Bernard Sahlins’s Second City comedy theater in Chicago helped turn improvisational sketch comedy into an art form, and introduced generations of comedians to the world, from Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd to Tina Fey and Steve Carell. The cigar-chomping Sahlins, known for his caustic wit, once greeted a six-person cast after a performance with characteristic praise: “Five of you were terrific!”
Sahlins began his career as a producer of “legitimate, dramatic theater,” said the Chicago Tribune. He co-founded the Playwrights Theatre Club in the 1950s, which featured actors such as Ed Asner, Mike Nichols, and Elaine May. But he and many of those actors also performed with the Compass Players, where they essentially “invented improvisation—in its current context, at least.” Nichols and May took their act to New York, but Sahlins stayed in Chicago to open a 120-seat cabaret theater in 1959 called The Second City, named after a “snotty New Yorker article” about Chicago. “The institution would go on to revolutionize American comedy.”
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