Last night I went to karaoke at Holiday Club. I love karaoke. I sang Faith by George Michael and MAN, if you ever want to really see my Trixie (that sounded dirty) come see me do the karaoke. I sing like Cameron Diaz and dance like Molly Ringwald. But heck, I enjoy it.
But before the festivities began my intelligent group of friends started discussing the word “meta.” We were trying to explain how some improv groups go meta…that basically they’re making fun of the art, poking holes in the rules and breaking 4th walls…how some improv groups show the structure of their art.
And my mind starts to churn – why, that’s just like post-modernism really – poking fun at the seriousness of the art. That Chicago improv comedy and architecture really have a lot in common.
And that my friends, is where my metaphor begins.
The original cast members of the Second City were “The Chicago School.” In the 1950’s these men, including Paul Sills, Severn Darden and Howard Alk, began a new way of doing comedy. They took the foundation people had been working on for years and expanded it. They created a set of rules for their art, a structure, a shared idea.
The architects of the Chicago School – Holabird & Roche, Burnham, Sullivan – they all did the same thing. They took what we already had and completely reshaped it. Sullivan gave it a structure and they all worked on writing new rules for a new way of building. Skyscrapers.
But then see, one guy, he gets it into his head that there is a more philosophical art to be found; a deeper passage to go down. He wants to exploit the pure truth of his art without all the bells and whistles.
For architecture, this man is Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe.
For comedy, this man is Del Close.
Now, I like to think at some weird party somewhere in the 1960’s Del and Mies smoked one hell of a doobie together. But that’s just me.
Del wanted to go another way with comedy, a way Second City didn’t really see working for them. They thought that improv is a tool for writing comedy, Del believed improv was an art. He set to work teaching thousands of students at Improv Olympic, some called him a guru, some called him an asshole.
Mies is similar, a guru teaching thousands of students how to design like he did. He wasn’t interested in all the things that make your building pretty, he was interested in it’s truth, it’s simplicity, don’t muck it up with dirty words and dumb bits. Oh wait…sorry, that was Del…
Now, the young improvisers of today, they’re your classic post-modernists. To them, Del is outdated and commonplace. They don’t want to follow serious philosophical rules for comedy. They want to add back all the fun, they want to make dick jokes and get on Saturday Night Live. They want to be on TV. Some of them are funny or have some promise and are honestly taking their comedy in a whole different direction, but some of them are just out there slipping on banana peels.
Some post-modernist buildings are awesome and whimsical and have a sense of humor. Some of them are just stupid, garish, silly buildings that are all flash.
If our future in architecture is the Supertall, then I’m not really sure what the new improviser is – someone who is going to take the art in a whole new direction, if I knew what fantastic direction that was, well then I’d be doing that instead of pondering the similarities between architecture and Chicago comedy.
O'Hare Arpt., IL
You imply that Del, by pursuing improvisation as an art, was doing something different than Paul Sills. He did indeed do some things differently than Paul, but not in this regard. Sills was always about the art of improvisation, and to suggest that all Sills thought improvisation was for was the creation of material is a serious misreading of history. Read SOMETHING WONDERFUL RIGHT AWAY, in which both Paul and Del have their extended say, and adjust.
Hey Jeff! Thank you for commenting. I never meant to imply that Paul Sills was about only the creation of material. Paul Sills was a visionary, he was the first builder. I likened him to the Chicago School of architects, to Burnham, Sullivan…he was an innovator, he laid the foundation. As they evolved, Second City used improv as a tool for writing material and that as a business, were not interested in using it in it’s purest form. Del did want to do that and he did. I hope that makes my metaphor more apt?