Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  There was often a remove between Fey and her improvised people, as if she wasn’t really, truly inhabiting their bodies and feelings, but regarding them as a writer would her characters. But she was fast and grounded, always grounded, and played without tricks. Her choices—marked by an ideal fusion of the credible and the unforeseen—were staggeringly productive; that she looked, in those days, just like any other girl only heightened her impact. “The thing that interested me about Tina was that she was so non-descript and quiet,” said fellow improviser Joe Bill, “but onstage she was so fucking smart and quick.”

  Del was now in the habit of saying, “Play at the top of your intelligence—or higher.” Tina Fey did.

  Lost in a scene? Turn to Fey. She easily gave herself to others’ ideas, good or bad; she could take what you gave her and improve it. “You enter a scene and decide that your character is in a bar,” she said, “but your partner thinks you’re performing dental surgery. The combination of those two disparate ideas melds into something that could never have been created on its own.” Her taste for crossbreeding ideas was less the actor’s “What can I do?” than the writer’s “Where can this scene go?” “If it wasn’t daunting,” Bill added, “if you had any measure of confidence in being able to play a strong character, you’d love to play with her, because she’d never let a scene go bad.” If Fey was not exactly in her character’s shoes, you could find her up in the lighthouse, watching the horizon.

  She was five years old, at home playing in the yard, when someone she had never seen before slashed her cheek and disappeared. It was one of those inexplicable, godless tragedies, like Colbert’s, that either takes a person down or inures her against the future. “It’s the attack out of nowhere,” Fey would explain. “Something comes out of nowhere, it’s horrifying.” In improvising, it must be said, she could synthesize conceptual attacks like none other.

  Meanwhile, Poehler took a class led by the Family’s Matt Besser. She fell in love with him and his ambitions for the Upright Citizens Brigade. They needed a girl, he said after McKay left for e.t.c., and Poehler accepted. “Once they got Amy,” McKay said, “they went into turbo drive.”

  It was Charna Halpern who first matched Fey and Poehler, placing them in Inside Vladimir, a six-person team named after a gay porn movie. They were Vladimir’s only women. Playing together regularly, their affection turned professional; they found how completely they had to rely on each other. “Once you [improvise] with someone,” Fey said, “and you don’t fail miserably you love them because anytime someone doesn’t bail on you in front of an audience you love them.” They grew closer, and rabid for improv, went to see whatever they could. Each show, it seemed, changed their lives. “It was all-encompassing work at the time,” Fey said. “When you’re in Chicago and you’re an improviser, it is everything to you. It is a complete cult, and a church, and everything to you.” Together, they haunted Second City, idolizing the senior class of Carell, Colbert, and Sedaris. Poehler stayed up and went out, but improv hours were tougher on Fey. Unendingly tired, she had to leave her apartment every morning before dawn to get to her day job at the front desk of the Evanston YMCA, by 5:30 a.m. “I made, like, $7 an hour,” she said, “and it was freezing in Chicago—but I was so happy. I was doing comedy with the best people in the world.”

  She fell in love with Jeff Richmond, pianist in residence at iO. “She was quite round,” Richmond said, “in a lovely, turn-of-the-century kind of round—that beautiful, Rubenesque kind of beauty.” But they told no one, she said, “because I didn’t want it to affect the dynamic of our team. That’s how important improv was to us.”

  On Paul and Carol Sills’s suggestion, David Shepherd went to visit Viola Spolin at her cabin in the Hollywood Hills, still very much her home since the sandbox days of the Young Actors Company. Now eighty-seven, Spolin was no longer driving. She was confined to a wheelchair after suffering a stroke. Speaking was difficult for her.

  Viola’s husband, Kolmus Greene, greeted Shepherd at the door and led him inside, to a glow in the center of a big room. It was Viola’s hair. It was Viola, sitting in her wheelchair, radiating warmth.

  Shepherd sat down beside her, and with Kolmus acting as interpreter, was guided into a kind of communication with Viola, who smiled throughout. Still, Shepherd could not be sure she knew who he was.

  Then Spolin reached out and took his hands.

  It surprised him. “Do you know who I am?”

  “Yes.”

  “I must tell you it was a very moving experience,” Shepherd would write to Paul and Carol Sills. “I felt there was real communication going on between Viola and me, in spite of her silence. She really seemed to be relating to me, in some mysterious way, and the vibes were all positive, benign, warm, and glowing.”

  Viola Spolin died a year later, November 22, 1994.

  Paul Dinello and Amy Sedaris left Second City early in 1994, and Colbert’s depression returned. Losing his truest friends was too much for one who had already lost too much, and what’s more, losing his partners left Colbert unsure about his professional future. Colbert, newly married, wanted a family of his own, but how could he earn a living without his team, Dinello and Sedaris? He said, “I realized, ‘I want kids and I don’t want to be traveling all over the world to go to this gig and that gig.’ And I had a complete nervous breakdown.” Anne Libera gave Colbert the name of her therapist. “He would lie down backstage before the show,” Libera said, “and try to figure out how he was going to get through it.”

  Colbert said to himself, “I want to do a scene where I play Maya Angelou.”

  It was after Bill Clinton’s inauguration and Angelou’s subsequent launch, after serving as Clinton’s inaugural poet, and they were working on a new show, Colbert’s first without Dinello and Sedaris. It would include “Doug,” a therapist scene featuring Colbert and Razowsky, which Colbert named for his and Libera’s doctor, and something, still gestating, about going home. Going home, Colbert knew, always changed him into the southern person he used to be, a version of himself his Chicago friends had never met and wouldn’t understand.

  In rehearsal, director Tom Gianas suggested Colbert somehow combine his Angelou idea with his concept for a homecoming scene. Colbert asked Carell to improvise it with him.

  “I’m going to do this as small as I can,” Carell warned him.

  Without further discussion, they improvised—live on a Tuesday night—as complete a scene as Second City had ever seen. Lights up:

  Carell: This is great.

  Colbert: Yeah, I love my hometown.

  Carell: It is just beautiful.

  Colbert: Yeah. I don’t know if this happens to you, but when I come home I act differently, people treat me different—it’s a great feeling.

  A few lines later, Ruth Rudnick enters with a southern accent. “Shirley! Shirley Wentworth! It’s me, Missy!”

  Colbert glides toward her. “Missy Kensington! Oh, Lord, how you’ve grown! Missy!”

  He twirls her. Carell looks on, confused.

  “Shirley! I have two kids of my own now and I named my girl Shirley and my boy Wentworth.”

  “Well,” Colbert smiles, “I’m twice blessed.”

  When she exits, Carell finally gets to ask the question we’ve been waiting for. “What was that all about?”

  “We’re old friends.”

  “Shirley Wentworth?”

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you. When I’m home, I’m an old black woman. Let’s get something to eat. C’mon.”

  The high point of the scene—which they would call “Maya”—comes as Dave Razowsky steps on stage and humbly greets Shirley, hat in hand. We soon see how much they loved, and still love, each other, though in this southern town there is no future for a white man in love with an old black woman. The tragedy hangs over them:

  “May I call on you later?” Razowsky pleads so tenderly.

  They stare at one another, obviously yearning. (Carell, watching upstage, is speec
hless.) Too scared to breathe, Colbert and Razowsky try to fight what we know is coming, but their love knows no color. It is too strong. Slowly, sweetly, their faces draw together, and they kiss. It is not a sloppy comedy kiss, but a beautiful kiss, held well past the point of discomfort and not played for laughs. “When that scene debuted,” Razowsky recalled, “we had people in the audience just shouting the worst names at us. I could not believe it and Stephen could not believe it, but that’s the guts we had and that’s the chutzpah that Stephen had in that moment, in 1994, to go, ‘I am going to kiss that man, that way.’”

  “Acceptance [of suffering] is not defeat,” Colbert would say. “Acceptance is just awareness.” He loved what J.R.R. Tolkien had written, “What punishments of God are not gifts?” It required gratitude.

  It required discomfort—what Jeff Michalski meant when he told Colbert he had to love the bomb—but living through it, that was freedom.

  “Boy,” Colbert said, “did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that’s why. Maybe, I don’t know. That might be why you don’t see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It’s that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”

  The high-profile success of Jazz Freddy was a mixed blessing for Del Close, on the one hand drawing attention to his dynastic influence, while on the other, setting off an artistic chain reaction that cribbed iO’s monopoly on innovation. Duly wowed by Jazz Freddy, Second City’s fervent youngblood producer, Kelly Leonard, hired many of its rising stars, along with some iO veterans, into Second City’s touring company. “Del knew what that meant,” Pat Finn said. It was now only a matter of time before Close’s original, longform thinking seeped into Second City’s mainstage, and from there, perhaps even America’s mainstream. He wanted glory. And he deserved it.

  As appetite for longform grew, Halpern’s phone started ringing with improv questions from all over the world. What was iO, this training ground for SNL’s Chris Farley? Who was Del Close? What, or who, was Harold?

  The time had come, she reasoned, to answer everything in a book, to write a comedy manual for students. It could do for improv comedy what Spolin’s Improvisation for the Theater did for pure improvisation.

  “I want nothing to do with it,” Close snapped.

  “Come on,” Halpern returned, “you have to write it with me.”

  “It would be like writing a religion. As soon as you’ve got it down on paper, it’s going to be out of date.”

  “But the basic tenets about how to care for each other onstage, that’s how you start. That isn’t going to change.”

  So Halpern began writing on her own, and enlisted Kim Howard Johnson, formerly of Baron’s Barracudas, to help edit and furnish the manuscript with interviews.

  “Who’s going to buy a book on improvisation?” Close asked Johnson partway into writing. “Maybe some people in Chicago. Maybe.”

  But after reading the finished draft, Close changed his tune. He contributed here and there and came to endorse the project wholeheartedly. When the book, Truth in Comedy, came out in 1994, it brought a new flood of interest to the iO theater. All across the country, improv groups of amateurs and professionals alike took it as their bible, quoting its “rules” (made to be broken) like psalms. Thus did Del’s longform begin to supplant shortform as the artistic superlative of improv comedy. “By 1994,” Kelly Leonard wrote, “there were enough of these longform improvisers in [Second City’s] system and they were itching to do longform work—so we decided we needed to give them an outlet as we didn’t want to lose them—so we created ‘Lois Kaz’ as a new kind of alternative show that we would do on normally dark nights in the e.t.c.” Directed by Noah Gregoropoulos and featuring the likes of Scott Adsit, Kevin Dorff, Adam McKay, Nancy Walls, Dave Koechner, and Brian Stack, Lois Kaz was Second City’s first fully improvised longform show, much like Jazz Freddy in form and structure, but with an added touch of Spolin-style space work (like the time Kevin Dorff played a wave). The show was a huge hit, earning Leonard “the cultural buy-in to do more adventurous casting” and signaling, to Del Close, the bittersweet end of an era. The Harold had grown up and left home.

  He dedicated Truth in Comedy to Severn Darden, Ted Flicker, and Elaine May.

  Mike and Elaine were out to dinner.

  She looked up. “You know what bothers me about God?”

  “That he hates arrogance so much, but doesn’t seem to mind cruelty?”

  “Exactly.”

  Adam McKay never thought he’d find himself at Second City, tourist trap and, of late, bastion of family-friendly comedy, but on a lark, he auditioned (he was broke; they paid), and to his amazement, got in. Like a spy stationed across enemy lines, he would incite a touch of UCB-style havoc wherever his touring company went. There was that time in Dallas when upperclassman Steve Carell paid a visit to his future wife, Nancy Walls, then touring with McKay, when McKay invited Carell to join him onstage for a bit of audience participation. (It had all been rehearsed.) As planned, Carell’s “improv” was so embarrassingly inept, McKay lambasted him onstage (Carell cried), and the audience left horrified. (“We weren’t invited back,” Kelly Leonard said.)

  As McKay climbed the old hierarchy from TourCo to e.t.c., he began to miss his antic UCB days of staged suicides and public malfeasance. He was thinking of quitting when Second City director Tom Gianas, bored with the thirty-five-year-old sketch and blackout conventions of the mainstage show, approached McKay in 1995 and began what would be a monthlong conversation, one that would permanently mutate the chromosomes of Second City.

  “I’m doing a mainstage show,” Gianas told him. “I want to break every rule and I want you to do it.”

  “For real? Like we can really do whatever we want to do?”

  “Yes. I mean it.”

  It was long overdue. A string of bad press, the incessant innovations of iO graduates, and—the last straw—Second City’s horrible best of show, 1994’s Old Wine in New Bottles, directed by Sheldon Patinkin, practically demanded a total reconfiguration. Easily the coolest improv in Chicago was taking place on Monday nights at iO. The Armando Diaz Experience, named (by McKay) for its first guest monologist was, to Tina Fey, “the big thing in improv culture,” a loosely structured longform suggested by a day in the life of the guest monologist. Favoring the everyday as reported by anybody, the Armando recalled Sills and Shepherd’s intentions for the early Compass. Fey said, “I always thought that was the appeal of it. ‘I’m going to have my random friend who is not an improviser just tell about his day.’” But where Sills and Shepherd endeavored to create playable forms not just about the people but for the people, the Armando was strictly experts-only. “It was so far from Spolin,” Fey said. “No one would start a scene by polishing apples or doing the dishes [while waiting for an idea to develop]. If you were in an Armando, you didn’t find your way to the scene; you entered with an idea right away in a way [Spolin] would have discouraged.” The most satisfying Armandos wanted both kinds of player, UCB and Spolin, to “enter strong [with an idea],” Fey said, “and then improvise. There’s regular jump rope and then there’s double Dutch,” Fey added. “That’s what this was.” She knew she had earned the respect of her predecessors, the most skillful improvisers in Chicago, when she was asked, one night, to be the guest monologist.

  Gianas and McKay, meanwhile, started having lunches at Second City.

  “If you could open a show any way you wanted, what would you do?”

  “Well,” McKay said, formulating the first of many UCB-esque answers, “I’d put the cast in gas masks and I’d accuse the audience of crimes against humanity.”

  “All right. Great. What else would you do?”

  Improvise.

  Ironically, improv, at America’s foremost improvisational theater, had become an endangered species. Most of Second City’s after-hours “improvisations” were really unscripted rehearsals; the audience suggestion was often littl
e more than a conduit to sketches in progress. “We wanted to change all that,” Kelly Leonard explained, “and do an all-improvised mainstage show.”

  The idea evolved. “We know we can make them laugh,” improviser Scott Adsit reflected. “Can we do anything else on the way to the laugh?” Gianas and McKay would break all rules, and eliminate jokey blackouts, reuse characters from scene to scene, and replay old scenes with variations (like one of Del’s Deconstructions)—creating a scripted show that looked like a Harold, but with all the effrontery of the Upright Citizens Brigade. The rumor that Blockbuster video was covertly editing their cassettes for content led to a “What if they asked the audience to throw their Blockbuster cards at the stage and the improvisers ran around with scissors, picking them up and cutting them up?”

  They called the show Piñata Full of Bees, which is what it was.

  Piñata played against a wall of exposed brick, not the friendly old colored doors, the lights stayed low, and instead of the regular piano accompaniment, they played prerecorded tracks, some harsh. “But these packaging differences are nothing compared to the material itself,” raved the Chicago Reader’s Jack Helbig, “easily the funniest and most intelligent, surprising, and creative stuff Second City has done in a long time . . . The show contains some wonderfully dark, taboo-breaking humor: skits about a killer ferret, a sweet meet in an elevator that ends in murder, and a harrowing journey worthy of R. Crumb through the dark side of the ’50s. Second City proved a long time ago that a comedy troupe can survive and even thrive (thanks to tourists, conventioneers, and suburbanites) long after its artistic death. Now they’re showing that there’s artistic life after death.”