Directed by Heather Ross
Runtime: 1 hour 25 minutes
Streaming and in theaters July 27

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

For Madmen Only, the new documentary about the inventor of modern improv, is ostensibly based on a comic anthology that's largely fictionalized autobiography. It's a bizarre way to get to the truth, but then that comedy legend, Del Close, was a pathological liar who spent years telling a totally fake story about his father tricking little ten-year-old Del into being complicit in his suicide. Maybe a sci-fi comic is the closest thing to insight you get into some people.

If you follow comedy, you're familiar with Close. I first heard about him as a high school kid in love with the Upright Citizens Brigade show on Comedy Central, which he narrated. The UCB founders were quick to credit Close as a mentor, and once learned his name, you saw it everywhere. He taught so long that he could count members of the original SNL cast and more recent stars like Jason Sudeikis as proteges. He's credited as turning improv from a curio into something you'd intentionally seek out. It was something that you could do to goof around while working on a scripted piece and then Close came and made it something you could teach.

He was also not funny. As with the old SNL sketches his students created, the surviving Del Close work has aged like chili. You can listen to him in 2021 and you'll understand where the jokes are, you'll get what they mean and what the punchline is communicating, but I can't imagine you'll so much as smile. That's me talking, as a person who's listened to his hit comedy LP How to Speak Hip online. It's also how many of the people in For Madmen Only felt at the time. Bernie Sahlins, co-founder of Second City, openly says he thinks improv is, most of the time, "not brilliant." Another former collaborator talks about doing two-hour-long improv sessions at Close's urging and, when director Heather Ross asks if they were funny, the collaborator sort of shrugs, says "Well, it was..." and trails off.

That's part of the appeal, and everybody interviewed admits it-- if improv is going to work, it has to tank every once in a while. It's noble doing that, and I've seen tons of great improv from people clearly inspired by Close, but that doesn't mean I want to watch Close himself try to crack a joke and just babble about random shit. This makes the documentary a great way to learn about the man-- it's fascinating to learn about him, even if you can't sit through any of the stuff that made him famous.

Ross isn't interested in hero worship, so we get a lot of Close not only not being funny, but also being a total prick. In filmed recreations of real meetings and conversations, we see James Urbaniak (an absolute deadringer for Close) call DC comics and berate random people just trying to get through their days. He yells at his students, too. He doesn't bathe, he goes on drug benders and alienates everybody. Early in the film, we learn he had gotten his showbiz start with Nichols and May before being boxed out of the deal that saw them become a hugely famous act. In the moment, you feel for Close's near-miss with success. By the end of For Madmen Only, you understand why somebody wouldn't want to be tied to Close professionally.

He was alone, bitter and in pain because he was an outlaw. It's also possible, and the movie explores this as much as it does the outlaw angle, that he died that way because he was a total asshole to anybody he had any kind of relationship with. Still, there are hints around the edges that Close is getting off the hook here. In her narration, Michaela Watkins notes that Close's comic included a composite character of Close's old bosses. She describes the character as "vaguely anti-Semitic." It's an interesting thing to bring up and then gloss over.

And that's what's mentioned. In The Guru, Jeff Griggs' biography of a man he loved, we learn Close sexually harassed women in his classes. He had to be convinced Black people could be funny and never truly thought women were. Again, this is what one of his supporters admitted about his mentor. Close's racism and misogyny is prolific and well-documented, and for a movie to bring one small example up glancingly and then never touch on it again is, frankly, a little gross. You start to realize Ross has shown you the bad parts of a man that could define him as an eccentric. You see him yell at students, but maybe he was just doing that to push them to greatness. You don't get to see him tell a woman to quit comedy and "sew her vagina shut" so that she didn't have any children.

With a little bit of context, you realize this film being presented as a "warts and all" deep dive has omitted all the things that made its subject a nightmare of a human being. If you want to make a documentary about a garbage-hearted bigot, that's totally fine. Just don't tell me you're showing me him at his worst when there are decades of stories about him at unfathomably darker levels of shitty.