The Second City

Precursor: The Compass Players (1955–1958)

The direct predecessor of The Second City was The Compass Players, founded in 1955 by David Shepherd and Paul Sills at a bar near the University of Chicago campus in Hyde Park. Shepherd, a New York transplant with utopian ambitions about democratic popular theater, had spent years attempting to develop a workers' theater that would be genuinely responsive to its audience; Sills, whose mother was theater games pioneer Viola Spolin, brought the improvisational pedagogical framework that made the experiment viable. The Compass was among the first American theater ensembles to use improvisation not as warm-up or comedy filler but as the structural basis for original dramatic and comedic work.

The Compass Players performed a rotating repertoire of "living newspaper" sketches based on audience suggestions and current events, alongside more conventionally structured scenes. The ensemble included Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Shelley Berman, Roger Bowen, Andrew Duncan, and Ed Asner at various points, and briefly Del Close. Nichols and May developed the improvisational two-person form they would later bring to Broadway. The Compass dissolved in 1958 as key members dispersed to New York, leaving Sills without an ensemble but with a pedagogical approach ready for a new institution.

Founding in Chicago (1959–1967)

The Second City opened on December 16, 1959, at 1842 North Wells Street in Chicago's Old Town neighborhood. Paul Sills, Bernie Sahlins, and Howard Alk opened the room with 120 seats and admission at $1.50, intending a permanent home for the satirical revue format they had developed through the Compass experiment. The founding cast — Eugene Troobnick, Severn Darden, Mina Kolb, Barbara Harris, Roger Bowen, and Andrew Duncan — established the company's early voice: intellectual, politically engaged, and committed to character over joke-craft. The company's name was taken from A.J. Liebling's dismissive 1952 New Yorker essay about Chicago, which called the city "the Second City" in contrast to New York; the founders adopted the slight as an ironic badge of honor.

In 1961, the company sent a cast to Broadway for "From the Second City," earning Tony Award nominations for Severn Darden and Barbara Harris, with Alan Arkin in the cast. The Broadway run established The Second City as a nationally visible institution — not merely a Chicago experimental venue — and proved the company's format had commercial reach beyond its home market. Joan Rivers joined the Chicago company in 1961 as well, one of the earliest women to become a central figure in the ensemble. Alan Arkin, Barbara Harris, Severn Darden, and Bill Alton constituted an era of performers who defined the company's early intellectual and character-driven comedy. John Belushi joined in 1971, connecting through Harold Ramis and the National Lampoon circle to the producer relationships that would eventually produce Saturday Night Live. In August 1967, the company relocated from 1842 North Wells to 1616 North Wells, a few blocks south within Old Town; the new building provided a larger stage and permanent backstage infrastructure, and has been The Second City Chicago's address continuously for more than fifty years.

Del Close, the Touring Company, and the e.t.c. Stage (1967–1985)

Del Close worked with The Second City as a performer and director in multiple stints across more than two decades. His first major tenure began in the mid-1960s; he was dismissed in 1965, rehired in 1967 as director, and worked with the company intermittently through the early 1980s. Close's teaching philosophy — built on the principle "the truth is funny" — rejected the construction of jokes in favor of discovering genuinely funny situations through commitment, emotional honesty, and ensemble thinking. Where earlier Second City directors had emphasized wit and cleverness, Close pushed performers toward the raw psychological truth of scenes, insisting that the audience's laughter at real human situations was more durable and interesting than laughter at cleverness.

Close directed productions featuring John Belushi, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Gilda Radner, Tina Fey, and many others. His method shaped not only the specific performers he directed but the company's institutional culture: the idea that comedy requires genuine stakes, that playing a character's authentic reaction produces better comedy than performing an idea of comedy, runs through the company's revue tradition in a direct line from Close's teaching. In 1967, producer Joyce Sloane launched the Second City Touring Company to develop new material and extend the company's presence to college campuses and regional theaters across North America. The Touring Company became a secondary development track for performers working toward the mainstage and a source of original material that occasionally migrated into the main revue. The Second City e.t.c. stage opened in the early 1980s at the North Wells complex, initially as a space for more experimental work and eventually as a full second revue series. The e.t.c. stage runs its own productions on a separate schedule from the mainstage, offering a second pipeline of material and a separate performance track for developing company members.

Toronto (1973–present)

The Second City Toronto opened in 1973 at Adelaide Street East, the company's first expansion beyond Chicago. The founding cast — Dan Aykroyd, Joe Flaherty, Gilda Radner, Andrea Martin, and Jayne Eastwood — was recruited in part by producer Andrew Alexander, who had brought a touring Second City production to Toronto and seen the market for permanent operations. The Toronto company developed a distinct voice from the start: more politically focused on Canadian issues, with a comedy sensibility shaped by the country's distinct relationship to American cultural dominance. Aykroyd and Radner were recruited to Saturday Night Live for its inaugural 1975 season, establishing the Toronto company's pipeline to American television alongside the Chicago company's.

The Toronto company relocated from Adelaide Street to the Old Firehall at 110 Lombard Street, which served as its home until 1997. Andrew Alexander took over the Toronto operation in 1974 and partnered with Len Stuart in 1976 to form The Second City Entertainment Company. That year, Alexander and Stuart produced Second City Television (SCTV) with the Toronto cast, launching a program that ran in various formats until 1984 and won multiple Emmy Awards. SCTV produced its own pipeline of major performers — John Candy, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Catherine O'Hara, Rick Moranis, Martin Short — largely independent of the Saturday Night Live track. In 1997, The Second City Toronto relocated to 51 Mercer Street in the Entertainment District, its current address, in a purpose-built facility that accommodated both the mainstage and a Backstage bar.

Training Centre and Ownership Transition (1985–1992)

The Second City Training Centre opened in Chicago in 1985 under founding director Martin de Maat, who led it until his death in 2001. The Training Centre was a formal separation of the pedagogical operation from the producing company: where previously performers learned improvisational technique by working their way up through the touring company, the Training Centre created a structured Level I through Level V curriculum accessible to the general public as well as aspiring performers. De Maat's curriculum placed ensemble thinking and emotional availability at the center of improv training, emphasising Spolin-derived exercises alongside scene work and character development. The approach codified Second City's teaching philosophy in reproducible form. In 1985, Andrew Alexander and Len Stuart also purchased the Chicago operation from founder Bernie Sahlins, completing the consolidation of both North American companies under a single ownership structure.

The Training Centre expanded to Toronto and eventually to satellite teaching locations in other cities. By the mid-1990s, the Centre had become a significant revenue source for the company and a primary employer of its own graduates as teachers. The level-based structure was widely adopted by independent improv schools seeking a teachable framework; variants of the model operate at schools across North America and in cities worldwide with no formal Second City affiliation.

Regional Expansion: Detroit, Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the Cruise Partnership (1993–2015)

The Second City opened its Detroit company in 1993 at the Fisher Building in Detroit's New Center neighborhood, its first North American expansion beyond Chicago and Toronto. The Detroit location produced original revues and a training program for sixteen years, developing local performers in the Great Lakes region. The Detroit company's closure in 2009 was a direct consequence of the city's severe economic contraction during and after the 2008 financial crisis; the company could not sustain operations in a market devastated by the auto industry collapse.

The Second City Hollywood opened in Los Angeles in 1999, the company's first West Coast presence. The Hollywood location produced satirical revues and offered training programs in the Los Angeles entertainment market, the city most directly associated with the television and film careers of Second City alumni. The Hollywood company closed in 2004 after approximately five years of operation, unable to establish permanent institutional footing in a market structured around short-term commercial entertainment rather than sustained theatrical operations.

In 2005, The Second City entered a partnership with Norwegian Cruise Line to produce and staff entertainment programming aboard NCL ships. The programme placed Training Centre graduates in full-time performing positions on Norwegian vessels, creating a major commercial employment pipeline for the Centre and generating substantial revenue for the company. At its height, the cruise programme employed hundreds of performers annually. In 2012, The Second City opened a Las Vegas residency at the Flamingo Hotel and Casino through a deal with Caesars Entertainment, producing satirical revues for tourist audiences at one of the Strip's highest-traffic venues. The residency ran until 2015. The Norwegian Cruise Line partnership, the company's largest commercial venture, ended when the COVID-19 pandemic halted global cruise operations in 2020.

The 2020 Reckoning, COVID Closure, and Restructuring

In June 2020, The Second City closed its Chicago and Toronto stages in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Simultaneously, a public reckoning over the treatment of Black performers and staff within the company unfolded in the form of an open letter signed by hundreds of alumni documenting specific incidents and systemic patterns of discrimination, exclusion, and mistreatment across decades. The letter named individuals, described patterns in casting and promotion, and situated the company's failures within the broader structural racism of American comedy institutions. The dual crisis — pandemic closure and institutional accountability — was the most severe the company had faced since its founding.

Co-founder and longtime CEO Andrew Alexander resigned in June 2020 in response to the open letter. The company was left without leadership or revenue as the pandemic eliminated both its performance and cruise income. In February 2021, private equity firm ZMC Partners acquired The Second City, the first time in the company's history that it had passed to institutional ownership outside the Sahlins-Alexander founding partnership. The acquisition prompted debate among alumni and comedy observers about the compatibility of private equity ownership with a mission-driven artistic institution. Ed Wells was named CEO in September 2022 as the company reopened its Chicago and Toronto stages. Wells stepped down in February 2026, after which the company announced co-presidents Elizabeth Howard and James Colquhoun would lead the organisation.

The Second City's theatrical form is the satirical revue: a two-act production of scripted scenes, monologues, and songs developed from ensemble improvisation and refined through weeks of workshop rehearsal and live testing before an audience. The improvisation at Second City is compositional rather than performative. Unlike improv formats at iO Theater, UCB Theatre, or other institutions where the improvised performance itself is presented as the art form, Second City uses improvisation as a workshop method for generating and selecting raw material that is then scripted, staged, and rehearsed into a polished show. A finished Second City revue is a scripted production; its origins in improvisation are structural rather than visible.

The development process follows a consistent pattern. The director and company begin a new revue cycle by improvising scenes and games from audience suggestions and current events in workshop sessions. The strongest material is selected and scripted into scenes that the cast then rehearses and performs in front of an audience in a "preview" format before the show opens. The audience response — laughter, silence, engagement, confusion — determines which scenes survive into the final production and which are dropped or reworked. This iterative public testing of material over several weeks produces revues that have been substantially pre-validated; by opening night, every scene has already survived multiple rounds of audience response.

The ensemble comprises typically six performers in a mainstage revue, working with a director and a musical director. The director's role is structurally analogous to that of a theatrical director rather than an improv coach: the director shapes the revue's overall arc, selects scenes from workshop material, oversees thematic coherence, and collaborates with the cast on scripting. This contrasts with the coach role at a Harold-based institution, where the coach works on process and ensemble skills rather than producing a specific product. Historically, the directorial role at Second City has produced strong individual voices — Del Close's multiple directing stints being the most consequential — whose aesthetic priorities shaped the company's output in ways that the more process-oriented improv coach tradition does not.

The company's comedy is rooted in social and political satire. Productions engage seriously with current events, cultural hierarchies, and the mechanics of American institutional life. The principle "the truth is funny," associated most directly with Del Close, holds that genuine emotional and social situations are inherently funnier than jokes constructed from the outside, and that commitment to a scene's psychological reality produces more interesting comedy than punching toward a punchline. This orientation toward authenticity over cleverness connects Second City's form to the Compass Players' democratic-theater origins: the goal was always observation and critique of real life, not the performance of funniness.

The musical element of Second City revues is a formal distinction from most improv institutions. Each production includes original songs written by the cast with the musical director, contributing tonal range and a different mode of satirical expression. Many Second City alumni trained in the company's musical tradition have carried it into late-night television, musical comedy, and film. The song component also gives the revue a variety-show structure that distinguishes it from the scene-only format of most improv performances.

"From the Second City" (1961, Broadway). The company's first major New York engagement, staged at the Royale Theatre on Broadway. The production earned Tony Award nominations for Severn Darden and Barbara Harris and featured Alan Arkin in the cast. The Broadway run established The Second City as a nationally visible institution and validated the satirical revue format on the country's highest-profile commercial stage.

SCTV (Second City Television, 1976–1984). Produced by Andrew Alexander and Len Stuart with the Toronto cast, SCTV ran first as a regional Canadian program and subsequently in various network and syndicated formats in the United States. The series won multiple Emmy Awards and produced an entirely separate generation of major performers — John Candy, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Catherine O'Hara, Rick Moranis, Martin Short, Joe Flaherty — alongside and largely independent of the Saturday Night Live pipeline from the Chicago company.

The Chicago Mainstage Revue Series (continuous, 1959–present). The Second City Chicago has produced more than 100 numbered and titled revues since its founding. Each runs for months before being replaced by a new production developed through the improvisational workshop process. Some landmark revues: "Alarums & Excursions" (1961); "Freud Slipped Here" (1975); "The Gods Must Be Lazy" (1992); "Paradigm Lost" (1994); "Curious George the Dictator and His Regime of Terror" (2007). The revue cycle is the primary mechanism through which the company renews its talent and material each season.

The e.t.c. Revue Series (1980s–present). The Second City's second Chicago stage has produced its own independent series of revues running parallel to the mainstage, providing additional performance opportunities and an additional track for developing company members. The e.t.c. stage has launched careers including Tina Fey, who performed there before being cast on Saturday Night Live's writing staff in 1997.

Norwegian Cruise Line Entertainment Programme (2005–2020). Not a single production but a fifteen-year commissioning relationship, the NCL programme placed Training Centre graduates as full-time performing casts aboard Norwegian Cruise Line ships, producing adapted Second City-style revues for hospitality audiences. The programme employed hundreds of performers annually and was a primary commercial operation for the company.

Maude (Amazon/Netflix, 2015–). The dramedy created by Jill Soloway, whose roots in Second City's Chicago community illustrate the company's reach into prestige television beyond sketch comedy. The direct alumni-to-prestige-TV pipeline includes many writers and performers whose careers passed through Second City before transitioning into drama, late-night, and premium streaming.

The Second City is the most consequential single institution in the history of American television comedy, not in spite of being an improvisational theater but because of how improvisational training prepared its alumni for the specific demands of live television. Saturday Night Live, the program that has defined American late-night comedy since 1975, has drawn from Second City's Chicago and Toronto companies in every decade of its existence. The original 1975 cast included John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd as Chicago alumni and Gilda Radner as a Toronto alumna. The lineage continued without interruption: Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Chris Farley, Tim Meadows, Mike Myers, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch, Keegan-Michael Key, Aidy Bryant, Tim Robinson, Chris Redd, Cecily Strong, and Vanessa Bayer are among the Second City-trained performers to join SNL's cast.

The connection to film comedy has been equally sustained. Animal House (1978) starred John Belushi and was written by Harold Ramis and Doug Kenney; The Blues Brothers (1980) reunited Belushi and Aykroyd; Ghostbusters (1984) was written by Ramis and Dan Aykroyd and starred Bill Murray; Wayne's World (1992) starred Mike Myers and Dana Carvey. The alumni pipeline continued through the Judd Apatow era and into contemporary comedy film and television. Tina Fey, who joined Saturday Night Live's writing staff from the Second City e.t.c. stage in 1997, went on to create 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Amy Poehler co-created Parks and Recreation. Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Steve Martin, and George Wendt are among the names associated with the company's extended alumni network.

Beyond individual career trajectories, The Second City's structural contribution to American comedy is the institutionalization of improvisational training as a pathway to professional performance. Before The Second City Training Centre formalized the level-based curriculum in 1985, there was no widely replicable model for improv pedagogy that could be scaled and taught by graduates rather than masters. The Training Centre created that model. Independent improv schools from coast to coast have adopted variants of its level structure, its scene-based curriculum, and its emphasis on ensemble technique, creating a national industry of comedy education that would not exist in its current form without the institutional framework the Training Centre pioneered.

The June 2020 racial reckoning at The Second City was one of the most resonant accountability moments in American comedy, extending conversations about systemic exclusion far beyond the company's own walls. The open letter signed by hundreds of alumni documented specific incidents and structural patterns — in casting, promotion, pay, and institutional culture — that had been widely known within the industry but rarely aired publicly. The letter prompted similar accountability efforts at other comedy institutions and contributed to broader industry conversations about who gets to be a comedian in America and who controls the institutions that produce them. The departure of Andrew Alexander, who had led the company since 1974, and the subsequent ZMC acquisition, ended the founding era of institutional ownership and opened a new set of questions about what The Second City is when it is no longer owned by the people who built it.