Laughing on Solid Ground
Carl Kozlowski

Think of standout American comics over the last three decades, and chances are you'll come up with a member of the Los Angeles-based improvisational comedy-theater troupe the Groundlings. After all, the company has launched the careers of top talents from original Saturday Night Live player Laraine Newman to The Critic's Jon Lovitz to Friends' Lisa Kudrow. It has also given us iconic characters like Pee-Wee Herman, the SNL cheerleaders played by Will Ferrell and Cheri Oteri, and the incredibly diverse characters of the late, great Phil Hartman.

Yet, the Groundlings have slipped under America's pop-culture radar, never drawing quite the praise and attention of Chicago's and Toronto's equally influential Second City troupes. In fact, they seem to go largely unrecognized outside the heart of the Los Angeles comedy industry.

Now the Groundlings are finally getting their rightful due. The venerable troupe celebrated their 30th anniversary on October 5 with an all-star, roof-raising fundraiser that was perhaps the comedy event of the year. Things have come a long way since the Groundlings early days as a hippie comedy collective -- where anyone could wander in and learn at a workshop or perform in a show for a mere dollar a week -- and as a group started as a way for a Bible Belt boy named Gary Austin to reinvent his life and give others the chance to do the same.

"It's funny, looking back, because in the '60s, I was very conservative," recalls Austin, who founded the Groundlings in 1972. "But when I was a little kid, I always loved performing and getting in front of audiences. There were three things I wanted to do: be an evangelist, be a baseball player, and be a cowboy singer -- all things done before crowds of people."

That need for notice stemmed from the hardscrabble oil fields of Oklahoma and Texas, as Austin's father spent his post-Navy career working for the notorious Halliburton company. He remembers stories his mother told him about her own rough childhood in Oilton, Oklahoma -- a town built so close to oil derricks that children were covered by the misty black spray while walking to and from school every day.

Austin spent his high-school summers working for Halliburton and his Sundays surrounded by holy-rolling members of the Nazarene church. (He came away with a distaste for both that sparked him to write the acclaimed solo shows Oil and Church.) He escaped to San Francisco State University, "where I was finally introduced to the world at large," and joined a sketch-comedy troupe that served as a fun outlet for his repressed creativity.

But it wasn't until he graduated and landed his first job as a social worker in Watts -- where his first week was during the 1965 riots -- that he spotted a sign on Sunset Boulevard advertising an appearance by seminal San Francisco improv troupe The Committee and decided to check it out.

"I was blown away by it and knew I had to be a part of it," says Austin, recalling a feeling that countless performers would later have after seeing the Groundlings. "You had to come to a workshop every Saturday afternoon, and there were 50 people taking the class for a buck apiece. Del Close (regarded within comedy as the ultimate improv teacher) took over directing the workshops and reinvented the form there with a game called The Harold.

"But my favorite recollection is the Group Grope, where everybody was lying on the floor, feeling each other up," he continues, cackling. "This was the '60s. Often, the Group Grope got us going, and we'd extend the experience beyond the workshop."

By 1972, The Committee had charted a decade-long run in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and founder Allan Myerson decided to move on. Those who stayed behind, however, wanted to form their own group -- and the Groundlings were born.

"I picked the name based on Shakespeare's description in Hamlet of the people who watch plays while sitting on the ground," explains Austin. "It was a name that didn't force us to only do comedy, like [now-defunct competing troupe] Kentucky Fried Theater, because at first we wanted to be open to all types of theater."

Whatever Austin's intentions, the group took off because of its comedic elements and rave reviews from the Los Angeles Times. Although city zoning and parking regulations tied up plans to perform in their own space for years, more established venues, like the Improv Comedy Club, opened their doors for them, and soon the Groundlings were packing theater seats. A rotating group of 90 students competed for 25 available performing slots in the weekly shows. Stars like Lily Tomlin dropped by regularly to watch, and, one night in 1975, she brought along a young NBC producer named Lorne Michaels.

Michaels was scouting the nation for talent, hoping to create an entertainment revolution of his own with Saturday Night Live. Among the Groundlings, he immediately took a liking to Laraine Newman. A fan of improv since she started performing at Beverly Hills High School at age 15, Newman had also seen The Committee in San Francisco and liked the idea of being able to create her own material with improv, rather than struggling to fit others' demands.

Michaels also wanted to hire a Groundling named Archie Hahn and invited Austin to direct the new venture, but both declined -- a decision Austin still doesn't regret.

"I believe the Groundlings would have dissolved if I'd gone. I was the only teacher and hadn't trained anybody else how to do it yet," Austin says. He continues, "I'm very glad I didn't have to deal with the drug problems on SNL because you had actors coming in late and stoned, and they would win any argument in making NBC decide whether they or the director had to go. The chaos might not have succeeded, and I'd [have] come back home without a theater because I'd [have] forsaken the same ship I'd asked everyone else to sacrifice for. To sacrifice that for anything would have been a mistake."

Yet Austin did leave in 1979, handing control of the troupe and its school to Tom Maxwell, a fellow Southerner who had come to L.A. years before as a USC graduate film student. That was also the year the Groundlings finally found their footing with the opening of their permanent location on Melrose.

During his time working with Austin, Maxwell had seen a growing need to weed through applicants for spots in the Groundlings school, and over the next decade he created a stratified system that made students' talent levels easier to define and track. But more importantly, his decade-long reign through the '80s saw the city of L.A. and the entertainment industry becoming more aware of the Groundlings.

"It's always been a character-driven company, in that we built scenes and shows around characters rather than themes," says Maxwell from his home in Vermont, where he continues to write several produced sitcom scripts a year. "But in 1984, the Olympic Arts Festival gave us a breakout hit with Phil Hartman's Chick Hazard show; our special show Casual Sex was being made into a movie, and Paul Reubens was breaking out into his own solo show as Pee-Wee Herman at the Roxy."

During this time, the shows lost some of their early political flavor, but according to Maxwell, "It was never a conscious decision to be more or less political. If an actor wanted to be political, they could, and if they didn't, that was fine, too."

Phil Hartman Stumbles In

Mainly, the Groundlings served as a home for an ever-changing band of comedy hopefuls. It was a place where a Columbia Pictures accountant, like Julia Sweeney, or a member of A&M Records' publishing staff, like Cheri Oteri, could finally exercise their creative spirits. But arguably the most famous Groundling to date was Phil Hartman -- a man who stumbled across the cast when his then-girlfriend and future fellow performer Jaye P. Morgan took him to see the troupe for his birthday.

Hartman's 1998 death at the hands of his wife, Brynn, has turned his story into a shared legacy of countless Groundlings members. Much like the untimely death of Second City Chicago graduate Chris Farley, Hartman's time with the troupe has taken on mythic proportions.

"I was in the backstage room giving notes to actors when I noticed our 30-seat theater was filled with laughs, and our show hadn't even started yet," Austin recalls. "But I looked, and there was this guy standing on stage. After the show, he and Jaye P. asked how to be Groundlings. We had just started doing auditions to weed people out, but he flew through them, and he soon was writing for the main-stage show."

During his decade-long stretch with the Groundlings, Hartman was best known for creating an improvised detective sketch called "Chick Hazard," in which he would construct and solve a different crime each week based on audience suggestions. But for Austin, Hartman's funniest creation was "Lightman." As Austin talks, he leaps onto the theater's stage to re-create the character.

"Phil comes from backstage and toward the audience dressed in 27 lit flashlights and a bathing suit, with one more [light] standing on his head," says Austin as he continues his performance. "He would shine them on the audience and then say, in a deep, dramatic voice, 'I am Lightman!' And would shine it on whomever he wanted to interview on the spot in the audience. It wasn't the best sketch he ever did, but it was one of the most popular."

Read reflections of famous Groundlings alums here.

Carl Kozlowski is a regular Arriviste contributor and the co-author of the satirical self-help guide Life: The Final Frontier. (Pick this up!) He has also performed standup coast to coast and written for the Chicago Tribune, New City Weekly in Chicago, Chicago Reader and Pasadena Weekly.