The Second City: The Comedy Theater That Fed Saturday Night Live

The improv comedy theater known as The Second City opened in 1959 on North Wells Street in Old Town, growing from a student comedy group at the University of Chicago. The name was deliberately ironic — "the Second City" came from A. J. Liebling's dismissive 1952 New Yorker series on Chicago, and the founders chose it as a badge. In the decades that followed, it trained nearly every major name in American comedy: Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Alan Arkin, Steve Carell, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Stephen Colbert, and dozens more. Its predecessor, the Compass Players, had already launched Mike Nichols and Elaine May. Second City's influence on American comedy is hard to overstate: several members of Saturday Night Live's original cast, among them Belushi, Aykroyd and Radner, came from its stage, and its method of building sketch revues out of improvisation has been replicated worldwide. The theater runs shows nightly — a main stage production, a touring company show, and late-night improvised sets. It first opened at 1842 N Wells Street in December 1959 and moved down the street to its current home at 1616 N Wells in 1967. The cast photos inside read like an index of American comedy for the past sixty years.