COURTESY OF THE SECOND CITY A new generation of Second City members will perform both old and new material from the troupe's storied history.

The Chicago group, noted
for its politically incorrect humor,
will do improv and sketch comedy

---

By John Berger
jberger@starbulletin.com

Chicago -- the name may conjure up for music fans either the band or that musical that recently became a movie. History buffs may think of Al Capone and the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, while sports fans have their pick of the Bears, the Cubs, the Bulls, the White Sox and the Black Hawks.

But for aficionados of sophisticated if "politically incorrect" comedy, it means the hometown of the Second City theatrical comedy troupe.

Member John Lutz says that when it comes to picking topics and targets, the group plays no favorites.

"What's great is that we make fun of both sides. Certain presidents, like Clinton, and Bush right now, are very easy to attack, but I really think that all of our presidents can deserve quite a bit of ribbing," Lutz said during a recent call from the Windy City.

Lutz and his partners in crime -- Allison Bills, Rebecca Drysdale, Tom Flanagan, Rob Janas and Sue Salvi -- will be presenting "two shows in one" at Gussie L'Amour's tonight through this weekend. Officially, it's a sketch comedy revue which includes archival material that spans the parent group's four decades of comic history and new sketches written by the current group, but the cast will be doing improv as well. The show may include sketches from such productions as "Curious George Goes to War," "Take Me Out to the Balkans," "Holy War, Batman" and "Thank Heaven It Wasn't 7/11."

The latter production opened in May 2002 and explored, among other things, what the impact on American pop culture might have been if the Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks had occurred on July 11 -- making them the 7/11 attacks.

Lutz says that extracting the humorous aspects of that national tragedy wasn't done in haste.

"That took a little more time for us to find the satirical side of it. That's probably the one event of my lifetime that seemed to take a little more time, but now we can find not the humor in it, but the humanity in it, so that the comedy comes through the human side of it. But that was a tough one."

With that exception, he says, almost anything in the daily news makes for potential material.

"I've been doing this for almost eight years now, so my brain automatically thinks of things even when I'm just watching the news. I don't know how to explain it, but just being around people who work that way, and then doing it enough, you find the humor in almost anything that happens."

THE ROOTS of the Second City go back to the early 1950s, when a small group of students in the University of Chicago theater department decided to take their politically oriented material into the larger community. A number of future stars and comedy writers passed through the two community theater groups that evolved out of the original student group before one of the ex-students started the Second City in 1959. Spinoff companies were established in Toronto in 1973 and Detroit in 1993.

The troupe first toured in 1961, and there are now four more national touring companies.

Lutz says that the Honolulu audience will be seeing material from all three theater groups and more.

"We try to take some stuff from those theaters, and we're doing scenes that were written by Gilda Radner and Eugene Levy, so we're trying to pick some stuff that's from the old-school people, and then also some scenes that are more current by newer people coming up. We also try to bring stuff that we've written ourselves, so it's a nice spread of what they did 30 years ago and what we're doing now.

"You'll be seeing us do the two things we do best: sketch comedy and improvisation."

‘The Best of the Second City’ Where: Gussie L'Amour's, 3251 N. Nimitz Highway When: 8:15 p.m. today through Sunday Tickets: $20 advance, $25 at the door; available at the club and Hawaii's Natural High, 339 Saratoga Ave. Call: 926-3000

Click for online
calendars and events.