The Second City

Opening Night and the Old Town Years (1959–1966)

The Second City opened on December 16, 1959, at 1842 North Wells Street in Chicago's Old Town neighbourhood. Opening night featured Barbara Harris in a spotlight singing "Everybody's in the Know," and tickets cost $1.50. Paul Sills directed; Bernie Sahlins produced; Howard Alk provided backing. The name derived from A.J. Liebling's 1952 New Yorker article dismissing Chicago as a second-tier city. The opening production, "Excelsior and Other Outcries," was an immediate success, with weekend performances selling out within weeks.

Within its first year, The Second City began offering improvisational workshops to the public, using methods drawn from Viola Spolin's theatre games that Sills had developed through the Compass Players. The workshops became a central part of the company's identity and, eventually, its primary revenue source. In 1961 the company moved to 1846 North Wells Street and staged a Broadway production, "From the Second City," at the Royale Theatre. The production ran for 87 performances and received two Tony nominations; the cast included Alan Arkin.

Del Close, the Move to 1616, and the Wells Street Era (1967–1981)

In 1967, The Second City moved to its current address at 1616 North Wells Street, a larger facility in the heart of Old Town. That same year, Del Close joined the company as director, bringing an orientation toward long-form improvisation and ensemble risk that permanently influenced Second City's rehearsal culture. Close's insistence that performers treat improvisation as genuine artistic investigation rather than merely a workshop for sketch development was a recurring tension with the company's commercial imperatives, but his teaching methods shaped every generation of performers who passed through during his tenure.

The 1970s brought international expansion. The Second City opened a Toronto location at "The Old Fire Hall" in 1973, the first permanent Second City company outside Chicago. The Toronto cast's 1976 creation of the television sketch series SCTV, which ran through the early 1980s and launched the careers of John Candy, Eugene Levy, Rick Moranis, Catherine O'Hara, Harold Ramis, Martin Short, and Dave Thomas, demonstrated that Second City's ensemble format could sustain a major television presence.

The e.t.c. Stage and Expansion (1982–2004)

In September 1982, The Second City opened the e.t.c. Theatre adjacent to the Mainstage, a second performance space seating approximately 196. The e.t.c. gave the company a dedicated venue for newer ensembles developing their own revues, providing a developmental stage between the Training Center and the Mainstage and deepening the institutional pipeline for talent. The Mainstage and e.t.c. stages created a dual-revue model that has remained the core of the Chicago operation.

The 1980s and 1990s saw Second City produce successive generations of performers who went on to major television and film careers. The company's alumni supply to Saturday Night Live became so consistent that Second City alumni constituted a reliable majority of many SNL casts across these decades.

Acquisition and COVID Closure (2005–2022)

In 2005, The Second City established a partnership with Norwegian Cruise Line to produce programming on cruise ships, becoming the first comedy theatre to operate at sea. The arrangement extended the brand into a new commercial context and generated revenue that supported the Chicago and Toronto operations.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced The Second City to close in March 2020 along with all live performance venues. In July 2021, the company was sold to ZMC, a media-focused private equity firm. The sale ended 62 years of ownership by the founding families and their successors and raised questions about the institution's future artistic direction. The Second City reopened its Chicago stages and has continued to produce revues at 1616 North Wells Street.

The Second City's defining format is the sketch-and-improv revue: a full-length programme comprising scripted scenes, songs, and satirical monologues developed through improvisational workshop, followed by an unscripted improvisational set in which the cast takes audience suggestions. The revue format, which the company has produced continuously since its 1959 opening, is distinct from the Harold-centred long-form model developed at iO: the revue values the polished, repeatable scene over the single-performance ensemble discovery.

The process by which Second City develops revue material is central to its artistic identity. Performers improvise scenes in workshops, the best material is identified and shaped through iteration, and the final revue is a collection of rehearsed scenes built from improvisational origins. The improv set at the end of each performance serves as the primary site for genuine improvisation and as the source material for future revue development. The form rewards improvisers who are strong editors and scene-carpenters as much as performers who excel in the moment.

The Second City's relationship to social and political satire has been continuous since its founding. From its early engagement with nuclear anxiety and Cold War politics through the civil rights era, the Vietnam period, the Reagan years, and the post-9/11 years, the company has used the revue format to produce commentary on American life that the mainstream entertainment industry has been slower to generate. The social-satirical register is not incidental to the Second City form; it is what distinguishes the revue from a comedy club or a sketch television programme and gives the institution its particular cultural authority.

Excelsior and Other Outcries (1959): The Second City's inaugural revue, opening on December 16, 1959, which established the format and social-satirical register the company has maintained across more than sixty years. The first-night audience encountered a company already capable of generating the kind of comedic commentary that the Compass Players had developed in their scenario format.

From the Second City (1961): A Broadway production at the Royale Theatre, featuring Alan Arkin, that ran for 87 performances and received two Tony nominations for Best Musical and Best Director. The production demonstrated that the Second City format could travel beyond Chicago and introduced the company to a national audience.

SCTV (1976–1984): The television series created by the Second City Toronto cast, produced initially for a Canadian television market and eventually broadcast across North America on NBC. SCTV established that the Second City ensemble method could generate world-class television comedy; its alumni, including John Candy, Eugene Levy, Rick Moranis, Catherine O'Hara, Harold Ramis, Martin Short, and Dave Thomas, constituted one of the most remarkable comedy cohorts in television history.

The e.t.c. Revue Series (1982–present): The Second City e.t.c. stage, which opened in September 1982, has produced a continuous parallel revue series alongside the Mainstage programme, developing ensembles that have included future Mainstage performers and generated productions recognized independently by Chicago theatre critics and the Jeff Awards.

Saturday Night Live Pipeline: The Second City has supplied more cast members to Saturday Night Live than any other training source. From the original Not Ready for Primetime Players (Aykroyd, Belushi, Radner) through Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Rachel Dratch, Keegan-Michael Key, Aidy Bryant, and Tim Robinson, the Second City alumni roster at SNL represents an unbroken lineage across five decades.

The Second City is the most influential comedy institution in North America, measured by the density and quality of its alumni pipeline, the durability of its format, and the global reach of its training model. Its revue format has been replicated at Second City companies in Toronto, Los Angeles, and New York, and its training methodology has been adopted by dozens of independent comedy schools worldwide.

The company's most consequential contribution to American entertainment culture is the uninterrupted pipeline of performers it has supplied to Saturday Night Live since that programme's 1975 debut. The alumnus-to-SNL relationship represents not merely a training credential but an active professional community in which Second City directors, casting directors, and producers have sustained a multi-decade institutional relationship with Lorne Michaels and NBC. This relationship has given the Second City format a visibility in American comedy that no other improv institution has matched.

The tension between the Second City's commercial imperatives and its artistic aspirations, present since Del Close's directorial conflicts with Bernie Sahlins in the 1960s and 1970s, has produced the institution's most significant internal debates. The question of whether the revue format develops performers at the expense of the long-form skills that iO and UCB prioritize, and whether a company that sells out nightly to corporate groups and tourists can sustain genuine artistic risk, has animated Chicago comedy discourse for decades. The 2021 sale to ZMC intensified this debate, as the new ownership's priorities and the company's artistic independence remain subjects of ongoing scrutiny.