A Dollar Fifty at The Second City

On opening night at the theater ahead, in December of nineteen fifty nine, a ticket cost a dollar fifty, and the founders, Bernard Sahlins and Paul Sills, were busy enough keeping the lights on that they took turns working the kitchen between sketches, feeding the same audience they had just finished making laugh. Nobody involved that night had any reason to think they were starting one of the most influential comedy institutions in the English speaking world.

The format they built on that first stage, fast improvised scenes built from audience suggestions, became a training ground almost nobody could have predicted. Bill Murray came through its stage before Saturday Night Live even existed. So did Tina Fey decades later, along with Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert, two performers who would go on to lead their own long running television shows after cutting their teeth in front of Second City audiences on nights that did not always go well.

The theater has since grown far beyond that original address, opening stages in Toronto and New York and training thousands of performers who never became famous at all, which was always closer to the point: improvisation as a discipline, not just a launching pad. More than six decades after that first dollar fifty door charge, the company was purchased by an outside investment firm, a business milestone that would have been unimaginable to two men splitting kitchen duty to keep the lights on.

The theater ahead still runs shows most nights of the week, built on the same basic idea that worked in nineteen fifty nine: put ordinary suggestions in front of fast, fearless performers, and see what happens.