Mike Polk

See: Comedians

The St. Louis Compass

Crystal Palace, St. Louis

"The third Compass to play St. Louis, again at the Crystal, was produced in the spring of 1962 and featured Jack Burns and Larry Hankin … Hildy Brooks (then known as Hilda Brawner), Martin Lavut, and Maggie Sullivan under the direction of George Sherman.” - Jeffrey Sweet, "Something Wonderful Right Away"

When I was enrolled at Ohio University, the head of the MFA Directing Program was George Sherman. It is a shame I did not return to O.U. to receive a Masters in Directing from him before he retired. Though I only took one course from him, he was a strong presence at the school, and I had great respect for the work he drew out of those in his program. He had a big smile, and a wonderful snorting laugh.

The one course I did take was in improvisation. Freshman year we received basic improv training from Denny Dalen, geared more in the direction of “club” improv. Though I grew remarkably as a performer under Denny’s tutelage, improvisation was George’s domain, and I soaked in experience during that one quarter course which has served me for the past twenty and more years.

However, it was before working with him that I got the idea to interview him for a paper I would write about improv for Mel Helitzer’s comedy class. It was probably Denny who suggested the idea, informing me that George had once been a member of The Second City, which is not entirely accurate. It was George who first told me of The Compass Players. Following the success of the Compass, and its offspring The Second City, branches of each opened in other cities through the late fifties and early sixties (and even today in the case of Second City).

Compass originator David Shepherd had started a Compass in St. Louis in 1957 at the Crystal Palace, which went bust soon after. They tried again in 1959, and again it did not last long. And again in 1962. And that is where George comes in.

I never did finish my paper on improvisation. I did interview George in early 1989, and he was very informative and interesting and spoke of many things I did not at that time understand. If a microcassette recording of the interview exists somewhere in my home, I have no idea where it is. But I recently found the notes, and they are spare but kind of interesting.

((These are not exact quotes, but reconstructions based on 23 year old notes.))

George Sherman

QUESTION: So, tell me about your work with Second City.

ANSWER: I wasn’t a member of The Second City.

QUESTION: Oh, uh, but I thought …

ANSWER: I was a director for the Compass Players. The Compass Players started in the late 40s or early 50s at a saloon near the University of Chicago by David Shepherd and Paul Sills. Shepherd was the intellectual of the bunch, in 1962 he started a branch of the Compass in St. Louis, we rehearsed in a big, airy basement. There was Alan Alda, Hildy Brooks, Jack Burns, Diana Sands …

Shepherd would create the premise for a scenario, we would perform object work, and create characters. He’d give us a place and time -- for example, in 1961 Jackie Kennedy gave the people a televised tour of the White House, that is a true story. So Hildy created a scene where she played Nina Khrushchev as this motherly type giving a tour of the “Red House” in Moscow, or what have you.

QUESTION: This was an improvised performance?

ANSWER: No. It was developed in a workshop. Everything -- everything you see at Second City today, for example, it is all finished material, developed in a workshop.

{{2011 QUESTION: So, David Shepherd had a hand in the 1957 St. Louis Compass? Did he attempt to make it a “people’s theater”? What role did class and politics play in your work?

ANSWER: (Janet Coleman, “The Compass”) “Shepherd found … producer’s chores, as usual, unfulfilling. He was in a hurry to get back to scenario writing … he did not bear in mind Grotowski’s precept: the theatre belongs to whoever is making it.”

ANSWER: (Del Close, “The Compass”) “I’d had enough of his bullshit about ‘you’re an upper-middle-class housewife in love with a middle-class white-collar worker with lower-class parents.’ As soon as he left, things began to work.”}}

QUESTION: Where did the Compass perform?

ANSWER: We performed at the Crystal Palace in St. Louis. Hildy, Jack … Larry Harkin, he was tall, beautiful, not verbal, Martin Lavut ... Lavut was quite knowledgeable, good with verbal styles.

The comedy comes from character. There is a sketch we developed that is still used today, the “Van Sketch.” Two people are driving all night in a van, and each tries to keep the other awake. It doesn’t work unless each has a well-developed character and is committed to the act of keeping the other person awake.

QUESTION: When I asked about improvisation in class, Mel said there is no such thing as improvisation. Robin Williams, Jonathan Winters, they prepare everything, it’s all a shtick, it’s all written and planned and they spring it on the audience and it looks like it came from nowhere.

ANSWER: Don’t tell me Jonathan Winters doesn’t improvise. In 1960 or something, he was cutting promos for a show, they just let the tape run for three or fours hour, huge improvised reams of tape. Sure, much of it would end up in some act. But he starts with, he draws on a character. And he can go anywhere.

Bert Lahr said “a comic says funny things, a comedian says things funny.” That is what makes a comedian more endearing than a teller of jokes. The Smothers Brothers routine couldn’t exist without it having grown out of their genuine relationship.

QUESTION: But I am confused. Is a Second City performance improvised or isn’t it?

ANSWER: Early in the week we would have improv sessions. Tuesday, Wednesday night, for people willing for something different. This would be pure improv. What works becomes polished in rehearsal. For the Saturday midnight show, everybody knows everything. We’d use lights to control the bits, wherever the scene was, we would end it on a huge laugh by taking the lights out.

If the show was dying, we’d dim the lights slowly. Lavut was hilarious, he refused to quit and the scene would become about the power going out.

The main show is rehearsed, out of free-form work. We did not think it was fair for people paying top price to receive the rehearsal itself.

... and scene.

Sources:
Something Wonderful Right Away (Jeffery Sweet)
The Compass (Janet Coleman)

UPDATE: George Sherman died in Athens, Ohio, at the age of 92 and surrounded by his family, on July 5, 2024.

Commemorative Superman Fence Damaged

Car hits decorated fence at Ohio 'Superman house'
May 26, 2011

CLEVELAND (AP) — A car has taken out part of a fence paying tribute to Superman around the Cleveland home where two high school kids created the Man of Steel.

The picket fence around the childhood home of Joe Shuster is decorated with large metal plates reprinting the first Superman story from a 1938 comic book. The Plain Dealer of Cleveland reports Tuesday night's crash damaged seven of the 15 color plates.

Neighborhood development director Tracey Kirksey tells the newspaper she believes a man who lives near the house hit the fence with his car. She says he wants to pay for the damage.

Last month, a historical marker honoring Shuster and classmate and Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel was stolen in the same Glenville area of Cleveland. It was returned undamaged weeks later.

Sources: Associated Press
The Washington Post

Mel Helitzer

Melvin Helitzer (October 18, 1924 - April 11, 2009) remains a legend at Ohio University, where for decades he was the professor of the Humor Writing for Fun and Profit course, in addition to other journalism classes. The class taught how to write for greeting cards, political speeches, cartoons. It's claim to fame, however, was the final exam which was five minutes of stand-up in front of a sold-out audience of their peers.

In the old days it was held in the Frontier Room, a bar. So the audience was drunk. When the campus went dry and the venue became the Front Room - a coffee house - the audience was still drunk but now also high on caffeine.

Prior to his "retirement" as college professor, Helitzer was one of the "Mad Men" (fo shizz) a Clio-Award winning advertising executive, though his work tended more toward and emphasis on toy companies, cereal and candy than cigarettes and bourbon. Mel was a WWII vet, and a hard-working journalist.

In spite of this sterling reputation, I was a young turk who thought he knew what's what about comedy, and saw Mel Helitzer and his class as Henny Youngman 101.

And so, I was a little confused when the director for Comedians (whose name I cannot recall) invited Mel Helitzer to participate in a symposium on comedy as part of the promotion for the play. I mean, in hindsight, duh, of course, he’s a nationally-known comedy instructor. He was an expert on writing comedy, for stand-up, for print, television, advertising, politics, public speaking. Good gracious, he wrote the Choo-Choo Charlie jingle!



But from my perspective a) he was representative of the kind of fatuous comedy that is sent up as reprehensible and empty in the play in question and b) this 20 year-old thought he was a hack. He did a few minutes of stand-up for our benefit, and every third joke was one I’d heard someone else tell before. It was unbearable. Take my life. Please.

Not to mention the fact that when the director in question did his own five minutes of stand-up at the symposium, it was like hearing watered down Robin Williams. And by 1988, I was already entirely done with Robin Williams.

Which is why, when signing up for winter semester classes, I enrolled in Humor Writing for Fun and Profit. Because in spite of my feeling like I already knew everything about everything, I had enough fire to try and beat the old horse at his own game.

It was challenging, it really was. I am not good at writing comedy. I don’t know how better to put it, but I find it very hard to slow down the thought process in my writing. I know where I am going with something, so I find difficult to spell everything out and bring people along. Gags I come up with seem so obvious I don’t even write them down, and then what I do put on paper is so obscure no one gets it but me. So that was an education. And Mel was invaluable in teaching me about the rule of three (okay, that one is easy) but also timing, set-ups, slow down!

But we had great, enjoyable conflicts about content. My routine was intentionally psychotic, half a series of jokes aimed largely at myself. I refused to make fun of others … except vague others like “ugly people” which could mean anything, and of course, Wham! Unfortunately, the Wham! joke was supposed to just be a weird twist on the old joke about separating the men from the boys in the Greek army, but in hindsight it comes off as homophobic. Sorry about that.

I think the real joke is that I love George Michael, and everybody knows it.

The second half devolves in this uncomfortable Oedipal shaggy dog story, which got laughs, and made people squirm. Mel hated that part AND YET was instrumental in improving upon my delivery. He didn’t like it, but he made it better.



Most people audit Mel’s class. But then you have to pay for it. I wanted to take it for a grade, but then in addition to the live performance, you also have to write a paper. I was going to argue the superiority of improv over stand-up.

To be continued …

On Comedians

"I should be drinking a toast to absent friends
Instead of these comedians."
Elvis Costello
My junior year was the year of comedy. Stand-up comedy. One of the main stage productions that fall at the Ohio University School of Theatre was Comedians by British playwright Trevor Griffiths. In brief, the play is about an older man who teaches an after-hours course in stand-up to working class guys in Manchester. The final exam is a five-minute routine at a local pub.

However, when the instructor’s old partner shows up, a very successful British comedian and talent agent, and announces he is scouting for new talent and will be attending that night’s event, well, that raises the stakes considerably, doesn’t it?

These two men of a certain age have differing opinions about comedy, and its uses. Morecambe and Wise vs. Angry Young Men, don’t you know. The guy in downtrodden, 1970s era Manchester, scraping his living, thinks of comedy as a time-honored art form best employed to divine difficult truths. The other gentleman is about entertainment and money -- If you can get everyone in the room to laugh at the fat kid in the front row, you win!

Also in 1988, when Tom Hanks was still willing to risk playing an asshole, he starred in the film Punchline, which might be my favorite role he’s played. A middle-aged housewife (Sally Field) is having a midlife crisis and wants to try out stand-up. Hanks' character is a moderately successful, workaday comedian, kind of a dick troubled character, and takes her under his wing.

"But doctor ... I am Pagliacci."

Comedians, it turns out, are not happy people. They are bitter, angry people. The best ones can be charming, lose themselves in the content of their “character” and who can cleverly cut down everyone around them but remain adored. Caustic, scorched earth comedians offend everyone and most often flame-out. I don't need to name them. The ones with the longest self-life are beloved, unknowable clowns. Who is Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, Johnny Carson? Who cares, they’re funny.

That school year was also my year of graphic novels. The daily comic strip I had written during my sophomore year had been cancelled, but as a result of that experience I had begun delving beyond strips and books, and into what Art Spiegelman called “comix.”

Junior year was when I began reading Harevy Pekar, Spiegelman’s Maus and Raw, and Watchmen, an underground comic posing as a superhero book. Watchmen famously features a character called The Comedian, an psychopathic mercenary who plays the American system to the hilt, G. Gordon Liddy with the expertise, style and strength of Batman. He wears the iconic “smiley face” button that is the signature gaphic for Watchmen. It’s also his blood that gets splattered on it.

He's the Comedian. He gets the joke.

The second act of Comedians features all of the younger performers presenting their shtick. To the playwright’s credit (and the ability of the actors) the routines actually do make the audience, the actual theater audience, laugh -- or not, if they are supposed to be lackluster. All the student had been instructed carefully to look into themselves, to find the humor within. When one comedian’s work begins to flag, he starts making racist jokes which are unfortunately hilarious. Win! A team of brothers have a melt-down onstage, however, when one of them tries to pull the same thing in the middle of their act, and the other refuses to.

The final comedian, Gethin Price, is entirely balls-out bizarre. It’s more like performance art, it isn’t "funny", it’s a grotesque lashing out against the upper class. It is COMEDY. I wasn’t in this production, but I was very interested by it, read the script in advance. I had made acquaintance of the guy playing Price -- he was an O.U. Alum, a visiting artist -- and gave him a Watchmen pin I had gotten from the Uptown Mini Maul. He was thrilled, and got permission from the costumer to pin it on costume.

I like comedy. I like funny. I do not like comedians. In general, I find them to be misanthropic, mean-spirited people. And the only thing worse than a comedian is an improv comedian.

To be continued.

Gleason's

William "Jap" Gleason (Cleveland's most successful impresario! The man that finds and makes the stars!) opened his jazz joint at 5219 Woodland near East 52nd St. in 1942. Blues were also a heavy favorite of the owner's, and attracted artists like Bo Diddley and B.B. King. Legend has it a young James Brown, in addition to singing, would sweep up to make a few extra bucks.

By the early 50s it was the home of interracial mixing to enjoy rhythm and blues. By 1952 WJW disc jockey Alan Freed was calling the stuff "rock and roll" and he and his entourage could regularly be found at Gleason's having late night supper and listening to the likes of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Muddy Waters and Big Maybelle Smith.

The advertisement above features The Metronomes, an r&b group (made up of several John Adams High graduates) that won Gleason's Fame And Fortune Contest on March 4, 1954. Their prize was a week-long engagement.

My father told me that when he was in high school he would frequent jazz clubs where the segregation apparent virtually everywhere else in the city was ignored. I need to ask if Gleason's was one of them. One local jazz trumpeter named Earl Douthitt described Gleason's as "a jamming joint, a good spot with no problems, an orderly crowd that came to listen to the music."

Sources:
Encyclopedia of Cleveland History
Jazzed In Cleveland (Joe Mosbrook)
Marv Golderg's R&B Notebooks

100 Days In Cleveland

Hot Sauce Williams on Carnegie
This is why it pays to be friends with Larry Collins on Facebook. Today he posted a link to 100 Days In Cleveland, which is now my favorite blog in the universe. Julia Kuo has a mission to draw or paint her favorite places in Cleveland, one day at a time for 100 days.

Make it a year, Julia! Please! These are utterly beautiful and every one of them makes me so happy.


Marc's on Coventry
If you hadn't noticed, I keep a Cleveland-oriented blogroll at left (Cleveland: It's Fun!) Please feel free to suggest others. kliːvlənd recently announced its own demise. Wimp.