AVC: When Anchorman came out, the Dreamworks publicity department sent critics a set of four anchorman bobblehead dolls.
SC: I have a set on my shelf.
AVC: It's gotta be strange, owning a bobblehead incarnation of yourself.
SC: That was really funny. That was... um... yeah. It doesn't get much better than that, to have a bobblehead in your likeness.
AVC: Is it true you wanted to be a lawyer growing up?
SC: I can't say that I wanted to be. I thought I would become a lawyer, but my career path changed after college, and I just... I couldn't honestly answer why that would be a good profession for me, other than that it sounded good. It sounded respectable, it sounded like a real job you get. It sounded like something tangible, whereas acting sounded like something akin to "I want to be an astronaut." "I wanna be a cowboy, an actor, or an astronaut." It doesn't live in the real world. It's not something that you walk around with pride telling people you're going to do. It's a very smirk-inducing thing to say. So I thought to be a real person, I needed to have a real job. But ultimately, my parents asked me what I'd always enjoyed doing along the way, and it'd always kind of come back to acting and doing plays. It had never been something I'd considered a career, but it had always been fun, it had always been something I did as a hobby.
AVC: Musicals in high school, things like that?
SC: Yeah, I did all of that stuff, I did musicals. My high school was very small, it was a prep school in Massachusetts, so everyone sort of did everything, and there was a lot of crossover between people in the band and people in sports and people in plays. There weren't lines drawn, so it was very accepted... You could be a varsity athlete in three sports and also play Judd in Oklahoma!, and nobody raised an eyebrow. So it was a very nice, nurturing environment for that sort of thing.
AVC: What made you start looking at comedy as a career?
SC: Comedy just sort of was a byproduct of what I was hired to do. Once I moved to Chicago and started trying to get acting jobs, I just tended to book more things that were comedically based than anything else. I never had the preconceived notion, "I will be a comedic actor." I just thought, "I'll go into acting and see what kind of work I can get."
AVC: It sounds like Second City was kind of what you were going for.
SC: That was the first big paying job that I got as an actor, and it was very consistent, and it was a really plum job in Chicago to have. I could actually earn a living doing it, so that was a big, big step. In the back of my mind, I'd always thought, "Boy, Second City would be such fun to be a part of," because I'd seen the touring company come through when I was in college, and the people in it seemed to be having the best time. So I thought, if nothing else, that would almost be an extension of college, where you go back to tour colleges and party with the students.
AVC: Was it like that?
SC: It was exactly like that. Once I got into the touring company, it was just touring around the country and doing these sketches that had been passed down through the generations of Second City, so we just picked the best of the catalog and went out and toured them around to colleges. It couldn't have been more fun.
AVC: So you could do skits that Alan Arkin wrote in 1964?
SC: Yes. I mean, a lot of them were more updated than that, because there were some that just didn't quite translate to a modern audience.
AVC: All the Barry Goldwater-based skits.
SC: Yeah. A University of Chicago reference—bringing football to the University of Chicago—was a very topical thing circa 1967. In the mid-'90s, not so much.
AVC: Was Second City very competitive?
SC: I didn't find it very competitive once we were working there. But it was hard to get in. A lot of people wanted to be a part of it and wanted to get into the company. I auditioned once, but I had taken classes there, and I was able to get in on my first audition. But I think I also caught it at a good time. There seemed to be a lot of turnover, so they needed to hire a lot of people when I auditioned, so I think I sort of timed it right.
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