Second City Unscripted : Revolution and Revelation at the World-Famous Comedy Theater

by Thomas, Mike

• ISBN13: 9780345514226
• ISBN10: 034551422X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-09-29
• Publisher: Villard

Summary

In 1959, a group of like-minded Chicagoans joined forces to open a hip new venue dedicated to coffee, cigarettes, conversation, and comedy. The result, a nightly cabaret featuring a troupe of inventive young actors skewering everything from politics to popular culture in witty, rapid-fire, improvised scenes, not only made delighted audiences laughuit made history. Copping its iconic name from a New York journalist's disparaging remark, Chicago's Second City theater brashly defied the role of runner-up and single-handedly made the Windy City North America's cradle of comedic brilliance from which generations of household names would spring. Now, in The Second City Unscripted, a Who's Who of the celebrated comedy camp's alumniuincluding Alan Arkin, David Steinberg, Harold Ramis, Dan Aykroyd, Eugene Levy, Amy Sedaris, and Stephen Colbertutell it like it was in the house that hilarity built. Here are candid tales of John Belushi's raw ambition and chemical experimentation, Bill Murray's heckler-pummeling and lady-killing, superstar Mel Gibson's roof-raising appearance in Braveheart regalia, and legendary director Del Close's shuttling between the comedic asylum he ruled over and the real one he rehabbed in. In this unvarnished, unexpurgated, and unprecedented account, what happened onstage, backstage, and offstage at Second City isn't staying there anymore. From the smash hits and near misses to the love affairs and the bitter feuds, from the showbiz politics and pitfalls to the inspired tomfoolery and heartbreaking tragedy, The Second City Unscripted is part memoir of a cherished era, part time capsule from a comedic renaissance, and part valentine to the exquisite art of being funny. It captures like never before the history of the men and women who caught lightninguand laughteruin a bottle.

Author Biography

Mike Thomas, a staff writer for the Chicago Sun-Times, has interviewed numerous renowned comics and comedic actors–several of them Second City alums–including Jerry Seinfeld, Robin Williams, Carl Reiner, Bill Cosby, Tom and Dick Smothers, Chevy Chase, Sarah Silverman, Richard Lewis, Phyllis Diller, Bob Newhart, Rodney Dangerfield, and Jon Stewart. Thomas’s national magazine work has appeared in Esquire, Smithsonian, and Playboy, and on Salon. He lives in Chicago with his wife and their two daughters.

Table of Contents

Prologue	p. xi
1959-61	p. 3
Coffee and Comedy, Hanging with Hef, and the Birth of a Sensation
1961-67	p. 19
Big Apple Bound, Naked Sonatas, and the Reign of King David
1967-74	p. 35
How to Speak Hippie, Return of the Guru, and a Bowl Full of Fuck
1973-78	p. 65
Livin' Large with Johnny Toronto, the Fury of Murray, and Taking Off in the Great White North
1975-84	p. 91
SCTV: Count Floyd, Johnny LaRue, and a Couple of Hosers, Eh
1975-80	p. 114
Saturday Night Live, the Brothers Belushi, and a Mom Away from Mom
1975-85	p. 135
Mummy Opium, Death of a Hero, and the End of an Era
1978-91	p. 154
Triumphs in Toronto, Shake-ups in Chicago, and a Van Down by the River
1988-95	p. 187
Out with the Old, In with the New, and a Sweet Talker in Sweatpants
1995-2007	p. 212
Renaissance on Wells Street, Chaos in Canada, and the Falls of Giants
2007-Present	p. 242
Offing Obama, Liberal Leanings, and a Still-Beating Heart
Epilogue	p. 247
Acknowledgments	p. 250
Selected Short Biographies of Second Citizens	p. 253
Bibliography	p. 259
Index	p. 265
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Coffee and Comedy, Hanging with Hef, and the Birth of a Sensation 1959–61

Alan Arkin, Barbara Harris, Paul Sills

America was in the midst of a comedy revolution when Bernard Sahlins, Howard Alk, and Paul Sills conspired in 1959 to open a bohemian coffeehouse for recreational smoking, erudite discourse, and satirical theater. Considering the times, it seemed destined for success—or miserable failure.

Alk and Sills had formed a professional bond working together at Chicago's famed folk den the Gate of Horn, where Sills house-managed and Alk ran lights. At that point, the business-oriented Sahlins was a budding producer and a devoted theater enthusiast. In addition to sharing a vision for what would become the Second City, another thing all three had in common was a diploma from the elite University of Chicago. A successful thirty-something entrepreneur, Sahlins had graduated in 1943 and went on to run a lucrative tape recorder manufacturing business. Alk entered the school in 1944 at the age of fourteen. Subsequent to his short-lived involvement with Second City, which ended in the early sixties, he became a respected film editor and cinematographer. In 1950, former military man Sills became a director with University Theater—which staged literary productions on a campus that had no formal theater program—and joined the student drama group Tonight at 8:30, where he worked with Mike Nichols, Elaine May, and several others who'd follow Sills to future endeavors.

Having already met during Sills's University of Chicago directing days, Sahlins and Sills initially hooked up professionally in the early fifties to produce dramas (Brecht, Chekhov) at and to sit on the three-member board of the highbrow but ragtag Playwrights Theater Club, which Sills co-founded with comrade Eugene Troobnick and a Socialist populist Harvard man named David Shepherd. For training purposes, Sills steeped the Playwrights cast in spontaneity-enhancing theater games developed by his mother, Viola Spolin. A Los Angeles–based improvisation teacher, Spolin also taught drama at Chicago's Hull House in the 1930s. Its Recreational Training School, founded by social worker Neva Boyd, was part of the U.S. government's Works Progress Administration. The Playwrights Theater Club featured a stable of young actors that included Ed Asner and Barbara Harris and operated at two locations on Chicago's Near North Side before the group folded in 1955.

That same year, Sills and Shepherd co-founded the Compass Players, which began performing extended scenario-based improv shows (essentially a modern version of the age-old Italian form called commedia dell'arte), shorter "blackout" scenes, and spur-of-the-moment material based on audience suggestions in the Compass Tavern near the University of Chicago campus in Hyde Park. The inventive ensemble was wildly popular among in-the-know intelligentsia types, and eventually migrated several miles northwest to the Argo Off-Beat Room. After leaving the fold, several Compass members—Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols, and Elaine May in particular—vaulted onto the national stage. Berman became a chart-topping stand-up (who mostly sat down), and Nichols and May formed the hottest social satire duo in recent memory, with bestselling albums and a triumphant run on Broadway.

But while the Compass drew capacity crowds night after night (the offering of then-rare Michelob beer may have played a role as well), it eventually hit financial bottom and folded in January 1957. Another incarnation opened in St. Louis shortly thereafter, but that branch dissolved before long, too. As of early 1958, after a roughly three-year run, the Compass Players was kaput. But the concepts upon which it was founded—a symbiotic actor-audience relationship and ensemble-based satire created through improvisation—were not. With that sturdy foundation already laid, Alk, Sahlins, and

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Excerpted from The Second City Unscripted: Revolution and Revelation at the World-Famous Comedy Theater by Mike Thomas
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.