A few hours before she is due to dazzle yet another crowd in Second City’s marquee Mainstage show, Adisa Williams is discussing her rapid rise. “I really didn’t intend to do it as a career,” she says of comedy. Despite pursuing it full-time only since 2022, she has thrice auditioned for Saturday Night Live in New York, once making it to the final round. (Merely being invited to audition is a compliment.) “You’re very talented — you should come see the show,” Williams recalls SNL creator Lorne Michaels telling her. To this day, she jokes, “I don’t know if that was a consolation or a ‘Keep at it.’ ”

Williams, who grew up in Boston and Jamaica, first started dabbling in comedy in 2016 while living in Seattle and toiling as an Amazon Prime Video program manager. She taught herself standup from books and tested out jokes she kept in a Google doc during open mic nights. Buoyed by improv teachers who saw her promise, she knew the next move was a geographic one. “When I was 14 or 15, I loved to look up people I admired and read their entire Wikipedia page. I remember going deep on Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Jessica Williams. I was like, OK, it looks like Jessica was in ComedySportz. Tina went through Second City. Everybody went through this little hidden underground.” Inspired, Williams set off to Chicago in 2019 to work for JPMorgan Chase and burnish her comedy creds.

She started with Second City under a fellowship in 2020 and is now getting raves for her performances in the company’s current revue, The Devil Is in the Detours. A former drama kid, choirgirl, and amateur dancer (everything from hip-hop to ballroom), Williams, 32, has a pleasant singing voice and physical fluidity that augment her high-energy hilarity. An invite to join SNL remains atop her wish list, but she knows nothing — especially in show biz — is guaranteed: “I’ll be applying again this year, and that’s all I can do.”