The Chicago Sun-Times ran a great story on Chicago-based topical shows. Rightly so, Whirled News Tonight was featured.
Chicago comics find fodder in politics
ELECTION-YEAR HEADLINES GIVE CHICAGO COMICS LOADS OF FODDER FOR POLITICAL, LOCAL SATIRE
Vice President Tony Rezko is asked: How did you get into office so fast? A day ago he was in prison, and already the new commander-in-chief has granted him a pardon, muscled out the elected VP and installed Rezko in the Obama administration.
“Obama’s wanted to pardon me his whole life,” the Chicago influence-peddler explains. “He just couldn’t do it till he was president.”
Even Hillary Clinton hasn’t posed a scenario that ludicrous. But nothing’s too farfetched for the imaginative minds of “Whirled News Tonight,” one of several comedy shows now dissecting the news for Chicago audiences.
In an election year when Clinton tries to score debate points by citing a gag from “Saturday Night Live,” the hot topic in humor is humor that’s topical. The appetite for satire has “never been higher than right now,” Second City vice president Kelly Leonard says.
And it comes at a time of unprecedented abundance in Chicago. In addition to the burlesques of “SNL,” the stings of the Onion and the wisecracks of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher and Keith Olbermann, audiences here can see the news mocked in several places near their own backyards:
• At both its Old Town theaters, the mighty Second City is in the middle of segue from an old show to a new one. It’s the company’s most fertile time for topical humor, when the lines and scenes are still fluid before being frozen for opening night. This follows the end of “Between Barack and a Hard Place,” a revue heavy on political content that was Second City’s biggest hit ever, selling out pretty much nonstop for nine months straight.
• The iO comedy house in Wrigleyville has two weekly offerings playing off the events of the moment. “Whirled News Tonight,” on Saturdays, is in its fifth year of improvising from the week’s headlines. And the new “Big News” takes an “SNL” approach, presenting a new batch of topical sketches each Tuesday night.
• Local TV, too, is getting into the act. The group Schadenfreude last month shot a pilot for a possible WTTW-Channel 11 comedy series, called “IL Informed,” that would make fun of issues and newsmakers in the area.
Even the Annoyance, the bizarro Uptown theater where the humor tends to be more peculiar than pointed, had a weekly show (now closed) that was written anew each week, sometimes with inspiration from the headlines. It being the Annoyance, the premises usually bordered on the obscene, as when an actress’ most intimate private part was billed as smarter about world affairs than George Bush, and answered audience questions to prove it.
Of course, topical satire is nothing new in Chicago; even before Second City started, its precursor company, the Compass, was acting out the top stories of the ’50s in a routine called “The Living Newspaper.” And current events inevitably crop up in the spontaneous, unscripted sets that long have been the main course of improv theaters and the dessert of Second City revues.
But entire shows mocking the news and nothing else have seldom been so plentiful, or so popular. At “Whirled News Tonight,” after years of up-and-down attendance, they’ve had solid sellouts for four months. “I can only say it’s because of heightened political awareness,” says director Jason Chin.
And the presidential campaign is fueling that. “It being an election year makes a huge difference,” says “Whirled News” performer Megan O’Neill. “People want to see the topical stories, and they’re really into it more.”
The creator of “Big News,” Michael McCarthy, has been a specialist in political comedy since the ’80s, when he wrote for “SNL” and then starred in Second City shows. He sees passions especially high in this round of primaries, and that may be helping people decide where to go for laughs.
“What’s interesting about this election as opposed to others,” he says, “is that you have the feeling that you can help change stuff more.”
The presidential wannabes are a fixture of the ever-changing “Big News” revues, which recently depicted Clinton and Barack Obama forming a joint ticket through a matchmaking service called VP Harmony. (”It turns out you complete me!” the fake Hillary gushed.)
The Chicago spinoff of a still-running show McCarthy launched in Los Angeles in 2002, “Big News” comes together in rapid fashion. Writers meet on Thursday night and hand over scripts for actors to memorize over the weekend. After a couple of rehearsals Tuesday the show goes on that night, ready or not.
“There’s a kind of wonderful energy that creates,” McCarthy says. “The actors are very, very awake. They’re very alive.”
Preparation is impossible, on the other hand, for “Whirled News Tonight.” Before the show, audience members post news articles on bulletin boards, and the cast plucks each story off, reads the opening lines and instantly commences an off-the-cuff scene.
It might be a re-enactment, but more often it will be a look at how this development got in the paper, or how people are affected by it. After hearing a recent piece attacking the exploitation of chimps on TV, one actor morphed into the president of the Fox network, raging that his programming won’t work without apes.
“Maybe we could produce well-written shows with good actors,” a toady suggested.
After a pause, the Fox boss screamed, “Get out of my office!”
With Second City’s shows still in flux, the casts there are having fun dropping in timely references that may or may not stick for the long haul. An impromptu gag about Eliot Spitzer the other day “brought the house down,” Leonard says. “Now, I don’t know that that will stay in the show. Three weeks from now it maybe will. But six weeks? Probably not.”
A Second City show can become static after opening night, when the scenes usually are locked into place for the next several months. But Leonard has urged his directors to keep the references timely, because updates can be made later without rattling the ensembles. “That’s the great thing about having improvisational-based performers,” he says.
Another way to keep a Second City show fresh is with loosely structured segments that allow for some variation from night to night. The cast of the upcoming mainstage show, “No Country for Old White Men,” has been experimenting with one such bit, about British House of Commons members commenting on the doings of the U.S. Congress. It may or may not end up in the final lineup.
Also key are some moments that remind Second City’s tourist-heavy audience where they are. The actors are dabbling with some Chicago-themed subjects, but ones that have import beyond the city limits — Rezko, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the Cubs. “All the local stuff right now is national,” Leonard says.
Others, though, are zooming in more tightly on the area; “Big News” recently depicted the “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” gang descending on Bolingbrook to give Drew Peterson a makeover.
McCarthy, the “Big News” boss, has been reveling in the opportunity to spoof Chicago events for Chicagoans — especially after working in L.A., where he says the audiences always need the news explained to them.
“Part of the Chicago character is: We read,” he says. “We read the paper, and we talk about what’s going on and have opinions about what’s going on.”
And we love seeing it ridiculed — the closer to home, the better.
“You can’t deny the reaction you get when you get something that’s really local,” O’Neill says. “When we get to talk about the CTA or the Cubs, the audience is automatically with you. Their volume goes up a notch, and they cheer and jeer and get excited about stuff.”
Besides the tenor of the times, there may be another explanation for why funny people have been poring over the papers: as a career move. Justin Kaufmann of the group Schadenfreude points out that actors who once aspired to a job on “SNL” now have reason to work up their topical chops in order to land on “The Daily Show” or “The Colbert Report.”
“It’s become a destination for comedians,” he says, “so they want to start working in that arena early.”
In April his group has several local gigs, from dive bars to Steppenwolf, to mark its 10 years of making fun of the news — especially the local stuff.
“You’ve got guys like Daley and guys like Todd Stroger. Whatever your political leanings, just the idea that they got in is ripe for comedy. Todd Stroger, whose dad won a primary while he was [recovering from] a stroke — I mean, that’s crazy,” Kaufmann says, also mentioning Stroger’s propensity for hiring relatives. “You don’t see at the national level that kind of ineptitude.”
So they keep pounding away at the local troublemakers, despite the occasional word of advice from producers in New York or L.A., who insist Schadenfreude will never get anywhere making fun of Chicago.
“But it’s not for them,” Kaufmann says. “It’s for the people who are in Chicago that we live with, who are our neighbors, who are our audience.”
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