Improv Nation: How We Made a Great American Art

A Finalist for the 2017 George Freedley Memorial Award

"With Saturday Night Live looming ever larger in the pop culture landscape, it's time for a history of improv comedy. Wasson delivers, moving nimbly from improv's origins in 1950s Chicago to movies like Caddyshack and TV shows like The C [...]
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A Finalist for the 2017 George Freedley Memorial Award

"With Saturday Night Live looming ever larger in the pop culture landscape, it's time for a history of improv comedy. Wasson delivers, moving nimbly from improv's origins in 1950s Chicago to movies like Caddyshack and TV shows like The Colbert Report." --Entertainment Weekly

"A compelling, absolutely unputdownable story . . . And, in case you're wondering, yes, the book is funny. In places, very funny. A remarkable story, magnificently told." --Booklist

At the height of the McCarthy era, an experimental theater troupe set up shop in a bar near the University of Chicago. From this unlikely seed grew the Second City, the massively influential comedy theater troupe, and its offshoots--the Groundlings, Upright Citizens Brigade, SNL, and a slew of others.
Sam Wasson charts the meteoric rise of improv in this richly reported narrative. He shows us the chance meeting between Mike Nichols and Elaine May. We hang out at the bar Dan Aykroyd opened so that friends like John Belushi, Bill Murray, and Gilda Radner would always have a home. We go behind the scenes of landmark entertainments from The Graduate to Caddyshack to The Colbert Report. Along the way, we meet a host of pioneers--Harold Ramis, Chevy Chase, Amy Poehler, Alan Arkin, Tina Fey, Judd Apatow, and many more. Wasson shows why improv deserves to be considered the great American art form of the last half century--and the most influential one today.