Severn Darden

Severn Teakle Darden Jr., born November 9, 1929, in New Orleans, Louisiana, was an American comedian, actor, and founding member of two landmark improvisational comedy institutions. He died on May 27, 1995, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, of congestive heart failure at age 65, and was interred at Lake Lawn Park and Mausoleum in New Orleans.

Darden attended the University of Chicago, where poet Paul Carroll described him as a "campus legend." Carroll characterized his sensibility as a fusion of surrealistic New Orleans humor and the tough, caustic style associated with Chicago comedy. That offbeat, intellectual quality became a defining element of the ensembles with which he worked. One illustration of his humor was his compression of the phrase "Know thyself" into the seven-character limit of a New Mexico license plate: NOYOSEF.

His professional roots lay with the Compass Players, the first improvisational theater in the United States, which performed around the Chicago area during the mid-1950s under Paul Sills. When Sills founded The Second City in 1959, he brought Darden and other Compass Players alumni with him. A signature piece Darden developed during the Compass Players years was a faux academic lecture performed under the character of Professor Walther von der Vogelweide, borrowing the name of a medieval German poet. The routine, titled A Short Talk on the Universe, was first performed as a solo act in 1959 at the Gate of Horn music club and was later cited by his New York Times obituary as influential with two generations of comedians. A second lecture-format sketch, Oedipus, cast the same professor character navigating the plot of Oedipus Rex while attempting to avoid his fate, only to find the same outcome produced regardless of his choices. A third piece, Football Comes to the University of Chicago, satirized the university's intellectual culture through a coach attempting to teach Football 202 to students who responded to the sport in philosophical terms.

Darden's stage work brought him to Broadway, where he appeared between 1961 and 1964 in three productions: A Murderer Among Us, Leda Had a Little Swan, and From the Second City. His Broadway work earned him a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Musical in 1962.

His screen career began in the early 1960s with television appearances that included the role of Franklin in a 1961 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and the painter Karpathia in a 1962 episode of Car 54, Where Are You?, a portrayal noted for its resemblance to his Professor Walther von der Vogelweide character. He appeared twice on The Monkees, first in 1966 as the confused president of a toy company and again briefly in 1968. Additional television credits from the period include Honey West in 1966 and I Dream of Jeannie in 1967.

Among his film work, Darden played Kropotkin, a Soviet agent with a relaxed demeanor, in the 1967 comedy The President's Analyst. That same year he appeared in Luv, based on Murray Schisgal's play, alongside Jack Lemmon, Peter Falk, Elaine May, and Nina Wayne. He is perhaps most widely recognized from his film appearances as Kolp, the human leader, in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes. In 1985 he appeared in Real Genius as a befuddled college dean, and in 1986 he performed in the Off-Broadway improvisational sketch comedy show Sills and Company, directed by Paul Sills.

His television work continued through the 1970s with a 1974 appearance in Kolchak: The Night Stalker as a neuroscientist whose sleep experiments went wrong, a 1976 episode of the sitcom The Practice as Dr. Herb Chisholm, and a role in the 1976 pilot for The Feather and Father Gang. Darden was also present at the February 12, 1964 Acid Test organized by the Merry Pranksters in Watts, Los Angeles, and participated with the experimental artists collective known as The TeePee Video Space Troupe, organized by filmmaker Shirley Clarke.

Following triple heart bypass surgery, Darden lived in semi-retirement in Los Angeles before relocating to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1992, where he remained until his death.