‘She’s not like other people,” Mike Nichols e-mailed me when I first approached him about being interviewed with his legendary partner in comedy, the soulfully offbeat and intensely private Elaine May. “As you know she ignores publicity but we’ll see.” John Lahr profiled Nichols for The New Yorker in 2000, but May declined Lahr’s offer to do a similar profile of her. The last in-depth interview she gave was to Life magazine in 1967, six years after her and Nichols’s professional breakup. She has mostly held her silence ever since.

But there it was in an e-mail from Nichols later that night: “Elaine says Yes. So sharpen your pencils and your tongue and we will commence.”

Judd Apatow, the guest editor of this issue, who yields to no one in his admiration of Nichols and May, reminded me that it’s been 51 years since the pair walked away from their comedy act at the height of their popularity, in 1961—Nichols to become a stage and film director, and May to become a playwright, screenwriter, director, and occasional actress. Their partnership lasted just four years, beginning at the University of Chicago, moving to nightclubs, then to television and radio, and culminating in a Broadway run and three top-selling comedy LP albums, all of which established Nichols and May as the freshest, most inventive, and most influential social satirists of their day. And then—we’re still scratching our heads about this—it was over.

They first worked together as members of an improvisation group called the Compass Players, founded by Paul Sills and David Shepherd. Shelley Berman and Ed Asner were early members of the troupe, which later evolved into Chicago’s Second City, the launchpad for, among others, John Belushi, Bill Murray, and Harold Ramis.

When Nichols first met Elaine, he was dazzled—and intimidated—by her sheer inventiveness and dangerous wit. Their first improvisation happened offstage, at a chance meeting in the waiting room of Illinois Central’s Randolph Street Station. Mike, pretending to be some kind of Russian spy, sidled up to Elaine: “May I seeet down, plis?” Elaine instantly went into character: “If you veesh.” Nichols: “Do you haff a light?” May: “Yes, zertainly.” Nichols: “I had a lighter, but … I lost eet on Fifty-seventh Street.” May: “Oh, of course, zen you are … Agent X-9?”

Both were primarily actors at first. Nichols would leave Chicago to study the Method with Lee Strasberg in New York; May studied acting with the Russian character actress and teacher Maria Ouspenskaya. But their improvised skits for the Compass were so outside the box and so hilarious that they soon attracted an enthusiastic audience of students, faculty, and other intellectuals who hung around the University of Chicago.

Before then, comics had just stood up and told jokes—jokes that were usually written for them by gag writers. Think of Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Milton Berle. But a new generation was taking comedy to the edge: Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. Nichols and May combined the political and social satire of Sahl and Bruce with the inspired comic skits of Caesar and Coca. “Individually, each one is a genius,” says Woody Allen. “And when they worked together, the sum was even greater than the combination of the parts—the two of them came along and elevated comedy to a brand-new level.” You might say there would be no Steve Martin, no Lily Tomlin, no Martin Short, no Saturday Night Live without them.

Soon a national audience was listening to Nichols and May on the radio, television, and rec ord albums, their voices nasal, earnest, and full of intimations of mortal, adult absurdities. Their skits mined everyday situations and mundane characters, stretching them to the breaking point of comic possibility: the woman psychologist left frustrated and weeping when her favorite patient announces his decision to spend Christmas with his family (“Merry Christmas, Doctor”); the officious operator in “Telephone,” who drains valuable seconds from the desperate caller’s last dime trying to spell his party’s name (“K as in knife P as in pneumonia … ”); the jealous doctor who asks his nurse in the middle of an operation, “Is there somebody else? … It’s Pinsky, isn’t it?” (“A Little More Gauze”); the Cape Canaveral rocket scientist whose phone call from his overbearing, guilt-tripping mother leaves him regressed and babbling (“Mother and Son”).