The Second City has faced a particular challenge in trying to maintain the quality of its work and appeal to its audience for nearly a half a century. How does a theater that derives its material from cultural pressure points and current events stay on top of a rapidly changing post-modern American society? What are the conventions that make The Second City unique and appealing?

The obvious advantage that The Second City has over traditional theaters, that is the distinct advantage that the agency of improvisation provides, is a permanent immediacy to the shows' content. The Second City has never employed a writer; at least not a writer in the traditional sense. Every member of the company acts as writer, director, and actor. Through improvisation, each member of the company had become, in the words of the New York Times: " something like stand-up playwrights for a theater of everyday life."

The Second City format has not changed in over forty years. The revues consists of a series of scenes, occasionally called sketches, in two acts with a few spot improvisations intermixed. Following the second act on most nights, the actors will do some improvisations based on audience suggestions. The Second City develops all the material for their shows through improvisation, either during a show or in rehearsal.

Following an improv set, the actors will sit down with the director and together they will discuss whether they believe any of the material that was created is worthy of the show. "As a director, you're not necessarily looking for the scene that's the funniest, but the scene that is the most real." says former mainstage director Jeff Richmond, "I look for a scene that says something about the way people really interact."

This has been one of the principle philosophies of The Second City since day one: above all else, strive for truth, honesty in reactions. Surprisingly for most people, actors in The Second City training center and in the companies often receive instructions not to be funny. The only way, in the philosophy of The Second City, that a theater can remain in tune with a society and successful satirize it is to capture the sincere anxiety and emotions of the people. As long-time owner Bernie Sahlins asserts, the theater actually goes beyond reacting instantly to what's going on in society:

"I think it goes beyond that. I think we are what's happens and the audience is what happens. And so we're just expressing ourselves. Because we are directly relating to our preoccupations and our audiences, we are of the time. As the times change, we change" (Sweet, p. 184)

Although the content has certainly changed, that one credo has remained the same. The Second City always works at the top of its intelligence and lets the humor derive from relationships, not shtick or gimmicks. Rather than just make fun or Einstein or Marilyn Monroe, The Second City chooses to place them in a scene together, speculating that the two had dated. Einstein is not the least bit aroused by the starlet because he obsesses over the relationship of matter and energy. When Monroe finally spouts off the complete theory of relativity, Einstein can then focus on her sexual attractiveness. Human truth is universal.

Another reason for demanding that scenes arise naturally out of honest emotion is to ensure that the material remains spontaneous. When actors come into an improve set with preconceived notions of what should take place on the stage, then the spontaneity that led The Second City to its success will be sacrificed. The action must remain immediate; otherwise, the audience can go to a traditional theater.

Today, people view The Second City as the very best at what it does. Originally, however, it was the only place in the world doing what it does. According to Sahlins, the original company could survive solely on the "whole novelty of getting onstage and saying things that hadn't been said onstage before. When we first came on, it was like an orgasm because nobody had been addressing the immediate political and intellectual situations, current events, relationships. So when you got onstage and said anything, it was like violating taboos. We were coming out from under McCarthyism and everything he had represented" (Sweet, 185)

The Second City not only shattered all understanding of what material was and was not appropriate for the stage, but more importantly subverted the expected paradigms of how that material would be presented to the audience. A contract existed between the traditional theater audience and the actors before 1959. If one went to the theater, they entered into a pact-an understanding-with the players. A middle-aged man came on in the first act and identified himself as Willie Loman; as an audience member, you comprehended that every time that same actor entered, he was still Willie Loman. The Second City fractured that contract completely.

With their own unique shattering of the narrative, The Second City players allowed themselves the opportunity to play anywhere from twenty to thirty characters in one show. The set was universal, and the company used little to no props. Must objets were simply created through pantomime-another convention of the commedia dell'arte. The scope of possible content for one evening increased as a result. They utilized the medium to its maximum capacity.

According to Second City director Mick Napier, even the best improvers in the world achieve only an 80-85% success rate-success defined as achieving real characters and scenic truth spontaneously. The Second City has always embraced this failure and used it to draw the audience into a new form of theatrical community.

People possess an innate desire to feel informed; the audience at The Second City revels in seeing the material for future shows created roughly before them, and off their own suggestions. Long-time actor and director Del Close once drew an analogy between the improvising and a sporting event. In both improv and sports, the uncertainty of the outcome captivates the audience. Tim Kazurinsky agrees: "You must fail for the audience to trust that you're truly creating. They don't want to see the tightrope walker go right across the canyon. The good ones, they'll pretend that they're going to trip and fall. That's what makes you more like a wizard" (Patenkin, p.54-55). Viola Spolin and Paul Sills sensed this strain in the American psyche when they opened their game theater in 1966

The immediacy of The Second City's formula has allowed them to adapt their shows, literally on a night by night basis, to what the audience is interested in. If the President goes on television one night and says something stupid, it could very easily be lampooned the next evening at The Second City. When Lenny Bruce was arrested in the 1960's, the cast created a blackout-a very short one joke punch-which appeared on their stage within days. The lights came up on the cast, minus one member, loitering onstage. The missing actor then ran onstage with a newspaper and exclaimed, "Hey, did you hear? Lenny Bruce was arrested for swearing onstage." The rest of the cast shouted back: "No shit!" Before long, people began to look to The Second City to react when anything happened.

John Belushi was called The Second City "the Oxford of comedy." Just as the original creators were voracious intellectuals, the original patronage of the theater tended to be experienced theatergoers, many from the University, who were accustomed to reading books, magazines, newspapers, and viewing the best of foreign and American film. They were, in essence, leftovers from The Compass Theatre.

As a result, the material tended toward the highbrow as well. In fact, the greatest strength of The Second City was probably its unique mixture of intellectualism with everyday reference. The early shows included a Freudian Western, a scene at an adult evening class on the "Great Books," and one of the theater's most famous pieces ever: "Football Comes to the University of Chicago." This scene contemplates what would occur if that bastion of academia ever attempted a football team. While the coach tries to explain the basic rules of pigskin, the students contemplate the religious implications of the crosses on the chalkboard, argue that they are not yard lines but line segments, and question why, if there is a right guard and a left guard, there is no Kierkegaard.

The original audience responded to that which they recognized and The Second City responded to them. Likewise, when the "Next Generation" of players entered the cast, they encountered an audience that was raised on television and movies. As a result, the material looked more toward mass culture. Still, the scenes did not became more vulgar. Even though a good deal of the intellectualism may have faded, the honesty has not. The Second City has changed as its audience has changed, because it is one with the audience. That is the philosophy. As H. Allen Smith once observed a humorist is "a fellow who realizes that he is no better than anybody else and, second, that nobody else is either" (McCrohan, p. 43).

The Second City still insists on a high integrity in its material, steering clear of the unjustifiably obscene or the cheap laugh. In her backstage history of The Second City McCrohan describes the difference between a simple cheap shot and true commentary: "Students draw goofy pictures of their teacher on the blackboard and call it satire...But true satire is more far-reaching than simple ridicule of humor. If the teacher has a mole and a strange nose and someone draws these in an exaggerated manner, the caricature may qualify as parody but it's not satire. It's only satire if it targets a defect that's hurting someone else. Satire ridicules to expose, with the idea that awareness is a step toward remedy" (40)

Even in sketch comedy, believability is a must. Sahlins believes this is the secret of their success: "It's probably unique in theater history that a group of people from the classical theater applied classical techniques to popular art forms. We were Shakespeare actors, we were Brecht actors, we people who'd grown up in the theater. We took these techniques-solid acting, rigorous structure, high reference level-and put them to work. I think that's why Second City has survived" (Patenkin, 53)