Nick Johne

Johne's career spanned two national comedy contexts: the Canadian improv and sketch tradition anchored by Second City Toronto, and the Chicago-centered training and applied improv expansion of the 1990s and 2000s. His work on The Red Green Show placed him within a distinctly Canadian popular comedy tradition, while his subsequent move to Chicago aligned him with the professional development infrastructure that Second City Chicago had built as both a performance company and a training institution.

The Improvisation for Autism program represented an early instance of applying Chicago-style improv pedagogy to clinical and educational settings for neurodivergent populations, a use of improv methods that has expanded significantly since the mid-2000s across therapeutic and educational contexts. Johne's personal connection to neurodiversity through his daughter Emma gave the program an authenticity and specificity that externally commissioned applied programs sometimes lack, and his institutional position at Second City gave it organizational credibility and reach.

The Improv Anxiety classes at Second City represented a parallel application of improv to psychological access barriers, recognizing that anxiety prevents many people from engaging with improv as either performance or therapeutic practice. By creating a dedicated program for that population, Johne helped extend Second City's training center reach to students who would not enter through the standard curriculum pathway.

Johne's teaching at Second City Chicago and his appointment as adjunct faculty in the Theatre Department at Columbia College Chicago place him within one of the deepest institutional lineages in North American improv pedagogy. His training at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto and his entry into the Second City Toronto troupe in 1991 gave him grounding in the Canadian branch of the Second City tradition before his relocation to Chicago extended that engagement into the American institutional context.

His classroom approach draws on the character-based, truth-in-comedy principles that the Second City tradition has developed across both its Toronto and Chicago operations. Where many improv teachers work within a single institutional tradition, Johne's career across two national contexts gives his teaching a comparative perspective on how improv pedagogy has developed differently in Toronto and Chicago, and what the shared principles of that tradition look like when applied in distinct theatrical and cultural environments.

At Columbia College Chicago, his work as adjunct faculty positions his improv teaching within a formal theatre studies curriculum, requiring him to articulate improv principles in terms that meet both the standards of professional comedy training and the academic requirements of theatrical education. This dual audience (comedy performance students and theatre conservatory students) shapes his pedagogical framing, demanding that improv technique be presented not only as a set of performance skills but as a body of theatrical and human knowledge with its own intellectual coherence.

His long tenure at Second City Chicago has given him exposure to successive generations of students, performers, and ensembles across the institution's training programs, and his teaching carries the accumulated understanding of someone who has observed improv development and improv failure across a career-length timeline at one of the world's foremost comedy training institutions.

Johne's Improvisation for Autism curriculum, developed at Second City Chicago with Lisa Bany and extended to autism centers in multiple states, contributed to the growing body of applied improv work with neurodivergent populations. The program drew institutional credibility from its Second City affiliation and has been documented through the Second City Works podcast, placing it within a lineage of evidence-based applied improv applications. His Improv Anxiety program at Second City addressed a barrier to improv participation that many students face, creating a pathway for students who would otherwise self-select out of traditional improv training. His DePaul University faculty role extended his influence into the formal academic training of theater students in a Chicago context.