“Chicago Improv” Is Dick Wolf’s Latest Show–At Least According to SNL
You’re dialed in on one node of the ceaselessly whirring internet content machine entirely too early on a Sunday morning between the months of September and May, which can only mean one thing: SNL did something.
SNL did a lot of somethings tonight, as it celebrated the end of its 43rd season with special guest host Tina Fey and musical guest Nicki Minaj. Did you know that it had some famous people on it? It totally did. It even made it into a whole thing, where the joke was not anything that could actually be considered a joke but the simple fact that the show acknowledged the frequent complaints over its reliance on celebrity cameos. I don’t know if reference anti-comedy is real but there were some references tonight and they definitely weren’t comedy as most folks would recognize it so yeah sure that thing probably does exist.
But hey: let’s talk about one specific sketch in particular right now. It’s not even a sketch, but a pretape, one whose humor is entirely dependent on your familiarity with or sympathies towards the network of improv theaters that exploit struggling, naive comedians nationwide. “Chicago Improv” makes one thing out of two things—those things being Dick Wolf’s post-Law & Order empire of Chicago-based NBC procedurals, and Chicago’s long and pivotal history of improvisational comedy theaters—and that one thing might legitimately be the highlight of an otherwise especially unmemorable episode.
The video posits itself as absolute insider baseball—as you’ll see, the joke of its critical blurbs is that nobody gets the jargon—but it’s the year 2018 and you don’t have to have ever done a lick of improv to know what a Harold team is or recognize the logo of Chicago’s iO Theatre. (Seriously—I have not a second of improv experience but by dint of my sheer professionalism I know all of the things and nod sagely at all of the references.) It’s not a stretch to imagine Lorne Michaels letting Fey and the show’s writers and performers put this video together as an end-of-season gift—a kind of benevolently tolerated senior prank—largely unaware that the language of improv is well-established enough for the video’s fake, confused New York Times and Wall Street Journal quotes to feel utterly unrealistic.