He Who Laughs, Lasts

In 1958, a former circus entertainer arrived in Minneapolis, opened a coffee shop on University Avenue, and began doing comedy shows. Fifty years later, after countless gags, gaffes, and guffaws, the Brave New Workshop is still going strong—and the influence of funnyman Dudley Riggs can be seen in shows and schtick across the country.

Photo by Darrell Eager

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Sue Scott: Being a company member with Dudley Riggs opened all these doors for us. People wanted us to audition for TV commercials or radio spot voice-overs. You were instantly placed in the top echelon of funny people in town.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, as sketch shows like Saturday Night Live became hugely popular and brought attention to sketch comedy and improv, the Brave New Workshop gained prominence.

Dudley Riggs: We tried to put together a television deal sometime in the ’70s. ABC News wanted to have a satirical comedy—a political cartoon—in the news each day, and we did a lot of work on that. The idea was that we would pick the big item of the day and then satirize it for the daily and nightly news. But being in Minneapolis didn’t help. The idea eventually got killed because the network people were afraid to turn over that much airtime to people they didn’t know very well. We tried some other things, but after a while, we decided we needed to stick with what we knew: We were stage people.

Dane Stauffer, actor, San Diego’s Triple Espresso (BNW company member, 1984–1987, 1996): For a while, we got interested in ideas that took a little longer to explore. We wrote one sketch called “Grandpa’s Head” about an old vaudevillian. Basically, all that was left of him was his head, and he’d been kept alive in this box on wheels. It was very funny, but the underlying theme was that he wanted to end it, and nobody wanted to let him end it. We were dealing with ideas like euthanasia that were deeper and edgier that what people expected.

Dudley Riggs: Sometimes we would scoop the general news. Right after Richard Nixon won a landslide election, we did a politically incorrect show called The Future Lies Ahead—with an emphasis on “lies.” The Star Tribune said it was about meaningless events and a waste of the audience’s time. But it was about Watergate. Six months later, people came back and said, gee, you sure had that one right.

Peter Staloch, actor and writer, Movies for Guys Who Like Movies (BNW company member, 1984–1991): During one show we had a scene called “Amish Porn.” Melissa Denton and I appeared onstage dressed as an Amish couple riding in a carriage. I cracked my whip to get the horses moving. Suddenly, the couple was slightly interested in the movement of the horses’ buttocks. I whipped them again and the couple got a bit excited. Again, the whip, and we were bouncing with the rhythm. Melissa grabbed the whip and whipped them again. We became very excited as she then whipped me. We smiled with insane glee as the scene blacked out.

Peter Tolan, Emmy-winning writer for Murphy Brown and The Larry Sanders Show (BNW company member, 1981–1983): We were always trying to make other cast members laugh, and sometimes that would make it into shows. I used to do an imitation of Ethel Merman, which was just really singing loudly and screaming, frankly, as loud as I could. Eventually, we did a scene on the show where someone would announce, “A treasure of the American musical theater, Miss Ethel Merman!” I’d come out in full drag, go down in the audience and shake people’s hands and scream at them. First, I’d start with songs that Ethel Merman would sing, and then I would get into “I Am the Walrus” and things like that.

Peter Staloch: Backstage or in the dressing room before the shows, our trust and comfort level with each other was generally so good that we’d often indulge in some very inappropriate, offensive, and downright obscene humor that would have never made it to the stage. We’d often try to outdo each other and see how far we could go with awful jokes before we’d finally say, “Stop it.” It was a way of letting off steam and also a way of making fun of ourselves—kind of an obscene parody of the real satire we were trying to write and perform.

Sue Scott: The process is very intense and collaborative. You go into the theater in the morning and sit there until 5, brainstorming. When you’re playing around with ideas, people bring up a lot of personal stories—maybe it’s your family or your siblings. You go to the deepest, darkest corners of your life, and you reveal it to these people because you’re trying to come up with something that’s insightful and funny.

Peter Breitmayer, actor (BNW company member, 1988–1992): Sometimes things got exciting. Once there was almost a fistfight: someone threw keys at Steve Schaubel, and he had to get stitches. But you have to have conflict. People are trying to create something and they have different ideas about what works and what’s important. People’s passions run so high, and in the end, that conflict can actually make things much better. When you’re writing political and social satire, it’s almost better to not to be so Minnesota nice.

Just as improv theaters like Chicago’s Second City became known for their role as a stepping stone to shows like Mad TV and Saturday Night Live, the Brave New Workshop also had its fair share of alumni making names for themselves on the national comedy scene. Al Franken and Tom Davis both wrote for Saturday Night Live, Mo Collins headed to Mad TV, and Sid Youngers began working for Comedy Central. Others—Pat Proft, Peter Tolan, Nancy Steen—went to Hollywood to write for movies and television.

Peter Staloch: It wasn’t exactly like Second City. I think the cast members loved the process. We loved the art of comedy.So for most of us it was about more than just trying to pursue a career. We wanted to see what we could write and create together—not just for ourselves.

Dudley Riggs: Eventually, cast members have to move on, and that’s part of the design. It’s like college, in a way. You want them to go through a few years, and then go off on their own.

By the mid-1990s, Riggs was ready to wind down his career with the workshop. He began looking for someone who could usher the theater into the next century.

John Sweeney, owner of BNW, with Jenni Lilledahl, since 1997 (BNW company member, 1993–1995): I started taking improv classes because my friend Chris Farley was on Saturday Night Live, and I was hired on the main stage in 1993. I’m not a typical theater person—I did six years in the corporate world after getting a degree in marketing. So I started selling corporate entertainment shows for Dudley. I spent more time with him than most of the actors. Every day we would spend hours together talking about the money he could get by doing what we do in other formats. We were business partners in a way. Business friends. In 1995, I moved to Chicago.

Dudley Riggs: John was a really positive force when he was here as an actor. One time he told me, in a flip sort of way, “I really enjoy doing this work. If you ever decide to sell, let me know.” So I took him up on that. There was a brief moment when Second City heard that I might sell and they came rushing in, but I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of what would happen under other management. And I trusted John.

John Sweeney: In January of 1997, when I was pretty sure I was going to buy the place, I heard through the grapevine that the Disney corporation was going to build two $1 billion ships in Venice, and they were going to need some entertainment on those ships. I spent a lot of time at Disney in January and February, convincing them that what they needed on their ships was a Brave New Workshop Theater. During the second month that I owned the place, I signed $1 million-plus contract with Disney.

Dudley Riggs: John is a much better businessman than I was.

John Sweeney: So we had some cash, some walking around money, and we walked hard. I’m sitting there thinking, “Well, so far we’ve owned the place for a week, we just signed a million-dollar contract—this shit’s pretty easy. Let’s start building stuff.” My first move—which will go down in the history of brilliant moves—was to spend a half- million dollars and build a brand-new theater in Calhoun Square. In a declining market. Then 9/11 came, our Disney contract ran out, and we were out of money. In 2002, we came back to 2605 Hennepin. Although, that was not so much our decision as the bank’s and the sheriff’s. They helped bring clarity.

Caleb McEwen, actor, director (BNW company member, 1993–present): One of the great things about the Workshop is that we’ve never relied on anything flashy. It’s a small group of people working hard to come up with creative solutions, because they can’t just throw money at the problem. The need for those creative solutions got accentuated from 2001 to 2004, but we knew we’d get through it and there would be light on the other side.

John Sweeney: I remember one time we were doing a show about humor in the workplace and the sketch was about someone who needed a paperclip in a corporate office, but the budgets were so tight that he had to go to the oracle—a paperclip-budget oracle. The oracle said that if he wanted a paperclip he had to go do all these tasks—an Indiana Jones–esque journey. There was a scene where he needed to swim across the river, and if we had large budgets there would have been a Plexiglas tank with water and a wave maker and hot chicks in blue bikinis. Instead, we really aggressively mimed that the actor was swimming. The other actors behind him had blue ribbons on sticks. The audience instantly understood, and almost every night we got a really big round of applause. Sometimes good ideas are better than budgets.

Caleb McEwen: Everyone is trying to hold the tradition of what has been going on here for years, but our shows have changed somewhat to reflect the way that audience tastes have changed. [Theaters have to compete] with Netflix and cable TV and YouTube, and as a result, we have to appeal to a fast-moving 60th-of-a-second-cut sort of generation. The shows move a lot faster, and there are lot more sketches in the shows than there used to be.

Dane Stauffer: It’s not just the Brave New Workshop—comedy in general is changing. I went back one time, and the cast was a generation younger than I was. The cast was really gifted, but it was clear that there was a different sensibility in some ways. They swore so much more than we had, but it was something that was informed by what’s popular in the culture and what people are comfortable saying. Comedy is louder now. We used to have a lot of things that were subtle, but today things are more in your face.

In some ways, the theater is far different today from what it was in 1958—some 27 people are now on the payroll, and the company offers corporate services and workshops, as well as classes that are open to the general public. More than 20,000 people attend the Brave New Workshop’s productions annually. The 52-weeks-per-year schedule is a thing of the past, but the heart of the company—its smart, finely tuned political satire—remains.

Dudley Riggs: We didn’t invent the wheel, but we pushed it along. At one time, there were maybe three or four places in town for stand-up comics to perform. Now there are 10. Comedy is a regular menu item on television. The kinds of structures and satire you see in The Daily Show are the same kinds of things we were doing 30 years ago. There are so many more first-rate outlets for comedy. I’m very happy about that.

John Sweeney: In Ireland, when someone is contrary or a challenger, we call him a messer. And I hope that’s how we’ll always be perceived. Whether we’re doing shows on Minnesota racism—singing “We’re Not Racists, Not Like Those Southerners”—or talking about “The Unbearable Lightness of Eagan,” we want to disturb the Minnesota thought process. We don’t want people to feel comfortable and warm. We want to provoke discussion.

Dane Stauffer: What did I learn from Riggs? In some ways, learning how to improvise and do it well is like learning how to live. It’s about how to be present to what’s happening without an agenda. It’s about how to listen, how to trust your impulses and start something without having to know how it’s going to end.

Dudley Riggs: Nobody that I know of ever thought that this would last that long, and I certainly didn’t. I was a suitcase act, and always figured I’d go back on the road again. I always think there’s another engagement coming up. You can’t ever completely unpack.

Erin Peterson is a frequent contributor to Minnesota Monthly.