Coming to Comedy Part Three: Improv—Something Wonderful Right Away, or Games People Play

The Chicago Way 

“He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago Way. And that's how you get Capone. Now do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that?” Sean Connery as Jim Malone to Kevin Costner as Eliot Ness in The Untouchables (1987)

“And in Improvisation there is one hard and fast rule, and that rule is known as ‘Yes And.’ The term YES AND: to say yes, and not just yes, but to add information. In the adding of information you don't negate the other person's idea - but you build on it.” Maya Rudolph

Most comedy historians locate the origins of contemporary improv in Chicago, known as the “second city” for a couple of reasons, because of the massive rebuild after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and because for many years Chicago had the second largest urban population in the United States after New York.  The New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling used the term as an insult in a series of articles chronicling his contempt for the city later collected in the book Chicago: The Second City in 1952, an insult hurled back at him when a young group of improvisational performers proudly repurposed the pejorative as the name of their theater in 1959.  We’ll get to that in a while, but let’s spend some time in the Chicago of an earlier era as dramatized in popular culture.

Set in 1930 Chicago during the Prohibition era, Brian DePalma’s The Untouchables dramatizes a conflict between the law (represented by Bureau of Prohibition agent Eliot Ness and his team including a veteran cop, a freshly-minted cop, and an accountant) and gangster Al Capone, his enforcer Frank Nitti, and the various government, judicial, and police officials Capone has bribed to advance his criminal enterprise.  After throwing standard procedure out the window, Ness states this toward the end of the movie, “I have foresworn myself.  I have broken every law I have sworn to uphold, I have become what I beheld and I am content that I have done right.”  When the rules he lived by won’t yield results, when criminals and elected and appointed officials flaunt the law, Ness must improvise in response.  He improvises when he kills Nitti by throwing him off the roof of the courthouse rather than arresting him after the sneering hit man provokes him by taunting him with details of how he murdered Malone.  He improvises when he privately bluffs the judge at Capone’s tax evasion trial into changing the juries once he knows the sitting Capone jury has been bribed.  Malone’s rendering of the Chicago Way prods Ness into doing whatever’s necessary via improvisation (think of it as “Yes And” with a high body count).  

Set in Chicago during the 1920’s, the 1975 Broadway musical Chicago (book by Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse, songs by John Kander and Ebb, with the 2002 film version directed by Rob Marshall) also offers us characters improvising in their lives and in the courtroom.  As defense lawyer Billy Flynn puts it, “This trial... the whole world... it's all... show business.” Hyper-aware of the need to capture and keep the attention of the audience, in his songs Flynn sings, “Give 'em a show that's so splendiferous, row after row will grow vociferous” and in his signature number,  “Give 'em the old razzle dazzle. Razzle razzle 'em. Give 'em an act with lots of flash in it and the reaction will be passionate.”  Aspiring singer Roxie Hart, on trial for killing her wayward lover, improvises by announcing that she’s pregnant (she’s married to the woebegone Amos) to garner sympathy from the press and the public.  Billy plays to the press as much as he plays to the jury (the judge he deems less important) as he gives them the old razzle dazzle when finding himself off balance in court due to an unexpected turn of the proceedings.  After escaping any punishment for their murderous deeds, Roxie and rival singer/dancer Velma Kelly improvise by teaming up as a vaudeville act to get back in the public eye, taking advantage of their notoriety to achieve their dreams of fame (think of it as “Yes And” with the high body count plus sequins and that slinky Fosse choreography).  

Pedagogy Break: When teaching how to integrate source material into research-based writing, I talk about avoiding the “island” quotation, plopping the excerpted words into the ocean of prose without introduction or commentary following.  We can think about strategy here in relation to “Yes And,” though those two words don’t represent the best option in most cases, if the “Yes And” simply leaves the quotation behind.  Consider Maya Rudolph’s description above–the “Yes And” adds information and builds on what the scene partner said.  So, “Yes And” might serve when the writer wants to add information to clarify something in the quotation, while corollaries including “Yes But,” “No Because,” and “Maybe Though” provide more nuanced opportunities to engage in conversation with the sources to build cohesion and develop complex ideas across sentences and paragraphs.  Birkenstein and Graff give us the most basic phrasing in their textbook title They Say, I Say, which unfortunately inscribes a sense of taking turns (think formulaic debate) rather than entering into a scholarly conversation by adding alternative perspectives, incorporating the dance of sources and commentaries to develop exploration and analysis.  Kenneth Burke’s well-known passage about the parlor incorporates both models, as the parlor represents a site for contentious argument while also charging the “you” who enters the parlor with the responsibility to listen carefully and respond only after understanding the conversation in progress.  A classroom activity focused on working with sources could lay out excerpts from a course reading, prompting students to play out possible “Yes And,” “No But,” “No Because,” and “Maybe Though” glosses to follow each excerpt, gradually building a dialogue (which can in later exercises become multiple texts in conversation).

Mother of Intervention

Admittedly The Untouchables and Chicago embellish the “facts” for entertainment purposes, though both draw inspiration from historical events in Chicago’s colorful (often lurid) past.  Let’s consider something else happening in Chicago in the Roaring Twenties, a noteworthy part of the city’s history made possible by the work of Jane Addams (1860-1935) beginning in the late 19th century.  Her mother died in childbirth when Jane was two; she also lost four siblings by the time she turned eight, leaving her surviving older sisters as her primary caretakers during her early years.  Their father, John Addams, married again in 1868; a successful businessman with an expansive portfolio, he also entered the political arena, serving in the Illinois State Senate and supporting his friend and colleague Abraham Lincoln’s campaigns for Senate in 1854 and the presidency in 1860.  He encouraged Jane to attend college, though he steered her away from Smith (her dream school) and toward the local Rockford Female Seminary (later Rockford University).  She earned a college certificate from Rockland in 1881, participating in debate and becoming valedictorian.  She then planned to attend Smith to earn a formal BA; her father’s sudden death right after she finished at Rockford interfered with those plans.  

The surviving Addams children each inherited a substantial sum from their father’s estate.  Several family members (Jane, her sister, and her sister’s husband) moved to Philadelphia to pursue medical training, but a series of health issues led them back to Illinois; Jane struggled with depression and feelings of uselessness for a time but then found a calling in her desire to serve others in alignment with her newfound commitment to Christianity.  A trip to England led her to Toynbee Hall, perhaps the first settlement house in England.  Addams described what she observed this way: "a community of University men who live there, have their recreation clubs and society all among the poor people, yet, in the same style in which they would live in their own circle. It is so free of 'professional doing good,' so unaffectedly sincere and so productive of good results in its classes and libraries seems perfectly ideal."  Note her commitment to steering clear of the “do-gooder” label and its connotations of superficial, primarily self-serving engagement.  Wikipedia describes the settlement house movement as “a space within which unexpected cultural connections could be made and where the narrow boundaries of culture, class, and education could be expanded. They doubled as community arts centers and social service facilities. They laid the foundations for American civil society, a neutral space within which different communities and ideologies could learn from each other and seek common grounds for collective action.” Lots of positive intent and idealism there.  Inspired by the Toynbee model, Addams and her friend Ellen Gates Starr co-founded Hull House, using Addams’s inheritance to purchase and refurbish the decrepit Hull mansion.     

Addams and Starr moved into the house, committed to making it a vibrant location for the support of women’s rights and immigrants’ rights, as Addams had realized that she didn’t need a medical degree to help people.  In what we might call an extended act of improvisation, she thus became a key figure in the development of the practice of social work and the discipline of sociology.  (Later in her accomplished life, she received an honorary doctorate from Yale and also the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1931.)  Hull House, which helped set the standard for the settlement house movement in the United States (as noted, England had a similar movement inspired by Toynbee Hall) that spanned the 1880s to the 1920s, became a home to women social workers and scholars who worked directly with the neighborhood people offering education and arts programs as well as social support and medical services.  

Settlement houses developed mostly in urban areas with large immigrant populations, aiming to provide a wide range of services, from English language classes to childcare and vocational training.  Another dimension focused on acculturation through educational and arts programs.  Settlement houses represent a definitive achievement of the “Progressive Era,” in stark contrast to the sensationalized dramatic portrayals of crime and corruption running rampant in The Untouchables and media-fueled obsession with murder trials in Chicago. (Side note: Andy Garcia’s Untouchables character, George Stone, born Giuseppe Petri, finds his way via a career in law enforcement; in real-world Chicago, counterparts of him and his family might have benefited from Hull House programs for Italian immigrants, as could some of the jailed women Roxie and Velma encounter in Chicago.)  With Addams and Starr as the first residents, Hull House expanded through the 1890s and into the new century, becoming a magnet for “university women” committed to working with working people (often immigrants) in the neighborhoods near their schools.  The women who volunteered at Hull House often lived there; all carried the title of “residents” (whether intentional or not, the title evokes a learning stage of medical training).  Wikipedia reports that “Prominent scholars and social reformers such as John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, Max Weber, and W.E.B. Du Bois lectured at Hull House.”  To build experience with and appreciation for the arts in the community, Hull House sponsored free concerts and scheduled free lectures on current issues, a parallel to the 19th century lyceum movement spreading “culture” and education beyond urban centers to a growing middle class (recall that Artemus Ward and Mark Twain both delivered humorous lectures to lyceum audiences, as described in Part Two).

In considering Addams as one of the mothers of the vocation and practice of social work and the discipline of sociology, we can learn from what she wrote about the three R’s of the movement represented by Hull House: residence, research, and reform.  First, she believed that the work required living in the community to foster “close cooperation with the neighborhood people.”  In this we can discern the beginning of the kinds of connection Stanford’s Haas Center strives to make possible and also the concept of “service learning” through Cardinal Quarters and other outreach initiatives.  We can think of Stanford residence halls as places of community learning and acculturation as well, with our VPSA colleagues in Residential Education, notably the Residence Deans, Resident Fellows, and student Resident Assistants, and our Academic Advising colleagues serving as dorm-based Academic Directors, as a network of resource people working with neighborhood residents (Stanford even renamed areas of campus as “neighborhoods” several years ago).  In relation to something closer to home, we can consider my friend and former colleague Tilly Warnock’s image of writing programs as “the front porch of the university,” as very few students arrive as native to university culture (perhaps the children of faculty RFs who grow up in a residence hall qualify).  Given the scope of the mission, settlement houses served in many ways as the “front porch” to the city and its resources and also its social and cultural ways and means for the immigrant populations.  

Second, Addams as a college graduate advocated for the “scientific study of the causes of poverty and dependence,” moving beyond the abstractions of theory to study life as people lived it, with observations informed by a scholarly perspective.  Third and finally, as an activist for change, Addams aimed for “communication of these facts to the public, and persistent pressure for [legislative and social] reform.”  The Hull House neighborhood in Chicago thus served many purposes for the residents who lived and worked there and the community members who utilized its resources.  As Wikipedia notes, the research conducted by the residents enabled them “to confront the establishment,” leading to partnerships with community members to design and implement programs that would improve “the opportunities for success by the largely immigrant population.”  Research for Addams drives reform and requires living in and working with the community.

In sum, invention and improvisation can describe how Jane Addams revised the English model of a social environment intended to connect young men of privilege to “the poor.”  She improvised from the model to develop perhaps the most famous iteration of the United States version of the settlement house movement, Hull House, to serve the needs of Chicagoans new to the country. She also provided a physical location and a durable practical philosophy for the successive generations of women we will consider next.  (I’ll note here that both of my sisters and my niece pursued social work as a career, one sister working for Family Services around Ann Arbor, the other working for the state of Michigan supporting families, and my niece working with mostly immigrant families as part of the K-12 school system in the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti area.  I’m glad to have learned about how Addams and settlement houses contributed to what became a family vocational path.)

Pedagogy Break: In my background reading for this installment I encountered the three R’s that guided Addams in developing Hull House, residence, research, and reform: of course I thought of the four R’s that I utilize in framing the multi-faceted PWR mission in welcoming new lecturers to the program, specifically rhetoric, reading, research, and revision.  Both word sets include research.  While the two sets don’t share other exact words, we can speculate on how the other terms manifest in the other context.  Students live in residence in university housing; we can assert too that they live in the classroom community, which we emphasize in PWR as a learning community of writers and researchers.  As for reform, we work on at least two levels, designing a curriculum and process-oriented practices that aim to nurture students’ development as writers and to help them understand and wield writing as a change agent in the culture outside the university, whether in social, cultural, or political settings.  Considering Hull House, the researching residents had to learn to read the neighborhood community while also aiding community members in reading an unfamiliar culture–we see this at a literal level in the language classes offered as well as in the social and cultural programming focused on reading and engaging with other kinds of texts.  As for rhetoric and revision, we can understand the experience of immigrants and their first-gen children as fundamentally an extended exercise in reading and responding to rhetorical situations, with opportunities for revision of one’s language and one’s actions and behaviors.  As we’ll see later, many settlement house principles found their way into higher education as colleges and universities became increasingly accessible to the population served by Hull House. 

Mother of Recreation

“The discipline of making judgments, often instantaneously, and of acting upon them within a static frame of reference, i.e. the verbalized rules, is unique to the playing of games. While the game is an imaginatively set up structure into which the players project themselves psychologically, they act consistently with the demands of the situation, and thereby subject themselves to the self-imposed discipline, which involves many aspects of social behavior.”  Neva Boyd

Another midwesterner, like Addams, Iowa-born Neva Boyd (1876-1963) relocated to Chicago after high school to attend the Chicago Kindergarten Institute for training in pedagogy for that age level.  While she briefly taught kindergarten in Buffalo, New York, she found herself back in Chicago in her early thirties, first to attend the University of Chicago and then to work for the Chicago Park Commission as a social worker (as noted earlier, this represented a new job category at the time, made possible to some degree by the settlement house movement).  Her duties included organizing social interactions such as dances and games for children.  This fit well into the activities supported by Hull House, and she joined the by then well-established neighborhood community to offer classes in movement and develop recreational groups for children, in which she relied on improvisation within game constraints to give youngsters experience with problem-solving and engaging with peers and adults.  Consider Boyd’s phrasing about “making judgments” in order to “act consistently with the demands of the situation” in relation to Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric; the quotation above suggests an awareness of what we might call the rhetorical situation of social life, with an emphasis on analyzing and adapting to the needs of the moment.  During the Depression, Boyd found a way to continue her work through the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA), contributing to the national Recreation Project.  Ultimately she moved the Chicago Training School for Playground Workers from its original home at Hull House to Northwestern, as higher education began to accept social work and its practices as relevant to the growing discipline of Sociology (an early example of universities absorbing settlement house missions into higher education via disciplinary formation and expansion).  In the university setting, at Northwestern and later the University of Chicago, Boyd served as a professor in Sociology and in Theater, becoming a key figure in the development of both the Recreational Therapy and Educational Drama movements in the United States.

We can see how cultural and arts programming could provide a culturally-sanctioned and endorsed supplement to what Boyd established a foundation for through her use of games and play-acting–children learned the lesson that the culture they would enter as adults consisted of elaborate but ultimately knowable games, games for which they could master the rules and then play successfully.  I’ll offer a bit of a strained comparison here: what Boyd and her protege Viola Spolin (the focus of the next section) developed in the 1920s at Hull House provides the kernel of a practice of “folk comedy” parallel to folk music explored in last year’s series.  Folk comedy comes from the people in the community, giving them access to a shared form of commentary, conversation, and connection rather than comedy as a form of entertainment for consumption–we’ll track later how the mass media, primarily television, transformed folk comedy into a commodity, parallel to the process that appropriated folk music to serve commerce.  

Mother of Improvisation

“The games emerged out of necessity. I didn’t sit at home and dream them up. When I had a problem (directing) I made up a game. Then another problem came up, I just made up a new game.” Viola Spolin

Note how Viola Spolin (1906-1994) describes her development of theater games as driven by exigency in the midst of directing young, inexperienced performers.  Perhaps we can discern a parallel with what writing teachers do when faced with a “problem” in the classroom or in a conference or tutoring session.  For writing teachers, the invented “game” might involve a freewriting activity, or small group work with a designated outcome such as revising an introduction or conclusion or revising a passage from a reading with a different audience in mind.  We can think of many of Peter Elbow’s focused freewriting prompts as equivalents to the games Spolin created; more generally, we can think of improv and process as presented by Elbow as close kin.

Let’s back up.  Joshua Flanders titled his December 2021 article in the Forward, “How One Jewish Mother Became the Matriarch of Modern Comedy.” Before Spolin became the mother of improvisation, she had a childhood full of formative experiences and a transformative time working as junior partner with Neva Boyd in Hull House in Chicago.  First, her childhood.  While providing some family history, Flanders cites Jeffrey Sweet, a writer and comedy historian we’ll encounter later as the author of Something Wonderful Right Away: An Oral History of The Second City & The Compass Players.  In Flanders’s account, Sweet has this to share about Viola Spolin’s father: “Make Mills was born Constantin Belachakovsky in Ukraine. Legend has it that when he arrived at Ellis Island, the immigration official told him that his name was too complicated and to pick a new one. He was multilingual and was carrying the essays of John Stuart Mill, so he told the official to ‘make it Mill,’ and thus Make Mills was born.”  (This reminds me of the origin of the Nichols surname noted in Part One, with Mike Nichols’s doctor father drawing on his Russian patronymic, Nikolaievitch, to come up with Nichols for the family recently immigrated from Russia.)  The bookish Make Mills became a Chicago police officer; the Flanders article gestures to incidents of Officer Mills harassing leftists, many of them immigrants, which posed some issues for the family children–at least two of the Mills daughters, including Viola, went on to work with immigrants alongside Neva Boyd, perhaps to achieve some karmic balance for the family.  Make Mills would seem to fit right into the corrupt Chicago of Ness and Capone dramatized in The Untouchables.  Off camera, the Mills sisters devoted themselves to their settlement house work, a vocation not deemed glamorous enough to memorialize in popular culture, though I’ll include a link below to a 2021 PBS documentary from the network affiliate in Chicago focused on Spolin’s life and work.

With the family patriarch off doing police work the Chicago Way, Viola’s early life teemed with an extended family inclined to theatrics.  According to the biography on the official Spolin website, they “came together to sing, play parlor games, and mount plays they’d written and improvised.”  (Think back to last year’s series on popular music and the anecdotes about the Ronstadt siblings singing with their mother and Laura Nyro’s mother introducing young Laura to a wide range of musical influences from classical to jazz.)  Young Viola learned early how theater, games, and imagination could build connections between people and serve to create community through collective focus on making something new in the world.  To his credit, Officer Mills took his daughter to the opera when assigned to work that detail, giving her access to "high culture" (I’ll mention here in passing that The Untouchables includes a scene of Capone, played by Robert DeNiro, attending the opera and crying out of emotion as he watches the performance).

From the ages of 18 to 21, Spolin learned from Neva Boyd as a member of the Group Work School in Chicago, which during this period moved to Northwestern, leading Spolin to enroll as a student there.  I can’t find explicit documentation, but I expect that her proximity to Boyd’s work with games as recreational problem-solving may have led Spolin to some initial experimenting with theater games at Hull House, a tweak to what she learned from her mentor; the official biography on the Spolin website states that both Boyd and Spolin rented out space at Hull House years later, after Spolin, with a boost from Boyd’s recommendation, became the drama supervisor for a Works Progress Administration project in the late thirties.  Spolin said this about Boyd’s influence in a 1988 Hollywood Reporter article: the time as Boyd’s student provided her "an extraordinary training in the use of games, story-telling, folk dance and dramatics as tools for stimulating creative expression in both children and adults, through self discovery and personal experiencing."  While Boyd focused on the games in relation to her social work helping people develop skills to put to use in their social and work lives, Spolin oriented her career toward creative expression in the theater context; the commitment to self-expression, creativity, and the revealing of the true self via spontaneity rather than actorly technique remained her touchstone.  According to Wikipedia, Spolin “strongly emphasized the need for the individual to overcome what she called ‘The Approval/Disapproval Syndrome,’ which she described as the performer blocking their own natural creativity in an effort to please the audience, director, teacher, peers or anyone else.”  That credo should ring loud bells for any Elbow fans reading this, as it rhymes with his exhortation to writers to banish the judging self from the early exploratory stages of the writing process.  

Spolin embarked on her first marriage at about the age of twenty, to her high school boyfriend, Wilmer Silverberg; he later changed his name to Sills (perhaps for a short time she went by Viola Mills Sills), with the result that their sons born in 1927 and 1929 became Paul Sills and William Sills.  After the marriage ended, Spolin, pursuing a career in theater, banded together with other divorced mothers to rent a large house on Sheridan Road in Chicago, an arrangement made possible by falling rents during the Depression when the formerly-wealthy owners of such large homes could no longer afford the upkeep.  The women called this communal space for themselves and their children “The Educational Playroom,” with Spolin likely sharing with her housemates what she’d learned from Neva Boyd about games and creativity in relation to how the house’s children could be nurtured by their collective.  I like to think of this time between 1934 and 1937 as a counterpoint to the rendering of women in Chicago, set in the previous decade, with the diverse chorus of women, some of them immigrants, performing the communal show-stopper “Cell Block Tango” with its refrain “He Had It Comin’”--these women form an ad hoc community while in jail awaiting trial, the song’s string of narratives sharing their stories of killing wayward husbands and lovers.  Quite a different focus in the large house full of mothers and children playing theater games on Sheridan Road.

After her stint with the Works Progress Administration, during which she returned to Hull House to run workshops, she and second husband Ed Spolin, a carpenter, moved west, ultimately settling in Los Angeles, where Viola opened the Young Actors Company in the Hollywood Hills in 1946 (with Alan Alda and Paul Sand among the youngsters who spent time in the group).  We’ll return to Viola Spolin when she returns to Chicago to direct a play for the Playwright’s Theater Club and then, at the request of David Shepherd and her son Paul Sills, to work with the acting troupe of their new company The Compass Players.      

For more on Spolin’s life and influence, watch this 2021 one-hour documentary produced and written by Jude Leak for showing on WTTW, the PBS affiliate in Chicago: The “Table of Contents” gives you some idea of the scope of the documentary: Inventing Improv: A Chicago Stories Special Documentary.  00:00  ➤  Preview 01:51  ➤  Intro 04:48  ➤  Viola Spolin's Early Life 07:28  ➤  Jane Addams' Hull House 10:40  ➤  The "Educational Playroom" 12:49  ➤  Viola's Theater Games 18:40  ➤  Young Actors Company 20:15  ➤  Paul Sills' Theater Workshops 23:41  ➤ Playwrights Theatre Club 26:23  ➤  The Compass Theatre 33:49  ➤  Birth of The Second City 46:26  ➤  Viola Publishes Her Theater Games

Here’s a link to the authorized biographical sketch on the Viola Spolin official organization site. 

The UChicago Way

John D. Rockefeller, wealth increased beyond vast by an oil business turbo-charged by the industrial revolution, donated the funds needed to recreate the University of Chicago in 1890, resurrected from what came to be known as the Old University of Chicago, a Baptist college that closed in 1886.  Marshall Field, another magnate, quickly donated the land for the main quad buildings, with other wealthy Chicagoans pitching in to build labs and other needed facilities.  Instruction began in 1892 with 594 enrolled male and female students, a year after Stanford opened with 555 young men and women enrolled.  Note that Chicago and Stanford extended the 19th- century trend of founding new research universities inspired by the German model, following the opening of such schools as Cornell in 1865 and Johns Hopkins in 1876.  A young scholar and Baptist clergyman, William Rainey Harper, served as the first Chicago president.  Although Harper believed in the study of faith as necessary, even central to a university’s mission (he opened a divinity school early in his tenure), the new Chicago university did not have a formal sectarian identity.  As Wikipedia puts it, “Westward migration, population growth, and industrialization had led to an increasing need for elite schools away from the East Coast, especially schools that would focus on issues vital to national development.”  This need accounts for the opening of many land grant universities in western states conceived and realized in the second half of the century after passage of the Morrill Act in 1862.

Let me introduce you to another young Chicago president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, through several quotations attributed to him: “Football, fraternities, and fun have no place in the university. They were introduced only to entertain those who shouldn’t be in the university.”  He famously eliminated football and the Greek system at Chicago, though both returned after his presidency.  As for fun, his version involved commitment to the life of the mind, as he proclaimed that “the object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives,” a concept we still talk about in relation to the university creating “life-long learners.”  He didn’t conform to the idea that a university education prepared students for careers, so he may not have fully approved of the land-grant university mission of advancing research and training in agriculture, engineering, and military science, stating, “There is only one justification for universities, as distinguished from trade schools. They must be centers of criticism.”  He doesn’t specify what kind of criticism he means here, though he explicitly states that he takes the “higher” in “higher education” seriously (along with condescendingly) when he asserts, “It has been said that we have not had the three R's in America, we had the six R's; remedial readin', remedial 'ritin' and remedial 'rithmetic”--we can imagine what he might say today as educators back away from assigning complete books knowing students won’t read them.  In sum, he proclaims the imperious view that “education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.” He doesn’t use the term “critical thinking.”

Hutchins became president of the University Chicago in 1929 at the age of thirty, earning the distinction of being the youngest person in the position nationally.  He came to Chicago after completing a bachelor’s and a law degree at Yale, arriving in the city of the big shoulders toward the end of the Roaring Twenties, with Al Capone not yet brought to trial on tax evasion charges (an act of improvisation by the Ness team’s accountant member) and the newspapers likely still fixated on tabloid-worthy domestic murders like those in Chicago.  Hutchins remained as president until 1945, through the Depression (when all universities struggled financially, leading him to explore the possibility of merging with Northwestern), the response of the New Deal (which made Spolin’s WPA work possible), and World War II, which led to an explosion in university enrollments via the GI Bill in the years following his presidency.  An Ivy League alum, he adhered strongly to the Great Books model and the Socratic method; he also revised admissions policies to allow students of any age to matriculate if they could pass a rigorous entry exam– applicants didn’t have to have a high school diploma as long as they could pass the exam (recall from Part One that Elaine May came to Chicago from Los Angeles when she heard that).  He didn’t particularly privilege attending class as long as students engaged in the life of the mind, in whatever manner they chose; they did have to pass the final exams in their classes to stay enrolled at the university, though.  Hutchins remained as chancellor at Chicago until 1951, meaning that he set the intellectual and cultural tone for more than twenty years, from the earnest focus on Great Books to the promotion of an intellectual hothouse atmosphere with few rules.  Students had lots of time for conversation and, for those who would become the founders and first performers at The Compass Players and Second City, devoting time to playing around with the arts, dreaming big dreams of revolutionizing the country’s arthritic theater by drawing on the European avant-garde. 

Not to make too much of this, but Hull House stands only seven miles or so from the University of Chicago campus in Hyde Park; thus during the Hutchins presidency Boyd and Spolin worked not far from campus conducting their workshops.  Ultimately another university, the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), moved into the Hull House neighborhood as part of an “urban renewal” project in the 1960s, leaving only the original house as a museum recognizing the work of Jane Addams.  As we move toward the origin story of Second City, keep in mind this disparate set of influences, the University of Chicago as Hutchins conceptualized it and the community focus of the Hull House social and cultural workers committed to the local immigrant population.  Most of the young people who developed The Playwrights’ Theater Club, The Compass Players, and finally Second City initially connected to the university, either as enrolled students or hangers-on, and to a vision of creative community work via Paul Sills, who brought his mother Viola Spolin back from Los Angeles to train the actors.  After a detour to New York City, we’ll consider how the people’s theater imagined by David Shepherd, along with Sills the co-founder of the theater experiments that led to Second City, in some ways reclaims the Hull House settlement house mission to locate creativity and intellectual work in the community rather than the university.  

Alcove Spritz: The Scene Back at CCNY

In the previous installment on stand-up comedy, we spent much of our time in New York City considering how the cultural milieu (urban, bustling, frenetic) provided a rich soil for the evolution of the spritz as a kind of improvisational, jazz-inflected comic strategy.  Let’s leave Chicago and the Hutchins version of the life of the mind to visit the City College of New York in the 1950s as experienced by writer Vivian Gornick (born in 1935 and still writing); she recalls her college days in “The 176-Year Argument,” published in the New York Review of Books in April 2025.  Her memoir describing her experience also provides a history lesson covering the origins and evolution of this particular college as a primary site of cultural collision and rollicking assimilation (and its limits) from its proposed founding in 1847 and opening in 1849 through the 1950s (she ends her account before the open admissions movement of the late sixties and its distinctive writing pedagogy as developed by Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich, a lodestar moment for writing studies).  Both her personal experience and the history provide a useful counterpoint to what Hutchins envisioned for UC in relation to ways of being in and doing school.  

Gornick writes of herself and her CCNY classmates in the fifties, “We were the children of tailors, shopkeepers, factory workers; accountants, bakers, dress cutters; clerks, milkmen, bus drivers. Our shoes were scuffed, our clothes came from chain stores, our haircuts from neighborhood barbershops and ‘beauty parlors.’ And what did we know of the world? Nothing. At the same time, how many of us were wise beyond our years.” We can easily adapt this portrait to fit the profile of the immigrants and their children frequenting settlement houses in New York City, Chicago, and other urban centers a generation earlier.  In reading about the Hutchins era, I encountered no explicit acknowledgement of what the students brought to the Hyde Park campus other than their intelligence as demonstrated on the entrance exam; apparently Hutchins wanted a certain kind of brain more than anything else.  By contrast, Gornick writes of what the students brought to the academic sphere, noting, “And there you had City College: unworldliness eclipsed by the insights of lived experience.”  She emphasizes that CCNY valued what students brought to the commuter campus: “Throughout the school’s history ‘lived experience’ had held pride of place, and I daresay it still does. Not so many years ago I was told that a writer who had taught at two posh schools and then at City College said, ‘At Chicago all they wanted to know was, What’s the theory? At Yale all they wanted to know was, What’s the technique? At City all they wanted to know was, How does this relate to real life?’”  

The origins of this CCNY emphasis on higher education connecting directly to real life has roots in its founding, which shares some parallels with what motivated Addams to create a settlement house at Hull.  Gornick provides this glimpse of CCNY history from the mid-19th century: “Townsend Harris, the progressive head of New York’s Board of Education who, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, foresaw a small-town future for New York unless the city started educating a greater proportion of its native population to become the teachers, lawyers, doctors, administrators necessary to run a major metropolis; this meant, largely, turning to the children of those immigrants (at the time mainly from Northern and Western Europe) who were either dead poor or not affluent enough to send them to one of the city’s private institutions, chief among those Columbia College and the University of the City of New York (the future New York University).”  Harris proclaimed, in calling for the creation of what Gornick heralds as “the first tuition-free school of higher learning in the country,” “Let the children of the rich and poor take their seats together and know of no distinction save that of industry, good conduct and intellect.”  Two cheers for meritocracy.

Gornick devotes a significant segment of her essay to CCNY in the thirties (synchronous with the first decade of the Hutchins UC presidency), which she describes this way: “It was during the radicalized 1930s that City College became famous for the depth and maturity of its students’ overheated debating skills, as practiced among a small but significant number of its students who, in response to the highly political atmosphere brought on by the Great Depression—every day, throughout the city, a rally, a meeting, a demonstration, and everywhere picket lines—developed radical debate very nearly to the level of Talmudic studies, except its rallying cry was rather more like ‘Down with the rabbis, up with the socialists!’”  She continues, sketching how the life of the mind cultivated by “elite” liberal arts colleges played out in this rough-and-tumble context (the reference to boys lets us know that CCNY didn’t enroll women as full-time students until 1951, just in time for Gornick herself to enroll): “In the 1930s at City College these were nineteen- and twenty-year-old boys arguing like seasoned speakers schooled in the finer points of literature, philosophy, and political theory, as though a world of values was at stake, very often debating like Lenin, who supposedly said, ‘I do not argue to defeat my opponent, I argue to annihilate him.’”  She adds that the CCNY experiment had real world effects beyond Townsend’s original vision of producing a professional class for a growing metropolis: “Within twenty years many of these Thirties debaters at CCNY would emerge as the country’s most effective public intellectuals, leaving the school in possession of its richly romantic reputation as the Harvard of the proletariat.”  

A word about the “alcoves” in this section’s title: Gornick locates the fervent debates in “a series of booths lining the student cafeteria, otherwise known as the Alcoves, particularly Alcoves One and Two.”  She then quotes from a 1965 Commentary article by CCNY alum Meyer Liben about this complicated, contentious intellectual terrain: “To understand CCNY in the 30’s it is necessary to understand the Alcoves.  These alcoves were the heart of the college.” Gornick glosses Liben with this nomenclature: “Each one was ruled over by one student organization or another—sports, social clubs, student government—but the ones that counted, that is, the ones that made CCNY history, were Alcove One, ruled by Trotskyists (that is, left-wing anti-Stalinists), and Alcove Two, ruled by Stalinists. In actuality, these groupings were rather loose, but everyone in the Alcoves identified as a member of one leftist persuasion or another.”  She returns to Liben recounting, “There were no fist-fights, even when the provocations seemed unbearable. Personalities were supposed to be out—we were arguing positions…. The radicals ranged from right-wing Socialists…to splinters from the Trotskyist left wing. In between was a bewildering variety—Austro-Marxists, orthodox Communists, Socialist centrists and Socialist left-wingers, Kautskyites,…Lovestoneites, Brandlerites, and many another group, faction, or splinter…. We also had in our midst philosophical anarchists, supporters of the IWW, and all kinds of sympathizers, fellow-travelers, and indeterminists.”  Quite a time, and quite a cast of character types ripe for satirical presentation.  

What of Gornick’s experience in the fifties?  She quotes from her own memoir about her relationship with her mother (Fierce Attachments, 1987), providing the foundation of a comedy sketch reminiscent of a mother-daughter imbroglio Nichols and May might have explored.  (Recall that a phone call to Nichols from his mother, with the wounded mother’s opening salvo “This is your mother.  Do you remember me?” inspired their mother-son sketch included in Part One.)  Gornick writes, “So I went to City and I majored in English. When I graduated and she discovered that I wasn’t a teacher—she’d assumed that a girl goes in one door marked ‘college’ and comes out another marked ‘teacher’—she felt tricked, as I recounted in a memoir in the 1980s. ‘You mean you’re not a teacher?’ she asked, eyes widening as she planted my diploma down on the kitchen table.  ‘No,’ I replied.  ‘What have you been doing there all these years?’ she demanded, dumbfounded.  ‘Reading novels,’ I said. I might just as well have said, ‘Preparing for inter-planetary travel.’  Wordlessly, she marveled at my chutzpah. And in a sense, I did too.  ‘Whatever you do,’ laughed my unhelpful big brother, ‘don’t learn stenography!’”  May can play both the mother and daughter, Nichols the older brother.  

More material for the sketch, or perhaps a feature film along the lines of My Favorite Year: “We still used the subways, still walked the familiar streets between classes, still returned to the neighborhood each night, talked to our high school friends, and went to sleep in our own beds. But secretly we had begun to live in a world inside our heads where we read talked thought in a way that separated us from our parents, the life of the house and that of the street. We had been initiated, had learned the difference between hidden and expressed thought. This made us subversives in our own homes.  My emotionally explosive mother never knew what hit her, and very quickly, I think, she was of two minds about City and me: She had wanted me to go to school, no question about that, had been energized by the determination that I do so…. She hadn’t understood that going to school meant I would start thinking: coherently and out loud. She was taken by violent surprise. My sentences got longer within a month of those first classes. Longer, more complicated, formed by words whose meaning she did not always know. I had never before spoken a word she didn’t know. Or made a sentence whose logic she couldn’t follow. Or attempted an opinion that grew out of an abstraction. It made her crazy….”  Consider all the sitcoms that make this inter-generational family dynamic the primary driver of the comedy; beyond the surface laughs, consider the emotional resonance and depth of the dynamic Gornick describes.  As a first generation college student myself, son of immigrant parents, I certainly identify with Gornick’s experience of the unintended consequences of college for family relationships.  How about you?

(Academic Peregrination Parenthetical: I’ve never had a real life conversation with Vivian Gornick, but at some point in the 1990s, we both walked the halls of the Modern Languages Building on the University of Arizona campus, home of the English Department, which housed the Composition Program.  I worked in the Comp Program offices on the third floor–actually the ground level of that oddly-conceived building, with the second floor in the basement and the first floor in the sunless subterranean world of the PBS television affiliate housed on campus–while Professor Gornick worked on the fourth floor, location of the main department and Creative Writing Program offices.  We had occasion to pass each other on the fourth floor when I journeyed there to check my mailbox in the department office.  We never spoke.  I knew her name and reputation as a journalist and memoirist; she had no reason to know mine.  I remember most vividly her facial expression, which blared, “I’d rather be in New York.  I’m supposed to be in New York.  What is this barren place?”  Of course her expression didn’t necessarily have anything to do with New York, or Tucson, as her long teaching career took her many places far from New York, and she may have enjoyed all of those places, including Tucson–I’ve even read a short piece of hers that includes a pleasant memory of her walking in Tucson, though I guarantee those walks didn’t happen in the scorching summer.  Nonetheless, when I read her essays now, I see that fourth-floor expression from long ago, and I hear “I’d rather be in New York.”)

Viola’s Child Meets David, a Shepherd Son

David Shepherd (1924-2018) came from “old money,” with a Vanderbilt among his great aunts on his father’s side.  The schools he attended that we see listed in his New York Times obituary illustrate his pedigree, from prep school at Exeter in New Hampshire to undergraduate studies in English at Harvard followed by a master’s degree in History of Theater from Columbia.  He also served for three years in the Army field infantry during WWII, studied at the Sorbonne, and taught English in Bombay, arriving in Chicago in 1952 with a depth of academic and real world experience in his 28 years.  Paul Sills (1927-2008) lived a different kind of life prior to meeting Shepherd.  The first son of the Viola Spolin/Wilmer Silverberg (Sills) marriage, he spent his childhood immersed in his mother’s theater games, living in that communal home on Sheridan Road in the thirties and then acting in his mother’s children’s theater in Los Angeles (alongside peers like Alda and Sands).  He attended the University of Chicago starting in 1948, making a splash as a director in college productions and finding kindred spirits in fellow classmates and actors including Ed Asner, Zohra Lampert, and Byrne Piven, who accepted the value of Spolin’s theater games as channeled by Sills in their desire to develop less mannered acting methods.  They had learned what the acting professors taught the theater kids in terms of history and technique; now they played the games Sills shared with them.  After graduation Sills and some of his circle, including Shepherd and Eugene Troobnick, founded the Playwright’s Theater Club (called a club to get around zoning regulations–audience members paid a membership fee to join the club in lieu of purchasing tickets).  

So Paul and David had met.  David had control of some of that old money, money he at first planned to spend to create a “people’s theater” somewhere in the midwest.  He’d left the east coast to get closer to working people, envisioning starting a theater in industrial Gary, Indiana, with the factory workers as actors.  No interest from the working people there, but he still had the money to spend. After the Playwright’s club closed, Paul Sills needed a partner with money to rent and refurbish a performance space.  While their dreams differed, they found enough overlap to partner as the co-founders of The Compass Players, considered by many the first improvisational theater group in the United States.  The acting troupe included Nichols and May as well as future show business luminaries Alan Arkin, Shelley Berman, and Barbara Harris.  In a 2014 Mark Siska documentary about the Compass years,  Compass Cabaret ‘55, Shepherd says this about what he wanted his theater to do: “Theater in New York was very effete and based on three-act plays and based on verbiage and there was not much action. I wanted to create a theater that would drag people off the street and seat them not in rows but at tables and give them something to drink, which was unheard of in [American] theater.”  Sounds like a coffeehouse setting, doesn’t it?  Shepherd’s iconoclasm illuminates part of the vision overlap with Sills, who also found New York theater dull and formula-ridden, including the stagy acting.  When Sills didn’t get the kind of performances he wanted from the Players, he called Mom to come back to Chicago to train them using her theater games.

Mother Knows Best

Okay, so Janet Coleman tells a more nuanced story about just how Viola Spolin came back to Chicago to work with the Compass Players in her definitive 1990 chronicle The Compass: The Improvisational Theatre that Revolutionized American Comedy.  Coleman has Spolin in Chicago to direct a Playwright’s Theater Club production of Juno and the Paycock starring Ed Asner.  She accepts Shepherd’s invitation to stay on in Chicago after the play closes, available due to the closing of her children’s theater in Los Angeles and her foundering marriage to Ed Spolin.  I imagine her son Paul agreeing with the invitation, though who knows for sure about family dynamics.  Whatever the behind-the-scenes drama, Viola Spolin offered theater games workshops to all comers including the Compass performers.  Andrew Duncan reports that Spolin’s approach provided the actors with the kind of coaching and mentoring that neither Sills nor Shepherd could offer.  He states that Spolin “instilled in everybody a sense that this was something you could do.  Sills would just scream and yell at you.  And David would be talking enigmatic mystification.  But Viola was a realist.  She was the one who dealt with the problems of improvisation that were moment-to-moment, which an actor needs.”  This strikes me as an eminently practical rhetorical approach.  Spolin, spiritual child of Boyd, claimed that “Everyone can act. Everyone can improvise. Anyone who wishes to can play in the theater and learn to become 'stage-worthy.' We learn through experience and experiencing, and no one teaches anyone anything.”  Barbara Harris adds about Spolin’s teaching, “Viola helped us understand what it feels like not to be attached to a script or to know what’s coming next.  The exercises gave you a point of concentration outside yourself.  You didn’t have to be brilliant.  It wasn’t competitive.”  Ego, the desire to stand out, would later become the snake in this improvisational community garden.    

We must pause for a moment here to contemplate the transition from the formal plays that the actors of the Playwright’s Theater Club performed to the audience-prompted improvisations performed by The Compass Players and later the Second City troupe.  Harris performed from scripts in the Theater Club productions, but The Compass co-founders had something else in mind borne of their desire both to connect to audiences about contemporary issues in their lives and to sprint away from the stodginess of conventional theater.  Inspired by what he knew about WPA people’s theater projects from the thirties, in the early days Shepherd insisted to his colleagues that he wanted something called The Living Newspaper as part of the nightly performance.  Cast members would walk on stage carrying the local newspaper and take suggestions from the audience, improvising immediate commentary on the major stories and newsmakers of the day.  Mort Sahl did something similar in the 1950s, complete with the newspaper as prop, as he developed (extending from Will Rogers earlier in the century) the observational comic op-ed as a form of stand-up.  As The Compass evolved, more general audience suggestions for situations they wanted to see enacted supplemented The Living Newspaper, creating what we still encounter today as now the most familiar form of improvisation, from college improv groups to the long-running television franchise Whose Line Is It Anyway?  

Coleman briefly describes several games Spolin taught in the workshops that aimed to help participants “to concentrate, to relax in the stage space, to develop an environment and a character, as well as to cooperate and share stage space and Focus with other players” (emphasis Coleman’s, as focus served an essential function for Spolin, often serving as her coaching exhortation).  This kind of training rooted in playing together well to achieve a common purpose prepared the Compass players to respond to the pressure of improvisation, with no script to rely on and only the contours of the prompts posing an immediate problem to solve.  Let me share a few examples Coleman highlights.  In Building a Where, for example, the game had the players “required to add something to the space through pantomime to make the ‘where’ more specific.”  Harris comments “because one thing leads to the other to add up to the whole, you learn to work together.”  In Contact, players could not say any dialogue “without first making connection with their partners in a physical way.”  Another game Coleman describes the players enjoying involved teaching a partner how to perform an activity.  Thinking about these games in relation to writing took me back to the alternate name for PWR that I put forward several years ago at September Sessions, the Program in World-Building and Relationship.  Building a World literally demands that players build a world object by object, creating a reality for all the players to live in.  We can think of the writer’s responsibility to build a detailed world that gives the reader the confidence to accept the invitation to move into the world, trusting that it has substance.  Contact obliges players to initiate an embodied connection before speaking, which likely reveals something about their relationship to the scene partner, reminding them that they don’t function in a vacuum.   We can think of Contact in relation to ethical appeal in writing, focusing on how the writer uses words (tone, style, pronouns) to demonstrate recognition of and commitment to the reader’s existence in and experience of the world built of words.

This link will take you to “Spolin Games Online.”  You’ll find many, organized by category with brief descriptions and videos of people playing each game.  Categories include “Creativity,” “Sidecoaching,”  and “Spontaneity,” including definitions and exhortations from Mother Viola such as this one reminiscent of her teacher Neva Boyd: “Discipline imposed from the outside (emotional tug-of-war for position) and not growing out of involvement with the problem produces inhibited or rebellious action. On the other hand discipline freely chosen for the sake of the activity becomes responsible action, creative action; it takes imagination and dedication to be self-disciplined. When the dynamics are understood and not superimposed, rules are abided by, and it is more fun that way.” Here Spolin explains some nuances of invention in relation to spontaneity, which she champions as essential for its creative dimension: “Invention is not the same as spontaneity. A person may be most inventive without being spontaneous. The explosion does not take place when invention is merely cerebral and therefore only a part or abstraction of our total selves.”  Again we encounter a warning against relying too much on the “merely cerebral,” as academic smarts don’t require engagement of the whole person.  She also offers this advice to drama teachers, though we can apply it to teaching other subjects (writing, for instance):  “Do not teach. Expose students to the theatrical environment through playing, and they will find their own way.”  For that last one, we can change “theatrical environment” to “language-rich environment” or even “rhetorical environment” if we supply a robust definition of rhetoric as a corollary to a performance space.

Before moving on, let’s contemplate a few more quotations from Spolin in relation to creativity and improvisation, translating them for the writing context as we go.  Note the consistent emphasis on learning as active and embodied in the whole self.

"If you have a problem, you can use a game, you are taking it out of the head where you think about it . . and you are getting it into the body, body-mind intuition, that is what we are after, body-mind intuition."  Ask students if they think of writing primarily or even exclusively as “head” or “brain” work (with a carve-out for what goes on in creative writing).  What happens to the rest of them when engaged in writing if writing requires only the “head”? 

“Through spontaneity we are re-formed into ourselves. It creates an explosion that for the moment frees us from handed-down frames of reference, memory choked with old facts and information and undigested theories and techniques of other people's findings. Spontaneity is the moment of personal freedom when we are faced with reality, and see it, explore it and act accordingly. In this reality the bits and pieces of ourselves function as an organic whole. It is the time of discovery, of experiencing, of creative expression.”  Here Spolin sounds many of the same notes Elbow plays in Writing With Power.  How can we cultivate spontaneity, discovery, experience, and creative expression in the context of the research process?  What activities/games can help students write beyond what Spolin calls “handed-down frames of reference” (what I’ve called enthymemes in previous installments) and “undigested theories and techniques of other people’s findings”?  In asking the question we run headlong into two complications: first, part of our university charge includes teaching “handed-down frames of reference” (also known as general academic and discipline-specific premises); second, ten weeks don’t provide much time to digest theories and understand techniques well enough to use them with confidence.  I still find the question worth asking and answering through developing games that create space for play in the research process.

“Theater Games are a process applicable to any field, discipline, or subject matter which creates a place where full participation, communication, and transformation can take place.”  Ah, here Spolin shares an ideal to strive for, and likely our colleagues across campus value “participation, communication, and transformation.”  An imagined response: “How to find the time for all this, though, when we have so much to cover in the way of frames of reference, facts, theories, and techniques/methods?  We can trust perhaps that transformation attaches to mastery of information, facts, theories, and methods as a natural byproduct.  I don’t see how to make time for games.”

“The theater workshop can become a place where teachers and students meet as fellow players, involved with one another, ready to connect, to communicate, to experience, to respond, and to experiment and discover.”  This one adapts smoothly to the writing workshop where teachers and students meet as fellow writers embarking on a shared language journey, though the school apparatus of deadlines and grades can undermine the potential for connection, communication, and experimentation.

Note that Spolin doesn’t mention comedy or getting an audience to laugh as the meaning or purpose of theater games.  She didn’t think about the games as entertainment for an audience but rather as a context for “full participation, communication, and transformation.”  She describes a “theater workshop” with language that focuses on nurturing an egalitarian community (think of her Hull House experiences).  Getting laughs doesn’t come up.  Performing as an individual with personal agendas (get laughs, get rich, get famous, get to New York) doesn’t come up.  Playing well together serves as the guiding principle and practice.

When Viola Spolin returned to California, Sills, Shepherd, and May took over running the workshops, each bringing their own ideas and emphases.  Mom had left the building.  Bad pun alert: The Compass had lost its compass.

Pedagogy Break (long one): Let’s explore some ways to develop improv games for the writing classroom, drawing inspiration from what Barbara Harris said about the games relieving the pressure of having to be “brilliant,” of having to show off.  While invention has had a prominent place in the western rhetorical tradition all the way back to Aristotle and Cicero, invention by other names makes a bigger splash in workshop contexts, particularly in composition through Peter Elbow’s Writing With Power and in a wide range of creative writing “invention” books including What If?: Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter (1990), Writing Fiction Step by Step (1998) by Josip Novakovitch, and Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway, originally published in 1982 and now in its tenth edition (that’s the text I used through the 1980s and 1990s when teaching fiction workshops).  That short list represents just the tip of the pedagogical iceberg of creative writing how-to texts, which tend to use the term “exercises” in place of invention and never use the term rhetoric; I have a couple hundred such books in my office, mostly from the second half of the twentieth century but a handful from earlier, before creative writing became a university sub-discipline, leading to the creative writing textbook industry.  

In the context of this installment, I see these books as guides to improvisation along the lines of Viola Spolin’s bible, Improvisational Games for the Theater, first published in 1963.  What can we get by bringing together the peanut butter of Elbow’s freewriting activities and the chocolate of Spolin’s theater games?  Elbow’s chapter “Metaphors for Priming the Pump” in Writing With Power compiles dozens of prompts for exploring topics from a dizzying range of perspectives, inviting association and creative (in place of critical) thinking.  In the exercise section of the 2000 textbook Crafting Fiction, which I co-edited with Clyde Moneyhun, we included a range of prompts for fiction writers.  I used the “Twenty-Sentence Scene” often in workshops, an exercise that asked writers to set up a basic situation–setting, characters, perhaps a general sense of plot direction or conflict–and then prompted them to write twenty sentences over about ten minutes, each in response to a prompt (e.g. write a sentence with a color in it, write a sentence with a ceiling or floor in it, write a line of dialogue of five words or less, write a line of dialogue of fifteen words or more). With a willing group of students, I could repeat this activity up to a half dozen times in an hour, resulting in a rough draft of a story; I sensed that the game aspect of counting words or integrating a ceiling or floor both took students out of their heads and pushed them to imagine the scene in ways they might not have without the prompts.  

Another exercise I relied on consisted of prompts exploring the inner life of a character, imagining their inner landscape, with prompts including sensory memories, family and school memories, secrets not shared even with the closest friends, and everyday items such as what song does the character always sing along with, what fictional character do they imagine themselves as, and which section of the newspaper (this was in the days of newspapers) do they read first.  For those of you who use the BEAM taxonomy (background, exhibit, argument, method, if I remember that right), you can create a game that asks students to alternate sentences in a paragraph by prompting them with the word or just the first letter–I believe that kind of game would demonstrate that those BEAM elements work (ideally weave) together rather than operating autonomously, always in their own cloistered paragraphs.

Commedia Tonight

Coleman begins her chapter titled “Viola’s Workshop” with an account of commedia dell'arte as a historical source for improv.  Wikipedia locates the heyday of commedia in Italy from the mid-16th century to the mid-18th century, noting that the traveling troupes improvised within set plots or situations familiar to the audience as well as character types the audience would recognize.  Wikipedia offers this about the topical improvisational element: “Since the productions were improvised, dialogue and action could easily be changed to satirize local scandals, current events, or regional tastes, while still using old jokes and punchlines. Characters were identified by costumes, masks, and props, such as a type of baton known as a slapstick. These characters included the forebears of the modern clown, namely Harlequin and the Zanni. Harlequin, in particular, was allowed to comment on current events in his entertainment.” Good to know the origin of the term “slapstick.”  Shepherd, with his history of theater training at Columbia, also invoked commedia as a predecessor to the kind of people’s theater he envisioned, with the audience actively addressed and invited to engage.  Keegan-Michael Key (of Key & Peele fame), in a recent book co-authored with his partner Elle Key titled The History of Sketch Comedy, devotes some time to commedia as a formative influence on both sketch and improv (we can observe clear areas of overlap in these comic genres, and after the success of Second City sketch performers almost always began as members of improv troupes).  The 2021 HBO limited series Station Eleven, adapted by Patrick Somerville from a 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel, features a commedia-like traveling troupe of actors performing in settlements in a dystopic future when humankind has been mostly wiped out by a pandemic.  Theater survives.   Sam Wasson, author of Improv Nation, insists that commedia didn’t help shape improv in developing his central argument that improv represents an art form specific to the United States springing to life in the 1950s, but the consensus view leads us to spend a little time with commedia.

First, let’s consider a Hollywood rendering in Kiss Me Kate, the 1948 Tony Award-winning Cole Porter stage musical made into a 1953 film directed by George Sidney.  Porter’s score and songs drew from Italian musical traditions, with the lyrics drawing liberally on Shakespeare, as the plot gives us a version of Taming of the Shrew.  The play and movie give the audience both the Shakespeare mash-up and a framing story about the present-day actors playing Petruchio and Kate, a squabbling divorced couple destined by genre to reunite by plot’s end.  Here we meet the commedia troupe in “We Open in Venice”:

“A troupe of strolling players, are we

Shakespearean portrayers, are we

But just a simple band

Who roams about the land

Dispensing fol-de-rol frivolity

Mere folk who give distraction are we

No Theater Guild attraction are we

But just a crazy group

That never ceases to troop

Around the map of little Italy” 

In this clip from the movie we get the song about the peripatetic actors’ life along with Howard Keel in character as Petruchio introducing the plot and main characters.  Note the comic types as well as the stock situations in how Keel frames the story to come.

In Part One, we met a number of figures who began their careers in vaudeville including the fictional Don Lockwood and Cosmo Brown from Singing in the Rain to comedy icons Burns and Allen and Jack Benny, all of whom could sing, dance (Benny just a little), tell jokes, and act.  Let’s meet another icon, George M. Cohan (1878-1942), portrayed by James Cagney in the 1942 biographical musical Yankee Doodle Dandy.  Cohan never attended an actual school, learning what he needed as a member of The Four Cohans, a family act touring the vaudeville circuit in the last quarter of the 19th century. 

This brief clip of The Four Cohans leaving the traveling life behind after George’s success in New York gives him the resources to get the family troupe back together in a series of Broadway theaters (a parallel to the montage of Kelly’s young hoofer who’s “gotta dance” and the earlier montage of Lockwood and Brown’s journey through vaudeville).

Before George leaves the family act for New York, the “meet cute” backstage scene in which Cohan first meets his future wife Mary.  She takes him to be the old man type he’s played in the show, as all four Cohans needed the versatility to play a variety of roles.

The older Cohan comes out of retirement to play FDR in a 1937 musical called I’d Rather Be Right, here performing “Off the Record.”  The film includes Cohan visiting FDR one rainy night at the White House, a command appearance, with FDR thanking him for his lifetime contributions to theater and especially for his patriotic songs (“Over There,” “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” and “Yankee Doodle Boy”).

A clip from a PBS documentary featuring a biographical sketch of George M. Cohan including his vaudeville origins as part of The Four Cohans and then his songwriting and Broadway successes, ending with his lasting legacy as seen in the styles of Broadway musical theater performers.

Another family vaudeville act, The Marx Brothers, deserves mention here, as the brothers portrayed types in their stage plays and movie roles that carry traces of commedia stock characters.

Groucho Marx as new college president Quincy Adams Wagstaff in the 1932 movie Horsefeathers, singing “I’m Against It” to the assembled faculty and students of Huxley College.

So, does improv differ in essence from commedia?  Importantly, the situations the audience suggests do not necessarily make an easy fit for the category types associated with what the traveling actors could expect to perform regularly.  In this context we can think back to Part Two’s discussion of jokes that support or reinforce the status quo and jokes that aim to incite the “tiny revolution” Orwell associates with a joke that deserves the name.  Improvisers can choose to go with what they trust the audience will recognize as familiar, with the laugh stemming from recognition and comfort rather than revelation and its potential for discomfort.  Relatedly, the performer also chooses whether or not to chart a direction beyond their own comfort zone–one can always go for the “easy laugh” of recognition or take the risk of pushing for revolution by pursuing insight and illumination.  As an example, Mike Nichols in his early acting at Chicago and in the Playwright’s Theater Club productions had a type of role he played, usually some kind of snarky conniver or snob; improvisation pushed him into the performing moment instead of relying on the mannerisms and characteristics that fit his accustomed characters–he credited Elaine May with showing him the way to more risky choices.  Perhaps we can answer the question posed at the beginning of the paragraph by proposing that the essence of improv involves risk, in the form of vulnerability for the actor and the rupture of revelation for the audience.

Improv Nation?

“It’s a special form that says, Even though you’re down there and we’re up here, we’re discovering this together.”  Sam Wasson in the preface to Improv Nation

Sam Wasson, at some remove historically from The Compass and the original Second City, nonetheless devotes some sixty pages to that place and time period in his 2017 book Improv Nation: How We Made a Great American Art.  He begins by picturing Viola Spolin at Hull House in 1940, tacking back in time briefly to consider her childhood filled with neighborhood games and her formative mentoring from Neva Boyd before showing her at work with the hesitant children of Chicago immigrants, asking them to improvise what the world would be like without adults and finding that giving them permission to play and create released them from inhibition.  Wasson’s historical method relies heavily on short dramatized vignettes featuring the players we’ve considered earlier in this installment (with a parallel narrative about Del Close of St. Louis, another key figure in the development of improv); his 435-page labor of love (including nearly 50 pages of notes about his sources) covers some 75 years, ending with his observation that “improv has replaced jazz as America’s favorite art.” 

He draws liberally on Sweet (1978) and Coleman’s (1990) earlier foundational books to evoke the heady era of invention while also adding his own observations about the essence of improv.  Here he muses on the kind of relationships improv allows to blossom: “Improvisers connect for the same basic reason you and your friends connect.  Say you meet someone.  You like something about them and they like something about you.  Your mutual interest begets mutual play.  Play begets cooperation and mutual understanding, which, trampolined by fun, becomes love.  Love is the highest form of play.”  In Part One, I described Nichols and May's chance meeting at a train station, some time after a quick bristling moment when Sills introduced them on a Chicago street; overcoming his impression that May intensely disliked him, at the train station Nichols approaches May with an unexpected opening line, inviting her to play an improv game casting them both as spies, complete with accents and references to absent spies they both know.  Without skipping a beat, May accepts the invitation to play, responding in character.  Wasson provides all the dialogue from that improvised scene, as if he sat on an adjacent bench with a tape recorder.  In any case, that legendary improvisation led to the phenomenon of Nichols and May described at length in Part One.  Wasson delves into their partnership, quoting Nichols about their performing principles and then adding his gloss: “‘Elaine and I had a rule,’ he said, ‘never try for a laugh.  Get the laugh on the way to something else.  Trying for it directly is prideless and dangerous, and the audience loses respect.  The audience should find the laugh itself.’  Relinquishing the need to be funny, he discovered, actually made him funnier.  Because, in reality, people are, mostly, not trying to be funny.  They’re just reacting, being themselves–which, it turns out, is pretty funny on its own.”  We could devote several full installments to this question of the relationship between the truth of human character and the funny of human character.

Wasson, I think appropriately, tracks the vexed question of the kind of theater Shepherd and Sills collaborated on to create.  When Shepherd recruited Sills to direct The Compass, Wasson notes, “Sills, a grumpy mystic, was conflicted.  No one, least of all him, intended Spolin’s games to get laughs.  Sills never considered how unleashing one’s spontaneous self–the intended result of his workshop–could be so funny.  But that’s what happens when your personal truth breaks out and blows up the socially acceptable one.”  We can consider this analysis in relation to the way enthymemes work in comedy (the enthymeme paradigm?) and Orwell’s sense of a joke’s social and cultural role–revealing the true self, allowing it to “blow up the socially acceptable one,” serves as a tiny revolution recognized by the audience’s laughter.  Here’s an excerpt from Wasson locating The Compass in the cultural moment, with a comment from original cast member Sheldon Patinkin; note how his take connects to what I wrote about the invention of “youth culture” via rock and roll in the popular music series last year: “The developmental stage of experimentation known as adolescence, like improvisation, was only just being invented. ‘None of us had seen or heard on tv or the radio that dealt with what it was like to be young Americans then and there,’ Sheldon Patinkin said.”  

In rendering the state of the entertainment/comedy industry at the time, Wasson also sets the stage for why The Compass met a need for a comic sensibility that aimed for truth-telling with an edge as a contrast to the homogenizing mass market appeals of network television.  He writes, “None of them intended to be funny… but the Compass Players, at that moment in the summer of 1955, were the most liberated comic ensemble in the country.  The Marx Brothers had disbanded.  Sid Caesar and Your Show of Shows had gone off the air a year earlier.  I Love Lucy still played to large audiences, but no matter how brilliant the show, it was, like all network television and most movies, basically well-behaved.  The Compass Players did as they liked.  With no script and no sponsors to obey, no Legion of Decency or family-friendly morality to uphold, they were saddled with no nos.”  We can think of this observation in relation to Lenny Bruce striving to find his comic voice in stand-up free of the standard jokes and de rigueur celebrity impressions. 

Remember, too, though, that the troupe at its inception reached a small local audience, mostly from the University of Chicago environs: “The effect was instantly obvious to those ninety or so Hyde Parkers present on opening night.  Even drunk, they felt it: as improvisers, these amateurs were like no one else on any stage or screen had ever been; they were like the rest of us offstage Americans actually ought to be: free to do and say as they felt.  Free to criticize; free to guess; free to feel differently.”   What we can observe in what follows over the next years, from The Compass to Second City, from small crowds of university types to Nichols and May at the Emmys and doing star turns on network television variety shows, represents the hegemony of cultural and market needs overwhelming the original motivation and ideals.  As The Compass grew in popularity, they experienced pressure to become more like show business and less like the kind of theater Sills and Shepherd imagined.  Cast members felt pressure to get laughs and stand out, leading to competition that undermined the communal ethos; the pressure to improvise night after night led to the repeating of successful improvisations that got laughs as “frozen scenes” in place of generating new scenarios every week based on audience suggestions.  The greater demand for tickets led to a change in location, moving away from the intellectual realm of Hyde Park denizens to attract a more affluent martini crowd.  In short, The Compass and then Second City evolved away from any kind of folk theater for the people and toward a more polished form of revue entertainment for the privileged who wanted their satire light and their jokes reassuring.

Come Together, or Crossing the Streams

Let’s review the many streams that crossed during this eventful period in the fifties in Chicago to provide a birthing place for improv as a specific genre of comedy practice.  We can consider the formal academic work of David Shepherd at Columbia in the History of Theater along with his experience as an audience member taking in the Broadway productions of the time, all of that privileged access to high culture complicated by Shepherd’s commitment to a people’s theater that would collapse the distance between audience and performers, even to the point of making the people the actors.  We have the simultaneously highbrow and Chicago-bohemian culture of the University of Chicago, which trained students in the Hutchins version of “secular perennialism,” with its emphasis on the canon (Great Books replacing the biblical scripture the long-departed Baptist founders endorsed) and Socratic erudition through critical inquiry and testing of premises; on the Bohemian side of UC, we have the underlife sanctioned by idiosyncratic admissions and attendance policies, with students like Sills and Nichols and May bouncing around coffeehouses, campus theater groups, and the streets enacting the Chicago version of the academic spritz Gornick describes at CCNY some eight hundred miles to the east.  

As nurtured by Viola Spolin and finding a new generation through her son Paul Sills, we have the focus on the productive creative nexus between theater games, self-development, and the connection to community that Spolin learned from Neva Boyd in the context of Hull House; as part of this legacy we have the theater games themselves that Spolin raised Sills on and taught to the fledgling Compass Players, with the emphasis on focus and attention rather than on performance to please the audience.  As writer Mary Moynihan puts it in a piece in Smashing Times, “Spolin’s work has relevance for the arts and human rights as she believed that games could play a part in breaking down barriers. She believed that her improvisation training ‘provides a way for people of different cultures, with different life experiences, to work together collaboratively to achieve productive outcomes. It is a way for individuals to participate fully and authentically in the solving of problems. It is a path to innovation and inspiration and personal commitment.’ That was how Spolin conceived of improvisation.”  Clearly Spolin never let go of what she learned in the settlement house about the centrality of community.  In the wider cultural media context, as Wasson illuminates, we have television providing nightly comedy for a national audience, presenting veterans from vaudeville and movies such as Lucille Ball, Jack Benny, and George Burns, the next generation represented by the cast of Your Show of Shows, and the younger strivers fighting for spots on The Tonight Show and The Ed Sullivan Show, alternating with the older generation and likely questioning whether they could break free from the old ways.  

Improv as Life

“But one of the things I learned from improvising is that all of life is an improvisation, whether you like it or not. Some of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century came out of people dropping things.” Alan Arkin

“Life is an improvisation. You have no idea what's going to happen next and you are mostly just making things up as you go along.” Stephen Colbert

“Life is improvisation. All of those [improv] classes were like church to me. The training had seeped into me and changed who I am.”  Tina Fey

“What life and society require of each of us is a constantly alert attention that discerns the outlines of the present situation, together with a certain elasticity of mind and body to enable us to adapt ourselves in consequence.”  Henri Bergson, Laughter (1900)  

Yes, I invoke Bergson in just about everything I write about comedy, as his words above strike me as establishing a rhetorical perspective on the comic, at least in terms of the distinctive character of those who wish to avoid the mechanical behavior that warrants and elicits laughter, what Bergson terms “a social corrective.”  In the context of improv, his words put in the foreground the need to adjust to changing situations, which requires attention and focus.  He sees the ideal human as endlessly improvising responses while avoiding the mechanical response.  Aristotle defines rhetoric as “the ability to discover the available means of persuasion in any situation.”  Spolin might define improvisation as “the ability to discover through attention and focus and then reveal through agile processing and performance the available range of spontaneous responses and subsequent behaviors in any game situation.”  An actual Spolin description of the theater workshop (yes, we saw this earlier) as at least potentially a communal rhetorical space, a parlor for players: “The theater workshop can become a place where teachers and students meet as fellow players, involved with one another, ready to connect, to communicate, to experience, to respond, and to experiment and discover.”

In the history of The Compass and Second City, the companies came more and more to rely on “frozen” response to the situation, repeating improvised sketches that had “worked” with the audience to decrease the constant pressure to create.  Russian composer and conductor Igor Stravinksy (1882-1971) defined “composition” as “frozen improvisation,” illuminating the tension between the organic/alive and the frozen/lifeless in a pithy phrase.  Akin to Bergson, perhaps, Stravinsky in an ideal musical universe would improvise endlessly, flexibly composing in response to the situation; Orwell would join their improvisers’ club representing the infinite capacity of humans to compose language.  Well, to get on in the world we need the “frozen” to some degree.  Thus we develop formulas, genres, templates, ways to get things done without creating wheel after wheel, fresh phrase after fresh phrase, spontaneous action after spontaneous action till we collapse from exhaustion.

In music, language, improv, and social interaction we pursue and balance various purposes: to explore the self, to explore the self in relation to others, to explore issues facing the community, and ultimately to explore the possibilities of play as an essential human activity.

An AI Coda Featuring Spolin and Elbow

Spolin asserts this too: “Creativity is not the clever rearranging of the known.” This led me to think about what AI does, which essentially boils down to rearranging the known language patterns in its training texts.  What about the adjective “clever”?  Can any AI outputs rise to this level?  Generally not, given the widespread general consensus regarding the “flatness” of AI-generated prose.  Grammatically correct, self-assured in its “just the facts” mode as well as in the hedging certainty of its surface analysis of things when prompted to address themes in a novel or perspectives on an issue, but not clever in its rearranging of all that has been written before about those facts, those themes, those issues.  Enthymemes along with patterns of prose drive AI prose, as the enthymemes weave through the training texts.  So, we get a flattened rearranging of the known.  

Consider how Spolin explores “talent” in relation to human experience of the world, experience that AI cannot have.  She asserts,  “It is highly possible that what is called 'talented behavior' is simply a greater individual capacity for experiencing. From this point of view, it is in the increasing of the individual capacity for experiencing that the untold potentiality of a personality can be evoked.” We can apply this to writing as well, as when we invite students to engage with their lived experience when building the world of their essay.  Consider an exhortation and a warning from Spolin about contenting oneself with the known or the response coming from repeating the known; first the exhortation, “The unknown is where we go to find new things and intuition is how we find them” and then the warning, “One must be chary of words because they turn into cages.”  Consider these as in conversation with Elbow’s language about the loop writing process, with the voyage out and the voyage back home, which he suggests for situations in which writers must engage with an assignment they didn’t choose and might prefer not to do at all.  He writes, “I call this process a loop because it takes you on an elliptical orbiting voyage. For the first half, the voyage out, you do pieces of almost-freewriting during which you allow yourself to curve out into space—allow yourself, that is, to ignore or even forget exactly what your topic is. For the second half, the voyage home, you bend your efforts back into the gravitational field of your original topic as you select, organize, and revise parts of what you produced during the voyage out. Where open-ended writing is a voyage of discovery to a new land, the loop process takes a circling route so you can return to the original topic—but now with a fresh view of it.”  AI can’t journey, nor can it experience or intuit.  It can only recycle the known.

Next Quarter in Coming to Comedy, Part Four: Sketch Trek The Next Generation ....