Why Betsy might love Stephen Colbert
AVC: What was that like?
SC: I spent my first two years at a small all-male college in Virginia called Hampden-Sydney. That was like going to college 120 years ago. The languages, a year of rhetoric, all of the great books, Western Man courses, stuff like that. Very regimented curriculum, and a 19th-century emphasis on rhetoric and grammar—and all male. And very conservative. Then I transferred to finish up at the Northwestern School Of Speech, where it was guys and girls on the same floor in my dorm, a quarter of my class was gay, and I was calling my teacher not "Professor," but "Ann," and she was coming over and partying at my apartment and crashing on the couch. It was a completely different experience.
Why ita might love Stephen Colbert
AVC: How did you become involved with Second City?
SC: When I was an undergrad, I met this guy named Del Close, who was sort of a godfather of comedy in Chicago, and a lot of people had sort of a guru relationship with him, which I did not have. I never got to know him well enough. But he and a woman named Charna Halpern were starting the ImprovOlympic, and at the time, it was a competitive, freeform, one-act, long-form improvisation. And they were looking for colleges to do competitions at their theater, the Annoyance Theater by the Belmont el stop in Chicago. And a friend of mine said, "We should go down and check this out," and he already knew something about Del and Charna. And I went and saw it once and was stunned by how much I wanted to go do it. We formed a team—we would go down on Tuesday nights and perform for audiences at the cabaret, and at the same time, I was taking more of a formal theater training. And when I got out of college, I wasn't gonna do Second City, because those Annoyance people looked down on Second City because they thought it wasn't pure improv—there was a slightly snobby, mystical quality to the Annoyance people, the ImprovOlympic people.
But I needed a job when I got out of college, and a friend of mine was box-office manager at Second City, and she said, "Well, just come answer phones." And then I found out classes were free if you work there, and I wanted to do something other than try to go get an acting job… I was so afraid of not being hired. And I found out that I really liked the people who worked there, that they were really trying hard to do something new and interesting. The form there was a little ossified, but it wasn't for lack of trying. It was just sort of like there was an inertia. I met some wonderful people, and it was a happy accident. I hadn't intended to end up there. I meant to be a serious actor with a beard who wore a lot of black and wanted to share his misery with you.