By this time in the holiday season, you may be yearning for a bracing dose of something less cloying than candy canes and less predictable than a pageant.

Here it comes: The Second City's "Pratfall of Civilization," landing at the O'Reilly Theater Thursday through Saturday for four performances. The players are a touring company of the storied Chicago improv funhouse that has given us, among others, John Belushi, Mike Myers, Steve Carell and Tina Fey, so if you see early signs of genius, save the program for your eBay stash.

One of the names on the program will be Sayjal Joshi, an Ohio native who moved at age 7 to North Carolina but spent her early childhood in Tatamy, Northampton County, near Allentown.

"It's in the middle of nowhere," she said. "We lived in a cornfield. We were trying to sell our house, and we had mice because of the cornfield we lived in."

But how can you keep them down on the farm when they want to go to Second City? "I went to school to become a veterinarian initially," Joshi, now 30, admitted. "My dad thought it would be a good idea for me to get a 'real job.' " She laughs. "I hated it.

"I do love science, and I love animals, but I really wanted to do theater."

Joshi moved to Chicago and Second City. "I took classes there -- improv and sketch writing." After a successful audition, "I was an understudy for about nine months, and then I got put in a touring company."

For now, she mostly wants to move up within Second City. "I would love to be on a resident stage. Lots of times if you do leave this sort of thing you go into film or television. I love live theater. I've done commercials" -- she took a facefull of Cookie Dough Blast for Sonic Drive-In -- "and I did an independent film, but it's not as exciting. You don't get that immediate feedback like from a live audience.

"I would like to be able to write and perform my own material. People ask me what I want to do in five years, and I can't tell you what I want to do in 10 months. I say I'll do anything except for porn."

"Pratfall" is a best-of sketch revue with some topical stuff and improv thrown in.

"Basically it's what we call archive material, from the mainstages at Second City, that has been written by people like Tina Fey, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert.

" 'Pratfall' is not like a play where you have a set script, because we can take out sketches and put other ones in -- we can totally customize it. Usually at the end, if we have time, we'll do a 'set,' which is completely improvised."

Joshi is looking forward to the Pittsburgh performances because -- and this tells you how frequent the travel is for touring companies -- she considers three days a long gig.

"We're thrilled to do an extended run for a whole weekend, in the same house, in the same city."