Photo: Clayton Hauck

RECOMMENDED

Second City’s one-hundredth revue jumps right into election year by kicking off with a bit where race, religion and Fox News take the forefront. From the opening moments, director Matt Hovde has shot the entire show through with a fast-paced, slightly unpredictable quality that makes for the best kind of sketch comedy. Even when we find ourselves in a familiar place (a pool hall or a couple’s living room) the characters we meet are captivating and original (without being caricatures… okay, without being complete caricatures). Read the rest of this entry »

Kellan Alexander, Cody Dove, Chelsea Devantez, Hans Holsen/Photo: Clayton Hauck

RECOMMENDED

For years, if you’d ask the average Chicagoan to name the best place to see improv, they’d answer Second City. The problem was, Second City did not produce improv shows; sketch comedy is their thing. So with the UP Comedy Club, their new upstairs venue with a focus on stand-up, they’ve added a regular Monday night improv show in a sort of “if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em” move.

Acclaimed comedy director Mick Napier has crafted a tightly rendered introduction to the basics of improv, broad enough to appeal to the tourist set, with bits and sketches built around audience suggestions and a recurring run of ” freeze tag,” a common improv game. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In a remount of their well-received 2011 improv format, Playground Theater ensemble member K.C. Redheart once again takes the audience through “the entire process of bringing a show to the stage,” breaking the action into three parts: the initial table read, a tech rehearsal and opening night. Working from an audience suggestion of the title of a show that has never been written or produced, the troupe (all sporting blank paper “scripts”) kicks off sitting in a semi-circle with the “director” welcoming his “cast” and letting them introduce themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

If alcohol did not exist, sketch comedy would have to invent it. I arrived at this brilliant insight sitting alone at a cabaret table on a Sunday afternoon watching the charming duo of “Gretchen and Regina” deliver a set of clever, funny songs about romance and heartbreak to a roomful of Sketchfest patrons swigging PBR Tallboys. (Three dollars at the lobby bar and from hawkers standing on coolers amidst the crowd lining up for the next show. The festival’s organizers are clearly a mile ahead of me in the revelation department.) It didn’t help my increasingly parched brain that Hillary Williams—apparently there is neither a Gretchen nor a Regina—systematically drained one cocktail after another between songs as part of her act. If Hillary’s character is “the drunk,” her partner, Emily Claiborne, is the guitar-strumming boyish “lesbian,” which informs their dialogue more than their songs, I recall. Though their casual banter sometimes seems a bit clunky, they’re actually quite endearing, as are their folky songs. I bet they’re even funnier if you’re drinking along. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release from Corn Productions:

Corn Productions has made it to 20! Founded in 1992, Corn has continued to bring original comedy to Chicago through three new Presidents, two Iraq wars, and one heck of a lot of laughs. Corn is celebrating twenty long years with a spectacular season that honors our mission to produce new works and celebrates our history with some slammin’ Corn classics. So, be prepared for a 20th season that will prove, once and for all, that Corn Productions is the best thing to ever come out of the early nineties.  Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Carol Rosegg

RECOMMENDED

Colin Quinn (best known for “SNL” and “Tough Crowd With Colin Quinn”) has a knack for making cynicism sound almost playful. His latest one-man show finds him systematically traversing the globe in (mostly) chronological order examining the successes and ultimate failures of various cultures and societies, constantly reminding us that despite what we think of the global situation today, things have always been screwed up and will always be screwed up simply because we humans are screwed up. Quinn’s thesis is that even the best societies are undone by continuously “doing the same thing that works, even after it stops working” and like a lawyer employing anecdotal evidence he systematically builds his case, giving humankind a gentle ribbing in the process. Read the rest of this entry »

The lightheartedly ominous backdrop (the Chicago skyline with a colorful storm bearing down on it) of the Second City’s thirty-fifth revue on the e.t.c. stage nicely sets up the theme of impending disaster that runs through this series of sketches and songs. Whether it’s a zombie apocalypse, an unexpected pregnancy or a couple arguing after getting kicked out of Wrigley Field, it seems the world is always on the brink of falling apart. But the energetic cast (made up of e.t.c. veterans Tim Baltz, Brendan Jennings and Mary Sohn along with newcomers Aidy Bryant, Jessica Joy and Michael Lehrer) handle it all with big smiles and the occasional shot of quirky emotional depth. The lightning-fast “pop quiz” bits that open each act are engaging and demand that the audience “pay attention” but, although the first act is strong and takes a number of risks that pay off, the show loses some of its momentum after the intermission and never quite gets it back. (Zach Freeman)

At SecondCity e.t.c. in Piper’s Alley, 1608 North Wells, (312)337-3992.  Tue-Thu/8pm, Fri-Sat/8pm & 11pm, Sun/7p. $22-$27. Open run.

Photo: Robert Trachtenberg

RECOMMENDED

At some point in Jeff Garlin’s free-wheeling stand-up comedy routine, he announces, “I’m the world’s most comfortable comedian. Not the world’s funniest, which is what you want, but the most comfortable.” That’s about right. Garlin’s show is less “show” (as he makes pains to point out more than once), and more like hanging out with him, at a dinner party or something. He tells stories—vignettes drawn from his life as comedian, TV star and, most significantly, someone with an eating addiction. (He’s also diabetic and new medicine, on opening night, led to spontaneous burps that he managed with reasonable grace.) Most hinge, not on punch lines, but on ironic turns or, often, just in his way of telling, in his timing. He bounces from story to story, as if he’s making it all up as he goes along, starting a tale, getting distracted, telling another and circling back, occasionally consulting a “set list” he’s got stashed behind his plastic jack-o’-lantern filled with water. His stories are not political, or connected to current events at all, and he’s careful not to lean too heavily on his experiences on Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” which is smart, since I imagine most of the audience members, like me, are fans of the HBO show and in doing so he keeps us hungry for more. Read the rest of this entry »

If you enjoy the loose vibe at Second City shows—the cocktail-lounge atmosphere, the audience-performer interaction—then you might just love the shows being produced in a Pilsen backyard by the Southside Ignoramus Quartet (SIQ) on June 25, July 9 and July 16. SIQ offers all the trappings of a great North Side show—special guest comedians, improv sets based on audience suggestion and sketch comedy—from the backyard of the South Side, in the comfort of a fully equipped and air-conditioned tent.

Founder David Pintor, a Pilsen native, discovered at the Second City Conservatory that South Side humor “didn’t always fit in with what you see with groups on the North Side.” His fellow students were often unsure how to react to characters drawn from the people of his neighborhood. In response, Pintor says, “I started training people and started my own group here.” Inspired by his father’s stories of traveling theaters in Mexico, he scraped together the money for a tent and equipment, he and his father built the stage and SIQ saw its first performance in June 2010. Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Barrosse always intended to return to Chicago, the place where he made a name for himself in the 1980s creating improv comedy revues while helping found the Practical Theatre Co. When the group—which for a time in the early part of the decade rivaled Second City as members like Brad Hall, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Barrosse himself all landed gigs on “Saturday Night Live”—closed its last show in 1989, its members were scattering across the country with other career obligations. Still, Barrosse knew it was just a matter of time before he found himself back on Chicago stage.

Turns out, it would be twenty-two years.

“It’s like anything, we always intended to do it, there just comes a time where you turn around and go, ‘Oh my God, it’s been twenty years,’” he says.

Barrosse, along with his wife and fellow Practical Theatre alum Victoria Zielinski, is returning to Chicago for the first time since leaving for Los Angeles in 1990 with “The Vic and Paul Show.” It’s essentially a return to their Practical Theatre manic oddball roots, but is now mixed with the experience and worldview of adulthood. Read the rest of this entry »