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| | David Shepard |  | |
Chicago improv pioneer David Shepherd dies at 94 — without him, no 'Saturday Night Live'
eople who feel differently about the culture to express themselves.” (Brian Kersey/AP)
Chris JonesChicago Tribune
In 2005, a crowd gathered at the University of Chicago’s Reynolds Club to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the invention of improv. No less an authority than the university archivist had declared that the 50th anniversary of the Compass Players — the famous Hyde Park comedy institution co-founded by David Shepherd and the incubator for such talents as Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Ed Asner and Valerie Harper — meant that it now officially was a half-century since the creation of an entire new art form that would, in time, revolutionize American comedy.
A hubristic assertion for Shepherd’s scrappy little Hyde Park troupe? Not really. History speaks for itself.
“Without David, no Compass,” the comedy historian and writer Jeffrey Sweet said Tuesday. “Without Compass, no Second City.”
And without the Chicago comedy institution known as Second City, no SCTV, no “Saturday Night Live,” no Tina Fey, no Steven Colbert, no Steve Carell, no Boom! Chicago, no iO and no Seth Meyers. No Upright Citizens Brigade in New York City, either.
Some would go further: David Mamet would not have written “Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” nor would Eric Idle have made “Spamalot,” as directed by Nichols.
Shepherd, who died Monday in his home in Massachusetts at the age of 94, was at the root of it all.
Second City announced Shepherd’s death Tuesday, ...
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