Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  Farley went to Mass every Sunday. “Then, fourteen hours later,” explained Second City’s Jill Talley, “I’d be carrying him home from a bar and putting him into bed.”

  The night Second City’s Bob Odenkirk brought Farley home, he watched helplessly as the drunken bull threw heavy furniture across the room—until suddenly, Farley slowed and turned, his face shining with sweat.

  “Odie,” he said, “do you think Belushi’s in heaven?”

  Onstage, Farley gravitated toward role-model characters—dads, coaches, older brothers. Their efforts to rehabilitate youngsters invariably ended in touchingly impotent outbursts, which Farley cribbed from his own father, in a voice that began in kind admonishment (“Aw, Billy, what you’ve got to understand is . . .”) before exploding (“I AM GOING TO KILL YOU!”) without shifting gears in between.

  At first, these characters didn’t have a sketch; but they were so popular, director Tom Gianas asked Odenkirk—who had, strangely enough, come to Second City backwards, from the SNL writer’s room—to write one. “I went home,” Odenkirk said, “and I thought the simple thought of what about a guy who uses himself—a motivational speaker who uses himself as an example of what not to be.” Odenkirk played directly into the improviser’s sweet spot, welding Farley’s two masks and creating a catchphrase—“I live in a van down by the river”—that teed up the character for an emotional swan dive. Odenkirk wrote the sketch quickly, perfectly, in one shot, handed it to Farley the next day, and watched as it became one of the funniest in Second City’s history.

  The night “Motivation” debuted, on July 26, 1990, Farley’s mentors, Del Close (“Coach,” Farley called him) and Father Matt Foley were in the audience. When Farley’s character stormed on, hiking his pants under his gut, he introduced himself as Matt Foley—and the actual Foley welcomed the tribute. And the name stuck.

  The sketch was so popular that come 9:15, Second City waitstaff would routinely leave their posts to watch Farley go. “Doing this sketch with Chris Farley at Second City eight times a week was the best thing I ever had in show business,” Odenkirk would say. “It was like doing ecstasy for seven minutes or however long it lasted because Chris would keep improvising it and pushing it further.”

  Casting Chris Farley, SNL coproducer Robert Smigel said, may have been the easiest decision Lorne Michaels ever made.

  Before Farley left for New York, Close and Halpern took him to dinner. They wanted to teach him to act like a professional (“He was such a slob, a child, an innocent,” Halpern recalled), and drum into him, one last time, the gospel of Belushi’s bad examples—as Del once explained, “There is, in effect, this whole industry dedicated to turning you into your public image.” Farley was too happy fulfilling his destiny to hear them, and for all his happiness, too sad and too afraid to leave his improv families, the Jewish-motherly duet of Joyce Sloane and Charna Halpern, and venture out of Chicago’s Old Town onto the world stage of American comedy. On NBC, in New York, the pressure, self-generated or otherwise, to push Fatty farther would be so hard to withstand, broken coffee table after broken coffee table, Saturday night after Saturday night. “Although I love this kind of comedy,” Farley said, “sometimes I feel trapped by always having to be the most outrageous guy in the room. In particular, I’m working on trying not to be that guy in my private life. Lorne told me that that’s what killed Belushi more than anything else.”

  Improvisers Matt Besser and Matt Walsh felt there was something new waiting for them, for everyone, on the other side of unspeakable idiocy.

  They found a venue in Chicago and started doing sketches.

  “I’m Matt.”

  “And I’m Matt.”

  “And I’m Matt.”

  “And I’m Matt.”

  It was so stunningly dumb it may have been actually smart.

  Stephen Colbert’s first night as a professional improviser began with a note from veteran Second City director Jeff Michalski:

  “You’ve got to learn to love the bomb.”

  It took time for Colbert to understand the deeper implications of the remark, that Michalski wasn’t speaking of the thick skin an improviser has to grow over his own, but the rodeo ride Slim Pickens takes, crashing down to earth in Dr. Strangelove. “You gotta learn to love when you’re failing,” Colbert explained. “The embracing of that, the discomfort of failing in front of an audience, leads you to penetrate through the fear that blinds you.” To train himself, Colbert began, consciously, to court humiliation. He took the stage in his underwear. In real life, he got into a crowded elevator singing too loudly. He paid for a bus ride in pennies. “I like to do things that are publicly embarrassing,” he said, “to feel the embarrassment touch me and sink into me and then be gone.”

  Colbert’s ensemble—indeed his entire generation—had a particular fascination with the excruciatingly uncomfortable. Into the 1990s, as “indie” and alternative sensibilities fought their way free of ’80s corporate culture, frolicking in perversely “bad taste” became as much a political gesture as a cultural one. While comedy innovation always turns on violation—Mike Nichols, Elaine May, and others were “sick”; the Lampoon descendants rejoiced in blow jobs, acid, and Belushi—Second City’s third great generation took theirs as an antidote to political correctness. Evil was good. Good was evil. Marginalized subcultures would now marginalize the mainstream. Improviser Amy Sedaris said, “We laugh at what you cry about.” “I like characters that can’t be easily defined,” Carell explained. “You don’t know whether you should like them or hate them.” Carell and Amy Sedaris wrote a scene about a woman (Sedaris) who runs into Chuck, a friendly serial killer (Carell), at a Laundromat. She teases him because he won’t tell her exactly how he murders people. “Aw, come on,” she pleads. “I’m not going to steal your idea.” In “Clowns,” Jackie Hoffman plays a deaf clown, and Colbert, Razowsky said, “was literally trying to rape Jackie” (Razowsky, wheeled on, plays a child from the Make-A-Wish Foundation). Scott Allman, Carell, Colbert, and Razowsky played the Beatles. One by one, as suppressed memories reveal themselves, they all remember Ed Sullivan touching them inappropriately. (Well, almost all of them. Ringo: “Mr. Sullivan didn’t touch me.”) Offstage Dinello proudly referred to himself, Colbert, and Sedaris as misfits. The same could be said for their onstage creations.

  Of all the marginalized subcultures, none was more prevalent on the current Second City stage than the nerds. But these were not the lovable frog-prince nerds of the John Hughes era; the ’90s nerds were pathetically and irrevocably uncool (which, worn proudly, as a badge of transgression, made them cool). Amy Sedaris loved to ugly herself up with sad wigs and buckteeth; Colbert, a former Dungeons and Dragons devotee, liked to remind Dinello that he had only three characters, the Geek, the Kid, and the Geeky Kid; and Carell would go on to play a virgin his own age. They tried that one in the improv set: Colbert, Dinello, and Scott Allman played the sexually experienced friends uncomfortably surrounding Carell at a guys-night poker table. “We tried it a few times during an improv set,” Carell said, “but it never made it into a show. We never figured out how to tell that story. It was basically just a bunch of guys sitting around, regaling each other with these tales of sexual conquest, and there’s one guy who clearly can’t keep up.” Carell’s character tries to keep the lid on his nerdy secret, but it gradually becomes clear this guy has never been with a woman:

  “You know how breasts are so powdery?” ventures the virgin.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, how they feel like a bunch of grapes?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “. . . they’re like these big bags of sand.”

  As Carell, master of repressed embarrassment, tries to hedge exposure, laughing too loud, his eyes shining with pain, he evokes the best of Alan Arkin, master of repressed rage. Emotional layering grounded both in the stuff of legit stage acting. Others, like Colbert and Sedaris, favored energy; but for Carell, it was about p
sychological clarity and control. “I look at improvising as a prolonged game of chess,” he said. “There’s an opening gambit with your pawn in a complex game I have with one character, and lots of side games with other characters, and another game with myself—and in each game you make all these tiny, tiny moves that get you to the endgame.” The Forty-Year-Old Virgin was classic Carell, an absurdity rendered with ferocious sincerity.

  You could say improv’s ascent from its early days as Chicago’s local, cabaret divertissement to America’s most influential theatrical phenomenon happened gradually, through the decades, as the form itself improvised to the suggestions of the eras, from Mike and Elaine’s brainy shortform to the Committee’s peace-and-love communal longforms, all the way through the corporate complacency of early-’80s Second City, the failure of which paved the way for iO’s Harold Revolution. Peopled by a generation of young improvisers driven by their exposure to SNL, SCTV, and other epochal works of their predecessors, the new revolutionaries sought out Del Close en masse. His sermon of risk, discomfort, destruction, and reinvention—of innovation at all costs—because that’s what improvisation is, innovation in real time, before your very eyes—had them awake at all hours, drinking up new ideas in their month-to-month semifurnished apartments, talking of, one day, filling a theater with the savviest improvisational audience ever assembled and figuring out, together, what it meant to improvise their own way. They would do for Close’s longform what Mike and Elaine did for shortform. They would elevate their nerd’s obsession with improv—“we understood the history,” iO’s Jimmy Carrane said—to the high level of theater art, Del Close’s dream.

  Treat your audience like artists and poets, Del had told his students, so they might have a chance to become them.

  Earlier generations were comprised of accidental improvisers pit-stopping at Second City en route to careers as dramatic actors; these kids, born into Second City America, were Sills throwbacks, improvisers committed to improvisation. “It was a religion,” iO’s Dave Koechner said. “There was no one that spoke about being famous. There was a passion about being better, and better, and be the best, and be the best, and be the best.” Most of their parents had never heard of improv. Those who had confused it with stand-up comedy. “One of the cool things about those days was that groups would come out and see each other,” Brian Stack said. “We would support each other the way musicians sometimes influence each other and admire each other. It was a magically fun time in Chicago.”

  You could say it was happening gradually, but quicker now than ever before. Chicago in the 1990s was the Florence of the improv renaissance. The philosophical advances of ImprovOlympic, which had challenged Second City’s forty-year monologue on improvisational theory, turned the future of the art form into a dialogue. Many dialogues. Now that Del and Charna had broken ice on the Harold, in came Ed, in 1990, the first longform show to be performed not in a storefront cabaret or black box, but a legitimate theater. “Just placing improv in a different environment, a theater,” Ed’s Pete Gardner said, “made people take it more seriously.” Second City’s e.t.c. theater picked up the scent and, in June 1991, offered We Made a Mesopotamia, Now You Clean It Up, which made the critic Jack Helbig, who had all but given up on Second City, into a fan again. He wrote, “I’m willing to forgive all of Mesopotamia’s minor lapses in light of its two great strengths: the tight, playful ensemble work—not once did anyone in this cast of six talented actors try to steal focus from anyone else—and the performers’ and director Barbara Wallace’s experiments, however tentative, with the Second City format. Several sketches are performed not on the stage but in the aisles or the light booth or at the back of the theater.” In March 1992, the e.t.c. opened The Heliotrope Players’ Production of Thornton Wilder’s American Classic, Our Town, as Directed by d’Eric Blakemore; or, Cash Stations of the Cross, which asked for audience suggestions in the middle of George and Emily’s famous love story.

  You could also say that it happened suddenly in the summer of 1992, as a handful of Ed veterans, mingled with choice iO alumni, “started to workshop,” Pat Finn explained, “to see if we could push ourselves in new directions and venture into directions that seemed a little unfamiliar to us.” Caught in an artistic limbo—post-ImprovOlympic, but pre-professional—the ensemble rehearsed with a frequency uncommon to improvisation, as much as three hours a night, five nights a week. “We approached it like it’s a theater show,” said Carrane. “Can you commit to six weeks of rehearsal? Can you commit to us and not the [Second City] touring company, if you get it? We want you to put all your eggs in one basket.” Working in Chicago’s Live Bait Theater, an actual legit stage, compelled the improvisers to approach scenes with as much “real” emotion as possible, as if they were playing in classical drama, not sketch comedy. Most Harold teams were constantly on the lookout for the next scene, moving the story forward; the Live Bait group was not afraid to slow down, stay with a character, let a situation breathe. “The scene work,” Brian Stack said, “was richer than most Harolds. We were giving scenes a lot more time to play out.” If they weren’t funny, they weren’t funny; most important was to play together and go deep. “If you had an interesting character,” Carrane said, “you could follow the life of that character. What was that guy like at home? At work? At the gym? In the Harold, you couldn’t follow that guy.”

  A new form emerged: two-person scenes interrupted by tag-outs, whereby an offstage improviser would retire an onstage improviser and introduce himself into the scene, taking the remaining character backward or forward in time. That offstage players were literally offstage, as opposed to onstage, waiting and watching from the traditional upstage line, enhanced the sense of proper theater, as did the deliberate, smooth cohesion of the ensemble—a stellar bunch that included Kevin Dorff, Brian Stack, Rachel Dratch, Dave Koechner, Noah Gregoropoulos, Pete Gardner, Miriam Tolan, Carlos Jacott, Chris Reed, Pat Finn, and Jimmy Carrane—longtime friends and collaborators from all corners of the Chicago improv world, who played the way they felt about one another, with patience, kind curiosity, and love. They called themselves Jazz Freddy.

  A class act, a reunification of a slowly diversifying community, a hot ticket, a triumph of improvisation’s DIY ideal, Jazz Freddy at the Live Bait Theater was the most influential, organizing improv experience of its generation. Among its fans was Del Close. He could take credit for instilling in Jazz Freddy their paradoxical appreciation of his teachings and their willingness to throw all of it out the window and improvise. “Del really liked the stuff, that we were messing with the form, taking the Harold in a new direction, that we were being patient, and doing serious scene work,” Finn said. “That was so gratifying for all of us because we all owed him such a tremendous debt.”

  “We’re in the midst of a real, you know, a real something,” Close said in 1993. “I generally get everything backwards. Like I don’t drive in L.A. and I had a car in New York. I didn’t go to Woodstock, I went to Altamont. But I’ve also been in a lot of the right places at the right time, and I think that this improvisational ferment that’s going on in Chicago at the moment is another one of those.”

  Tina Fey got to Chicago and enrolled in Second City’s introductory classes with “people who worked office jobs and would brave the cold just to learn improv and then go out and have a drink after.” How beautiful, Fey thought; their curiosity to try this thing, just to see where it took them, how it felt. She was only slightly more prepared than they were, having earned a theater degree from the University of Virginia, sampled some improv in drama class (“but we weren’t really doing it”), and watched some Whose Line Is It Anyway?, which, if you weren’t in Los Angeles or Chicago—Fey grew up in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania—really was the only way to see improv. Martin de Maat, who “was all about trust and loving your partner,” would be her soft landing into Second City’s Training Center. A rougher guide, like Del Close, might even have scared her away. “[De Maat] wasn’t as much about fin
ding comedy as [he] was about finding this magic that would happen, making something together that could not be made alone, finding that unexpected thing that will be ephemeral now and inexplicable later.”

  Kevin Reome, her friend at Second City, told her about ImprovOlympic. “Some buddies of mine are going to see this place tonight,” he offered. “Wanna come?”

  Adam McKay, coming to terms with his limitations as a stand-up, heard about Del Close from his friend Rick Roman.

  “There’s this old hipster,” Roman told him, “teaching this form where you get onstage and you can do whatever you want, like you improvise plays and anything you say happens. Oh, we’re on the moon—”

  “I’m coming out there. Hold on.”

  McKay had never heard of Second City. He had never heard of improv comedy. Like most of his generation, he had worn out his VHS copies of Bill Murray movies, but he had never put two and two together—it started there, in Chicago.

  Two days later, he dropped out of college (in the middle of his senior year), sold his comic book collection, bought a used Chrysler New Yorker ($800), drove out to Chicago and into an iO show at Papa Milano’s restaurant. The place was packed. The Harold team was Blue Velveeta. McKay was knocked out. “I can’t believe this exists,” he thought, and signed up for classes.

  Close was, for this brief period, teaching iO’s beginners in Papa Milano’s basement. Treacherous even for many advanced improvisers, his candor and intensity were invigorating to McKay. “Your job is to lead the audience, to push them,” Del preached. “There is no failure in result; there is only failure in process.” McKay came prepared, fortified by his stand-up experience and Close’s respect for McKay’s intellectual urgency. Charna Halpern said, “Adam’s belief is you have to have something to say otherwise don’t get onstage.” Where few in his circle engaged with topical issues, preferring instead to play with the cultural marginalia of nerdom, McKay, something of a throwback, showed the insurgence of a radical. At the same time, he had no aversion for the absurdly apolitical, like a Committee improviser crossed with a Python, born into Generation X.