Send in the Clowns

It's rare to find humor in corporate America. That's why Second City Communications has made it its job to bring comedy to the business world.

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Second City Communications Inc. sells a service that's trickier to deliver on than most: bringing humor to corporate America. In its own digs, however, funny's not a problem

Joe Keefe is a human dipstick: always testing his customers' comfort levels. Leaning back in his chair -- his head almost brushing the casual tableau of bottles (aspirin, mouthwash, bourbon) arrayed on a shelf behind him -- Keefe listens intently to Lauren Price, whose voice is being channeled through a speakerphone into his Chicago office. Price, director of sales development for People magazine, has retained Second City Communications (SCC) to run a workshop at her company's annual sales meeting, and she wants assurances from Keefe, the SCC cofounder, that no People employees will be made uncomfortable by, for example, being required to fall backward into the arms of any other People employees or having to do anything alone on a stage. Solemnly, Keefe pledges that workshop participants will remain upright and in groups at all times. "We want your people to feel they're in a situation of total security," he tells Price, in the kind of soothing tones you'd expect to hear issuing through a confessional screen. "If you have any more questions, feel free to call back in the afternoon when we're sober."

Keefe's demeanor -- pitched between the executive aplomb of King Lear and the irreverence of Lear's jester -- is a business requirement given SCC's not-always-compatible audience and ancestry. SCC is the offspring of the Second City Inc., known for its edgy, improvisation-driven shows (the current production features a running gag about a dentist who molests female patients) and the Emmy Award­winning 1980s television series, which took potshots at Mother Teresa and other targets who were clearly asking for it. SCC's audience is a different crowd -- ordinarily straight-edged business folk engaged in the risky business of exposing their organizations' delicate sensibilities to the emotional and intellectual bungee jumping that is comedy. Not surprisingly, corporate customers demand a humor that is simultaneously cutting edge and incapable of so much as nicking a finger. "Big issues become funny when you bring them down to a personal level," explains Keefe. "But you've got to be careful not to make them too personal."

It is that tension between safety and satire that has traditionally rendered oxymoronic the very notion of corporate comedy. Forward-thinking companies yearn to exploit the genetic links among humor, creativity, and morale, but they cringe at the possibility of lawsuits erupting from off-color E-mail or the odd Seinfeld reference. Consequently, those hoping to season bland corporate cultures with a dash of levity often gravitate toward the most sanitized options: forcing their staffs out to the miniature golf course for some putting at windmills, for example, or hiring humor consultants who urge employees to find the elf in self while pummeling one another with Toobers & Zots. "The corporation is the epitome of safety, and humor and safety can't coexist," says that Jonathan Swift of business culture, Dilbert creator Scott Adams. "If you don't have a little danger, it's not going to be funny."

Danger, by Adams's definition, exists when someone is shown "doing something dumb." That's victimization in the lexicon of SCC, which offers seminars, speaker training, customized comedy shows, corporate-video production, and assorted other items that cry out for bullet points. At SCC, victimization is taboo. So are profanity, sexual innuendo, and other mainstays of its parent company, the incubator that hatched such celebrated gut busters as John Belushi, Martin Short, Bill Murray, Mike Nichols, and Elaine May.

Joe Keefe launched SCC to "bring comedy where it is most desperately needed, which is in business."

Despite the fact that SCC shares its name, pedigree, location (Chicago's nightlife-saturated Old Town), and some performers with so irreverent a parent, hundreds of businesses -- from politically correct Web start-ups to transgression-phobic Fortune 500 companies -- have trusted the group with their events. Stranger yet, SCC is funny, even with the gloves on. That's because, while it eschews cruelty, the company eagerly sends up the bad habits, entrenched conflicts, and unfathomable processes that prevent the corporate equivalent of harmonic convergence. The video created for a giant consulting firm suffering from acronym metastasis, for example, featured an "Andersen Consulting to English Dictionary" and an employee who used pie charts to talk to his dog.

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Leigh Buchanan

Leigh Buchanan is an editor at large for Inc. Magazine. A former editor at Harvard Business Review and founding editor of WebMaster magazine, she writes regular columns on leadership and workplace culture, and she contributes Inc.'s capsule book reviews, "A Skimmer's Guide to the Latest Business Books."

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