Show Business: Still Crazy After All These Years

To help celebrate its 25th birthday, the Second City comedy troupe has some new trophy cases in the lobby of its Chicago theater. Now they have more space to show off pictures of such former Second Citizens as John Belushi, Joan Rivers, Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray. Other alumni, including Alan Arkin, Robert Klein and David Steinberg, were back in person recently for an anniversary reunion, which was taped by Home Box Office for airing in April. And in the world beyond, a Second City troupe is established in Toronto, touring companies are on the road, and SCTV is in reruns on the tube, still biting the hand that feeds it.

Second City rests on the sparest of theatrical trappings: a few bentwood chairs, a bit of lighting, a piano and six performers. At the start of one recent show, four of them are onstage as Soviet agents trained to imitate the people of Chicago. (“I am a full professor, so I only talk to graduate students.” “I don’t do anything; I work for the city.”) The props are simple and the costuming sparse. Ski hats and overcoats are enough to dress all six as victims of Reagan-era policies. “We wear our characters lightly and dress them lightly,” says Co-Founder Bernard Sahlins. “Put on a pair of glasses and you’ve got a businessman.” Put on a beret, as Troupe Member Richard Kind does later, and you have Jean-Paul Sartre, unpleasantly surprised to discover that there is an afterlife and that God, played by Mike Hagerty, is a sort of hearty camp counselor. Sartre: It’s not what I expected. God: What did you expect?

Sartre: Nothing.

In this cabaret the guiding idea is improvisation. Most of the dozen or so skits in each revue are scripted and rehearsed, but they begin life as spontaneous vignettes developed at the end of each night’s performance, when the audience is asked to yell out ideas for the cast to work up. The actors retreat backstage to concoct some appropriate sketches, then return with the results. Afterward, cast and director refine the best bits into formal scenes for the next revue. Tonight the audience is asked to suggest professions. “Psycho killer!” someone shouts. O.K., you asked for it. Dan Castellaneta, a stand-in that night, comes back as a bellowing lunatic, confronting an unfortunate career counselor: “Those people aren’t dead! They just went swimming! Without their limbs!”

Naturally, improvisation is sometimes like swimming without your limbs–you just sink. But when it works, you fly, and without instruments. Second City took flight on a December night in 1959, opening in a converted laundry on North Wells Street, not far from the present, more spacious theater. It was the creation of two University of Chicago alumni, Sahlins and Paul Sills. Earlier, Sills had co-founded the Compass Players, where Mike Nichols and Elaine May first scored their sharp points. Just as the Compass had been, Second City was to be a showcase for performers whose native wit had been quickened by training in the methods of improvisation. Before long, it had gained a reputation as a small pond that spawned big fish, and as veterans took off for Broadway or Hollywood, eager newcomers arrived to take their places. “Everyone will tell you we all loved one another,” snorts Rivers, who arrived in the early ’60s. “But when the rundown for the night’s show was posted, people would say, ‘What do you mean my scene is not on tonight?’ “

Sills departed from Second City in the mid-’60s, and later developed his ideas into a critically acclaimed Broadway show, Story Theater. Sahlins stayed – on. Under his guidance, Second City arrived at the peak of celebrity in the mid-’70s, when the Saturday Night Live troupe featured three of its graduates: Aykroyd, Gilda Radner and John Belushi, whose brother Jim has also gone from Second City to SNL.

By now, more than 200 performers have been launched by Second City or its predecessor, the Compass Players. The average tenure of a Second City member is about four or five years. A healthy turnover is ensured by the siren call of television and movies, or by the howling of the wolf at the door–the pay does not range much beyond $350 a week. Quips current Trouper Mindy Bell: “They make it so you can’t really afford to do it forever.”

After decades in which the audience dared the performers to go further, Sahlins thinks he detects a new conservative mood. Jokes about the President are often met by scattered laughs, and some subjects get a touchy response. “There was a piece we did about Jesus marrying Joseph,” he says. “People threw glasses at the stage.” On the other hand, some critics complain that Second City is just not as acerbic and brainy as it once was. Oh yeah? says Sahlins. “Everybody looks back to the ’60s,” he objects. “If people think it’s not as exciting as it was back then, well, neither are they.”