugh and maybe even love; but he couldn’t abide hurting others. “I want to be a good Catholic,” he confessed late in his life, “but I’m a hedonist, my friend.”

  He did fly. At the Ark, Farley—who had studied ballet to improve his football—could be seen literally pirouetting, with zero irony, his hundreds of pounds into the shape of an airborne swan. Beast into beauty, the transformation suffused Chris Farley with the poignancy and grace of the greatest clowns. But if you told him so, he would look to the ground and laugh, “Naaahhhh,” he would tell you, and mean it, “not me.”

  As she underwent chemotherapy, Gilda Radner would improvise with herself. She would poll her brain’s audience for suggestions, pick one, and assign the Cytoxan a character, like a dancer, no, a line of Russian dancers, arms crossed, in big leather boots, dance-kicking the cancer cells out of her body.

  At the end of their first shooting day in Morocco, Elaine May, writer and director of Ishtar, assembled her allies to review the day’s rushes, which consisted entirely of shots of the film’s stars, Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty, mounting camels. One shot after the next: camels in the sand. Mounting them. “Five minutes, ten minutes, fifty minutes,” Hoffman recalled. “Camels. You knew what you were in for right then and there.” He turned to gauge Elaine’s reaction. But she was, to his amazement, sitting calmly, chewing gum, scribbling notes on every take.

  She wanted choices.

  “Elaine, what if—”

  “Try it.”

  More than her previous films, Ishtar was full of crafted jokes. Improvising, she knew, was unlikely to improve them, but she encouraged the actors to improvise on their way there.

  “Wait, wait,” Beatty said to Hoffman before a take. “What are we going to say?”

  “No, we’re going to improvise.”

  “I know, but what are we going to talk about?”

  Hoffman paused. “Warren, you don’t—”

  “Come on. Just tell me the first sentence.”

  This was Ishtar, an Elaine May production. It was made, unmade, and made again in the cutting room. Refusing to slow down for exercise or meals, May sat beside editor Stephen Rotter (and a weight bench, brought in just for her) in their postproduction suite at New York’s Sound One, trying not to smoke. Chomping gum, guzzling Tic Tacs, pecking at bagels she’d spear with a pen and hold up like lollipops, she interrogated the footage—“an enormous amount of film,” Rotter said—well over a million feet of Ishtar. She had to be reminded to change clothes. “Elaine had this whole network of people that would check in on her, that wanted to make sure she was taken care of,” Rotter added. “It frees her mind to these flights of fancy or whatever you want to call them where she creates this incredible stuff.” She started smoking again.

  May was, as usual, agonizingly behind schedule and overbudget, the turbulent epicenter of Sound One’s Ishtar floor (yes, a whole floor), and the subject of an unfunny industry-wide joke created and maintained by the Hollywood press. Everything nasty one could write, they wrote about Ishtar, and before seeing a single frame, as if the way the film was made, or even bungled, should have some bearing on how audiences received it. “It was about creation for Elaine,” Hoffman said. “She loved process. Those are dirty words when you’re shooting.” Ishtar, the Heaven’s Gate of Hollywood comedy, they wrote, had already run up quite a bill. Now they waited for catastrophe, or “the Reckoning,” as Ishtar’s hoped-for downfall was known in executive circles. To say public opinion had turned against Elaine May, her stars Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty, and their new buddy movie—Elaine’s first film in nearly a decade—was also to say the yuppie obsession with box office, the infiltration of Hollywood by Wall Street, had reached a level of absurdity equal to the national bias against Ishtar, though Elaine was only still cutting it, and would be, for nearly a year, through 1986. “The thing that makes Elaine stop is running out of time,” Rotter said, “so until you’re running out of time, you’re always trying something. What can we do with the building blocks we have? She’s always writing, whether it’s improvising in shooting, or improvising in editing. It’s always approached as a ‘What if?,’ or ‘Let’s try this.’”

  Side by side in Sound One, May and Rotter were looking at the first thing she filmed, a purely improvisational scene of Hoffman and Beatty on location in Morocco, trying to mount a camel. It took her two full days to shoot the scene.

  “You know,” s
he confessed to Rotter, “I never meant for this to be in the picture.”

  With careful attention to language and sound, May mixed her jokes like they were a musical score. So attuned was her ear, May would sweat the syllables to get her dialogue to pitch. “Could you take the S from that line,” she asked Rotter, “and put it into this one?” But there were important exceptions. Ishtar’s memorable opening, in which Hoffman and Beatty ad-lib with preexisting (and perfectly bad) song lyrics, would be the film’s funniest scene—“We never shot it the same way twice,” Hoffman said—and, with its ridiculously earnest high highs and low lows, its desperate and awkward lunges at inspiration, one of the movies’ truest pictures of artistic collaboration.

  As ever, May prospected her streams of improv for sparks of life, fearing throughout that her postproduction stay, reextended many times over, would one day run to zero, and the studio would turn up at Sound One and take her gold away. Paranoid? It had happened before. May said, “Every movie I made except for The Heartbreak Kid, the studio changed regimes in the middle of the movie.”

  “This was her sandbox,” Hoffman said. “She would never leave if it was up to Elaine.”

  There were big wooden desks at Sound One, as thick and nicked as old prison furniture. Well into Ishtar, sound editor Michael Kirchberger opened a desk drawer and found a strip of film taped to a back corner. It was eight frames of Mikey and Nicky.

  Stephen Colbert graduated Northwestern in 1986, choosing to forgo drama school in New York, though he had been accepted, and linger instead in Chicago and search for theater work, or any work, waiting tables, serving scrambled eggs at the Blind Faith Café in Evanston, and nights, making futons for money. Reconsidering his plan one fruitless year later, Colbert reapplied to that drama school in New York, and this time was rejected. He fell hard into despair. “Stephen was very, very depressed,” his friend Anne Libera said. “His friends were worried.” For hours on end, he would lose himself in his carpentry, hammering away in the basement of their duplex, surfacing for the odd class with Del Close.

  “Stephen,” Libera said to him, “come work at Second City. I can get you a job at the box office.”

  Colbert accepted reluctantly. He had already cultivated the snobbish attitude toward Second City that was de rigueur in the early years of ImprovOlympic, but he was in no position to turn down money, especially when working for Second City came with free improv classes. Moving from box office to merch table to bar to waiter, advancing through Second City’s training program, Colbert began to enjoy himself despite himself, and over the course of a year revised his prejudice against sketch and improv comedy’s old-fashioned way. “Once I was there for a while,” he said, “I realized that this sort of was a place for me. I liked the atmosphere of it, I liked the fact that a lot of people who worked there were sort of damaged—I enjoyed that.” Damage, he found, was talent, the precursor of personality. “Damaged people are very interesting,” he said. “The way they behave to cover up their damage is usually very entertaining.”

  A short time later, Colbert was hired into a touring company that included, among others, Paul Dinello, Amy Sedaris, and Chris Farley. (“He was actually a great guy to improvise with,” Colbert said of Farley. “He wasn’t a hog.”) But the other Colbert, the young actor, was still convinced his destiny was Hamlet. Throughout his tenure with the touring company, he kept leaving Second City to pursue local opportunities in legit theater. Dinello took Colbert’s ambivalence (and preppy wardrobe) for high-mindedness, and along with his girlfriend, Amy Sedaris, relished every opportunity to corrupt Colbert’s pretensions in flagrante delicto. Colbert was trying his hardest to squeeze his improvisations, as best he could, into controllable entities. He clung to his formidable intellect and preset ideas of theatrical rights and wrongs, but he was no match for the taunting and unchecked silliness of Dinello and Sedaris. Before long, they broke him down, cracked him open, and set him free. He abandoned ideology entirely. “Those three were inseparable,” Libera said. “Like siblings,” a family within a family.

  Intentionally apolitical, the trio sidestepped references to real places, people, and things to foreground the weird, insular realities of their freak show characters. Colbert said, “We wanted the joke to stay the same five years from now, hopefully.” If the Toronto improvisers of the early ’70s loved to invent phonies and buffoons, Dinello, Sedaris, and Colbert worshipped at the altar of the grotesque, the damaged, the gleefully offensive. “Paul and Amy allowed [Colbert] to be who he was,” Libera said, “allowed him to have all that darkness and be playful at the same time, so he can actually live with the dark parts of himself as well as the playful parts of himself, which characterized the best of his work at Second City.”

  “And I made a conscious effort then not to do political stuff when I first started out,” he said, “because I found so much political humor false—stuff that just told the audience what they thought already about a political situation. I mean, the example is people making Ted Kennedy drinking jokes, which didn’t seem to be informative or satirical. They just seemed mean-spirited and just told the audience what they thought already.” He was just as gracious by day as a waiter at Scoozi, an Italian restaurant where Colbert, in gold waiter’s jacket, worked the lunch shift, learning Spanish and Italian from the other employees. “What was interesting about my day shifts spent working along Stephen Colbert,” wrote one of his coworkers, “is that the guy seemed to avoid the trappings of the waiter gabbing about his ship about to come in routine. Instead, Colbert helped the backwaiter/busboys with all sorts of tasks that weren’t his responsibility. He loaded giant sized aluminum oval shaped trays placed on bus stands with dirty dishes. He was essentially busing tables which he didn’t have to do.”

  There was that one time when Steve Carell, a Second City mainstage player, needed a last-minute understudy.

  “You’re on for Carell in six days,” the director warned Colbert. “Can you play the baritone horn?”

  “What is a baritone horn?”

  “Ah, we’ll have Scott Adsit do it.”

  “I’ll do it!”

  Colbert had never played a brass instrument, and the production wouldn’t rent him a practice horn, so he rented his own miniature tuba, and in under a week, with lips puffed up “just like a baboon’s ass,” he learned the bass line to “Anchors Aweigh.”

  Whenever Carell had to leave town, Colbert would go on for him, but such opportunities were rare. After two years of intermittent touring, living off a puny income, and wondering if he ever would be elevated to his own position on the mainstage, Colbert began to think seriously, again, of leaving Second City for the dramatic stage. He went out, meanwhile, with Second City’s Northwest ensemble, a gang that included Nia Vardalos and Paul Dinello, and toured “Ku Klux Klambake,” directed by Mick Napier, one of Colbert’s first improv teachers at Second City, who watched Colbert come to recognize his own strengths. “You try so many different scenes in the improv sets,” Napier said, “that you learn everything you need to know about yourself. So Stephen Colbert would be able to learn that it works really well when he has this high-status character that’s a little bit quirky and a little bit weird. He learns time after time that it hits.” And yet comedy was only a stopgap on Colbert’s career path.

  Some months later, waiting in the wings during “Where’s Your God Now, Charlie Brown?” at Second City’s adjoining stage, the e.t.c. theater, Colbert and Dave Razowsky watched Jenna Jolovitz take on “Whales,” a surefire blackout, which begins as Jolovitz, playing a folksinger, proudly tells the audience that she’d like to do a little song for the whales. Jolovitz then tunes up her guitar, deadly earnest, as the expectation builds, until finally, she clears her throat and barks like a whale. “It’s not a great joke,” Colbert would say, “but it never fails.” But one night it did: Jenna bleated out the whale noises and got back not a single laugh.

  Colbert whispered to Razowsky. “What?”

  “This always ki
lls.”

  Then Jenna, onstage: “Oh, I forgot to tell you! It’s a song for whales!”

  Colbert and Razowsky threw their arms up, Colbert recalled, “and hugged each other in the joy of her agonizing failure! But it wasn’t schadenfreude! It was just like, ‘Oh, we know what she’s going through and it’s agonizing and how hilarious, what a perfect fuckup to make,’ and her trying to save it and now what can she do? And they’re not taking the lights out on her and she’s burning in silence out on stage.” Howling with laughter in each other’s arms, Colbert and Razowsky fell to the floor (“like a deflating teepee,” Colbert said), their legs poking onto the stage, failing to kick themselves back up they were laughing so hard. And then Jolovitz started laughing.

  This is healthier than straight theater, Colbert thought between gasps. “Because in straight theater, when someone fails, you come backstage, and people are very quietly sort of touching up their makeup, going, ‘How’s it going out there? It seems pretty quiet.’” In straight theater, there are mistakes. There is terror. But in improvisation, where, as the saying goes, the only mistakes you can make are sex and casting, Colbert understood there can be no real unhappiness, “because if there can be this much joy at a moment of this much agony and failure, there’s something very healthy about that.” In that moment, covered in Razowsky’s tears, Colbert said to himself: “I will do comedy and not drama.”