TV PRESS TOUR: “SNL’s” Sudeikis reflects on Second City’s demise

  I accidentally broke the news to “Saturday Night Live’s” Jason Sudeikis, an original member of the Second City cast in Las Vegas, that the show was set to close at the Flamingo on Aug. 1.
  After an “SNL” panel discussion, I asked the actor — who also has had a recurring role on “30 Rock,” for which his wife and Second City Vegas alum Kay Cannon is a writer — for his thoughts on the show’s closing. The only problem: He’d spent most of the summer in North Carolina shooting the fantastically titled movie “A Good Old-Fashioned Orgy” -- it’s “like ‘American Pie’ meets ‘The Big Chill,’” he explains -- and hadn’t heard of the comedy troupe’s demise.
  “I take a lot of pride in that place,” Sudeikis said, after the news had sunk in.
  “I mean, I felt personally like I grew into a man both as a human being and also as a performer there. Some of the most insane performance nights. My performing on 9/11 was a powerful, powerful memory for me. It was always nice to know that that was going to be there to go back to, so that’s a bummer to hear. And I hope that there’s something going on behind the scenes and it shows up somewhere else.”
  As much as I love sketch comedy, smart, Second City-style satire always seemed like it would be a hard sell alongside the topless revues and larger-than-life spectacles on the Strip.
  “It was early, but then we found our rhythm with it,” Sudeikis said. “You know, it’s the material. If you make ’em laugh, then they come. That’s the thing.
  “We found things much funnier coming from another city into there that people that were showing up there for vacation purposes didn’t wanna find as funny. And once we made that switch in our brain, I think we found a great deal of success.”