Belated Tributes to Bernie Sahlins and Gary David Goldberg (Part 2)
Around 1990, I became obsessed with SCTV, and I only knew the name Bernie Sahlins from his listing as a co-creator in the credits of each episode. Later I would learn he was also instrumental in, you know, INVENTING SKETCH COMEDY.
I won’t even attempt to detail how Sahlins co-created The Second City or his specific contributions to the art of improv–that’s been done very well elsewhere–but I do want to take the opportunity to talk a little about what Second City has meant to me.
I remember stumbling across a Best of SCTV special on NBC while watching TV with my dad one night. The very first sketch I saw was a commercial featuring Martin Short for “Shower in a Briefcase.” I can still hear my dad chuckling in anticipation–“Oh, this is great”–and I can just as clearly remember being in full belly-laugh mode by the end of the sketch.
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Granted, I was 14 and slapstick still had considerable charms over me. But again, I knew there was something smarter at work here, and I was immediately in love with SCTV.
Now, this was before yer fancy-schmancy “electronic programming grids” and yer high-falootin’ “dee-vee-arrrs”–what with their ability to automatically record every episode of a series at the touch of a button and all–so I had to find syndicated airings of SCTV by hand, scouring through TV Guide one page at a time. (And I LIKED IT!)
And of course, I did my corresponding obsessed media deep-dive, riding my bike to the library to look up old magazine articles from the heyday of SCTV. Wait, “SC” stands for “Second City”? And all these actors are from Second City? What’s Second City?
14-year-old me: “Look at John Candy!”
It turns out the Second City roots run deep in my family. My parents also love comedy, and they remember going to Second City shows in the ‘60s and '70s and seeing people like David Steinberg, Robert Klein and George Wendt. They knew first-hand how you could go to any show at Second City and have the chance to see a future comedy star in the making. So in 1992, they took me to see my first Second City show.
I KNOW.
BUT, here’s the funny thing: Steve Carell was not actually in the show that night for some reason. So instead, they had his understudy, a guy named Stephen Colbert.
I remember taking notice of Colbert because he was tall and thin and had round glasses, so he reminded me of Egon Spengler. And because I’m a huge nerd, in my countless viewings of Ghostbusters, I’ve always thought of Egon as “the cute one.”
A couple of years later, when Colbert, Amy Sedaris, Mitch Rouse and Paul Dinello co-created Exit 57 on Comedy Central, I felt like some kind of genius talent scout with exclusive access to rare insider information about how funny all those guys were.
(Left to right: Paul Dinello, Jodi Lennon, Stephen Colbert, Amy Sedaris, Mitch Rouse)
I saw a bunch more revues at Second City through high school and college–with cast members including Scott Adsit, Rachel Dratch and Keegan-Michael Key–before I moved to Atlanta and lost my hometown access. Luckily, I fell in love with a guy who loves comedy as much as I do, and in December 2009, we trekked north for Second City’s 50th anniversary weekend.
One of my favorite weekends ever. There was a phenomenal SCTV cast reunion show and panel, including several touching John Candy tributes, along with an incredible, star-packed alumni performance that spanned two stages. And somewhere in the middle of all that, this happened:
There’s an Onion T-shirt that says “I Appreciate the Muppets on a Much Deeper Level Than You.” That’s how native Chicagoans feel about The Second City. Those actors feel like old friends, if only because we all know what it’s like to live through a Midwest winter. As is fitting with starting a theater centered on improvisation, Bernie Sahlins never could have predicted where his work would lead. But like millions of other comedy fans, I’m forever thankful it found its way to me.
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