Satire in Chicago

The situation is critical. Japanese industrialists have developed the Hicoupet Mark III sports car. U.S. price: $49.95. Obviously, Detroit will soon be just a swallowed Miltown. The hero pulls his thumb out of his mouth, strips to his Bermuda shorts, and shouts: "This is a job for Business Man!" He is, of course, "faster than a speeding ticker tape, more powerful than a goon squad, able to leap loopholes in a single bound." He does all this on the stage of a Chicago coffeehouse-nightclub called the Second City.

When he has wrecked the Oriental T-bird on a quick-built brick and mortar tariff wall, Business Man moves on to do battle with Collective Man. They square off and slug it out with slogans. Collective Man lands two left hooks: "The irresistible historical momentum of the workers' movement" and "the forward thrust of Soviet science." Business Man fights back with collective bargaining and the eight-hour day, follows up with everything from recovered space monkeys to the thinking man's filter. Momentarily victorious, he says: "Come back next week to see how I straighten out that troubled island of Cuba."

Aristotle Invoked. The audiences keep coming back to the Second City, on Chicago's North Wells St., where the declining skill of satire is kept alive with brilliance and flourish. Reorganized last summer, the group that once gave basic training to Comics Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols and Elaine May rented a Chinese laundry, built a stage and paneled the walls with the sides of discarded phone booths. Many in the company--including Director Paul Sills, Actors Barbara Harris, Severn Darden, Andrew Duncan--date back to the Nichols-May-Berman days, keep up their longstanding practice of developing material as it comes into their heads during rehearsal.

Collected around a nucleus of University of Chicago alumni, the players stand on a high platform: "We are Aristotelian in the true sense; we entertain while we instruct. We slip the message in between the laughs. Our target is pomposity." Chicagoans like both the laughs and the message; the group's sharp entertainment goes far toward relieving Chicago's country-cousin complex as the U.S.'s second city. Even the Tribune praised the show for its "sparkle and sauciness, speed and irreverence." Oedipus Revisited. If the Second City comedians have a trademark, it is "The Living Newspaper," a flexible skit touched off by items in the press. When discoveries of police corruption recently scandalized the Chicago area from Cicero to Lake Forest, a Second City actress would rush onstage each night, frantically dial a number and say: "Hello, FBI? There's a policeman hanging around in front of my house." Virginia's Senator Harry Byrd is nightly impersonated in a minstrel show, puts on blackface and sings: "How I love to pick old massa's cotton." But "the thing I like most," adds Byrd, "is to take this off and be a white man." He tries--but the black will not come away from his face.

Pantomime is both basic and superb at the Second City: Charlie Chaplin is figuratively assassinated in a bit called "City Blights," and Sweden's Cinema Director Ingmar Bergman is taken apart in a parody called "Seven Sealed Strawberries." Another regular feature, "Great Books," pours cholesterol into the heart of literature. In one session, as an adult evening class discusses Oedipus Rex, a woman declares brightly: "I think he knew it all the time."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.