By: Ben Johnson
There’s a decent chance you’ve heard of iO.
It’s that place in Chicago where all those famous people learned how to do
comedy. Improv comedy. You know like the Chris Farleys and the Tina Feys and
all the people from Saturday Night Live who didn’t come from LA’s Groundlings
theater or from doing standup or from internet videos. It’s just, like, a place
where a certain percentage of the general comedy population filters through, is
a reason you may have heard of it. And also it is a going concern, and it
benefits pretty fucking directly from telling you about how it’s the place
where the famous people went to learn how to become rich and famous, so you may
have heard of it because its owner, Charna Halpern, very much wants you to have
heard of it. The building it was in is being torn down.
I spent irresponsibly huge swaths of my 20’s
hanging out there, so this is turning into one of those “what does it all mean”
things for me. It’s turning into one of those things for a lot of people. I
hate those things. They bubble up from inside of you, like a flooding basement,
and you go “no no no no not me,” but then because it’s an emotional response, you
don’t really get to decide how much water you’ll get. It’s a force beyond your
control. So then you go “okay, this is happening, this is a thing I need to
process, I’ll say something on Facebook about it, but just not something embarrassing
like everybody else, I’ll do a real good real one,” and then you do it and you
look at it and you go “shit, that’s exactly embarrassing in the exact way I was
trying to avoid.” And then you go back to replacing your emotional drywall, or
whatever the basement flood analogy thing it is people do with their emotionally
flooded basements.
Improv is embarrassing. You ever watch improv
comedy? It’s embarrassing. You go “oh jeez oh man I hope this doesn’t suck,
that would be embarrassing,” and then it sucks worse than anything you can
imagine. Watching bad improv is like experiencing time in negative increments.
It always seems like somebody should be able to go “no thanks” and it will just
stop happening and that will be the best thing for everybody, but that apparently
can’t happen. Sometimes improv doesn’t suck and you go “phew, that didn’t suck
that much, but man, that was tense.” Sometimes, very rarely and increasingly
very very rarely as you watch more of it, it moves beyond merely not sucking
and becomes actually good. And about a hundredth of the actually good times are
actually GREAT. And if you see one of those, it’s hard not to want to see more
of them, and be around the people who do them, and maybe even do one and be one
yourself. And so you go and you launch yourself into the great seething mass of
embarrassing suck and you try to climb. Because you need to, for some reason.
This need is embarrassing. You are 22 years old. You are embarrassing in the same
ways all 22 year olds are. Plus, as an extra added layer of embarrassment, you
are doing improv. Improv is the worst.
One of the additional ways improv is embarrassing
is the culture of it. Improv, as a whole, is insecure. It’s like Ultimate
Frisbee. If you’re the best athlete playing Ultimate Frisbee, you probably have
all the same skills and abilities as a football player or a soccer player.
People who play Ultimate are always like “how come there’s no Major League
Ultimate Frisbee that people pay money for,” and it’s because the best Ultimate
players are way less amazing than the best any other sport players. I WOULD pay
money to see Billy
Hamilton play Ultimate Frisbee. Unfortunately he’s busy playing centerfield
for the Cincinnati Reds. That’s what improv is like. It’s all these people
going back and forth between “there should be a Professional Ultimate Frisbee League”
and “I think I’m good enough at Ultimate Frisbee to play centerfield for the
Cincinnati Reds.” Improv is a hobby run amok. It’s a thing people enjoy doing
which inflicts itself on audiences.
I’ve been lucky enough to improvise with some
of the funniest people alive. I was in improv groups with Saturday Night Live
cast members and ABC sitcom showrunners and Daily Show correspondents and screenwriters
whose work has been produced by Relativity Media. I was on groups with crazy
people and weird people who show up to your party too early and never leave and
off-the-grid type people who don’t have a telephone and don’t mind and sleep in
a sleeping bag on an unheated porch and live off 7-Eleven nachos for months at a
time. I went to parties full of heterosexual naked men and got naked myself and
had honest, unstrained, normal conversations with other naked heterosexual men,
and we did this because naked men are funny. The Asian guy from Walking Dead has seen my penis.
Anyway, iO is closing. Not the business, but
the physical building in Wrigleyville, Chicago that iO has been housed in for a
while now. It’ll be razed to the ground and replaced with some kind of inhuman bajillion
dollar hotel development for extreme Cubs fans. iO has been where it is for like,
I don’t know, somewhere between 15 and 20 years. But its Clark Street location
is and I guess was the best possible version of what it is. The new one is
going to suck. I mean, technically, it’s going to be amazing and great, but it’s
also going to suck the way all new things do.
Especially comedy venues. The ideal comedy
venue, as is the case with Old iO, has a seating capacity grandfathered in from
whoever was the fire marshal during the Coolidge Administration. You want to
stack audiences on top of each other as uncomfortably as possible. That’s how
laughter happens. It spreads like a communicable disease: most efficiently in closely-crowded
communicable disease-like conditions. New comedy venues have too many fire
safety regulations to contend with, such as “you need to prevent all these
people from tripping over their chairs and dying in a big pile of burning chairs
if anything bad happens,” so there’s no closeness. You might as well put the
people in vibrating Sharper Image recliners. When was the last time you saw a
person laugh in one of those things? Safety kills comedy. Liability insurance
kills comedy. Real estate is killing comedy.
And more importantly, a brand new nice comedy
venue especially doesn’t work with improv. Improv needs to feel like an
adventure for everybody. It can’t just be entertainment. You need to go be led
down a long steep stairway, around a dumpster, through a Laundromat, and into a
20’X20’ room with 9 people in it, and be scooped, ladled really, into an
uncomfortable seat, and fed booze, and then some people come out and do
something weird that surprises the hell out of you and you say “I’m alive now, and
now no matter how much in the future I am bludgeoned by the dull enormity of
functioning in society, I will always have proof of having been alive once as
long as me and these nine other people are still breathing.” Improv at the old
iO was like a road trip with six friends in a 1995 Mercury Tracer station wagon
with broken air conditioning and a boombox for a stereo. At the time, it
totally totally sucks because you’re sore and cramped and sweaty and Ryan’s
being annoying and everybody keeps farting all the time, but you went because
you wanted to and you got there and now it’s something you remember. The new
place is going to be like a vacation in a brand new Escalade with every modern
convenience so a sullen family of uptight WASPs can avoid connecting to each
other. Probably. I mean I haven’t been.
I did improv in other places too. There were
places which had set up some fairly rigorous formulas for what happens on stage
and when, formulas which minimize the uncomfortable risk to an audience of
catching the show on an off night where nothing works. Minimizing risk is the
same thing as minimizing the role of talent in attempting the thing you are
doing. It’s still nice if it works but you get bored easily. I’ve performed at
places which had even less structure than iO, and done what I thought were
great shows that I still think about and laugh, but nobody came to those
because no structure means all risk and the percentages with improv just are
not that high, and also maybe, definitely, I thought I was much funnier than I
was. iO was always the place where talent went to experience and hone itself,
not in a vacuum and not within a strict formula. It did so via fully embarrassing,
fully risky improv, focused by the lens of some hippy dippy philosophical
claptrap about “group mind” and given artificially high stakes by a sloppily
arranged and often infuriating but weirdly effective bureaucratic power
structure. It drew its power from the collective energies of an
ever-replenishing army of other frightened, insecure 22 year olds. It was a
ride. It was frightfully boring and long and uncomfortable and it smelled like
farts and everybody was cranky and mean to each other, and our reward was night
after night of fully embarrassing improv comedy. In retrospect none of that
matters really, because we got to be together and do something, which is true
no matter what because even if we were only pretending we were doing something,
that is something in itself.
 |
| The year I got a bullhorn at the Christmas gift swap and spent all night drunkenly heckling people in the bathroom. |
All of this is seeping up from some deep
spring within me because Old iO closing is the real, true, final death knell to
that phase of my life. Even after having walked away because of needing to get my
life together and needing to have healthier priorities and needing to not spend
two, three, seven nights a week doing embarrassing improv shows, there was this
feeling that I could always go back. It’s a delusion, of course. Some weird
fantasy that I’d snap my fingers and walk in and the whole building would be full of everybody I
ever knew from within its walls, all cracking each other up, and everybody I was an asshole
to forgives me, everybody sincerely appreciating each other, and there would be no improv show because finally we no longer need the pretense of doing improv for each other, and you’d just stand
there and know you’d made it and you were funny and you were talented and you
were part of something, and you’d just smile at each other like Mr.
Miyagi and it would be the total best.
That could never and did not ever happen of
course, although it got damn close a time or two. Time doesn’t work like that.
People don’t work like that. Life doesn’t work like that. I know that. I have over the last few years gone back to
the theater every once in a while and it’s weird and it sucks and I don’t know
anybody and there’s nothing happening there but shitty improv and overloud moderately
funnyish 22 year olds who haven’t learned how to calm down yet. It’s like
taking a tourist trip to a 1995 Mercury Tracer full of somebody else’s farts. I know
the fantasy version isn’t real and isn’t going to happen. But they’re tearing
down the building. Now it’s REALLY not going to happen.
There’s still going to be an iO Theater. It’s
going to be nice. All of those same improv things are going to happen in it.
Waves and waves of 22 year old will crash endlessly at its shores, and they are
going to suck at improv and be totally totally unforgivably embarrassing, and a
few of them will become little Chris Farleys and Tina Feys, and you will have
even more reason for hearing of iO. But I no longer have adequate energy to
misplace there for this newfangled version of it to ever become the setting of
my weird sirenlike utopian heaven fantasies. So something is ending. Some weird
big fake important thing inside of me can’t happen anymore, and everybody else
on Facebook is getting all sentimental about it, and I guess I am too because I
can’t stop myself.
Goodbye and good luck, iO. May you always be
somebody’s fart-reeking heaven of youth. I'm sorry I had the embarrassing urge to say all of this.
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