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Many of my friends regard improv with a great deal of skepticism - and understandably so. When the only available points of reference are Whose Line Is It Anyway? and some similarly game-based high school and collegiate comedy groups, there's no reason to assume that improv is anything beyond formulaic, lazy approximations of sub-SNL humor.

This means that most of my friends, despite living in Chicago for at least four years, have entirely avoided seeing long-form improv, one of the city's greatest cultural offerings, and arguably one of the greatest innovations of American theatre. They all love Chicago improvisers when they hit the "big time," appearing on 30 Rock or writing for The Colbert Report, yet rarely express any desire to see them in the environment where they get their start - and where, usually, they're at their best.

Last night, I saw a special performance of the Armando Diaz Experience at i.O. (formerly Improv Olympic) celebrating what would have been the 75th birthday of Del Close, the i.O.-cofounder and probably the most influential figure in American comedy of the past 50 years. The usual monologist was replaced by all of the performers periodically offering stories about Del, which continued on in a post-show discussion. The portrait painted of Del was of a mad journeyman and genius - a hyper-literate, larger-than-life drug-abuser who intimidated and inspired awe from everyone he encountered. One of the members of Baron's Barracudas, the first Harold-team he ever directed, returned to i.O. and offered a story about being a wide-eyed youth meeting Monty Python's Graham Chapman when he was in Chicago, who asked to be taken to meet Del. When they arrived at Del's roach-infested apartment, he found Del already sitting there with Bill Murray. Seeing the rapt attention that Chapman and Murray gave to everything that Del said, the young improviser realized that Del Close was more than just a local teacher, but instead a kind of guru to the entire comedy world.

A point they emphasized was the importance Del put in "playing smart." Though notoriously brash and outspoken with his students, being stupid was really the only thing he would not tolerate. It doesn't have to be funny, as long as you are playing to the top of your intelligence. This elicited a quickly glossed-over moment of contention as Joe Bill interjected that, if the product you are selling is billed as "comedy," then it ought to be funny.

And there, I think, is the great tension that causes a lot of problems, and ultimately prevents many smart, funny people from exploring the world of improv. Really, it's a matter of marketing that trickles down to the content itself. There's a tension between Improv Olympic presenting itself as part of a larger narrative of innovative, experimental theatre and presenting itself as COMEDY! - a fun thing-to-do in the evenings for tourists and Wrigleyville barhoppers. i.O. attempts to do both, I think, perhaps necessarily so for survival, but I wish it could veer more toward the former. Hearing the veteran improvisers speak last night, I think they do too.

The global perspective on improv is, I think, that it's full of yukks and that's about it - a fairly brainless and harmless form of light entertainment. The story of improvised theatre in Chicago, though, is a story of intellectuals. It was born on the campus of the University of Chicago in the 1950s, with brilliant minds like Paul Sills, Mike Nichols, and Elaine May coming together at places like Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap to create a new approach to theatre as the Compass Players, which would eventually morph into Second City. Del Close was a book fiend and a member of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters. His ideas, as last night's performers implied, were inspired as much by quantum physics and Chaucer as Laurel and Hardy.

The Compass Players in Chicago, 1956

It's this approach that I like most in the improv I see. I'm not trying to be elitist and claim that all improvisers must hold advanced degrees and make exclusively referential humor. But I appreciate it when I see it. Maybe the most revered improv act in town, TJ Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi, manage to perfectly blend universality and literacy - they even feature as a frequent guest Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts. They play characters that everyone knows and has encountered in life, yet also infuse their dialog with pieces of literature and science that imply that they actually read - a lot. You sense the same thing seeing Noah Gregoropoulos perform, and The Reckoning, and others. These are people who experiment with form, who will often not be "funny" for 20 minutes, yet suddenly deliver an amazing payoff.

What's particularly astounding with Del Close's brand of long-form improv is that it is group theatre. If you pay attention to a good show by any Harold team, you can see stunning improvisational pyrotechnics at work - an element introduced at the beginning will return, inverted and reimagined to amazing effect, and all done with the performers arriving magically at the same destination. With only minimal elements of form pre-planned, the shows end up with better structure than, well...this rambling blog entry, for example.

So, I think the key for long-form improv to be taken seriously as an art form is for the community to take itself seriously. I wish it could rid itself of the word "comedy" sometimes, as the label is both helpful and toxic. As proud as I am of its Chicago roots, I wish it were not such a local phenomenon, but could be reproduced globally at the same caliber. Frankly, it's a subject that ought to be studied academically. It's not that the story hasn't been told - Jeff Griggs and Kim "Howard" Johnson, for example, have both published books in recent years about Del Close's life and death. It's just that the stories haven't been heard outside a very specialized audience.

I don't know what it would take - a biopic? A This American Life episode? But I think that the same people who revere Ian Curtis and Charlie Parker in music, or Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka in literature, or Orson Welles in film, would hold Del Close in the same regard as a tragic icon of improvisational theatre, if only they knew the story.