A few months ago, when Jester was just an idea, there was a reading and Q&A at the Printer’s Row book fair in Chicago by comedian Robert Klein, who decades ago was a cast member of that city’s Second City, the renowned sketch and improvisation group, and was now trying his hand as a novelist. Klein had in recent years been a cast member on a few failed sitcoms, including Jason Alexander’s “Bob Patterson.”

Asked if the sitcom was in fact dead, as had been much discussed in the media at the close of the last TV season, Klein said he didn’t think so, despite his own latest experiences in the format. “These things are cyclical,” he said, explaining that a bad year or two for TV sitcoms can just as easily be followed by a few good years, but during the years when a lot of the new sitcoms fail with viewers, sitcoms get pronounced dead by critics.

With the new TV season soon beginning, another round of new sitcoms will be taking their shots. Jester got an advance look at first episodes for two of the new crop, UPN’s “Everybody Hates Chris” and CBS’s “How I Met Your Mother,” and found some signs of life.

“Everybody Hates Chris” operates in a similar vein as “The Bernie Mac Show,” with some hiccups. “Chris” views a family dynamic from the kids’ point of view, unlike “Bernie Mac,” and as a result is a little choppy, as when it reflexively returns to jokes about the father’s tightfistedness with money. Perhaps if given time, “Chris” can flesh out its characters a bit better and better root its comedy in those characters as “Bernie Mac” has.

“How I Met Your Mother” bends sitcom conventions with intelligence, making its own convention of an off-screen version of its main character, Ted, talking to his children 25 years later about how he met their mother, as a counterpoint to the present day story. Its first episode seems to be setting up a show that, if it lasts, will have a running story within the sitcom format, rather than consistently self-contained episodes tailored for syndication. Also, Neil Patrick Harris really shines as Ted’s best friend with an aggressively jerky personality. This serves as a good counterpoint to Ted’s sad-sack quest to find the love of his life. In a way that the American remake of “Coupling” failed to do, this show does a good job of mining the romantic travails of twenty-somethings for its comedy, with a mix of wit and truth that is a good sign there’s still life left in the sitcom format.

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Aired on the Bravo cable network in early September, rather than the better targeted forum of Comedy Central, the "Asssscat: Improv" special featuring the four original members of the Upright Citizens Brigade adapted the previously rarely seen long-form improv to television. With only this one shot, however, it remains to be seen whether Bravo will be happy enough with its ratings to turn it into a series.

But it was good to see this long-form improv get an airing so any viewers at all might get exposed to the source of much great sketch comedy, and see it done by performers with direct links to Del Close, who is credited as the pioneer of the form.

Amy Poehler, Matt Besser, Matt Walsh and Ian Roberts, the members of UCB, were joined by Andy Richter, Kevin Dorff, Tina Fey, Rachel Dratch and Horatio Sanz. Fey and Sanz often appear with some or all of the foursome in their Sunday night live Asssscat shows at their theater in New York. Dratch and Fey have worked together at Second City in Chicago, as well as on Saturday Night Live.

In the one-hour show, the foursome and guests did make an effort to make the long-form style more accessible by prefacing the bits with single monologues from the audience’s one-word suggestions. The scenes come a little more directly from the monologues than they do in the New York live shows, which are typically seen by an audience that is much more “in the know” about the form.

As a weekly series, "Asssscat" would be a great way to both educate and entertain those unfamiliar with the fountain for much of TV comedy today -- beyond just Saturday Night Live, including everything from shows like VH1’s Best Week Ever to writers for late night talk shows and the Daily Show to writers of sitcoms.

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For a more direct look into how the improvisational sensibility first broke into the national consciousness, check out reruns of early 1970s episodes of Saturday Night Live that air at 3 a.m. on early Sunday mornings on NBC. These are especially easy to pick up on now in the age of TiVo; years ago, insomnia would have been required to get to see these.

There’s a novelty to seeing the guest hosts and musical guests booked then, which were a much more eclectic and diverse mix than the current SNL, including such performers as Kris Kristofferson, Kinky Friedman and Jaclyn Smith, of all people.

With these episodes, which are complete unlike versions that may air on E! or turn up on retrospective specials, one gets to see the funny wraparounds with audience members captioned with joke descriptions of them or comments about them. This bit later reappeared in dumbed-down fashion on the Arsenio Hall Show.

The full episodes also let you see that the classic “Ask President Carter” skit -- in which Carter talks down a guy from an acid trip, for one thing -- had an entire second act usually not included in retrospectives. In this, host Sissy Spacek played Amy Carter, talking to the family housekeeper (who had made news at the time because of her prison past), played in drag by Garrett Morris.

The more experimental sensibility plays out in another episode where John Belushi plays NBC boss Fred Silverman repeatedly throughout the episode in different sketches, all around the them that Silverman is still loyal to his former ABC colleagues and is trying to sabotage SNL and the entire NBC network at their bidding.

All in all, the tone and the feeling in these original complete episodes seems much less frenetic than today's version, succeeding in retrospect at letting its comedy breathe more as the sketches found their way to the humor, in the same spirit as good improv.