FROM NICHOLS & MAY TO POEHLER & FEY
How improv became one of America’s greatest art forms Sadaf Ahsan
Improv Nation: How We Made a Great American Art By Sam Wasson Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 464 pp; $40
If you take author Sam Wasson’s word for i t, improvisational comedy can teach you everything you need to know about the world. For starters, “there is no better drama (or comedy) in the world than the comedy (or drama) of actual life.” Second, all the fun is in getting lost – in fact, the more lost you are, the more fun there is, “and therefore, for the best results, get lost as often as you can.” And third, failure is “freedom’s friend,” and the more you get a taste of it, the stronger your craft will become. In the comprehensive history Improv Nation: How We Made a Great American Art, Wasson reminds us of all this and to “pursue the strange” in an effort to find the funny – great advice for the fledgling comic and their audience. Here’s what else we learned:
1 Theatre Games As though moving from sketch to sketch, Wasson recounts how improv evolved over time, “made up as we went along,” always a mutual discovery between comedian and audience. First implemented as a practice by teacher and social worker Viola Spolin (“Tina Fey’s spiritual grandmother”) in the 1940s as an educational tool, it was dubbed “Theatre Games.” When Spolin would teach children’s theatre classes, she used them to help the kids break out of their shells, asking them to imagine a world where adults didn’t exist: “What would you do?” Unburdened by fear, they began to interact and explore together with a gentle kindness and charm – fundamentals of improv. Theatre Games was “laughed into” a resurgence at the University of Chicago, where it was developed as a true art and eventually became the core practice of the comedy theatre Second City, which itself evolved from Compass Players and founding director Paul Sills, Spolin’s son.
2 Soul mates As Mike Nichols tells it, Elaine May was the manic pixie dream girl of the comedy world. “Everyone was in love with her,” whether it was Sills or Sheldon Patinkin or Jerry Cunliffe or, well, Nichols himself. The pair met at the University of Chicago in the 1950s, working together at Sills’s Compass Players. After struggling in New York for a few years, Nichols would return to Chicago and opt for the Spolin method after having failed at Lee Strasberg’s Method, eventually forming a double-act with May. They were an actual couple “only sort of for a minute,” more suited to seeing other people while telling each other everything. They did marry his “serious” acting with her theatrical style to become Nichols and May, a legendary pairing that would lead to three award-winning comedy albums, and a performance at John F. Kennedy’s birthday in 1962. Theirs was a special kind of chemistry, Nichols said, interviewed by Wasson days before his death: “When you have to make things up on the spur of the moment, you gravitate very quickly to the person who understands you most easily.”
3“No, and…” Second City inspired several improv troupes, including New York’s Premise, headed by George Morrison. An unknown Dustin Hoffman auditioned to be a member, but “he couldn’t resist doing sexual or scatological material that was really too much for the time.” It was the 1960s, and “no one was really doing sex yet.” Instead, Morrison hired Hoffman’s friend Gene Hackman, and because he needed a job, let Hoffman serve hot chocolate and espresso during intermissions. Hanging around these circles was how Hoffman met Nichols, who would cast him as Benjamin Braddock opposite Anne Bancroft’s Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate (1967). Hoffman would prove to be difficult, repeatedly resisting the role, saying he felt he was too Jewish and not enough Robert Redford for the part. But Nichols envisioned the role differently and pursued Hoffman who, in Improv Nation, recalls how much the film incorporated improv. In one scene in particular, Bancroft removes her sweater and notices a stain, vigorously attempting to remove it. Hoffman then places a hand on her breast, a move she didn’t know he was about to make and that Nichols had encouraged. When he did it, Bancroft acted as though she hadn’t even noticed, continuing to remove the stain. It led Hoffman to turn and walk away in laughter (while Nichols did the same behind the camera) – and the take went into the movie. In recent months, Hoffman has been accused by multiple women of sexual harassment, specifically, groping their breasts in the same way he did in that scene, something former co- star Meryl Streep actually accused him of doing when they met way back in the ’70s.
4 Northern exposure “What are they going to know about improv?” That’s what Chicago’s Second City team theorized upon entering Toronto in the early 1970s with hopes of setting up a chapter there. Little did they know, it would foster as much comic talent as Chicago. The team arrived in 1972, setting their sights on the production of Godspell at the Royal Alexandra, “the only comedy opportunity in Toronto, a lighthouse for like minds.” Performers and soon- to- be members included Eugene Levy (who dragged friend and co- star Martin Short out of final exams to audition), Andrea Martin, Dave Thomas and Gilda Radner. Dan Aykroyd begged friend John Candy to tag along to his and Valri Bromfield’s audition. Candy obliged, but only to lend moral support; Second City wasn’t his thing, he said. Except Aykroyd put his name on the audition sheet anyway, and when his name was called, Candy trudged to the stage – and ended up being the easy favourite. They would all feature in SCTV, the sketch show birthed by the Toronto troupe in 1976 – except for Radner, who would instead become the first cast member to be hired by Lorne Michaels for Saturday Night Live in 1975.
5 Ready for prime time No one proved to be more beloved than Radner, who would go on to win an Emmy in 1978 for SNL and debut a hit one- woman Broadway show, while starring in a handful of films. She stood out among her contemporaries with an irresistible energy similar to Elaine May’s – “Her personality could bail her out of every situation, the audience loved her.” She didn’t need character, according to Short, “Gilda was more than enough.” She died in 1989 from ovarian cancer, but even that journey was made lighter by Radner at every opportunity. During chemotherapy, she’d improvise, and “poll her brain’s audience for suggestions, pick one and assign the Cytoxan a character, like a dancer, no, a line of Russian dancers, arms crossed, in big leather boots, dance-kicking the cancer cells out of her body.” For Gilda, improv and comedy in general offered “permission to go comfortably insane.”
6 Liz and Leslie As mutual worshippers of Radner, and sharing the sort of chemistry Nichols and May once had, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler picked up the baton when they met at Chicago’s ImprovOlympic theatre in 1993. They were introduced by co-founder Charna Halpern, who recalled: “They were not the typical women who get steamrolled by men. [ They] were no shrinking violets. They were bold and ballsy and fearless.” Poehler would eventually move to New York with her sketch group Upright Citizens Brigade, freeing up a spot in Second City’s main company for Fey, but it was just the beginning for both. After all, Fey noted, “For us, improv was close to religion.”