Boom Chicago: 60 Minutes Reports on the Amsterdam Theater That Helped Create Comedy Superstars

An English-language improv theater in Amsterdam might seem an unlikely place to search for the roots of modern American comedy. Yet tucked into the Dutch capital is a venue with an alumni list that rivals some of the most famous comedy institutions in the United States.

Boom Chicago has been operating since 1993, giving young comedians the opportunity to perform night after night before live audiences. Among those who passed through its company before becoming famous are Seth Meyers, Jordan Peele, Jason Sudeikis, Brendan Hunt, Amber Ruffin, Ike Barinholtz and Kay Cannon.

Jon Wertheim explores that unusual comedy pipeline in “Boom Chicago,” a 60 Minutes report airing again on CBS on September 6. The story examines how an experiment started by young Americans in the Netherlands developed into an institution with connections to Saturday Night Live, Key & Peele, Late Night with Seth Meyers and Ted Lasso.

Two Americans Take Improv to Amsterdam

Boom Chicago’s story begins with Andrew Moskos and Pep Rosenfeld, two young Americans who had recently graduated from Northwestern University and were trying to establish themselves in Chicago’s comedy scene.

Amsterdam offered an appealing alternative. The pair decided to take the improvisational style they knew from Chicago and create an English-language comedy show in the Netherlands. The conventional advice was hardly encouraging. They were warned that Dutch audiences would not want comedy performed in English and that tourists visiting Amsterdam were unlikely to spend their evenings watching improv.

Moskos and Rosenfeld went ahead anyway.

They called their venture Boom Chicago, referencing the American city from which their comedy style emerged. The first performances took place in the back of an Amsterdam bar in 1993. What was conceived as a summer project soon attracted enough interest to become a year-round operation.

The company eventually moved into a dedicated theater near Amsterdam’s Leidseplein entertainment district. More than three decades later, Boom Chicago says its performers have entertained more than a million people.

Why Boom Chicago Became a Training Ground

Boom Chicago belongs to the same broad improvisational tradition associated with institutions such as Second City in Chicago, the Groundlings in Los Angeles and Upright Citizens Brigade in New York. What distinguished Boom was its location and the intensity of the experience it offered young performers.

The company’s comedians generally commit to at least a year and work as paid performers. 60 Minutes found that the troupe performs around six shows a week, providing the kind of repeated stage experience that can be difficult for a young comedian to obtain elsewhere.

Those repetitions matter in improv.

Unlike stand-up, performers are not simply delivering a prepared routine. Scenes are created in real time, often from suggestions provided by the audience. A performer has to listen to the other actors, contribute ideas, react to unexpected developments and recognize quickly whether the audience is responding.

A bad performance cannot be endlessly analyzed because another show is approaching. Performers return to the stage and try again.

Boom Chicago’s current operation extends beyond its professional troupe. Its comedy academy teaches improv to more than 200 students, according to the 60 Minutes report.

Performing for the Dutch Changed the Comedy

Amsterdam itself became part of the education.

American performers arriving at Boom Chicago discovered that jokes and references that worked at home did not necessarily connect with a Dutch or international audience. The performers had to determine which ideas crossed cultural boundaries and which depended too heavily on American assumptions.

The Dutch audience also acquired a reputation among Boom alumni for being direct about what it liked and what it did not.

Seth Meyers recalled encountering an audience member after a show who offered to buy him a drink despite openly telling him that he had not liked the performance. For Meyers, the exchange captured a cultural bluntness that could provide comedians with immediate feedback.

That environment helped create performers accustomed to adapting quickly. Instead of spending years waiting for occasional stage opportunities, members of the company were repeatedly writing, improvising, performing and assessing what worked.

For several future stars, that experience became an important bridge between college or small comedy venues and the professional entertainment industry.

Seth Meyers Arrives in Amsterdam

One of the most important early recruits was Seth Meyers.

Meyers joined Boom Chicago in 1997, when he was still near the beginning of his comedy career. Boom Chicago records his years with the company as 1997 through 2001.

He arrived with limited knowledge of the Netherlands and no certainty that spending years in Amsterdam would advance his career. The alternative, however, was continuing to compete for limited stage time in the American improv scene.

At Boom Chicago, Meyers received something particularly valuable: regular opportunities to perform.

He eventually developed a productive partnership with Jill Benjamin, who joined the company in 1998. The pair began creating material together, including a sketch called “Bar Pickup.”

Their collaboration would prove important well beyond Amsterdam.

How Boom Chicago Helped Meyers Reach Saturday Night Live

Meyers has described his years at Boom Chicago as providing a path toward the next stage of his career.

He and Benjamin were not simply performing improv. They were learning how to build sketches, develop characters and assemble material into a show. Meyers later told Wertheim that the experience effectively gave them a “road map” for creating work that could attract attention elsewhere.

That attention eventually came from Saturday Night Live.

Boom Chicago says Meyers’ performances attracted the notice of SNL scouts. He joined the NBC series in 2001 and remained there for 13 years, eventually becoming head writer and the anchor of Weekend Update.

He left Saturday Night Live in 2014 to take over NBC’s Late Night, transforming a performer who had once been earning his living on an Amsterdam improv stage into one of America’s most prominent late-night hosts.

Meyers nevertheless retained his connection to Boom Chicago. He has returned for anniversary events and reunions, including the theater’s 30th-anniversary celebrations.

Jordan Peele’s Years at Boom Chicago

Another young performer who arrived in Amsterdam was Jordan Peele, years before Get Out, Us and Nope established him as one of Hollywood’s most distinctive filmmakers.

Peele performed with Boom Chicago from 2001 through 2004, later returning in 2009. His shows included Europe: We’ve Created a Monster, Rock Stars and Boom Chicago Saves the World (Sorry About the Mess).

The Amsterdam years were significant for another reason.

In 2002, Boom Chicago participated in a Comedy Swap with Chicago’s Second City. During that exchange, Peele met Keegan-Michael Key.

The two comedians later worked together on MADtv before creating Comedy Central’s Key & Peele, the influential sketch series that ran from 2012 to 2015.

Peele subsequently made an unusual transition from sketch comedian to filmmaker. His directorial debut, Get Out, received four Academy Award nominations, and Peele won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

The path from an English-language Amsterdam improv stage to an Academy Award was hardly predictable. Yet Peele’s career became one of the strongest examples of the level of talent that passed through Boom Chicago.

The Boom Chicago Connection Behind Ted Lasso

Perhaps the most surprising connection explored by 60 Minutes involves Ted Lasso.

Long before the Apple TV+ series became an international success, Jason Sudeikis, Brendan Hunt and Joe Kelly were all part of the Boom Chicago world. Boom’s alumni records list Sudeikis as a cast member in 2000 and Kelly as a performer during the early 2000s.

Amsterdam had an important influence on Hunt in particular. Living in Europe exposed him to football culture on a scale that was difficult to avoid. He became fascinated with the sport.

More importantly, Boom Chicago brought Hunt together professionally with Sudeikis and Kelly. Their working relationship continued long after their Amsterdam years.

Those connections eventually fed into the development of Ted Lasso, with Sudeikis starring as the American football coach unexpectedly placed in charge of an English soccer club and Hunt playing his understated assistant, Coach Beard.

Asked by Wertheim whether Ted Lasso would have happened without Boom Chicago, Hunt’s assessment was clear: he did not believe it would have.

The connection is deeper than simply three former colleagues later working on the same television program. Amsterdam gave them the environment in which they developed relationships and, in Hunt’s case, an enthusiasm for European football that would later become central to their biggest project.

Amber Ruffin and Another Route to Late-Night Television

Amber Ruffin represents another generation of Boom Chicago performers who eventually made an impact on American late-night television.

Ruffin spent years performing in Amsterdam before moving into American television comedy. She later joined the writing staff of Late Night with Seth Meyers, becoming known for her appearances on the program as well as her writing.

She subsequently hosted The Amber Ruffin Show, further demonstrating the unusual overlap between Boom Chicago alumni and American late-night comedy.

Her path also shows how Boom’s influence extended beyond one particular group of performers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The company continued attracting American comedians who could use Amsterdam as a place to build extensive professional stage experience.

Boom Chicago’s wider alumni network includes performers and writers such as Ike Barinholtz, Kay Cannon, Colton Dunn and Josh Meyers, among many others.

More Than a Launching Pad for American Stars

It would be easy to view Boom Chicago only through the famous people who eventually left it, but the theater developed its own identity in Amsterdam.

The company has survived major changes in comedy, tourism and entertainment since its establishment in 1993. It has expanded into comedy education and corporate work while maintaining live performances as the center of its operation.

Its anniversaries have also become opportunities to reunite former performers.

Boom Chicago celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2018 with two sold-out performances at Amsterdam’s historic Royal Theatre Carré. For its 30th anniversary in 2023, almost 100 current and former members returned for a major reunion, while Meyers performed a stand-up show as part of the celebrations.

Those reunions reveal something important about Boom Chicago. It became more than a temporary job for Americans spending a year overseas. Many of its alumni continued to regard it as a formative part of their careers decades after leaving Amsterdam.

Why Boom Chicago Produced So Much Talent

There is no single explanation for why one relatively small theater produced so many successful performers.

Part of the answer appears to be repetition. Performing several times every week means accumulating hundreds of hours of stage experience in a relatively short period.

Another factor is collaboration. Improv works when performers support each other’s ideas rather than competing to dominate a scene. That principle can translate naturally into television writers’ rooms, sketch comedy and collaborative projects.

Boom Chicago also offered independence from the traditional American entertainment centers. Its performers were far from Hollywood agents, New York television executives and the pressures of constantly auditioning for the next job.

They could concentrate on making a show work that night.

The international audience added another test. A comedian capable of finding humor that worked for Dutch residents, American expatriates and tourists from other countries was learning how to communicate without relying entirely on familiar cultural references.

Those conditions did not guarantee success. Hundreds of performers have passed through Boom Chicago without becoming household names. But the careers of its most prominent alumni suggest that the system provided unusually fertile conditions for developing comedic skills.

Boom Chicago’s Unlikely Place in American Comedy History

The irony at the heart of Boom Chicago is that an institution important to American comedy developed outside America.

Chicago has Second City. Los Angeles has the Groundlings. New York has long had institutions including Upright Citizens Brigade. Amsterdam has Boom Chicago.

Its legacy can now be found across several generations of American entertainment. Seth Meyers carried skills developed there to Saturday Night Live and Late Night. Jordan Peele’s path eventually led from improv and sketch comedy to an Academy Award. Jason Sudeikis, Brendan Hunt and Joe Kelly developed relationships that became part of the foundation for Ted Lasso.

More than 30 years after Moskos and Rosenfeld were warned that English-language improv was unlikely to work in Amsterdam, the theater remains in business. Boom Chicago says it has entertained more than a million people and helped launch performers and writers who went on to work across dozens of major television productions.

What began as an unlikely summer project therefore became something its founders could hardly have planned: an Amsterdam institution that quietly became part of the history of American comedy.

Jon Wertheim reports “Boom Chicago” on the encore edition of 60 Minutes airing Sunday, September 6, 2026, from 7:00-8:00 p.m. ET/PT on CBS, with the program also streaming on Paramount+. The segment is produced by Michael Gavshon.