Thirty years ago last month, a peculiar late-night comedy show began airing in syndication. It was frequently funny, unabashedly absurdist, and brimming with talent—and it gave a number of future stars some of their earliest exposure on national television.
Steve Carell did it. So did Alex Borstein, Ian Gomez, Jackie Hoffman, Jeff Davis, and Wayne Brady. Matt Gourley, who now co-hosts and produces Conan O’Brien’s podcast, turned up in at least one episode, which he referenced in a 2024 chat. And Tina Fey almost joined the cast, but decided to write for SNL instead.
The show was Kwik Witz, an improv-rooted comedy competition that shot in Chicago for most of its run. The Cleveland Plain Dealer once described it as “Saturday Night Live meets American Gladiators.” Despite garnering respectable ratings, it was underappreciated in its day and underexposed due in no small part to wee-hours scheduling.
To understand how such an offbeat enterprise made it onto television—and how it managed to survive for three seasons—LateNighter spoke with the people who created it, produced it, and performed on it.
First, a little history (but just a little)
The cratering of America’s standup-comedy “boom” in the early 1990s coincided with a rise in the popularity of theatrical improvisation.
The centuries-old art of creating spontaneous short- and long-form scenes, improv had long been revered by comedy writers and performers as both a presentational end in itself and a tool for crafting comedy sketches. Starting in the ’90s, though, it moved from niche to mainstream.
Improv shows drew big crowds. An influx of new students, many of them eager to acquire the skills that helped springboard their comedy heroes to fame and fortune, paid for classes and joined improv teams at The Groundlings in Los Angeles, ComedySportz in Milwaukee, BATS Improv in San Francisco, and—before the decade ended—at the Upright Citizens Brigade in New York City.
But the epicenter of improv, as it remains to this day, was Chicago. Home to The Second City, the Annoyance Theatre, and ImprovOlympic (now iO Theater), among others, it’s where countless improv aspirants—overwhelmingly young and youngish white dudes at first and for years after—and would-be acolytes flocked to glean wisdom from established teacher-gurus like Del Close, Charna Halpern, Mick Napier, and Martin de Maat, and to learn the meaning of “Yes, and…” and “follow the fear.”
Chicago’s booming improv scene also supplied a growing pool of performers looking for opportunities beyond the stage. It was into that environment that Cleveland entrepreneur Steve Belkin arrived with an idea for a comedy competition—and, eventually, Kwik Witz.
Belkin, a world-traveler who is also known as “The Mileage Maniac,” conceived the show during improv’s stage resurgence but before it was common to see improvisation on television. The British competitive improv show Whose Line Is It Anyway? had been airing since 1988, but Belkin had no interest in aping its format or tone. At first, in fact, he wasn’t even interested in improv as the core of a commercial venture.
A fan of standup comedy and many of its ’80s-era stars—Seinfeld, Leno, Reiser, Saget—since their nascent years, Belkin instead envisioned pitting individual comedians against each other.
“I’d go to the Cleveland Comedy Club every weekend, probably for the last two years of high school,” he remembers.
“As I got a little bit older and wiser, I was with my friend Doug Singer and we went to see two different [comics]. Doug was like, ‘This guy’s great.’ I’m like, ‘No, I like the other guy way better.’ And we both looked at each other and said, ‘How can we even compare them? One guy did mother-in-law jokes, the other did dick jokes.’ So I said to him, ‘What if we could get a couple of different comedians and tell them, “Here’s the subject matter. Go up there and show us what you’ve got?” Apples to apples.’”
But when Belkin and Singer tested this concept using local comics, they discovered that standups hated being compared and judged. “They knew what they were getting into, but once they got there and were all on the same stage with the same material, they just despised it and were like, ‘We’re going to tell every other comedian not to do this.’”
So Belkin shifted the focus to improvisers, who turned out to be a much better fit.
“Improvisers are used to being onstage with multiple people,” he says. “And because they don’t have anything written, you can throw anything at them, and they’re not feeling overly taxed. So we were like, We’ll get three improv guys and put them on the same stage. But we realized that improv works much better if you pair them up, and that’s when we came up with a team comedy competition.”
With $10,000 in backing from NBC Productions, plus more out of their own pockets, they shot four reels—three in the upstairs of Belkin’s suburban Cleveland home and one in Los Angeles.
Early days and a successful test run
In order to sell Kwik Witz nationally, Belkin knew he needed to prove its potential through test marketing. When other avenues hit dead ends, he leveraged media contacts he’d made in Wisconsin while doing local TV and radio programming with coaches and players from the Green Bay Packers and the Milwaukee Bucks.
After the general manager and program director at Hearst Broadcasting-owned ABC affiliate WISN-TV in Milwaukee saw the test reels he’d done with Singer, they agreed to air not just a pilot episode but a full 13-episode test run that would also include Green Bay, Eau Claire, Wausau, and La Crosse.
But Belkin was a sports media consultant and agent whose forte was salesmanship and management, not television production. Which meant he needed a skilled team to help him realize his vision.
Investing his own money and a good chunk from his father, legendary Cleveland concert promoter Jules Belkin—$150,000 to start—he launched a production and syndication/distribution company called Beau & Arrow Productions (named in part after his son Beau) and assembled a crew that included veteran game show writer-producer Mark Maxwell-Smith (best known for Truth or Consequences) and Gary Shimokawa, who’d directed Archie Bunker’s Place as well as episodes of Night Court and The Golden Girls.
Accomplished Chicago-schooled improvisers Dave Razowsky and Ron West spearheaded talent recruitment and polished material. In Chicago, Belkin secured a small studio close to downtown and shot episodes there in mid-May of 1995. WISN had offered a studio, but it was too small to accommodate a live audience, which was key.
The show’s Wisconsin numbers were solid out of the gate, especially on WISN, where Kwik Witz aired Saturdays at 12:05 a.m. ET. (Slots varied in different markets and shifted over time.)
Its first outing earned a 3.3 rating and a 10 share, besting an SNL rerun to take the top spot, and the remaining episodes placed second or third for the rest of the show’s 13-week tryout. It all boded well for the prospect of future syndication—which took several more months to achieve and benefitted greatly from Belkin’s constant schmoozing during weeks on the road, as well as his inventive guerrilla marketing tactics.
“At a time when station consolidation and broadcast network expansionism has steadily eaten away at available time periods, Belkin’s Dale Carnegie-style, door-to-door salesmanship is rekindling hopes that the days of the mom-and-pop, independent program supplier are not over,” MediaWeek wrote in early June 1996, as Belkin and his team were busy with set design, theme music, talent recruitment, and ad sales.
Belkin’s efforts to syndicate Kwik Witz and to renew its syndication in ensuing years were both comical and no-holds-barred, including sending out canisters of pepper spray and yellow yo-yos.
Early on, he mailed out comically large handwritten pitches on artist sketch flip pads, with 12 pages of massive text content, to prospective syndicators in the top-three markets across the U.S. The stunt got him meetings with nine of the 15 stations in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—the latter of which, WMAQ-TV, was first of five major-market NBC affiliates to commit.
With Chicago on board and the show’s respectable numbers from the Wisconsin test run, Belkin attended his first of three National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE) conferences in Las Vegas in January 1996.
Beforehand, he sent red plastic lunchboxes to the five network stations in each of the top 100 markets. Inside was a two-minute demo tape and some M&Ms, but the lunchbox was padlocked and stations could open it only by calling Belkin for the combination. Most did, he says.
Belkin used the opportunity to invite stations to his booth at NATPE, which was also shaped like a giant red lunchbox. Tiny, but brightly colored and uniquely shaped, it stood out among the sea of other booths. He also hired two women to give brief shoulder massages to any TV station general manager or program director who watched 10 minutes of the show. While it failed to produce many commitments, Belkin’s unique outreach created relationships that enabled him to book later meetings.
Once Belkin and a couple of syndication reps had secured enough markets—more than 55 as of early summer 1996, representing 50 percent of coverage nationwide, on the way to 80 percent coverage—Kwik Witz was greenlighted for national distribution.
Come August, they settled into a small NBC Tower studio provided by Chicago’s WMAQ-TV and shot the show’s first eight episodes over the first of several weekends before a live audience. Some were more tuned-in (and awake) than others. As it would for the next couple of years, Kwik Witz shared space with The Jenny Jones Show; Jerry Springer’s circus was across the hall.
Debuting on September 20, 1996, it aired in roughly 100 markets across the country to upwards of 1.5 million people. And while Belkin was pleased, getting there had been an expensive and exhausting slog.
“It has not been fun or easy,” he admitted to the Cleveland Plain Dealer at the time, “and I would not recommend it to anybody. If I’d realized the implications before I got into it one step at a time, all the debts and production costs, I wouldn’t have done it.”
“You’re bastardizing improv”
We should state here that while Kwik Witz was billed as an improv-based comedy competition, most of the improv wasn’t true improv—as in, conjured on the spot. It was, instead, pre-rehearsed improv based on premises and props (or at least a description of props) provided ahead of time.
This was television, after all. Time was money, which necessitated structure. Host Andi Matheny, who was hired for the Wisconsin run and stayed until 1997, helped provide it. “Being the host sometimes felt like being in that Far Side cartoon, where the dog is practicing violin while all the other dogs play out in the street,” she recalls.
“I wasn’t really the meat of the show. The whole thing was fun, and when I had a chance to banter with the sketch players, that was great. But my job was more to keep the structure together.”
And live improvised scenes don’t always produce a dependable number of laughs. Seeing as Kwik Witz was also a comedy show, that wasn’t an option—or a good strategy for longevity.
“At [a place like] Second City, where even if the improv isn’t super funny, there’s an energy in the room,” Belkin says. “Everybody has all the anticipation and excitement of whether it’s going to be good, and even when it isn’t great, people sometimes have nervous laughter and they stick around. With TV, if it’s not funny, people click off. So we said to [the players], ‘Look, we’re not asking you to script this out, but we want you to have the material in advance. We want you to do a little bit of polishing. We want to know that there’s at least X number of jokes or punchlines or funniness.’ Some people were like, ‘That’s fine. We’d love to be on TV.’ Most of them had never been on TV. But there was a certain segment who were like, ‘You’re bastardizing improv, Steve.’”
Razowsky, also an occasional performer, says that while the scenes were prepared ahead of time, “we never told the talent what to do, we never told the talent what to write.” If people were too purist-minded about the concept, he adds, “they would not participate. I knew a couple of Second City people who’d go, ‘No, you’re writing, and it’s not improvisation.’”
Rehearsal was also necessary because of how the show was shot.
“On Whose Line Is It Anyway?, the games are made for TV and made to be edited,” explains West. “So you can do 40 scenes from a hat, cut out the 20 that didn’t work, and reassemble the 10 in almost any order you want. Sometimes you’d have enough for two or three shows. On Kwik Witz, the show’s success was entirely reliant on individual sketches. If they flopped, you had nothing.”
The rehearsal component, West says, bothered him only “when the sketches were dumb.” Mick Napier, then a long-form purist who’d taught improv to a number of Kwik Witz players and was himself a protégé of the legendary Del Close, recalls “not having a great feeling about the way they were packaging improvisation for television.” But he didn’t dissuade anyone from doing it.
At the end of the day, comedy trumped logic—a phrase Maxwell-Smith attributes to West and Razowsky. “I think all four people had one goal,” he says, “and that was to make people laugh.”
A wee-hours time slot, but a solid start
Airing most often after Saturday Night Live made for a decidedly low-key start.
Still, Chicago Tribune TV critic Steve Johnson took note and offered high praise. “The really funny thing is that Kwik Witz—using a format not unlike that of Chicago’s Improv Olympics [ImprovOlympic]—is fresh, frantic and boasts a much higher funny batting average than the usual SNL episode,” he wrote in a short review published a week after Kwik Witz premiered.
“My chief quibble,” he continued, “is that audience vote determines the winner, which means victory seems to go to the material that uses the most pop-culture references, rather than necessarily the funniest. But winning isn’t really the point.”
He was right. Winning wasn’t the point. The whole competition aspect was something to keep viewers engaged.
“It was just an amazing gathering of people,” Razowsky says. “A feeling of, ‘I can’t believe you’re here, I can’t believe we’re working with you, I can’t believe I’m watching you, I can’t believe I’m playing with you.’”
Maxwell-Smith adds, “What we were doing more than anything else is attempting to be a showcase for people.”
And what a many-splendored showcase it was, mixing prepared short-form sketches, object work, and spontaneous banter with the host. The premises ranged from a “Federal Department of Jive Talk” to a Las Vegas bomb squad performing stage magic to a Shakespearean take on Three’s Company.
Before they were stars
A few years out of Second City, where he was a standout performer on the theater’s vaunted Mainstage, and shortly before he joined the now-fabled cast of Dana Carvey’s short-lived sketch show, Steve Carell appeared in several syndicated episodes of Kwik Witz in early 1996. But he was also an integral part of its Wisconsin test run the year prior.
“Steve was somebody who was so committed to a comedy bit that sometimes I was afraid he was going to ruin his health,” says Matheny. “That’s how committed he was. I mean, the veins in his forehead would stick out.”
But Maxwell-Smith says Carell’s overall engagement level seemed pretty low. “I got from him—not in words, but just in presence—that [Kwik Witz] was not a station where he wanted his train to come again. But he said a lot of funny things when we were riffing, none of which we could have used [because of censors]… To this day, I regret that we only had him one time [in syndication].”
Carell’s scene partner in some of the episodes, Richard Laible, recalls their dynamic warmly. “We were super good friends, and we trusted each other,” he says. “That’s the biggest part of improv, trusting your partner.”
Absent from Carell’s online showbiz resumé, Kwik Witz appears on neither his IMDb nor Wikipedia pages, which Belkin finds a bit curious. But “it’s a free country.” And he still has a $600 SAG-AFTRA-minimum check that Carell cashed in 1996.
As for Brady, who’d go on to success with the American version of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, three seasons of The Wayne Brady Show, and as the host of Let’s Make a Deal, he was in it to win it. Literally—as a contestant, but also as someone who knew, as plenty of his colleagues did, that he was destined for bigger things.
Laible sensed that those who, like Brady, had come from the L.A. improv scene—as opposed to the Chicago-schooled players—were “obviously showcasing themselves for something bigger and better, while I think we were just out there having fun.” Of Brady, specifically, he had no doubts—and not in a pejorative way—that “this guy’s all about making his way in show business.”
Belkin, too, saw Brady’s talent and potential from the jump. Maxwell-Smith says one woman who voted for Brady’s team told him, “It really doesn’t matter how well they do. I just think Wayne is so cute, so I always vote for him.”
For her part, Fey was actually contracted and pre-paid to appear on Kwik Witz, per Belkin’s telling. But she’d been dissuaded from doing it by her management. Nonetheless, she called Belkin to say she didn’t break contracts and would honor hers if he insisted. He cut her loose and let her keep the money. SNL happened shortly thereafter, and in two years she was the show’s first female head writer in its history. (Fey’s longtime manager is fuzzy on details, but says the scenario seems feasible).
A New York snub and the end of an experiment
Three seasons in, Kwik Witz had survived longer and performed better than most predicted.
It had also changed its name to Quick Witz and switched syndicated home bases, from NBC affiliate WMAQ-TV to Chicago’s ABC affiliate WLS-Channel 7, before relocating to L.A.
There, with a bigger local talent pool to draw from, it continued under the new direction of Jim Stimpson and shared studio space with an adult video production company in the San Fernando Valley.
By then, however, the American version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? had become a ratings winner hosted by comedian and sitcom star Drew Carey. As Belkin puts it, “A lot of stations were like, ‘Now that there’s Whose Line, we don’t necessarily need to do amateur hour with Quick Witz.’”
When New York City—a crucial market in the syndication game—fell through in Belkin’s latest effort to re-up the show for another season, it was curtains for Kwik Witz.
“We had all these episodes from the first three years, and Mark [Maxwell-Smith] said, ‘You have enough episodes to do five days a week with zero production cost,’” Belkin says. “And we actually got off the ground. But you have to get New York; if you don’t get New York, don’t even bother. So I met with the CBS station [there], and he said, ‘Steve, I’d much rather air your show at 1:30 in the morning than an infomercial. I’ll give it a shot.’ Then a month later, he called me back and said, ‘I’ve got bad news for you.’”
The station aired Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, which were controlled by King World. King World had a new TV show they’d been unable to clear in New York. In order to keep them happy, the station gave them Kwik Witz’s would-be spot.
“I wasn’t happy about it,” Belkin says, “because I had spent a lot of money and time pitching the rest of the country that we had New York.”
Even so, he took the loss and moved on.
And there endeth the tale of Kwik Witz. Though largely lost to history, it’s remembered fondly by those who were part of this improv-esque experiment that kept on keeping on—until it didn’t.
Its mere existence, in fact, was something of a minor miracle.
“It was silly, it was stupid, it was low-budget, but everybody loved working with each other,” Razowsky says. “One of the bonuses was you didn’t have the same cast every show, and because of that, everybody was just excited to be working there. Was it the best material anybody ever wrote? No way. I’ve watched some of this stuff, and it’s like, ‘I cannot believe we did this.’”
Belkin was delighted and amazed that the show stayed afloat. “I was so grateful to have the opportunity to do something that nobody from Cleveland who didn’t have a resumé, stars, or leverage could do,” he says.
Razowsky is far less subtle about Belkin’s impact: “Steve put the crew together, and there wasn’t anybody there who didn’t belong, who didn’t know the gestalt of what they were doing. Everybody was on board, and the communication was great. Of course there’s going to be friction, personalities are going to clash. But in that situation, Steve, along with Mark Maxwell-Smith, knew what he wanted. He had a vision. You don’t put this together if you don’t have a vision. I’d never worked with anybody like that before, somebody who said, ‘I have this idea, and we’re going to put it on television.’ And he did. He made it happen.”
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