Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  “Stephen,” she said, “you look so tired, why do you look so tired?”

  “Well, Anna, I’ve been working late after the show. I’m writing a script to get ready for the Correspondents’ Dinner. I’m going to perform for the president.”

  “You perform in front of the president?”

  “Yeah, I’ll be like five feet from him.”

  “But you’re a satirist. You’re a critic. You’re going to do your jokes right next to him?”

  “Yeah.”

  She took his chin in her hand. “This is a good country.”

  Mike Nichols climbed into bed with Diane Sawyer and The Colbert Report as often as he could, with awe and gratitude, and for what Colbert had accomplished, a surge of grandfatherly pride. “Every time I watch Colbert,” he said, “I am reminded that we really live in a free country.” Despite all he had, watching Colbert or Stewart, Nichols would always yearn a little for his old improvisational platforms, the Compass and Elaine May, the satirist’s prerogative to win revenge instantly, and that thing that happens in living theaters, when ten or a thousand evolving people, formerly strangers, are thrown off their scripts and joined together in laughter and self-discovery.

  A monumentally clever, breathtakingly treacherous, backhanded compliment to the Bush administration and the press, Colbert’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner roast was received about as well as could have been expected by those present. But as for the rest of America—a zealous portion of which “Stephen Colbert” addressed as “Nation”—the performance was the era’s defining satirical expression. While the New York Times did not cover Colbert’s speech, the C-SPAN video went viral overnight, prompting C-SPAN to order YouTube to remove the video (they would make it available for download at $24.95) a short time before it was uploaded again. The discrepancy between big media and the tastes of the internet generation was never more pronounced, signifying more strongly than ever the death of one by the birth of the other. Colbert’s “Nation,” after the Correspondents’ Dinner roast, really was Colbert’s.

  He ran into Martin Short at a party a few days later.

  “Were you scared?” Short asked.

  “No. That day when I was a kid. When the plane crashed. That day I was scared.”

  Colbert’s monster, which had begun as a joke, had gained, literally overnight, the support and power of an actual autocrat, and with his own television show to command his subjects to action, he upgraded the object of his satire from extremist punditry to the entire mechanism of unchecked authority. The joke was not a joke: the producer in Colbert found himself, in his own words, “Yes, anding” opportunities to take “Stephen Colbert” out of the studio and, with an air of is-this-or-isn’t-this? reminiscent of an Andy Kaufman happening, place his alter ego, or his influence, in real-world situations, “as a pebble that I can throw into the news and then report on my own ripples.” For instance:

  After Bing West, assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, appeared on The Colbert Report, West extended a big hand to Colbert and noticed, on Colbert’s wrist, a silicone WristStrong bracelet, a running Report joke on Lance Armstrong’s LIVESTRONG bracelet, in support of the Yellow Ribbon Fund, a program to help veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. General David Petraeus, Colbert told West, had noticed the bracelet—it had prompted him to invite Colbert to Iraq.

  “If General Petraeus invites you to do your show in Iraq,” West returned, “you should do it.”

  “Gosh,” Colbert thought to himself, “an improviser would say, ‘Yes.’”

  And then they were in Iraq. “The people in Iraq were so grateful that we came,” Colbert said, “but the feeling of gratitude we had in return was enormous. It was a physical thing in the air during the shows. It was almost as if I didn’t see the audience—I only saw the grateful space between us. It was as beautiful and awesome as a night sky.”

  The audience. They were playing with “Stephen Colbert.” And Stephen Colbert, and his writers, played back. He said, “These initiations and these responses are where we make our discoveries and they give us games.” On air, Colbert joked about wanting to name a new bridge over the Danube the Stephen Colbert Bridge. Suddenly, fourteen million people, voting in an online naming competition, cast their ballots for Colbert “and that,” Colbert said, “led to a continuing game.” He did a “Better Know a District” segment with Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey from Marin County, and joked about George Lucas, a Marin resident, contributing, in some form, with his own green screen special effects. The next morning, the Colbert staff discovered a YouTuber had already begun the process. That turned into a three-month game, the “Green Screen Challenge,” in which viewers were invited to place Colbert in a digital environment, a concept the band the Decemberists then used for one of their own music videos, which brought on Colbert’s retaliatory segment “Stephen Colbert’s Rock and Awe: Countdown to Guitarmageddon.” (One such game, The Colbert versus Willie Nelson feud, was resolved with a treaty Colbert signed as Compass and Second City improviser Eugene Troobnick.) “All those things,” Colbert said, “were extended improvisational games with my audience.”

  The lines blurred and the breadth of Colbert’s games grew with his courage, one feeding the other, until Colbert’s long-latent activism began to show.

  In 2010 he appeared, in character, to testify before a subcommittee on illegal immigration. (They invited him; he replied, “You know this is going to be a terrible idea?”)

  “Good morning,” Colbert began, sitting before the subcommittee. “My name is Stephen Colbert and I’m an American citizen. It is an honor and a privilege to be here today. Congresswoman Lofgren asked me to share my vast experience spending one day as a migrant farmworker. I am happy to use my celebrity to draw attention to this important, complicated issue, and I certainly hope that my star power can bump this hearing all the way up to C-SPAN1.”

  He responded, under fire, to questions in character.

  Q. “How many of those individuals were illegal and how many were legal?”

  A. “I didn’t ask them for their papers, though I had a strong urge to.”

  And:

  “Does one day in the field make you an expert witness?”

  “I’m sorry I can’t hear you.”

  “Does one day working in the field make you an expert witness, do you think?”

  “I believe one day of me studying anything makes me an expert in something.”

  “Is that to say it’s more work than you’ve ever done before, right?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s more work than you’ve ever done before in that—”

  “It’s certainly harder than this.”

  And:

  “I actually was a corn packer. And I know that term is offensive to some people because ‘corn packer’ is a derogatory term for a gay Iowan and I hope I didn’t offend anybody.”

  Colbert’s astonishing leap from comedy personality to national spokesperson was without precedent. You would have to go back to Bob Hope to find someone approaching an analog, but even still, Hope’s commentary never surpassed or even reached that of his contemporaries in the news media. Colbert’s had.

  As TV news’s emphasis on entertainment reached new highs (lows?), and the internet, with each passing year, broke another hole in old journalism’s monopoly, a space opened for a commentator with a new kind of integrity, one that openly acknowledged the lack of integrity sweeping the profession. Playing both sides at once—thank you, irony—Colbert not only solved the problem, he managed to convince both the left and the right he was on their side. The internet made it so; it let him improvise for the world. Mere hours after it aired on Comedy Central, everyone with Facebook or Twitter (and increasingly the online outlets of Fox News, MSNBC, and the New York Times) would be sharing Colbert’s latest achievement. You can’t imagine the same ever happening to a Wolf Blitzer—unless something went hilariously wrong on the air.

 
Still, something even bigger was happening. By way of first Jon Stewart, and now Stephen Colbert—in 2009, the written-in addition to Foreign Policy’s list of the world’s top twenty public intellectuals—comedy, surpassing entertainment, became the country’s rhetoric of choice for serious discourse. In an age of partisan politics ad absurdum, it was far less ridiculous than reporting seriously on the world.

  Years later, Harold Ramis would still have Bill Murray dreams. In dreams, they were friends again, the way they were for the first comedies. In those days, no matter the state of the script, Murray was always next to Ramis. He could be counted on to improvise an ailing scene back to health. “That was our alliance, kind of, our big bond,” Ramis said. “I could help him be the best funny Bill Murray he could be, and I think he appreciated that then. And I don’t know where that went, but it’s there on film.”

  Finally, after a complete round of rejections from every studio in Hollywood, Adam McKay and Will Ferrell got Anchorman its green light. Old School had made a movie star of Ferrell, and the windfall raised his comedy circle—a company that included McKay, Judd Apatow, and a host of other improvisers—to a new premium. Many had been friends for years. That most were represented by the United Talent Agency made them easier to package, that they had grown up on the same comedies made them a coherent ensemble. “We are all the spawn of [Harold] Ramis,” Apatow said. “We all grew up on Stripes and Caddyshack and Animal House.”

  Among all the improvisers on Anchorman, McKay’s first film as director, Steve Carell was probably the most attuned to the financial implications of improvising on a movie. As they played, he could actually hear the film, the money, running through the camera, a reminder that Hollywood was not Second City, his improvisational choices, or “alts,” should be modified accordingly, and that despite the freedom the executives had conferred on McKay’s ensemble, they should not roam from story. The 2000s were not the ’70s. Anchorman was not an Elaine May movie, where all was subject to rediscovery; it was not a low-budget Christopher Guest movie, where improvisers could know where they were going but not how they were going to get there; Anchorman, emblematic of the new Hollywood comedy, was a big-budget home movie, caught between convention and invention.

  It was three or four takes as written, then McKay, his camera still rolling, would call out ideas, loudly, for the actors’ immediate implementation. “I know the rules of improv,” he would explain, “I know I’ve got to make the actors feel safe enough to fail, so I start throwing out ideas, and some of them suck, and so they get it. They know that it’s cool.” Often, he would get so involved in the scene yelling out ideas he would go home hoarse.

  Judd Apatow, an Anchorman producer, approached Carell between takes. “You have any ideas for a movie?”

  Carell told Apatow about a scene he used to do at Second City, the one they improvised a bunch but never put into a show, about a middle-aged virgin pretending he was sexually experienced. Carell still remembered the line about breasts: the virgin claimed they felt like big bags of sand.

  Apatow loved it. “I could walk into a studio right now and sell this based on that line alone.”

  Which is what he did.

  Carell and Apatow completed a draft of The 40-Year-Old Virgin early in 2005. It would be Carell’s first starring role and Apatow’s first film as di­rector.

  Apatow worked like McKay, and as Ramis and Reitman before them, making comedy by committee. “It’s almost a think-tank approach,” Will Ferrell explained, “and it gives you about thirty percent more options.” The collaboration extended from the improvisations on set—which, in Apatow’s films, could run out entire magazines of film, and leave hours of unused footage—to postproduction, a process Apatow centered on test-screenings. Seeking audience feedback on his film’s every aspect, from jokes to song selections and even, in one case, a five-second-long music cue, Apatow continued to rediscover his film up to its very release. “Judd is like a feedback machine,” said director Paul Feig. “He wants feedback of the person he doesn’t even like or trust.”

  Owing largely to the strength of Carell’s performance, The 40-Year-Old Virgin exceeded test audience’s expectations. “What became clear very early is that people wanted the story,” Apatow said. “They didn’t want a joke fest. All the notes were: You can cut the jokes.” It is an ancient custom of working writer-directors to envision a dream film too personal, too challenging to match reigning commercial tastes; Apatow embraced his executives as part of the creative team. He said, “They didn’t tell me anything I disagreed with.” Either the director had his finger on the pulse, or the pulse had its grip on 40-Year-Old-Virgin; the movie was a breakthrough for the star, the director, and the slacker style and substance of the Apatow signature, inconceivable without improvisation. “I look at the people I meet,” Apatow said. “No one’s dying to have a lot of responsibility in their lives.” His selective use of improvisation, not dialogue, conveys it. Apatow said, “It’s very hard to capture the energy of men joking around with each other if it’s completely scripted. You just feel its stiffness. It’s very hard to fake laughter, the way you laugh when a friend says something crazy.” He might, over the course of an improvisation, write down funny lines on Post-its, as reminders to hand back to the actors after a take. “Say that again!” He might shoot the same scene with different costumes, in different locations just in case, in editing, he discovered the scene was better here than there.

  At the Deauville Film Festival with Virgin, Apatow and Seth Rogen discovered they were staying at the same hotel as Harold Ramis, a hero to both in two different ways. “As a Jewish actor with a very deep voice who was kind of large,” Rogen said, “he was kind of the only precedent there was for success.” Abounding with lovable underachievers, Ramis’s comedies spoke to the eternal boy in Apatow; they made him want to make Ramis’s kinds of movies in Ramis’s kind of way. “If I was 20 years old,” he reflected, “I would sign up for classes at Second City or iO—that’s, like, the ultimate life I wish I lived.” So it was with humility and disbelief that Apatow called up to Ramis’s hotel room and introduced himself, or rather, reintroduced himself. They had met before, Apatow explained, twenty-three years earlier, back in Long Island, when he interviewed Ramis for his high school’s radio show. Ramis didn’t need an explanation. He remembered the article in the New York Times; Apatow had said they were all the spawn of Harold Ramis.

  In short order, Apatow and Rogen went to see Ramis’s new film, The Ice Harvest, and all three went out to dinner. The connection was instant. “We’re in the same business,” Ramis said, “and we all speak the same comedy language. There was a familiarity and a family feeling.” The next night, they switched. Ramis went to see The 40-Year-Old-Virgin, all went out to dinner again, and Apatow told Ramis about his next movie, Knocked Up. It would be Rogen’s first starring role, he explained, but of course, they were still writing it.

  “I never finish a script,” Apatow would say. “I just start.”

  He would cast a spiritual father, Harold Ramis, to play Seth Rogen’s screen father. Their scenes, improvised from script, were, for Rogen, “a thrill that I constantly remind my real father that he can never ever actually live up to.”

  “Do you have any weed on you?” Ramis asked Rogen after the shoot.

  “I don’t have any on me, but I do have some at my apartment . . . It’s around 45 minutes away.”

  “Okay.”

  And off they went.

  Elaine May, Mike Nichols, David Shepherd, and other original Compass members gathered at the New Actors Workshop in New York for Paul Sills’s memorial. He died on June 2, 2008.

  Elaine turned to her old cohorts, sitting all in a row beside her, and with little-girl enthusiasm Shepherd thought so unlike her, chirped, “Isn’t this great? Don’t you think? To be all back together?”

  Sills, Shepherd mused, would certainly think so. He died knowing nothing is ever finished.

  Oftentimes, days after the fact, Bi
ll Murray would look back and realize, no, he hadn’t been connected to himself, he hadn’t always felt the feelings, his actual actual feelings, and the succulent sense of calm that comes to all who feast on the present. What had stopped him? Fame, mostly; his persona, and the stale and automatic reactions it incurred in him. Who got to decide what Bill Murray was? “Fuck loss of privacy,” he said. “That’s not the least of it. That you can handle. You can buy privacy, to an extent. What you really lose is yourself, your real self. Every time you’re reminded that you are the guy from TV, you sort of gravitate to being that guy. You leave yourself to answer that need for someone else.” Fame was a script, but Murray was an improviser.

  So he left the script that fame imposed upon him; he got lost.

  There was the time in the Australian jungle when he moved in with a posse of surfers and lived on rice and night swims. (“I ended up staying seven weeks. It was more than a vacation. It was right on the edge of expatriation.”)

  There was the time he was watching TV, saw something about the Strait of Malacca, flew to Indonesia to see it, checked into an expensive hotel, reconsidered, rented a motorcycle, and ended up at the edge of a volcanic lake, took a room for sixty cents a night, where he watched the live crater through his open window.

  “Would you sign this for my sister?” a fan once asked. “She’s a real diehard.”

  “Try hitting her when she’s sleeping,” he said, putting pen to paper. “Wait till she dozes off, and . . .”

  There was the time, in New York, when he dropped a bill in a panhandler’s bag of coins, then ferreted around in the bag for change.

  “Sorry, I don’t do autographs,” he told one girl. “Gave ’em up for Lent. I do impressions.”

  “Impressions?”

  “Yeah, impressions,” he said, taking the paper from her hand and biting it. “Dental impressions.”