Top 35 Second City Quotes

I met my wife, Nia Vardalos, at The Second City, and she was chomping at the bit to move to L.A.

I joined an improv group in college, which was a lot of fun. After I graduated, I moved to Chicago to try to get into the Second City.

I would love to carry on with Second City and see where that takes me, but it’s always been a dream to work on ‘Saturday Night Live’ and do films.

When I graduated from college, I moved to New York and started doing improv because I read all about the early ‘Saturday Night Live’ guys having come through Second City and learning how to improvise, so I wanted to get immediately into that.

There’s such a freewheeling nature to ‘Second City,’ and the greatest thing about ‘Second City’ was having a sophisticated audience night after night who appreciated what it was. They knew it wasn’t all going to be great when you improvised, so they were very forgiving that way.

I went to Second City, where you learned to make the other actor look good so you looked good and National Lampoon, where you had to create everything out of nothing, and SNL, where you couldn’t make any mistakes, and you learned what collaboration was.

Out of 30 years of Second City I was probably the third African-American with the main stage cast. I was surprised when I first heard that. I think part of the reason that improvisation has never been popular with African-Americans is that it isn’t popular in the inner cities.

I always enjoyed writing. I did playlets in high school, I did radio shows in college. That’s one of the reasons I went down to Second City, because you could do acting and writing.

I had worked for ten years in theater; I had worked at Second City in Chicago. Then I got to Hollywood, and I was like, naively, ‘Where’s my pilot?’

I thought of Second City as just the greatest therapeutic job anybody could ever dream of having.

I was at Second City L.A., going through the conservatory, and I graduated in 2004 and I got ‘SNL’ in 2005.

We did a year of Uber in San Francisco before we went to a second city. You get those processes down, then you really get started.

I took one class at Second City called Improv for Actors, and that was it, and that was only because my agent told me I had to.

My first improv was Second City in Chicago. Before that, I worked at – with a partner, doing comedy sketches.

I did Second City, and Nia Vardalos also did Second City, so I knew her from there.

Tina Fey is part of a generation of women who have changed the face of comedy at ‘Second City,’ ‘SNL,’ in sitcoms and in film.

I got an agent when I needed one, when I had a contract negotiation for the first time. I was doing the Second City E.T.C., and I got invited to audition for the last season, it turns out, of ‘In Living Color.’

I went down to Chicago to try to go into a place called Second City. I auditioned for that and got in pretty quickly, but I couldn’t stop partying. They gave me a warning: ‘If you do it again, we’re gonna kick you off the main stage.’

At Second City and improvising at iO, you’re creating a character in an instant. All of a sudden, you’re creating this history and this past for your character, and you’re discovering it while you’re doing it, and that’s part of the fun of it.

Because I started my career in improv, performing with Second City and the Ace Trucking Company, I always enjoy being in situations where – as an actor – you have to think fast & be light on your feet.

I’m a bug on acting, which distinguishes Second City from a lot of other revues. It comes from the character, the behavior, and not from the jokes. I don’t think jokes are funny. Humor comes out of character and out of situations the character is in.

I started in Shakespeare. I’m classically trained, which, how hilarious is that? Then one night, I saw Second City and thought, ‘Wow, that’s what I want to do.’ But I never thought it would morph into screenplay writing.

Well, actually, the Second City thing came about because I was taking a few improv classes there. I thought that the improv classes would help with my wrestling career, which it has.

It was my third Second City review before I even got mentioned in the review. It was the third review where it finally was like, ‘And Lauren Ash is here.’ Thank God, it’s about time!

I think a lot of studios today are run by women, and we are entering a time when a lot of women have evolved in Second City and Upright Citizens Brigade and wanted to become writers and comedians.

When I came to Chicago, I didn’t even know what improvisation meant, as far as pertaining to comedy. I knew about Second City, but I didn’t know what the word ‘improvisation’ meant.

I met Kevin when I was 19, at a Second City workshop. We were paired up together in the first class I went to. By the end of the class we formed our improv group, and over the next three years we performed leading up to the formation of The Kids in the Hall.

I took a class at The Second City, and it became contagious.

I grew up on Don Knotts and Jerry Lewis and all the guys from Second City.

I did a lot of commercial and theater work when I got out of school and was living in Dallas, and I moved to Chicago to go through the Second City Conservatory Program.

To romp along the connected rooftops and fire escapes of Chicago’s second city of garages was my young life’s passion.

I came out of the old Second City in Chicago. Chicago actors are more hard-nosed. They’re tough on themselves and their fellow actors. They’re self-demanding.

I never looked at my future as comedy. Even at Second City, I always thought of it as acting. I knew I was going to be an actor, financially, emotionally, egotistically. I still don’t think I’m in comedy.

There’s different kinds of improv. There’s Second City improv where you try to slowly build a nice sketch. There’s stuff you do in college coffee houses where you just go joke, joke, joke. Bring another funny character with a funny hat on his head. Christopher Guest is more the line of trying to get a story out.

I took Second City out of desperation, and that’s what ended up working out. It shows that you should be doing a lot of different stuff, taking whatever opportunities are there, to see what works.