The Training-Wheels Harold

Abstract

Second City producer Bernie Sahlins vehemently argues that improv is only a tool, a means to an end. Using improv to generate ideas and later refine sketches has worked for the Second City for over 50 years. They see improvisation as the process by which the product is created. For Sahlins, improv is a “technique, a stage tool like mime or fencing.”¹ Close disagreed, asserting that improv “was indeed an art form, deserving to be elevated to presentational status.” The Second City model manifested Sahlins’s view that improvisation was primarily a tool or technique and that improv “elevated to a form of presentation failed most of the time, that any scene could benefit from editing, concision, and shaping.”² This stubborn viewpoint fueled the Harold and actually helped form iO’s ideology. Replacing the concept of a finished, complete, and unchanging text with a fluid work-in-progress style of performance forms the ideological bedrock upon which the Harold and iO were built—in other words the process became the product. In this chapter, I will be exploring the development of the Harold at iO by first looking at how it came into existence and then by exploring the evolution of the traditional Harold through its implementation by iO’s house teams (and a few key groups outside of iO) from its inception until it was totally revolutionized by the Family in the early 1990s, a stage that Halpern has referred to as “the training-wheels Harold.”