Behold the Treasures of my Library 11: Improv Edition
Yes and it’s more than you want to know
Introduction
This month’s installment of Behold the Treasures of my Library is ostensibly about my collection of improv books.1 In fact, I will barely address the books themselves, all of which are fine, and mainly discuss the history of improv comedy and my own personal history performing and watching it. The result will be even more meandering and discursive than the typical entry in Behold the Treasures of my Library, which is really saying something.
I will be discussing improv comedy mostly in New York and Chicago, the two scenes I am most familiar with. There is of course a huge scene in LA too, as well as many regional improv theaters in smaller cities, and numerous international ones across the world. Someone more knowledgeable can write about them. I will also assume the reader has little to no familiarity with the subject, so diehard ’prov-heads may find much of the information here very elementary.
I gave an outline of my performing background in my post Acting Is Not What You Think It Is which I will recap briefly here as a preface. Stand up was my first endeavor in comedy in 2010 and my first teacher was Nate Bargatze. Although unrelated to the topic of improv, enough people have asked me what he was like that I will answer briefly: he was very nice and very funny, although I had no idea at the time that he would become the super star he is today. I remember one of his notes in particular. I was leaning against the upstage brick wall at the Eastville comedy club because I thought it looked cool and he cautioned against this because my stage persona was a low energy comic. This was not an insult; Nate would likely not dispute that he himself is a low energy comic. The problem is that if you’re being low energy upstage it reads as if you’re nervous, so you should come downstage close to the audience and be low energy there. Excellent advice.
In any event, I spent several years doing stand up, mostly open mics and so-called “bringer” shows where, as the name implies, you have to bring a certain number of paying audience members to the show to perform. I also tried—one time only because I was horrible at it—“barking” for stage time, i.e. cold selling tickets to strangers on the street. In retrospect I should have been using the open mics to network with other comics so I could get spots on their bar shows, and I also should have been producing my own bar shows and giving them spots. Unfortunately I’m bad at networking and not very entrepreneurial.
During my first year of stand up I was told several times that I should also do improv to be able to think on my feet if I was ever heckled. I was not entirely sure what improv was at this point. I had heard of the Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB), the largest improv theater in NYC, and I had seen maybe one or two shows, but I definitely did not understand it.
In 2011 I ended up taking a “free” intro class at the Magnet Theater, i.e. a loss leader to get you to sign up for their Level One; it was very effective and given the vast quantities of money I have spent on improv it was the single most expensive free class I have ever taken. My teacher was the same one that Zohran Mamdani had some years later.
For a while I was pursuing both stand up and improv a the same time. I will share one anecdote about how these two world collided. There is a business that produces shows, mics, and classes for new stand up comics which I will call the Chuckling Confucius; if you are a bottom feeder of the NYC comedy scene like me you will likely know the real name I am concealing. In any event, I went to see a friend perform there and the owner of the Chuckling Confucius angrily came up to me and said “I know who you are and what you’re doing!” In the spirit of Yes And which I had been learning in my Magnet classes I agreed with him and we almost had a fight before I admitted I had no idea what he was talking about. It turns out that for some reason—likely related to weed—he thought that I was an undercover investigator at an insurance company trying to bust him for some sort of workers comp/disability fraud he was running.
What is Improv?
Let’s review our comedy genres before continuing. Stand up is one person telling jokes and/or funny stories that are mostly scripted, although some comics do crowd work with the audience which is essentially a verbal form of improv. Sketch is scenic comedy, i.e. an ensemble acting out funny scenes. The scenes are scripted, although as we will see with the Second City approach they can start out improvised and then be honed and polished into a written script. Finally we have improv which can be divided into two sub-genres, short-form and long-form, which despite these horrible and confusing names have nothing to do with length. Short-form improv consists of comedy games with predetermined rules of the type seen on Whose Line Is It Anyway? whereas long-form improv is scenic comedy which is not pre-written but rather improvised on the spot.
Modern long-form improv usually starts with asking the audience for a suggestion (sometimes called the get) to inspire the set. This somewhat hokey tradition is intended to prove that the performance is in fact made up on the spot and not pre-planned. Some improvisers ask for a specific type of suggestion, like a location or a song lyric, but the typical formulation is to ask for a word or for a suggestion “of anything at all.” Since many people say food items or animals sometimes there is a caveat not to suggest these, and one food item in particular, pineapple, is suggested so frequently it has become a sort of meta inside joke among improvisers for being a bad suggestion.
TJ and Dave (TJ Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi), whom some people believe are the best improv group in world, famously do not start their set with a suggestion. The Improvised Shakespeare Company, in actuality the best improv group in the world, makes the suggestion a big part of their show but I won’t spoil how exactly I case you haven’t seen them yet.
In any event, after getting the suggestion the improv team (the terms team or troupe can be used interchangeably) will then typically do a particular form. There is a bewilderingly large number of different improv forms—we will discuss one, the Harold, in more detail below—which are basically skeleton outlines of how the scenes should be structured within the show. The form may dictate an opening immediately after the suggestion to generate ideas. It may require, for example, a certain number of two person scenes followed by a group scene. It may require the action to unfold in real time in a single location (the monoscene) or it may put restraints on the order in which players are in scenes (la ronde). It may be a genre, like film noir or rom com. In addition to settling on a team name, choosing which form to do is by far the most tortuous part of improv.
The most common way to end scenes within the form is the sweep edit which consists of a cast member running across the stage between the audience and the performers, although there is a wide variety of other ways to edit. At the very end of the set the tech in the booth will typically black out the stage lights, but sometimes improvisers will call their own set: the preferred verbiage for this is saying “And that’s our show!”
The History of Improv
Some form of improvisation is likely universal across all cultures throughout history. People sometimes cite the commedia dell’arte as a precursor, which is true only in the most general sense: commedia actors were improvising, but they were doing so as stock characters and not getting suggestions from the audience. For our purposes, modern American improv starts with the Compass Players founded in Chicago in 1955 by David Shepherd and Paul Sills and espousing the teachings of Sills’ mother Viola Spolin.
Spolin (1906-1994) is by far the most influential figure in improvisional theater. Leafing through her book Improvisation for the Theater (not in my library unfortunately but with the text available here) one comes across many of the the improv principles and exercises still widely taught today. Her ideas originated from her work as a Chicago settlement worker in the Twenties and a later WPA project during the Depression to teach drama to immigrant children.
Shephard (1924-2018) and Sills (1927-2008) had previously founded the Playwright’s Theatre Club, also in Chicago in 1953, which produced both original American plays and avant-garde European writers such as Bertolt Brecht. The rehearsal techniques relied heavily on Spolin’s concepts and games of improvisation. With the Compass Players, which relocated to St. Louis, the approach shifted entirely to generating material via improv. And although it only lasted until 1958, it would prove extremely consequential, launching the careers of Mike Nichols and Elaine May as well as Del Close whom we will meet again later.
The following year, 1959, Sills returned to Chicago and co-founded the Second City theater with Bernard Sahlins (1922-2013) and Howard Alk (1930-1982). This theater is so famous I won’t dwell on it at length. A list of your favorite comedy actors very likely includes multiple Second City alumni. As early as 1961 it won a Tony Award for a Broadway musical revue and in 1973 Sahlins opened the Toronto location which would produce SCTV. The Second City approach consists of creating a sketch revue by improvising in front of an actual audience (these shows are called “in process”) and then bringing back the parts that work to hone and refine while dropping the parts that fall flat. The end result is a show that is largely, but not entirely, scripted for its first two acts followed by a completely improvised third act.
Let’s move on from the relatively mainstream Second City to some more niche and underground aspects of improv. I briefly mentioned Del Close (1934-1999) in connection with the Compass Players. By many accounts an unpleasant and problematic figure who dabbled in the occult, Close would exert a tremendous influence on improv and, indirectly, on American comedy and popular culture. He spent much of the Sixties in San Francisco in the orbit of the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead. He also directed an improv troupe there called The Committee which created the improv form known as the Harold.
The Committee (the name is a reference to the House Un-American Activities Committee) ran from 1963 to 1972. The Harold was first performed in 1967; its name is a non sequitur reference to a joke in A Hard Day’s Night. The form as it is typically taught now at UCB and elsewhere is what Del called a “training wheels” Harold: an opening game to generate ideas from the suggestion, then three unrelated scenes, then a palate cleanser group game, then so-called “second beats” of the three scenes, then a second group game (which is not a second beat of the first), and then “third beats” where the scenes and games intersect and collide and converge into whatever the show is thematically about. In a sense, though—and here we get into the woo-woo aspect of improv—this form structure is incidental and Harolds are really about group mind and collaboration and how the ensemble takes whatever the audience’s mundane suggestion was (usually pineapple) and elevates it into a work of art. The definition of the form’s name was in fact retrofitted and “seeing Harold” or “Harold showed up” came to mean that the ensemble successfully worked as “one mind” with “many bodies” (see Truth in Comedy chapters 8 and 10). UCB people will likely disagree with this definition of what a Harold really is but we will get to them shortly!
Del moved back to Chicago in the Seventies and spent much of that decade performing and directing at Second City. In the Eighties he and Charna Halpern became involved in what was originally called ImprovOlympic. The idea of improv teams competing against each other like a sporting event had originated with Shephard after he parted ways with Sills. The actual Olympics very much disapproved of the name however and threatened to sue, something that amusingly enough Stephen Colbert’s brother Ed, a patent and trademark lawyer for the USOC, was involved with. The name was changed to iO and the Harold became its mainstay form.
Let’s deal with one more Chicago improv theater before turning to New York. The Second City viewed improv primarily as a means to generate sketch and iO viewed improv as an art form in its own right, but both theaters espoused very similar improv “rules” (some of which date back to Spolin’s writings) for good scenes. Examples include “don’t do teaching or transaction scenes,” “don’t ask questions,” “show, don’t tell,” “don’t negotiate or be coy,” etc. Mick Napier, who directed numerous Second City revues as well as the cult classic sketch comedy series Exit 57, came to view these rules (which to be fair are usually framed more as guidelines) as counterproductive and likely to lead to timid, bad scenes. In the late Eighties he founded the Annoyance Theater with a deliberately transgressive aesthetic (its flagship show is a musical called Co-Ed Prison Sluts). The Annoyance philosophy of improv involves taking care of oneself first by having a strong character “deal” and aggressively ignoring what the rules say you should or should not do while improvising.
The Upright Citizens Brigade started in Chicago and moved to New York City in the Nineties. There was improv in the Big Apple before this, for example the group Chicago City Limits and an offshoot of the Groundlings called Gotham City Improv, but the UCB Four (Amy Poehler, Matt Walsh, Ian Roberts, and Matt Besser) dominated the scene to a vastly higher degree. The theater would open a location in Los Angeles in 2005 (where iO had an outpost, iO West, from 1997 to 2018).
The UCB approach views improv very much like sketch where a single comedic idea (typically the first “unusual thing” in a scene) is heightened by exploring what else happens if the unusual thing is true. This is called the “game of the scene.” The Upright Citizens Brigade Comedy Improvisation Manual, an overly prescriptive book I have read but do not own (written by Walsh, Roberts, and Besser) focuses on finding game very quickly. For example, it likens a word association opening game for Harolds, the Pattern Game, to a late night writers’ room pitching funny premises. This is very antithetical to the unstructured way the same game is described in Truth In Comedy.
Indeed, one of the most tedious debates in all of improv is between practitioners of game-based or premise-based improv and so-called relationship-based improv. The basic dispute involves what exactly is being heightened in the second and third beats of the Harold. Although it’s softened a bit recently, before the pandemic UCB people were fairly dogmatic that only game should or even could be heightened; many asserted that heightening a relationship made no sense whatsoever. This is despite the fact that on page 141 of Truth in Comedy Del, speaking specifically about Harold second beats, wrote, “The relationships have been established in the first round of scenes, so the players further them in the second” (emphasis mine).
Of course UCB has and has had many very funny performers and many very famous alumni. Their approach can be very successful for good scenes and shows. However, they are far from the be-all and end-all in improv and Harold history. They possibly did themselves no favors by having “Don’t Think” as their motto when in fact their entire philosophy involves lots of thinking.
The Aughts saw UCB performers Ali Farahnakian and Armando Diaz split off and found the Peoples Improv Theater (PIT) and the Magnet Theater. I was on a house team at the PIT; this is a term of art for teams that are cast (usually by audition) by a theater which produces and promotes shows for them, largely to sell classes (which is how the theaters make their money; performers are unpaid with the exception of Second City). The term is in contradistinction to indie teams, of which I have been on far too many, where performers cast, produce, and promote themselves.
Conclusion
Let’s conclude by asking two questions: 1) is improv bad? and 2) should you do improv?
Many TV comedy writers come from an improv background and sometimes sneak in self deprecating jokes about improv being bad and unwatchable to the extent that this has become a fairly well established trope. So, is improv bad?
Yes, the vast majority of improv is bad because the vast majority of everything is bad. Your favorite one hour stand up comedy special is the result of thousands of hours of that comic being bad at open mics and bringers followed by thousands of hours of them being mediocre at bar and week night comedy club shows. And that’s just the bad material from one good stand up. For every good comic there are thousands of bad comics churning out thousands of hours of bad comedy. The same is true of music and writing and every creative endeavor. Except for a handful of savants there’s really no way to get good at something other than starting, being bad, and gradually getting less bad over time.
Of course if it was all bad no one would do it. I vividly remember my first time seeing the Improvised Shakespeare Company circa 2013 at the much missed Theatre 80 on St. Mark’s Place. The suggestion was “Apothecary Whom” so the show became essentially a Doctor Who spoof in the form of a Shakespearean play. After the first scene I thought it was the best improv I had ever seen. After the first musical number I thought it was the best comedy of any genre I had ever seen. After the black out I almost had a heart attack because I thought it was the best thing that had ever existed in any category of things that exist.
In terms of my own performance history I don’t remember what the exact scene was, but I do remember the experience of my first time killing at improv. It was at a jam (sometimes called a mixer) which is basically the improv equivalent of an open mic. It was at the Magnet probably when I was in Level Two around 2012. Again, I do not remember the scene but I did something right and the entire house exploded in hysterical laughter. It was a very good feeling that I have been chasing for 15 years now.
Should you do improv? Everybody does not need to get into improv as much as I have, but I believe that everyone would benefit from one or two classes. The benefits to public speaking alone will justify the cost. Of course there are other ways to improve at public speaking like Toastmasters, but doing improv in front of an audience—even if it’s just a class show—is an overload mechanism like running with a weight vest.
There are other benefits beyond public speaking when you incorporate the principles of improv into your life, but here we are again getting into the woo-woo and borderline cultish aspects of improv so I will tread lightly. If you want to save money and learn the secret to 85% of good improv I will tell you plainly: listen to your scene partner and respond to the last thing they said. For the remaining 15% I’m afraid you’ll have to join the cult.
Of course if you want to do improv then you should. My main regret in life is that I did not go to Chicago and do improv after graduating from college in 1997, but I had a different impractical dream and did that instead. I also did not know about improv until 2011 so the timeline just didn’t work out for me (assuming a linear theory of time).
Wanting to do improv presents its own challenges. Unless you are the right “type”—whatever that means at any particular moment—for being an advertisement for selling improv classes there is a decent chance you will not get cast on a house team. Improv theaters are often cliquish and filled with gatekeepers strictly regulating who performs on their stage. This, however, is no excuse for not doing improv because the only person who can stop you from doing improv is you. Remember the opening words of Viola Spolin’s book: “Everyone can act. Everyone can improvise. Anyone who wishes to can play in the theater and learn to become stageworthy.”
Previous installments in the series are available here: The Hasheesh Eater, Ben Hecht edition, The Age of the Grand Tour, J.S. Le Fanu edition, Survival of the Pagan Gods, My First Two Thousand Years, The Night Climbers of Cambridge, Tony Millionaire edition, Cards As Weapons, Music Edition.
>>Again, I do not remember the scene but I did something right and the entire house exploded in hysterical laughter. It was a very good feeling that I have been chasing for 15 years now.
My version: in a jam at ImprovBoston, I did something to which one of the mainstage regulars burst out "That's the funniest thing I've ever seen!" I do not remember anything about what I did, but that reaction is one of my best memories.