Keefe is something of a Chicago comedy institution, having launched his career by playing area coffeehouses at the age of 13. Following an unimpressive-verging-on-embarrassing college career, he dabbled in legitimate theater and, with his brothers, ran a locally famous comedy club that employed such nascent bright lights as Saturday Night Live alum Nora Dunn and Dan Castellaneta (the latter better known as his two-dimensional incarnation, Homer Simpson). In fact, Castellaneta and Keefe auditioned for the Second City together in the mid-1980s. Both were hired as performers, but Keefe eventually left the stage ("at the audience's insistence," he says) to produce and direct shows both there and at other theaters.

In 1990, Keefe and Andrew Alexander, who, with a partner, had bought the Second City five years earlier, launched Second City Communications to "bring comedy where it is most desperately needed, which is in business," says Keefe. The new company (or "the bastard child," as Keefe calls it with a throaty cackle) has generated enough revenues to save the theater from having to continually raise ticket prices.

The application of comedy and improvisation as organizational lubricants isn't unique to SCC -- other companies, such as ImprovEdge, in New York City, take a similar tack. But SCC is the grand old man of the genre, with the kind of brand name that helped Monty Python's John Cleese morph from a guy beating a dead parrot into a successful maker of training videos. SCC's ambitions, too, are grander than most. The company promises to help its customers develop "a corporate sense of humor," which Keefe describes as a loosening of cultural corsets in the name of creativity, communication, and fun, and which translates on the ground into anything that helps dislodge the stick from the organizational posterior. "People in companies have to cope with so many things: mergers and acquisitions, new technologies, communication gaps," says Keefe. "They're desperate for their employers to show a sense of humor, to let them know that everything's not so dire."

Keefe's theory of business humor, which he began to develop while producing industrial films in his twenties, elevates emotion over logic, democracy over authority, and those who do over those who become critics. The SCC staff evangelizes those virtues through the improvisational games, exercises, and sketches that -- together with theory, lecture, and Q&A -- compose a typical workshop. (Workshops are priced according to the number of attendees and start at $2,500, not including transportation and lodging for SCC staff for events outside Chicago.) The improv may require participants to sing show tunes in gibberish, play catch with invisible dead rats, or concoct ads for such products as a necklace that kills people. "What we're trying to do with these people is marry their right brains to their left brains and have both of them be happy," says writer Michael Kuhl. "Because if your right brain atrophies, you start walking in concentric circles."

The company-specific comedy shows command the most exertion and ingenuity from SCC's staff, and the going rate is usually between $5,000 and $7,000. Along with customized fare, they include comic treatment of universal business themes, such as the delinquency of temp workers and the screwball antics of office technology. In one sketch that is part of the company's repertoire, a presenter rattles on obliviously while her PowerPoint slides turn against her, urging the audience to mutiny and ranting nonsensically about teapots and badgers. Up in Keefe's office, Kuhl, who created the sketch, explains its genesis. "I once worked for the HR department in a brokerage firm, and I can tell you it was a soul-crushing experience," says the writer, who like many SCC employees draws inspiration from stints in the corporate world. "But it was educational in terms of learning about the irritations that are true for all companies. PowerPoint presentations. Expert speakers. Travel issues. Conference calls. Meetings. The planning meeting. The preplanning meeting. The planning for the preplanning meeting meeting." He turns to Keefe, who is leafing through some paperwork. "Were you planning on meeting at the preplanning meeting meeting?" the writer inquires.

"I hadn't planned to," replies Keefe, without looking up. "Can we meet on that?"

The measure of a joke's effectiveness is equal to the quality of its writing and delivery multiplied by the familiarity of its subject. Simply put, stuff is funnier when it's about people and places you recognize. To unearth company-specific touch points, SCC's producers conduct multiple interviews with their corporate customers -- sometimes over as long a period as two months -- grilling them on hot-button issues, labyrinthine processes, detested jargon, and company lore. Some of SCC's customers have wonderful ideas about what to include. Others don't. "You'll get people who use a catchphrase themselves, and they just assume everyone else uses it too," says writer Blair Butler. "This one client told us that if we used the phrase 'Great Guy! That's the name!' it would kill. They said everyone in the company would get it and laugh. They wanted us to say it, like, 10 times. It turned out no one in the audience had any idea what we were talking about. At that point, you've got the grave dug, and you're chiseling the headstone."

To attend one of SCC's workshops is to hear the corporate sense of humor explicated. To visit SCC's headquarters is to see humor in the workplace made flesh. Like a college dormitory, the company's offices are inelegantly furnished, casually organized, and deeply marked by the personalities that reside there. A fervent believer in the importance of visual stimulation to creativity, Keefe has nurtured an environment that is attention-deficit-disorder chic, from the videos of the television show Saved by the Bell and various action figures crammed in employees' mail slots, to the never ending chess game (between Keefe and all comers) set up by the watercooler, to the loopy dalmatian piņata that dangles from the ceiling in the writers' room, to a garish painting in which the ghosts of Second City past seem to cower behind a trio of figures that look like members of the Village People, as rendered by Peter Max. "The queerest painting in the world," reads an inexpertly typed descriptor beside the canvas. "This work is a not-so-subtle blend of colors meant to disturb the viewer in nontraditional ways. The artist sought to explore the triumph over failure by failing himself. Parents are asked to deter children from licking the painting."

On one wall of the writers' room, an enormous hanging -- of the type generally sold out of trailers by the side of the highway -- depicts a burly Viking driving a team of white bears into what one can only assume is a fjord. Butler explains that Keefe discovered it in an educational surplus store. "We're the polar bears, and Joe is the large Arctic lord leading us all into water," she says.

She jests, of course. Yet no one at SCC disputes that it is Keefe's barrel-of-monkeys leadership style that makes it possible for employees to be funny and -- please relish the paradox here -- spontaneous on demand. And that ability is critical, given the company's workload. A staff of around 35 -- writers, directors, producers, performers, and a few support types -- produces 350 shows and 100 workshops every year. "We've put together an entire 90-minute production in 72 hours when we've had to," says Keefe.

The monsignor's philosophy is embodied in more than just the physical surroundings. Hours are flexible. Snacks are copious. Socializing is encouraged. Dress is business casual -- if the business in question is a video arcade. Most important, hierarchy is nonexistent. So comfortable with Keefe are his employees -- even relatively new ones -- that they mimic the boss to his face. Staff meetings, which are chaotic to begin with, occasionally devolve into a litany of Keefe impersonations. "Everyone in the office does Joe," says Butler, arching her eyebrows and slicing an edge into her voice. "Now we're going to go into something that we like to call 'the creative process.' "

Kuhl interrupts: "Or he'll make an inappropriate comment and then go" -- he looks around wide-eyed, grinning -- " 'Did I say that out loud?' I swear Joe should have played the Catskills."

Even when Keefe isn't around, the staff finds plenty of fodder for comic workouts, including those subjects too sensitive to treat in customers' shows. For example, employees sometimes indulge in what Kuhl calls "inappropriate talk," in which they shed the mantle of political correctness and "just say, 'Whoo hoo' and go nuts, say anything," the writer explains. "Everyone knows it's just in fun. No one is offended." Then there are the sketch ideas that get tossed around in a kind of exorcism of high spirits before sense and propriety take over. "For Blue Cross and Blue Shield, I was thinking of a bit about strippers with guns," says Butler. "Maybe we could throw in a robot and a pony."

Kuhl grabs a pad and pretends to take notes. "So we've got robots..."

"... ponies, strippers, guns," continues Butler, tenting her fingers. "And then to close, the CEO will sing, 'Just call me angel of the morning...' I think that should convey how the company's new Internet capability is going to transform the way it services its customers."

Kuhl pauses in his mock writing. "I see pudding," he says thoughtfully. "Large vats of pudding."

SCC's own very evident corporate sense of humor benefits hugely from its ability to draw staff from its parent's Chicago shows, touring companies, far-flung alumni, and rigorous training program. Some of SCC's employees -- most of whom are in their midtwenties to midthirties -- see the company as a stepping stone to the Second City's main stage or to careers in writing for and performing in television and film. Others like the regularity of the work -- a rarity in what is, after all, show business -- and the exposure it gives them to the business world, which, as a subject, is a growing staple of comedy.

And there's another incentive to working for the offshoot: two or three times a year, SCC produces mainstream comedy shows created by staff members and performed at small theaters around Chicago. "The writers and performers put a premise together, put the budget together, bring it to me, and we fund them," says Keefe. "It's an artistic expression for them, and it teaches them about business profitability." Indeed, so far all the shows produced in that manner have been profitable, which is not surprising, since they cost less than $15,000 to mount. SCC recoups its investment from the first ticket sales; after that, revenues are split evenly between the company and the individual performers. Three years ago one such production, about a fictive sports bar, enjoyed a brief run as a syndicated television program.