Mourning a comedian is awkward business. After a lifetime in pursuit of punchlines, surely there's nothing a clown would relish less than a room full of miserable expressions, sack-cloth dresses, chest-beating and wailing.
Then again, Del Close was no punchline-chasing, knockknock-slinging hack: The whole point of improv comedy, he always insisted, was not the punchline, but the process. As Charna Halpern, Close's partner in founding Improv Olympic and the emcee of Saturday's memorial service at Second City, puts it, the goal of improv is "to listen, to pay attention, to take care of other people. Improv is theater of the heart."
The Close tribute, then, is a comedy of the heart. As much roast as tribute, as much open mike as memorial, it flows freely across emotional tides, evoking tears for a funnyman and wry nostalgia for a man who was - as is agreed upon by several of the speakers - "truly a scary prick."
Close considered improv comedy "the last bastion of the counter-culture," and the memorial fittingly veers at times into anti-establishment rhetoric. An old-timer waxes nostalgic for the leftist politics of Nam-era Second City, only to be answered a couple speeches later by current mainstage director Mick Napier: "I'm sorry there's not a fucking war on, man."
Even more present than the comedy of politics is the politics of comedy. Matt Besser - a one-time Close pupil now starring on Comedy Central's "Upright Citizen's Brigade," a show that owes much to the late guru's performance methodology - uses his time at the mike to rail against a generation of comedians, including several figures present at today's affair, for denying Close the respect due him. "We got to give credit where credit is due," says Besser. "We've got to give it up for Del!"
After gently denying that anyone has forgotten about his subject, Tim Kazurinsky (of "Saturday Night Live" and "Police Academy" fame) riffs on Close's willing of his skull to the Goodman Theater. "Alas poor Yorrick, I knew him... Del? Del is the only person to give head posthumously."
The most poignant trbutes come from Close himself: Leave it to a comedian to be egomaniacal even from beyond the grave. ("I met Del in a production of 'A Christmas Carol'," reports long-time collaborator John Ostrander. "We thought he was playing the ghost of Christmas Past. He thought he was playing Dionysius.") In a series of monologues videotaped almost a decade ago for a short-lived TV show, the ghost of Del Close past breaks up the room again and again.
One of the monologues concludes with a joke about a plane-jumper whose chute doesn't open, and who goes into a series of acrobatics rather than plummet heavily to his final end. Close proposes the joke as model for life: None of us has a working chute, so we better do as much skydancing as we can before the big splat. Fitting final words, but not as good as the ones Halpern reports from Close's death bed, where he was surrounded till the end by friends, most of them comedians. "I'm tired," said Close before his final curtain, "of being the funniest person in the room."
(Ben Winters)
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.