Leonard says at Second City they create spaces where risk is supported and failure is not punished.  It’s not about saying or expecting that they will fail.  But as an organization, Second City has discovered that it performs much better when it creates those spaces.

Second City ensembles have to take risks together to find the funny.  They fail fast and often in rehearsals and sometimes in shows, but they fail with context and with purpose.  Second City views comedy as taking place at the edge of taboo and failure – at the edge of what we are comfortable with. And teams need to use that failure. Ironically, says Libera, the only way to guarantee that you are really going to fail is to be afraid of failure all the time.

Examples of the need to embrace failure come from the comedy writing room.  Libera notes:  

Writing jokes and performing improv are risky because things can go wrong, and in improv it happens in real time in front of an audience.  But Libera notes that the minute the funny thing the writers and improvisers thought they were doing “breaks” – that’s where the exciting stuff happens.

For example, during an improv show, the performers do many scenes in a row, and in each scene they name each other’s characters (avoiding actual names).  With so many scenes and names in every show, it can be challenging not to mix up or forget those character names.  But that can lead to comedic gold.  For instance, in a scene, a woman may get named Sheila, but the actor playing her husband accidentally calls her “Barbara.”  And now the actor has to justify why he called her Barbara, and who that is. Perhaps it was a slip of the tongue, and Barbara is his boss or mistress… either way, something interesting is about to happen in the relationship on stage.

And experiencing failure in improv rehearsals and on stage creates resilience, says Leonard, because you are not allowed to not get back on stage:

In Second City auditions, casting directors know immediately if the fear of failure will prevent an auditioner from succeeding. Leonard says:

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