Slow Comedy

Rooted in Del Close's dissatisfaction with the rapid, joke-driven pace of traditional sketch comedy, slow comedy represents a deliberate philosophical shift in how improvisation is performed and taught. Rather than racing to deliver punchlines or clever premises, performers working in this mode commit to patience, deep listening, and the organic unfolding of scene work, trusting that humor will emerge naturally from honest character behavior and authentic emotional situations.

Close developed the approach during the 1980s at iO Chicago (then ImprovOlympic) as a direct counter to what he saw as the manic, laugh-oriented atmosphere that had come to define Second City improvisation. As he explained to the Chicago Tribune, he could no longer watch a situation comedy and had lost his feeling for most conventional comedic timing. The result was a new form he called Slow Comedy, in which players were encouraged to take their time rather than leap to intuitive, sometimes obvious, responses. Close wanted improvisers to sit with moments, explore the truth of their characters, and resist the impulse to comment on or heighten scenes before they had been allowed to breathe. His aim was not to make comedy per se, but to join human beings together in an act of communal creation, as Paul Sills had attempted in earlier decades.

The concept builds directly upon the principle of truth in comedy, the idea that scenes grounded in honest behavior and emotional reality will generate laughter more reliably and more meaningfully than scenes built around gags. Where truth in comedy provides the theoretical foundation, slow comedy offers a practical discipline for achieving it in performance. Players pursue what Close described as "the truth, our own truth and the truth of the character," with the understanding that "the result is often laughs, but funny isn't the task."

TJ Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi became the foremost practitioners of slow comedy in Chicago, performing long-form two-person sets that demonstrated extraordinary patience and mutual attention. As former students of Close, they embodied the approach at its most refined: rather than playing at the top of their intelligence, as Bernie Sahlins's golden rule advised, they played at the top of their honesty, discovering scenes moment by moment without rushing toward resolution or comedic payoff.

Jimmy Carrane further codified the approach through his Art of Slow Comedy teaching methodology, which treats improvisational performance as an acting discipline centered on emotional truth and behavioral authenticity rather than comedic technique. Carrane developed this framework across decades of teaching at Second City, iO Chicago, and the Annoyance Theatre, as well as through independent workshops. His methodology extends the principles Close established into a structured pedagogical system, emphasizing vulnerability, presence, and the willingness to sit in discomfort rather than escape into humor.

In practice, slow comedy asks performers to resist several deeply ingrained habits: the urge to be clever, the fear of silence, and the assumption that comedy requires speed. Scenes performed in this mode often feature longer pauses, more sustained eye contact, and a willingness to explore mundane or emotionally charged territory that faster-paced improvisation might skip past. The discipline is not about performing slowly in a literal sense, but about removing the artificial urgency that leads improvisers to abandon truthful scene work in favor of easy laughs. Close's innovation recognized that patience on stage creates the conditions for genuinely surprising, deeply human comedy to emerge on its own terms.