News

When John Candy was a newcomer at Second City in Chicago in 1973, he was paired with another rookie comedian. “I started the same day as John Candy,” said Bill Murray on The Tonight Show last year. Candy and Murray on the same stage? Sounds terrific — but Murray says it was anything but.

“We were both terrible,” he confessed. “We were both lousy, and no one would work with us. So it was just Candy and I looking at each other like, ‘I guess it’s us again, you know?’”

That was the year when the Second City cast was known as the Seven Giant Goyim because every cast member was a Gentile more than six feet tall, according to The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray. The other five giants wanted nothing to do with Murray and Candy, at least according to Murray, leading to their frequent collabs.

When the two worked together,...

Chicago — Comedy fans know the names – John Belushi, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Joan Rivers – but before those famous faces graced Hollywood movies or the "Saturday Night Live" stage they were discovered by Bernie Sahlins, co-founder of The Second City.

Alumni of the Chicago comedy club spent Monday remembering Sahlins, who died Sunday at age 90, as an innovator who along with business partners Howard Alk and Paul Sills opened the theater in December 1959. It quickly gained national attention and helped establish Chicago as a vibrant comedy town.

"Bernie was absolutely crucial in the formative years of Second City, as important a figure as it's ever had," said comedian and actor Robert Klein, who went on from Second City in 1965 to star on television series and in movies.

Second City caught on within months of opening, despite some early money problems and other issues. It became instrumental in the growth and development of improvisational and sketch comedy.

Chicago – Director Jack C. Newell ended up meeting one of his great collaborators while taking classes at Columbia College Chicago. His future filmmaking partner turned out to not be a fellow peer, but his teacher, Ron Falzone. Together, they made the acclaimed short, “Typing,” about two Hollywood screenwriters whose brainstorming session draws inspiration from the clacking of typewriter keys in the next room.

Newell and Falzone’s first feature effort is “Close Quarters,” an endearing and insightful collection of parallel vignettes set in a Chicago coffee shop. Baristas Abby (Erica Unger) and Barry (Seth Unger) flirt with the possibility of long-term romance while observing the dysfunctional relationships of their customers. Two friends, Patrick (Tj Jagodowski) and Olivia (Kate Duffy), chat upstairs while their respective partners, Dina (Holly Laurent) and Cary (Dave Pasquesi), make love in the downstairs bathroom. An estranged couple (Susan Messing and Jim Carlson) argue over Skype while...

Chicago – “I can’t stop my leg” is the lyric to Robert Klein’s most famous comedy song, and the venerable stand-up comedian still keeps the laughs coming with his brand of observational hilarity. With a career spanning over 45 years, Klein still knocks ‘em dead on his latest HBO Special, “Unfair and Unbalanced.”

Klein’s roots in comedy are right here in Chicago, having spent a year with The Second City improv troupe in 1965 (he auditioned with Fred Willard). On returning to his native New York City, he started doing stand-up, which led him to his big break on a 1970 summer replacement TV show called “Comedy Tonight.”

Symphony for the Comic: Robert Klein in the HBO Special, ‘Unfair and Unbalanced’

Photo credit: Kevin Mazur/HBO

He then had several successful comedy albums, including “Child of the Fifties” [1972] and “Mind Over Matter” [1974], which skewed the escalating Watergate scandal of the time.