By Dexter "Box-Office" Reel
Long before streaming specials and late-night writers' rooms, there was a scrappy improv stage in Amsterdam called Boom Chicago — and CBS News gave it a spotlight this week, tracing the club's role as an unlikely launchpad for comedic talent.
The segment, part of CBS's Sunday-morning style rundown, paired the Boom Chicago profile with an unrelated feature on a Virginia man who unknowingly bought a former plantation house tied to his own family's history of enslavement — two very different stories bundled under one broadcast. On the comedy side, CBS's framing credits Boom Chicago as a training ground behind names now recognizable well beyond the Netherlands, though the report stops short of listing specific alumni or founding dates in the material provided to this desk.
That's a gap worth naming plainly: without the full segment, we can't independently confirm which comedy figures passed through Boom Chicago's stage or when the club got its start. What is clear from CBS's own description is the throughline — an American-style improv club transplanted to Amsterdam, built into something that shaped comedic careers far from home.
It's a reminder that comedy's biggest names rarely arrive fully formed. They cut their teeth somewhere unglamorous first — a basement, a converted theater, a city that didn't necessarily ask for an English-language improv troupe but got one anyway. Boom Chicago, by CBS's account, is one of those places.
Loved it, hated it, or wasted my afternoon — here's which: a solid premise, thin on specifics here — worth watching the full segment before handing out stars.
— Compiled from reporting by CBS News.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."