Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  In the Victim’s Family—a Harold team built by Halpern, with improvisers McKay, Roman, Miles Stroth, Neil Flynn, and, in time, Matt Besser and Ian Roberts—Close found the best possible coconspirators. “They were real smart and real fast, as fast as Jazz Freddy was slow,” Halpern recalled. “Del used to describe them as watching six men fall down the stairs and land on their feet.” They played with an unprecedented level of risk and emotional freedom, and almost always their Harolds came together—when they did, Close would call it “seeing Harold”—proving, at last, the viability of Del’s once-unplayable form, and solidifying the team’s position as the most exciting improv ensemble in the city, the country, the world. Their most challenging invention, “Horror,” a favorite of Close’s (and reviled by Halpern), began with a gruesome or distasteful newspaper headline. One Horror, about a valedictorian killed by her stalker boyfriend an hour after she delivered her commencement speech, had some in the audience crying, pleading for the improv to end. Del reveled in it; you could hear him, under especially grim improvs, cackling in the back, near the bar.

  In fact, the Victim’s Family, later condensed to the Family, worked so well together, it seemed almost inevitable that they would keep growing. “We wanted to write sketches,” McKay explained, “do street stuff, do some assaultive comedy”—the antithesis of the lucrative sitcomy “observational” humor that crested with Seinfeld. Oversaturated in media clichés, they recoiled from laugh tracks and tidy setup/punch line jokes, anything that smacked of corporate aesthetics. “Money,” McKay would say, “has swamped our culture too much.” If it wouldn’t sell, if it alienated, or violated, good taste, it called to McKay and his iO compatriots Rick Roman, Matt Walsh, Matt Besser, and Horatio Sanz.

  “We just started hanging out,” Walsh said, “causing trouble, and putting up shows.” They started performing “really insane shit,” McKay said, as Cerebral Strip Mine, a group name they hated. They’d play the Roxy, a variety-show venue, celebrating rude, volatile improvs to the tune of: “For a suggestion, we need a reason to eject a homeless person,” or “I need a tuber. Please give me a tuber.” For “Machine Gun Blackout,” they took a suggestion and rushed into conflict to see how fast the scene could degenerate into a screaming argument. Roman, joking, had an idea to improv as an imaginary social-action organization, the Upright Citizens Brigade. McKay loved the name so much he suggested they take it for their own. And so, “Thank you, we’ve been Cerebral Strip Mine” became “Thank you, we’ve been the Upright Citizens Brigade.”

  They had no money. To eat, they would haunt happy hours, order one orange juice apiece, and fill up on bar snacks. “Adam was so poor,” Halpern said, “I used to have to send him pizzas.” At one time, she put him up in her living room.

  The aim of their first show, Virtual Reality, was to push the fourth wall to the precipice. Before each show, audience members were assigned a number, and if their number was called, they’d be pulled into the improv. The improvisers could be forceful. But they lived for violation, within reason. If anyone resisted them, Sanz had stationed a friend in the back with a lab coat and stun gun. “If people leave or get out of control,” they warned, “they will be dealt with by one of our assistants.”

  “We were maniacs,” McKay said.

  “We had no respect for any other comedy enterprise in Chicago,” Sanz said. “I’m sure we weren’t liked for that.”

  Once they brought the audience back to McKay’s apartment and staged a murder scene.

  Once they intentionally incited a riot. (“They put [Sanz] in cuffs and put him in the back of the car and drove off,” Besser said, “and it happened so quickly that the audience felt we had put the cops in the show. We were like, ‘Nope, that wasn’t part of the plan.’”)

  Once they put up flyers with McKay’s headshot: “Attention. On February 28, 1992 Adam McKay age 23 will kill himself during the performance of VIRTUAL REALITY NO JOKE Friday at Midnight.” At the designated time, a tremendous audience (which included Stephen Colbert and Del Close) gathered at the foot of a five-story building, and looked up.

  “You want this?” McKay yelled down to the mob. “You think this is a joke? Man, this is fucking hell, and you came here for entertainment.”

  (“Jump! Jump!” Del screamed up at him.)

  On cue, a CPR dummy, dressed exactly like McKay, flew off the roof. The Grim Reaper hauled the dead dummy away and McKay, stationed on the ground, reappeared “back to life.” “There was just this freedom,” McKay recalled. “There was just a freedom to try to get away with whatever you felt you could get away with. Del Close encouraged that.”

  The Upright Citizens Brigade—UCB—won praise from theater critic Helbig, and even a financial investment from Mike Nichols, who wanted to add his name as producer and bring them to New York. But the death of Rick Roman, by car crash, in 1992, halted UCB’s ascension.

  The Victim’s Family became the Family. And they kept going.

  The confrontational, form-breaking spirit of UCB directly influenced Del’s next comedy experiment. Appropriating the tag-out from Jazz Freddy, the Family, under Del, developed the Movie, a speedy longform structure intensified by screenplay-like stage directions—“We zoom in on the mouse’s face”; “We cut to a Ferris wheel spinning in the distance”; “The house bursts into flames”—called out, during a scene, by observing improvisers. They invented the Deconstruction, a cubist longform that, as its name suggests, continually revisited, revised, and expanded upon its initial two-person scene. The Family presented the results in “Three Mad Rituals,” an iO triptych consisting of a classic Harold, a Movie, and a Deconstruction, all set into motion by a single suggestion—a line of poetry. And where most Harolds clock in around thirty or forty minutes, “Three Mad Rituals” stretched to an hour and forty-five, taxing its improvisers’ imaginations to the brink, leaving them breathless and electrified. “My God,” McKay sighed after one show, “my mind feels like a hot machine gun. Somebody better piss on my head.”

  Tina Fey would go see the Family any chance she got. “They were the ultimate aspirational Harold team, Murderers’ Row,” she said. “Going to see them do the Movie was, like, our weekend.” How articulate they were. How deft they were with story, especially when, Fey knew, “improv was usually the enemy of story.” And the Family’s media savvy, in its hyper self-consciousness, seemed to predict the near future of storytelling. The Movie, Fey said, was “ahead of its time in the way young people now process everything as a reality show or a movie because [the improvisers were] calling out the devices that manipulate us.”

  Amy Poehler, a beginning iO improviser, would sneak through standing-room-only crowds and up to her friends in the light booth just to get a chance to lay eyes on them. It was, for Poehler, the beginning of a transformation. The risks she wasn’t taking, they took. Their trust and fierce commitment, she wished she had. And they were all very tall. “I want to be like them,” Poehler thought.

  This time, Harold Ramis was waiting for just the right script. It had been years. He hadn’t directed since 1986’s Club Paradise, a comedy marred by the “Yes, and” ethic that had alchemized Caddyshack. Those days, and that spirit, were behind him now. Mellowing on his way to fifty, Ramis’s improviser had passed the torch to his storyteller, and the question How do I make this funnier? became How do I make this meaningful? or, in Ramis’s words, “so silly and so broad and yet so serious?”

  Danny Rubin’s original screenplay, Groundhog Day, which Ramis’s partner Trevor Albert discovered in 1991, offered Ramis, with some rewriting, the beginnings of his long-sought Grail, a truly spiritual comedy. Albert said, “I think we both felt like we had something with great commercial, and more importantly, with great artistic potential and I’d never seen Harold more serious about the writing.” Script development had become, suddenly, Ramis’s high priority. “Humanizing the film was of course in Harold’s wheelhouse,” Albert added, “but taking apart the script was a very delicate and difficult e
ndeavor . . . Needless to say, it took endless revisions to get it to a point where we felt satisfied.”

  Groundhog Day’s central premise, about a man forced to relive a single day, over and over, until he gets it right, demanded from Ramis a new level of premeditation. “You could improvise on Caddyshack,” said Albert, who had been Ramis’s assistant on the film, “but because of the continuity issue [matching days], improvising on Groundhog Day was much trickier.” But Bill Murray, their star, was an improviser. It was the actor’s job, he believed, to make improvements, and any director that refused him that freedom was acting the tyrant. “I can’t make Bill do the script,” Ramis said. “I can’t make him do anything. There’s a great sigh of relief when he actually comes to the set.” Unpredictability was the price Ramis would have to pay for, well, Murray’s unpredictability. Ramis knew as much going into Groundhog Day, Ramis and Murray’s sixth film together, but this time out, Murray’s volatility shocked him. And right away.

  Eight weeks before filming began, with the locations secured, the schedules set, and the script one development year stronger, Murray decided he wanted to change the tenor of the comedy. He wanted Groundhog Day darker, meaner. “There were big changes in his personal life happening at that time,” Ramis said. “His marriage ended and a new one began during that film, and I think he felt kind of isolated from the production. He was never happy. He seemed to be suffering a lot. I think he was convinced it wasn’t going to be good and that he wasn’t going to be good in it.” Murray said, “Harold, you see, felt that it would work best if we centered on the romantic aspect between Andie [MacDowell]’s character and myself. Harold thought that is what could make it successful, the idea that true love can save you from a life of monotony. But I disagreed. I wanted to center on the wild comedy.”

  When Ramis and Albert heard—not through Bill Murray—that he wanted Danny Rubin in New York to make his changes, they were apoplectic. Albert said, “This was the first we had heard that Bill had any issues with the script and we knew only too well how insanely difficult it had been to disassemble the script and put it back together over the course of a year.” What’s more, Rubin hadn’t worked on Groundhog Day in months. The script had advanced considerably since then; unraveling it at this state could be catastrophic.

  The stink of sabotage was in the air.

  “Gee whiz, you know this is perfect for Bill Murray,” said the film’s legendary production manager, C. O. Erickson, to Ramis.

  “I wish he thought so.”

  Murray forced himself into the casting and hiring process normally reserved for the director and producer. His kindess tested, Ramis tried to let him in, but no matter his concessions, Murray was dissatisfied. Finally, it seemed to Ramis there was nothing he could do to sway him. The actor was petulant, unreasonable, enraged. “What I’d want to say to him is just what we tell our children,” Ramis said. “‘You don’t have to throw tantrums to get what you want. Just say what you want.’” But Ramis was a diplomat, not an autocrat. He kept quiet and gently maintained his air of business-as-usual. But those close to him knew he was miserable. Most were; Murray’s mean streak, beyond mere hostility, carried intimations of actual violence. “Going to the set every day,” Trevor Albert said, “you think there is the possibility you’re going to get slugged by the star. It was like working with a wild animal where you have no idea how they’re going to behave.”

  Three weeks into production, Murray, inexplicably, stopped speaking to Erickson. “He will get it in his head that he doesn’t like somebody on the crew,” Erickson recalled, “and that fellow, you know, better stay out of sight somehow, if he wants to continue on. You’ve got to hide him in the office or send him to the department or something. You can’t have him on the set. And it has no rhyme or reason.”

  “If I had been on my first movie,” recalled actor Stephen Tobolowsky, “he’d have brought me to tears more than once.”

  Ramis had introduced them on Tobolowsky’s first day of shooting. It was dawn, all were exhausted and freezing; the weather in Woodstock, Illinois, was as it had been and would be for the rest of the shoot, viciously cold. Still, Ramis managed to be personable as he brokered hellos between Murray and Tobolowsky, who was to play the part of exasperating insurance agent Ned Ryerson.

  “Bill, this is Steve—”

  Murray cut him off. “So,” he spoke at Tobolowsky. “What are you going to do? Is it funny?”

  Tobolowsky, auditioning, it seemed, all over again, had no choice but to offer Murray a taste of what was to come.

  “Okay, okay.” Murray held up his hand. “You can stop. That’s funny.”

  Five hundred townspeople, come to see Bill Murray make a movie, had gathered all around them. To Murray, these were the good guys, the “real” people, the proverbial caddies of the world. Now Murray was rich and powerful, but he was determined not to act the part. At least not in front of them.

  “Do you know what these people need?” Murray glinted at Tobolowsky. “Danishes!”

  Murray raced Tobolowsky into a local bakery and declared, “I need every Danish in this place,” piled Tobolowsky’s arms high with boxes of donuts and bear claws, and together they ran back to the set and Murray tossed the pastries into the crowd.

  The crew snickered at this lavish show of humanity. They knew another story.

  Murray, meanwhile, held Ramis and Albert responsible for the uncomfortable working conditions, the miserable weather actors and crew had to endure while he, the director, got to sit out the freezing cold in his expensive parka. “When we did Groundhog Day,” Murray said, “I felt like Harold had become sort of like a mogul.” Yet by all accounts it was Murray’s behavior that fit the description. Albert said, “Bill knew Harold as his fellow improv guy who based on that philosophy was open to anything. It was all about collaboration. The fact that Groundhog Day was a script that was more than a template and needed to be respected put them into a different power structure. Now Harold was indeed in charge and Bill needed to serve the script and ultimately Harold.”

  Their feud continued through the end of filming.

  It continued through postproduction.

  They stopped speaking. “I don’t call him, he doesn’t call me,” Ramis would say. “But it’s not like he’s—I have no idea. It’ll be one of the great mysteries in my life, and I’m sure that’s how he wants it—to be a mystery.”

  Before they met at iO, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler heard good things about the other. “Oh, she’s really good, she’s so great,” someone told Fey, then Adam McKay’s beginning student. (“I was all about you gotta crush the individual ego to create the group mind,” McKay said. “I don’t think I had Tina do an improv scene the entire time she was with me.”) In addition to her classes at the Second City Training Center, Fey was taking a playwriting class at Chicago Dramatists Workshop. A few choice details from those classes made their way to Poehler, in a separate beginner’s class at iO: “I remember Tina Fey wrote a play about Catherine the Great fucking a horse and I thought, ‘That lady is hot stuff, I wanna know her.’”

  For their predecessors, improvisation had been a layover, a gig; for Fey and Poehler, it was a calling. “The first time I went to see a Second City show,” Fey said, “I was in awe of everything. I just wanted to touch the same stage that Gilda Radner had walked on. It was sacred ground.” The light went on for Poehler at Boston College. Her first week of freshman orientation, she saw BC’s improv group My Mother’s Fleabag perform; Poehler roomed with one of the players and through her learned about iO. Yeah, she thought, I can do this. Poehler would follow her roommate to Chicago after she graduated.

  Poehler and Fey came together in Del Close’s advanced class; Tina, in overalls and old sweaters, Amy in T-shirts and bleached hair. Their rapport developed in the back of the class as they snickered to one another about Del, who terrified them.

  “He’s a fucking old man.”

  “What the fuck is he talking about?”

/>   Nichols and May had bonded in much the same way. “[Tina] was very judgmental,” noted iO improviser Kevin Reome, “but at the time it was good to be on that side of the fence with her, making fun of all the other ‘terrible’ people. She was a little catty that way. That’s maybe what made her fun.”

  Close was not an instant friend to young women, had pretty much heard every idea in improv history, and was typically downright grumpy. His new false teeth hurt like hell and he looked to Tina Fey like a monster.

  “What do you think that scene’s about?” he croaked in her direction, after yet another boring patient-doctor scene, his millionth.

  “The conflict,” she stammered, “the conflict between—”

  Close let her squirm before correcting her. “That scene was about bad improv.”

  Matt Besser, one of Fey’s first iO teachers, advised her, “You have really good characters, but I think you came here with those characters.” He was right. She had a tendency, as Harold Ramis did, to write first, improvise second, and yet she didn’t suffer from the beginner’s need for audience approval—Close would have nailed her for it. “The main thing you learned from Del,” she said, “was not to be cute or precious because he would just call you out and eat you alive.” Later, she realized that Close’s note applied to many women improvisers. They were often slower to risk. “It was a funny sort of pattern in the improv world,” she reflected. “The girls were all these well-educated, nice, obedient girls, and improv is some sort of outlet. Then there were a lot of guys who did two years of college or one year of college”—like Adam McKay—“they never finished and they liked to buck authority. So the reasons they’re drawn to improv and sketch are the opposite.” Not that Fey and Poehler were timid. “They were not the typical women who get steamrolled by men,” Charna Halpern saw right away. “[They] were no shrinking violets. They were bold and ballsy and fearless.” But as with any beginner, Fey tended toward her perceived strengths, in her case favoring harmless (but raunchy) lower-middle-class mothers and daughters, types that didn’t completely free her, as Del endeavored to, into brave new regions of self. “Some people are more fully in it,” she confessed.