Add
director Paul Sills (whose mother, Viola
Spolin, wrote “The” book on Improvisation),
and an ex-Harvard student named David
Shepherd, and the result was a sonic boom
that’s still reverberating through the
American theater. Shepherd and Sills first
did Compass theater, and when that
splintered Sills found backer/partners Alk,
Sahlins et. al. and opened Second City to
instant acclaim. How grim the Fifties were,
and how welcome but momentary the early
Sixties mix of coffee house, bookstore, folk
music and satire. In Chicago the Gate of
Horn; the Café Oblique, Bill Smith’s
Bookstore, the Second City, and the College
of Complexes, The Pad and Maury’s coffee
house made for a Beatnik nirvana . These
scenes changed lives, forged impossible
possibilities, and led to literacy,
insurrection, sex, drugs and post-beatnik
hippy culture.
Sills,
whose last show at the Second City (1967)
“The Trip,” concerned an acid trip, grew
disgruntled at displays of mere irony and
wit and moved on to direct the Game, Story
and Free Theater’s - where I was resident
actor/musical director. The name changes
came as often as the debt collectors waving
heating bills. The story of satire in the
Sixties is tied to American Improvisational
theater, which led, not just to the Second
City and Story Theater, but to the Improv
comedy scene, Saturday Night Live, Second
City TV (Canada) and Belushi’s descent into
fame.
The first
Improvisational theaters were among David
Shepherd’s and Paul Sill’s many attempts at
building a community culture independent of
the corporate behemoth which has come to
dominate American life, as they predicted.
Both Sill’s and Shepherd’s efforts are
invariably lumped as part of a “theatrical”
scene which does disservice to their
attempts at addressing the Post War
marginalization, angst and bleakness - using
theater as a focus for community. Its all
background to Steven Kercher’s Rebel Without
a Cause. Whether or not you prefer moderate
satire, this is the “liberal” stuff. It’s a
great story, this adventure with
Improvisation at its heart.
When
post-war America suddenly put a great hand
round its own nasty throat, the hand was
satirical theater. Where once there was
morbid triumphalism; the sleepy Ike years
with their hidden histories of assassination
and torture; the Organization men and their
treadmill, there was now laughter and
mockery. Should you read between the lines
of Kercher’s book it’s actually a hard
history: careers destroyed (Mauldin and
Bruce), marginalization, Red baiting and
exile (Oliver Harrington), thwarted visions
(Second City, Premise, Compass), Cold War
hypocrisy and chauvinism. Kercher, whose
book is otherwise encyclopedic, does not
touch on the devolution at the Second City,
where caustic comic commentary turned to
Sit-Com pretension and business franchise in
but a few decades.
But there
are hilarious business moments. Ted Flicker
of the Premise writing to Sills and Bernard
Sahlins at the Second City offering to
divide America between them: “A Premise
here, a Second City there,” because there
was: “money, money, money to be made.”
Sills, whose contempt for commercialism was
legendary, may not have been amused. But
those were heady days, and Flicker made
himself a fortune while extolling the
virtues of “playing together,” and “not
going commercial.” Flicker, in all his
visionary glory, cashing in. Look where it
went. Women for a start: whether Joan
Darling’s or Barbara Harris’ ove-psychoanalyzed,
unloved, lonely, neurotic urban heroines who
could be simultaneously emasculating and
vulnerable to the point of suicide, or
Elaine May’s icy charm and savage Male
demolishing repartee.
He: “Hi.”
She:
“Schmuck.”
May, like
Darden could drill a victim in seconds, on
or off stage. On entering Jimmy’s, a
legendary Hyde Park bar on a windy night,
May heard a male patron say: “Hi, Elaine,
been out on your broom?” May responded:
“Why? You want something up your ass?” Pity
the poor undergraduate after that riposte.
Nichols and May were to construct an entire
universe of the guilty Jewish son, and his
sadist mother. And then reverse the roles.
Neurosis, analysis, catharsis, Broadway. Yet
Kercher does an end run around Post War
satirical/political theater: its as if Show
Biz is safe ground, but the corrosive
attempts of the satirical/radical theater
elude him. The two most significant
political/ satirical theaters this country
produced in the Sixties, Peter Schumann’s
Bread and Puppet, and the San Francisco Mime
Troupe under R.G.Davis, are hardly mentioned
but for a cursory reference to Davis. Both
outfits were radical and both were
influenced by the German Marxist satirist
Bertolt Brecht.
Davis and
Schumann are world-class artists who
extended the satirical form. Davis
went on to found Epic West, the first
Brechtian Theater in the U.S. I mention them
because their inclusion would have extended
Kercher’s attempt at a vision of Sixties
satire. Perhaps there will be room in a
revised edition. Kercher’s quite good on
Lenny Bruce’s modulated self-destruction and
evisceration at the hands of moralist-cops,
and Mort Sahl’s determined spin-out. Kercher
also gives us cartoonist Bill Mauldin’s now
forgotten eclipse, from War hero creator of
Willie and Joe to Red baited victim, knocked
back into line but almost out of his
profession. There is an excellent account of
the Black cartoonist Oliver Harrington,
whose work is as piercingly bitter as was
his life and exile, and anonymous death in
East Germany after decades of obscurity.
Kercher
weights his account with facts, and hundreds
of quotes - so much so that the reader is
sometimes left groping for a perspective
amidst the meticulous detail. The downside
of a work as detailed and scholarly as this
one is its dismaying academic insistence on
a ‘false’ neutrality. Judgments, whether
right or wrong, make for interest and reader
response, and research, no matter how well
documented, can soften and sometimes annul
the wit and incision of an argument. Kercher
often balks at venturing an insight when a
generality will do. Well-honed and judicious
opinion there is in abundance, but one must
sometimes grope after Kercher’s point.
Product of an Academy that insists on
Professional objectivity, and a wit
diminishing fair-mindedness, Kercher
invariably does his duty: all of which can
make for terrific scholarship and
somnambulist indecision. Do we really have
to be told endlessly that Sixties performers
were male chauvinists?
Kercher
sidesteps the question of how the absolute
laugh-strangling futility of Flip Wilson,
Bill Cosby, Dick Cavett, Soupy Sales and the
rest was “achieved” following the fantastic
stuff done just a few years earlier by
Second City, Nichols and May, the Premise
and the rest. And yes:” (Tom) Lehrer’s
parodic songs were pessimistic.” This is, as
the Po Mo people like to say:
“over-determined.”
This fine
book will long remain a useful reference
guide to American cartoonists like Herblock,
Walt Kelly, and Al Capp,”the sick
humorists,” Lenny Bruce, Second City,
Premise, Ted Flicker, Del Close, Sills, The
Committee, Nichols and May, Gary Goodrow and
thousands more. There are good sections on
the English: Cook, Moore, Bennett, Miller,
and the rest of that Fringe Establishment
that are now an irreducible part of cultural
history, whether Cook and Moore’s brilliant
improvisations; Jonathan Miller’s
directorial career, or the increasingly
acclaimed playwright Alan Bennett. For a
book this size, Kercher makes remarkably few
missteps. In one footnote, however, he
mistakes Lenny Bruce’s use of the word
schtick for “stick,” and then compounds the
error by making Bruce’s Yiddish, which was
pungent and fluent: “Black argot.”
There is
some very good stuff on NBC’s attempt at
“commercial satire” geared to the now
defunct corporate assumption that audiences
can think. Although not his stated purview,
it would have spiced things to get Kercher’s
views on why TV satire (Maher, Colbert,
Stewart, et. al.) is now the only place
within the Network media spectrum where you
hear something approaching the Truth
disguised as comedic routine. Stewart is
now regularly quoted and and so effortlessly
humiliated two CNN hosts (one Liberal, the
other a bow tied Conservative) that they
were yanked off the air within weeks of
their dicing at his hands. Bill Maher does
some great spot-on political analysis, but
keeps undermining his own considerable
intelligence by insisting on going into the
toilet, unprompted, when he senses he’s
losing em. Colbert, whose devastating
critique of Bush, disguised as homily (with
a clueless Bush present) at a White House
Correspondents dinner, was largely ignored
by the mainstream media, brought off the
satirical coup of the Century before an
audience of befuddled, stupefied fruit
flies. In that incredible moment revealing
the Titanic gulf between White House
journalistic sycophancy and the devastating
skewering of a serving President seated but
a rubber chicken away and oblivious to his
lampooning, as was much of the fat cat
audience.
The
internet, despite the New York Times
insisting that the single greatest “live on
camera” disemboweling of an American
President had “bombed” made Colbert a
National reputation overnight, as his
astronomical Youtube.com stats would verify.
Maher, Stewart, and Colbert owe a debt of
gratitude to the Network Media Black Hole
that has made their careers and fortunes.
The film documentary (Michael Moore the
prime example)- remains, with TV satire, the
last popular source for political
information and analysis, often uncorrupted
by Spin, Mercantilist “logic” and pro Market
crooning. Satire remains a means of
communication, education and information
where, as Kafka pointed out: “The Lie has
become a world order.” Satire is that
greatest of modern heresies: critical
consciousness.
Kercher
points out that satire can also amount to
little more than elitist snobbery, and
insider tediousness. Kercher, in treating
the “liberal satire” of his subjects, does
not venture, as did Brecht, Hasek, Kafka,
and Edmund Wilson, to suggest that satire is
an educational method disguised as
entertainment. This approach would have
given Kercher a driving through-line (just
what is it that satire does?) that the book
lacks. But the Improv legacy now contains a
well-paid fact: Improvs co-optation as a
sales tool. Improv, as a method does not
appear to do much to create satirical
material, (as Roger Bowen notes in the book)
but it does serve to further solidarity and
group cohesion. Tom Peters and the thousands
of less successful business gurus now use
“Improv” as often as they do the word
“market.” Improv is heard endlessly at the
thousands of “act out your career dream,
let’s all pull together” guided weekends to
which middle management executive trainees
are now routinely sentenced. Long way from
those Bohemians at the University of
Chicago, riffing in a drafty storefront. But
here's the final problem I’ll urge Kercher
to consider next: satire presumes a very
definite standpoint, is that why America is
currently the world’s laughing stock?
