Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  Chris Farley took a job with his dad at the Scotch Oil Company selling asphalt and waited a year for Pat Finn, his best friend from Marquette, to graduate, before making the pilgrimage to Chicago, together, in June of 1987. Farley and Finn thought, half-joking with each other, if they just showed up outside Second City and looked funny, someone would notice them. “Hey, you two!” “Who, us?” “Yeah, you! We need two more people for the show tonight! Why don’t you come in and join Second City?” But they knew better. Upon their arrival in Chicago, Farley and Finn stopped by Second City to see how they might get into classes, when Farley spotted a familiar face walking in their direction, toward the theater.

  “Hey, wait, look . . .” he loud-whispered to Finn. “Over there! There’s Joel Murray, Bill and Brian’s brother!”

  Finn, a native Chicagoan, knew Joel, a little, from elementary school.

  “Go say something!”

  “Farls . . . I don’t know . . .”

  “Come on, do it! C’mon! That’s why we’re here! You’ve got to!”

  By then, Murray was too close to ignore. Someone had to say something.

  “Joel . . .” Finn began. “I’m Pat Finn . . . From St. Joe’s?”

  Yeah, sure, Murray remembered Finn, and in the course of their catch-up gave him and Farley the line on Second City: you couldn’t just walk in anymore and get a part in the company, the way you did in the old days. Now you started at the Training Center. Along with hundreds of other hopefuls, you studied five levels of improvisation on your way, maybe, into one of the touring companies, a chance that only sometimes led to a part at the e.t.c. theater or the mainstage. Throughout his explanation, Murray couldn’t help but take note of the big guy quietly bursting next to Finn. (“Being with Chris was like walking around with a panda,” Finn said. “He was so wide-eyed you couldn’t help but be ingratiated to him.”)

  “What do we do?” Farley asked.

  “Take classes here,” Murray instructed, “and go study with Charna and Del.”

  Farley already knew all about Del Close, the master teacher Belushi cited as his biggest influence in comedy. Now, it seemed, he was about to meet him.

  As directed, Farley and Finn signed up for Second City’s level-one class and Charna Halpern’s beginning workshop at ImprovOlympic (iO). Working where they could, they earned only just enough to cover rent, food, and improv instruction (Farley, at one low point, barely covered his Second City class fee with an exchange of forty dollars for his guitar—“a major sacrifice for Chris,” Finn said), but they didn’t care; they had arrived. “We liked the style of both,” Finn said, “the satirical mode of Second City and the Wild West feeling of iO.” They shared their Second City classes with doctors, lawyers, and businesspeople curious about improv; but the atmosphere at ImprovOlympic, Finn said, “was more blood-and-guts improv. There was this kind of energy because no one knew where we were going but everyone felt confident in the people that were there. We felt like the pirates of the theater community.”

  Although Farley was eager to learn, he played, at first, with an idiocy verging on desperation, flashing his ass crack, screaming when just speaking would do, and more than once injuring other players. “I really didn’t like him at first,” Halpern said; it worsened when he started begging her, nagging her, to prematurely release him from the safety of the workshop environment to improvise for an audience at Orphans, their current venue, a bar on Lincoln Avenue.

  “I want to be onstage,” Farley told her, sometime into his third week of classes. “I want to be onstage now, I’m going nuts.”

  “You’re not ready.”

  “Come on!” Farley bellowed, slamming his fists on the wall above her head. “Let me play tonight! I want to play!”

  “I’ll tell you when you’re ready—”

  “Come on!”

  He badgered Charna until she lost her patience.

  “I’m not going to put you onstage. I’m going to put your friend Pat onstage.”

  Finn, standing by, thought he could see Halpern beginning to warm to Farley. Or had he just worn her down?

  “You could get on my stage tonight,” she said finally, “and if you screw up, you’ll never get on my stage again. And,” she added, “take Pat with you.”

  That night, with Finn as support, Farley pummeled the stage, “and,” Halpern said, “he was hilarious.” (“Charna was mesmerized,” Finn said. “You could see there was this ‘wow’ in her eyes.”)

  When he returned to Halpern’s beginners workshop, Farley was changed somehow, still a tornado, but now, having proven himself, Charna noticed how well he could listen—to her instruction, the other improvisers, and his own ideas. Instead of reacting, onstage, with his first and neediest thought, or defaulting to “Fatty Fall Down” mode, Farley would take a short moment’s consideration—a version of the slow comedy Del taught to his advanced students—to reveal his complete self, a sweet little boy in a big shouting man. This was something Charna had never seen: an improviser who was smarter onstage than he was off-. “I don’t know how that could possibly be,” Halpern would say. “But onstage he could do a movie review, he could do a joke, he could talk about anything, he could be the physicist. Then offstage you’d go ‘Farley, why are you drinking and smoking? It’s dangerous.’ ‘Really?’ He’d be like an idiot.”

  At first, Farley didn’t understand what Halpern meant by making truthful choices.

  “Chris,” she explained, “you have brothers, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Pick one of your brothers and do them. Go ahead.”

  Finn watched as Farley grew a seed of truth into something more. “He learned,” Finn said, “that it’s better to emulate someone than making someone up out of the blue. That became a big part of it for him.”

  Late in Farley’s beginners training, Charna invited Close to watch him perform. It was immediately obvious to Close what he was seeing.

  “Oh,” he said to Charna, as though it were fact, “that’s the next John Belushi.”

  And then, at last, Farley arrived in Del’s class, and the Guru was indeed the comedy wizard Farley had been hoping for. (“Try to kill the audience,” Del instructed Farley. “Fucking kill them. I want you to make them laugh so hard that they vomit and choke on their own vomit.”) Del said, “[Farley] didn’t have to learn how to be honest and intelligent onstage because he didn’t know any other way to be. He didn’t put on a different persona to walk onstage and improvise. Improvising was just a seamless continuity with his regular life.” That was a quality Gilda Radner had better than anyone, Del explained to Farley’s class: that and her ability to make everyone else in the scene look good. She may not have been the funniest all the time, he said, but she was the best to play with because she was always herself, or versions of it.

  “Chris was an athlete,” Finn said, “and he knew the importance of a coach because a coach can see what you can’t see. And that’s what Del did. Del guided him.” Del’s challenge to Farley was to swirl his thoughtful and his violent selves—instructions Farley accepted gratefully. Why, for instance, is today different for this character? What does he bring onstage with him? It was a question Farley brought into Second City. Finn said, “When Chris took a suggestion of Waiter and made it that waiter’s first day on the job, and he kept forgetting menus, and chastising himself for it, he was being the intelligent improviser Del wanted him to be.”

  “It truly was a family,” said Farley’s fellow ImprovOlympic player Jimmy Carrane. “You’d do a show, you drink till two in the morning, you’d end up at Farley’s apartment, he’d do something crazy, like you’d be in the hall getting drunk and all of a sudden you’d see Farley drop his pants.” And throughout, they were always discussing the work, what they had seen, what they had done, what succeeded, what needed improving. Finn said, “Sharing that camaraderie we became better because the better you know someone, the better you can work with them onstage, the better your ­chemistry.”

/>   The chemistry only improved as the prejudicial line between Improv­Olympians and Second Citizens—put in place by Close’s campaign to push improvisation out of Sahlins-style entertainment into an art form—began to fade with ImprovOlympic’s growing success. Monday nights, Second City’s dark night, Close invited students past and present to informal Open Harolds. It was like a class reunion. “Wow,” Farley and Finn said to each other, “this place must be pretty great if [Second City’s] Joel Murray and [Dave] Pasquesi are coming here on their night off.” Word spread. As Del and Charna continued to look for a permanent home base, the venue for Open Harold Night kept changing, and growing. “Hey,” a friend would tell you, or you would pick up secondhand, “Del’s at the Red Lion Tavern Monday . . .” It was improvisation’s all-star night, when the cognoscenti played for the cognoscenti. Improviser Dave Razowsky said, “We would all get together afterwards and talk about what we saw, like ‘That was weird? What happened there? Did that work? Why didn’t that work?’ We thrived on that interaction. When you thrive on that interaction with like-minded people, it doesn’t matter where you are, whether you’re Second City, or Improv­Olympic, shortform or longform. You have this new toy called improvisation that somebody suddenly rejiggered into a newer toy and what you thought you could do with it, you could do more.”

  There was no longer just one way to improvise in Chicago. There were many ways, maybe infinite ways.

  And when a directorial vacancy opened at Second City, Joel Murray and David Pasquesi requested that Del Close—mostly sober and the father of the rising new wave of improvisation—return to direct one more show. Their timing was apt: Second City’s previous show, its seventieth, Kuwait Until Dark; or, Bright Lights, Night Baseball, was yet another serving of soft satire, and Joyce Sloane, always ready to embrace Second City’s extended family, conceded the time was right to give Close another try. Close accepted Sloane’s offer on the condition that he be allowed to handpick his own cast—trained in his very own style. Sloane agreed, and onto the Second City mainstage went Del’s brainchildren, Tim Meadows, Joel Murray, Dave Pasquesi, and—after only a short time in a touring company—Chris Farley.

  16

  1988–1994

  If you approached Harold Ramis at this moment, as he stood atop the Everest of his career, and asked him to reflect on how he got this far, to Ghostbusters II, he would not have had to think long—for he was always asking himself the same question—before he answered, chuckling, that he didn’t really do much at all except be at the right place at the right time, take some chances, wear glasses, and live at the top of his intelligence. It was his talent, he once said, “to float with it,” to improvise. To live easy.

  As his college roommate, David Cohn, had before her, Harold’s wife, Erica Mann Ramis, deepened his engagement in Buddhism, whose precepts he could summarize in a single word: kindness. Ramis, who had kindness to spare, funneled the surplus into the writing of Ghostbusters II. “My idea,” he said, “was that negative human energy collects under big cities and has explosive potential on a psychic level. So people would have to be nice to each other.” The river of ectoplasmic slime that runs beneath New York City was the suffering the Ghostbusters, like civic therapists or spiritual gurus, had to exterminate. From that premise (which, Ramis conceded, did not lend itself to satire), the writers struggled to find a villain both in keeping with the theme and as surprising as the original’s Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. So they enlisted Elaine May for a consultation.

  Initially, there was some concern that May, for all her experience doctoring scripts, wasn’t the Ghostbusters’ ideal consigliere. “What was really great,” Reitman said, “was I thought she was going to come in and crap all over what we’d done, but she liked the script; she thought it was really funny and understood how it worked.” Rather than ply them with suggestions, May offered specific, often mundane, story questions (“If the guy can do this, why can’t he do that?” or “What does the photograph have to do with the painting?”) that she and Ghost Corps debated over a coffee table, like a Second City ensemble at intermission. Reitman called it “throwing script around.” A week later, Ramis found himself on surer ground. “It made it all clear,” he said, “at least in our own minds.”

  In 1988 Mike Nichols reached another mountaintop. He released two films, Biloxi Blues and Working Girl; directed Waiting for Godot, starring Steve Martin and Robin Williams, at Lincoln Center; and married television journalist Diane Sawyer.

  “Do you think I’m passive?” he once asked her.

  “No more than a set of wind chimes.”

  When news of their engagement broke, Sawyer heard one of her relatives was calling everyone she knew, bragging, “Did you hear Diane is marrying Mike Nichols and Elaine May?” (To which Sawyer thought, “I should be so lucky.”)

  Nichols’s incredible success, at work and at home, embarrassed him. “I am, and have been, terrifyingly lucky,” he said. “I never thought I was hot shit. I thought I kept getting away with it.” His self-reproach, his fugitive’s nose for troubles ahead, crept into his relationships with two of his best friends, pals from the University of Chicago days, acting teacher George Morrison, and Paul Sills. Thinking of them, the wind chimes in Nichols tinkled their resentment. He feared they loved him with an asterisk. “I did everything I did with them because of guilt,” Nichols said. “And I couldn’t make it up, I couldn’t get it out. And they hated me more and more. It was a terrible thing we were all trapped into. And I helped with the school because of the obvious guilt and so forth.”

  The school, the New Actors Workshop, was an intimate, two-year training program founded by Nichols, Sills, and Morrison to blend the contradicting powers of the Method with improvisation, as Nichols and May once did, to build a more flexible actor, facile with depth and spontaneity. “As actor training,” said student Diane Paulus, “it was a profound combination to be exposed to both.” Along with classes in technique (voice, speech, etc.), workshop students were given four hours of Spolin games a week, taught by Sills; a unique version of the Method by Morrison; and a weekly master class in scene study from Nichols. Viola Spolin’s sister, renowned improvisational dancer Beatrice Lees, taught movement. Friday nights were devoted to improvisational shows, and every year culminated in a production of Story Theater.

  In 1988 they opened on an upstairs floor of a Greek Orthodox church on the Upper West Side. Carol Sills painted a large blue circle in the center of the floor and designated it the playing area.

  “You played the game,” Sills would commend his students. “Well played.”

  Nichols conducted his weekly, four-hour master class like a University of Chicago symposium. There were no “lessons,” no skills to master. Rather, every week, three pairs of students would present a scene of their choosing, which Nichols would watch, grinning from front row center, “completely present in the moment,” Paulus said. Then he would talk. He would remember. “He would tell stories,” Kathy Hendrickson, student, and later vice president, said, “on the way to answering questions pertinent to the scene.” Though he posed it to the actors, Nichols’s foundational question—“This is like when you . . . what?”—prompted his own answers, asides, epiphanies, anything, really, that came to his mind. “I think those master classes allowed Mike a place where he could just hang out,” Hendrickson said. “Sills, in the end, really didn’t like me,” Nichols reflected. “I think that his headlong rush away from success didn’t deprive him of rage and envy. And I realized to my great sadness, after all the years of the school, he out and out hated me because [he and Morrison] couldn’t take me being successful. So we were fucked. We were stuck. There was no way I could undo it.” Still, Nichols held on. For the next twenty years, every week, schedule permitting and without pay, he would open his master class to first- and second-year students and New Actors alumni, establishing, not by accident, an informal legacy of like-minded rookies and veterans, “sort of like a rep company,” Hendrickson said, an extend
ed theatrical family. The one he used to dream of. “Mike’s hope,” wrote his student Johnny Zito, “was that we would all form a company together outside of school.”

  Del Close was at Crosscurrents, not drinking at the bar, when he heard the news. Gilda had died.

  Ovarian cancer. May 20, 1989.

  “Look at this,” he said to improviser Rick Thomas, on the stool beside him. “It’s on all the wire services.”

  Thomas took the paper.

  “We’re bigger than John Lennon,” Del added. “We’re bigger than Christ.”

  If his intonation were any less sincere, Close’s callousness would have offended Thomas. But Close wasn’t angling for a reaction, and he wasn’t celebrating in bad taste. “I don’t think he was being ironic,” Thomas reflected. “I think he was making a point about improvisation as a movement.”

  The country was catching on.

  After shows, when the bars closed and everyone went home, Chris Farley would haul himself up the stairs to the little apartment above the Mexican place on Wells Street, a block from Second City, and dial his old friend Father Matt Foley. “He was really struggling,” Foley said, “he was so damn lonely.” Farley’s phone voice buckled with drugs and booze and the shame of a Catholic morning after; he hated himself for sinning against the talent he considered a gift God gave him to give to the audience. But at the same time, as a disciple of John Belushi’s, he knew intoxication was his Faustian comedy juice, a self-sacrifice made in the name of harder laughs. Did that redeem the sinner in Farley? Killing himself for their enjoyment? Foley listened as Farley’s addicted brain tried to explain itself, swinging from altar boy to funny fatso, neither forgiving the other, then rationalizing himself out of blame, then confessing. Was he going to hell?

  “There was heavy betting,” Del Close said, “that he wouldn’t make it a week on the mainstage because of drugs and alcohol. But he could always cut the gig.”