Improv Was Invented to Teach Immigrant Children English
The theatre games that produced Second City, SCTV and half of Saturday Night Live were designed in the 1930s as social work for children — and reached comedy only because one of those children grew up to direct.
The training system behind modern English-language comedy did not come out of a theatre. It came out of Depression-era social work, and it was aimed at children.
Spolin's problem
Viola Spolin developed a set of structured exercises — she called them Theater Games — to get recent-immigrant and inner-city children in Chicago to play together and to communicate across languages they did not share. The games were not acting technique. They were problem-solving structures: give the players a clear objective, a constraint, and no script, and watch behaviour emerge that nobody could have written.
She eventually collected them in *Improvisation for the Theater*, published by Northwestern University Press, which is still the field's founding text. But the transmission into comedy ran through her family: her son, Paul Sills, used her games in rehearsal as a director.
The Compass, 1955
David Shepherd wanted a company that would build new plays out of improvisation from scenario outlines, in the tradition of *commedia dell'arte*. He recruited Sills to run it, having noticed the games Sills used in the room.
The Compass Players opened on 8 July 1955 in the back room of a bar called The Compass, near the University of Chicago in Hyde Park — Wikipedia locates the site at the present Engine 60 fire station on the corner of 55th Street and University Avenue. Six performers played the premiere under Sills's direction: Elaine May, David Shepherd, Robert Coughlan, Loretta Chiljian, Sid Lazard and Roger Bowen. The first piece was Sills's *The Game of Hurt*.
The intention was that scenes would be performed once and discarded. That is not what happened. Some of the players started polishing what the games produced into finished material — Mike Nichols and Elaine May built most of their signature two-handers this way, and Shelley Berman discovered he could construct a solo routine by performing one half of a telephone call.
That drift is the single most important thing that happened. An improvisation system designed to generate ephemeral behaviour turned out to be the most efficient writing tool anyone had found. Comedians have used it that way ever since.
Three years, then the split
The Compass lasted from 1955 to 1958. It moved out of Hyde Park into rooms that were more nightclub than theatre, and the material coarsened to suit the new audiences — a pressure any club comic would recognise. When it ended, part of the company reassembled at the Crystal Palace in St. Louis under Theodore J. Flicker, and it was there that Nichols, May, Close and Flicker codified a further set of governing principles for improvising players. Del Close spent the rest of his life developing and testing those rules, which is why so much of what is taught today traces back through him.
Nichols and May took the material to New York and became stars on it. Berman became a star on the phone calls. And in Chicago, Sills reasoned that a more disciplined version of the Compass could work as a business.
The Second City
It opened in 1959, staffed substantially with Compass alumni. The name is a joke at Chicago's expense, lifted from an A. J. Liebling article in *The New Yorker* in 1952 — a company that named itself after an insult and then outlasted everyone who took the compliment.
It is the oldest improvisational theatre troupe continuously based in Chicago, with theatres and training programmes in Toronto and New York. Its alumni list is effectively a personnel roster for six decades of North American comedy: Joan Rivers, Alan Alda, Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, John Candy, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Chris Farley, Mike Myers, Steve Carell, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Stephen Colbert, Jason Sudeikis.
In February 2021 it was bought by ZMC, a Manhattan private equity firm.
There is a straight line from a Chicago social worker's exercises for children who could not talk to each other, through a bar's back room, to an asset class. The games did not change much on the way. The ownership did.