Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

There was the time, bored at a fancy benefit dinner, when he entertained himself by throwing silverware, one piece at a time, through an open window.

  There was the time, at the Friars Club, when a kid came up to him and asked for an autograph. “Sidney,” the kid instructed. Murray took Sidney’s outstretched pencil and pad, and wrote, “Sidney, run away from home tonight—Bill Murray.”

  Bill Murray had been running away from home, moment by moment, long before he became famous. It’s what brought him to Second City. But why should that first fateful “Yes, and” be his last? “Why,” he asked, “should I devote my whole life to this career which happened so accidentally?” Better to devote his life to accident. He would stay light on his feet, always alert to audience suggestion. Kickball? Roosevelt Island? “We just figured he was someone’s dad on the other team and kept playing, NBD,” wrote a kickballer on a website devoted to Bill Murray sightings. “The man kicked the ball and ran pretty well to first base, trying to round to second, but one of my teammates chased him back to first, deciding not to attempt to peg the man. That was when everyone on my team realized who he was . . . BILL MURRAY DECIDED TO PLAY KICKBALL WITH US!”

  The internet gave Murray a stage for the greatest improvisational run of his career, a venue for those Bill Murray stories formerly confined to rumor and word of mouth. Seen goofing on Pebble Beach, Wrigley Field, or a pub in Scotland, Murray, as the internet’s Zelig, man of a thousand men and Robin Hood of free play, liberated himself from the prison of typecasting. Google Search contained his multitudes, the spiritual and social splendors of a life lived improvisationally.

  In 2013 he was spotted in his hometown of Chicago, first in the house and then onstage, standing near the back of the ensemble, as they sang Second City’s “Good Night Song” at the memorial for Bernie Sahlins.

  Mike said to Elaine:

  “You’ve changed more than anybody I’ve known in my entire life. You changed from a dangerous person to someone who is only benign. I have not—”

  “What a vicious thing to say.”

  “But it’s true! All the things about, say, certain heroines have come true of you. If you can’t say anything nice, you don’t say anything. You never ever attack people to their face or behind their back. You’re the most discreet person about other people that I have ever met in my life. I haven’t heard you unkind for fifty years. You have done a complete 180 degree turn.”

  “This is such a horrible thing of you to say.”

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “I feel exactly the same way about you too.”

  “You bitch.”

  “Blackout.”

  Laughter.

  “That was great, Mike.”

  Goodnight, Everyone

  I have no idea what improv does next—no one does—but if it’s anything like The OkStupid Show, the form I chanced on in early 2016, at UCB’s Franklin Avenue outpost in Hollywood, a mile and a half from the original site of Viola Spolin’s Young Actors Company, Spolin’s vow, “Anyone can improvise,” may finally be proven irrefutably true. One of the sincerest, funniest, most painfully raw and exuberant nights I’ve ever had in an improv theater began as two civilians—amateurs, in accord with David Shepherd’s original intentions for a people’s Compass—took their chairs on opposite sides of a bistro table that had been waiting for them in the dead center of the stage. Before the show, these two individuals, in this case a man and a woman, had been matched online, via a dating website. Now they had come to UCB Franklin to have their first date live, in front of us, a tiny, one-hundred-person audience. Scary? Terrifying. Two “cupids,” trained improvisers, were stationed at the table’s edge to goose slips into small talk, keep the scene moving forward (to a clear rejection or possible next date), and refill the prospective couple’s red plastic cups—with alcohol, of course—like waiters in an actual café. Other than that, the figuring-it-out couple—with no concept of the “rules” of improv—are left to themselves. And the date begins.

  One might think that under such contrived circumstances, neither participant could really feel, or act, “themselves,” but whatever self-consciousness blights these untrained performers as they grapple toward each other, awkwardly, under the hot lights, is canceled out by the self-consciousness and awkwardness accompanying any first date. Remember Mike and Elaine in “Teenagers”? In this “game,” the unnaturalness is natural. Soon we forget—as these newborn improvisers have—that this is a show. Emotionally, we leave the theater. Now I’m a voyeur, at that imagined café, listening from the next table, rooting for him to break down her wall, for her to see he’s not worth her time, for phoniness to be exposed or romance to fly. I—we—saw it all (for seven dollars a seat), a complete abridgement of the human adventure as good as any performance of anything, Shakespeare to Jules Feiffer. For if there is no better drama (or comedy) in the world than the comedy (or drama) of actual life, the inventors of OKStupid, in returning, as Paul Sills did, improvisation to the “real” people of the audience, have erased the dividing line between art and being, and through spontaneity, united all.

  As it is a truth universally acknowledged that the tenets of improvisation, founded on playful cooperation and mutual self-discovery, contain so many, if not all, of the ingredients of love, it follows that the sustained and meaningful practice of one regularly leads to the other. The inclinations of each ensemble change with the times, but climb all the way down to the bottom of the family tree, to Mike and Elaine, sitting there in the waiting room of Illinois Central’s Randolph Street Station, and note the slight dilation of their pupils. Those are the eyes of Spolin and Sills, 1063 Avenue Road, the 505, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey . . .

  Joy, improvisers understand, is a custom of the form, and providing you play by the rules—“the rules of improvisation,” Eugenie Ross-Leming told me, “are just good manners”—you will never be in short supply, even when you get lost, because all the fun is in getting lost, and so the more lost you are, the more fun there is, and therefore, for the best results, get lost as often as you can, pursue the strange, the “impossible,” the horrific, the very far away.

  Failure, improv teaches, is actually freedom’s friend; it may score less, but it lives a whole lot more. And the more it lives, the stronger it gets. Despite what you might think about age stealing genius the way it erodes the body, improvisers prove that when dauntless instincts agree to play, the exact opposite is true. With exercise, those tendons strengthen. With practice they renew. In any context, Elaine still leapt; Mike still caught her. Years and years later, their perfect convergence held.

  There are people you’ve known for years—actual friends and loved ones—who remain remote no matter how many times you see them, or how hard you try to connect; a good improviser, no matter how new your acquaintance, incubates you in warmth. He makes you better. In his company, you are safe to be free and confident, because this person, in his understanding, sees you.

  Wherever there is improvisation, anyone can speak her mind, and that mind, folded in with others’, will form a totally original, harmonious entity—thesis, synthesis, antithesis—the democratic spirit channeled through art. Improvisation, then, is inherently egalitarian; it is about how we can be free together. Improvisation, then, is also inherently social; as Spolin and Sills knew, its singular power to fire rooms full of strangers into instant families burgeons real trust. And where there is trust, there is, as Nichols and May recognized, the fearlessness to plunge into the unmapped oceans of one’s psyche, one’s many personae, and surface onstage with the treasures of infinite selves. Improvisation, then, is inherently metaphysical; as Del Close, seeking for himself altered realms of consciousness and higher peaks of experience, intuited early on, it teaches you that there is more, that you don’t know you. Not all of you. You only ever know the you you know. The rest of you, the complete and boundless you, is a prism of infinite refraction, waiting for a shock of light—a spontaneous impulse from another—to surprise a beam
of unknown you to life.

  Acknowledgments

  This book began thirty years ago in the Pacific Palisades with Jack and Joe Dolman, Andrea Martin, and Bob Dolman, and the taste of waffles and carpet, the flavor of laughing so hard at SCTV I fell over, mouth first, and regurgitated breakfast at the floor. Over the years—the Bestor Years, as we call them—my lips spent more time on that carpet than on any person, food, or drink. It was there, many detergents later, that I first asked myself, Who are these people, the people of SCTV? What miracle brought them—the funniest ensemble, I still believe, ever assembled—together? And while most bands end, and end acrimoniously, what keeps this one, even to this day, so close? That last question was the one I wanted answered most of all; it was the one that could pertain to me, to my friends and me, and answering it, I knew, would make life better. The how of comedy was incidental; what mattered then, as now, was how artists, in life and in work, collaborate, fall in love, and stay together. I had a hunch paradise was on the other side of that one.

  Hundreds of conversations and three decades later, I found myself on February 24, 2014, catalyzed by the loss of Harold Ramis, following the breadcrumbs back to Second City, Toronto, Chicago, Nichols, May, and Viola Spolin, then forward to The Graduate, to Saturday Night Live and on. That’s when I started writing. How fortunate, then, that I happened to have Marshall McLuhan right there, and could turn to Andrea and Bob. But more than offering information, they energized me. They joined in. They opened every door, materialized doors where I saw walls, and where there seemed no way through helped me carve out caves and gladly walked me in. When it was too dark to see, Jeffrey Wasson, Cindy Wasson, Sophie Wasson, and Maria Diaz lit candles. When I was hopeless, they waited, with patience and imaginative understanding.

  Every step of the way, Andrew Alexander, Kelly Leonard, Erica Ramis, and Martin Short gave me more than everything I asked for. I am so grateful to you.

  What I always hope for in an interview is someone who, in addition to having a gigantic memory for emotion and detail, is willing to entertain my theories and ideas no matter how farfetched, to let us play with the whys and wherefores of their own experience, to improvise with me. This is where I was lucky. I got to improvise with improvisers about improvisation. They were Annie Abrams, Trevor Albert, Andrew Alexander, Alan Arkin, René Auberjonois, Gary Austin, Ronnie Austin, Dick Blasucci, Valri Bromfield, Jimmy Carrane, William Carruth, John Carter, Sally Cochrane, Larry Coven, Nell Cox, Dennis Cunningham, Joan Darling, Dana Delany, Deb Devine, Lena Dolman, Leslie Dolman, Robert Dolman, Robin Duke, Murphy Dunne, Jayne Eastwood, Phyllis Epstein, Robert Falls, Jules Feiffer, Tina Fey, Pat Finn, Jim Fisher, Joe Flaherty, Barbara Flicker, Bruce J. Friedman, Nancy Geller, Kathy Greenwood, Charna Halpern, Larry Hankin, Barbara Harris, Michael Hausman, Cordis Heard, Kathy Hendrickson, Beth Henley, Buck Henry, Dustin Hoffman, Tino Insana, Norman Jewison, Kim “Howard” Johnson, Jackie Joseph, Elaine Kagan, Sheldon Kahn, Judith Kampmann, Steven Kampmann, Victor Kemper, Michael Kirchberger, Joe Klein, William Joseph Kruzykowski, Nathan Lane, Martha Lauzen, Kelly Leonard, Eugene Levy, Anne Libera, Joe Liss, Andrea Martin, Allaudin Mathieu, Paul Mazursky, Adam McKay, Lorne Michaels, Michael Miller, Judy Morgan, Robert Morse, Gregory Mosher, Alan Myerson, Mick Napier, Mike Nichols, Catherine O’Hara, Marcus O’Hara, Sheldon Patinkin, Diane Paulus, David Picker, Judy Belushi Pisano, Frank Price, Erica Mann Ramis, Harold Ramis, David Rasche, Dave Razowsky, Ivan Reitman, Eugenie Ross-Leming, Stephen Rotter, Gena Rowlands, Harvey Sabinson, Jane Sahlins, Paul Sand, Stephen Schwartz, Michael Segel, Cybill Shepherd, David Shepherd, Katherine Short, Martin Short, Nancy Short, Aretha Sills, Carol Sills, Brian Stack, Lynn Stalmaster, Douglas Steckler, David Steinberg, Violet Stiel, Dave Thomas, Rick Thomas, Stephen Tobolowsky, Larry Turman, Pat Whitley, Fred Willard, and Bill Wrubel.

  Thank you to the librarians and archivists: foremost, Sondra Archer, Jenny Romero, and everyone at the Motion Picture Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills; the great Ned Comstock at USC’s Cinema Arts Library, who was still thinking about my book even after I left; Michael Golding, who allowed me to look through David Shepherd’s most valuable papers; Barbara Flicker, who trusted me with treasures; Sam Shaw, who took a break from his work on a forthcoming Committee documentary and helped, always promptly, with queries and photos; those at Northwestern University who saw me through Viola Spolin’s archive; Chris Pagnozzi, who let me run wild through the Second City Archive, and who never let on that I was bothering him, if I was bothering him, which I hope I wasn’t; and as ever, Patrick Hoffman, et al., at the New York Public Library’s Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, which is even better than Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, I promise. You all put me at ease, stretched the rules, lent me your expertise. Thank you.

  Thank you to Caroline Aaron and Jamie Foreman, Janet Cross, Colleen Dodson-Baker, Nicolette Donen, Nancye Ferguson, Jenni McCormick, Hendriik Riik, Lisa and Dustin Hoffman, Deborah Solomon, George Stelz­ner, and Alicia Van Couvering, who facilitated interviews, and in the case of one particular interview, tried very hard.

  There aren’t many things in this life I love without qualification. The Robbins Office is one of them. As the grace and dignity of my friend and agent, David Halpern, is not native to our era, his presence is as rare as good luck. And his counsel refined as diamonds. This is not hyperbole. Thank you, David and Kathy Robbins, once again, for giving me a life as a writer and a home on Park Avenue. Thank you, Rick Pappas, for recommending me to Mike Nichols; I was overcome by your endorsement. I still am. Thank you to Arielle Asher, Rachelle Bergstein, and Lisa Kessler for being so warm when I was in a cold panic, and Lucinda Blumenfeld, for every restaurant you brightened, thank you.

  At Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, my editor, Eamon Dolan, made everything smarter; like a good parent, the director of a years-long improvisation, he was there when I needed him and obligingly absent when I didn’t; he yanked the weeds from my mind and where I thought nothing could grow burgeoned the most exotic flowers, many of which he was wise to cut back entirely. Thank you, Eamon. If you’re proud, I’m proud. To Rosemary McGuinness, whose voice is a lullaby, and Melissa Dobson, whose copyedits were a dream, thank you for your soft handling of this tired writer.

  The complete story of improvisational comedy—which is changing and becoming even as you read this—can be written only after the whole thing ends, when its last theater closes and its last player dies. But until then, which I hope is never, its history will be a work in progress, and any telling of it, like this one, only a draft. For this and too many other reasons, I don’t recommend anyone write a history of improv comedy—or, for that matter, a history of anything still with us—but if you must, and I hope you do, you should surround yourself with (in addition to the names listed above) the likes of Jeanine Basinger, Amy Blessing, Peter Bogdanovich, Maria Chilewicz, Gary Copeland, Marla Frazee, David Freeman, Judy Gingold, Liz Hanks, Beth Henley, Alex Horwitz, Allyn Johnston, David Jones, India Jones, Suzanne Joskow, Nathan Lane, Natalie Lehmann, Zander Lehmann, Lynne Littman, Veronica Lombardo, Jill Mazursky, Jocelyn Medawar, Brandon Millan, Graham Moore, Jackie Nalpant, Amanda Parker, Jane Parkes, Lynn Povich, Nic Ratner, Sarah Shepard, Steve Shepard, Katherine Short, Holland Sutton, Ted Walch, and Simone White. The only way I could get myself to write this book was to dangle at the end of every working day the carrot of your company so that I might peek over the anxiety to the coming night of laughter.

  Sam Wasson

  December 2017

  Notes

  This book is especially indebted to Jeffrey Sweet’s Something Wonderful Right Away, Janet Coleman’s The Compass, and Kim Howard Johnson’s The Funniest One in the Room: The Lives and Legends of Del Close. They were with me throughout, and if you’re interested in the subject, they should be with you too.

  EPIGRAPH

  vii “Ours is the only modern country”: Harold Clurman, foreword to the 1957 edition, in his The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre and the Thirties (1945; New York:
Da Capo, 1983), viii.

  HI, HOW ARE YOU?

  xii “It’s kind of like fireworks”: Del Close, in The Second City 15th Anniversary Special, directed by Eugene Levy (SCTV, 1988), DVD.

  1. 1940–1955

  3 tag, jacks, marbles, hopscotch: Carol Sills to author.

  3 “Play means happiness”: Neva Boyd, “The Theory of Play,” Intuitive Learning Systems Foundation website, www.spolin.com, accessed June 5, 2017, http://spolin.com/?page_id=1068.

  4 “When we find ourselves”: Ibid.

  4 “qualities which cannot be talked about”: Clayton D. Drinko, Theatrical Improvisation, Consciousness, and Cognition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 18.

  4 “a non-authoritarian climate”: Richard Christiansen, “Second City’s Founding Father Comes Home,” Chicago Tribune, September 21, 1980.

  4 “The unfolding of the scene”: Viola Spolin, Improvisation for the Theater: A Handbook of Teaching and Directing Techniques, 3rd ed. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 257.

  4 “the first intelligent question”: Lenny Kleinfeld, “Del Close,” Chicago, March 1987, p. 146.

  5 “My grandfather”: Ibid.

  5 “Every few months, the cast”: Viola Spolin Papers, Northwestern University, Box 1, Folder 4, Early Work, “Creative Recreational Theater.”

  5 In 1940, in Chicago: Howard Vincent O’Brien, “All Things Considered,” Chicago Daily News, May 26, 1939.

  5 On a trip out West: Carol Sills to author.

  6 “It was like stepping”: Paul Sand to author.

  6 roast chicken, herbs, and cigarettes: Ibid.

  6 “Viola was a powerful woman”: Ronnie Austin to author.

  6 “The games were really”: Jackie Joseph to author.