Thoughts on Improv

I’m not a very artsy person.  I don’t often speak dramatically unless I’m doing it for effect.  I most often am very direct and to the point.  I answer emails within 30 minutes typically.  I’ve been known to not “sugar coat” much and that sometimes has gotten me in trouble.  I don’t usually reminisce and if I do, it’s almost never in a fantastical fashion. 

This is going to be a little different.  Recently I’ve had a resurgence for my “love of improv.”  So much so that it has even encouraged me to write my thoughts down and share them on the “Information Super Highway” known as the internet.  If this gets to be too much, I apologize.  If it doesn’t get to be too much, I really hope it helps convey to you why I love improv so much.

*Please note that a lot of these thoughts aren’t new.  Nor do I pretend to be an expert on the topic of improv.  These thoughts are simply what have been running through my head as of late.

In 2005, I tried out for the improv team at Calvin College.  I didn’t have a real reason to other than the fact that I saw some of my soon-to-be peers do improv for the first time during freshmen orientation.  I was fascinated and intrigued- but mostly I thought that I needed to do that.  I had no idea what it was about, if there was structure to it, or if it was just a bunch of people trying to be funny- but I knew I wanted more of it.  So a couple months later when school started, I tried out… and didn’t make it.  To be honest, I wasn’t too crushed.  Not being accepted isn’t ever a great feeling but as I was being cut from improv, I gained the lead role in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and at that moment in my life, theater was my major.  So I figured the better of the two options won out. 

Months passed, the play I was in came and went, I dropped my theater major, and life continued.  Let’s fast forward to March or April, I can’t remember which one, but one of those months was when second tryouts to the improv team came.  Usually that didn’t happen but this year, there were an uncharacteristically large number of seniors graduating so they needed some young blood.  Surprisingly, I was asked to try out.  So I did.  And I got on the team.  Little did I know, that one night would change so many things in my life for the better.

It’s been 6 years now- which is really not that long at all- but since that March or April night, my life mantra has changed in ways that I had no idea it even could.  I won’t go into the details of improvisational comedy because most people have heard of the concept of “Yes-And” and the basics of how improv really are fundamental in succeeding in your life.  If you haven’t, pick up Tina Fey’s book, “Bossy Pants,” read it, put it back down, and then continue reading here.  What I will go into is the biggest basics of improv because that’s what I want to focus on.

Improv at its simplest form is story-telling, and sometimes joke-telling, by a team of people that generate their ideas from suggestions from the audience.  That’s it.  And it’s beautiful.  Because that means that the thousands of hours that I have spent in improv practice or on an improv stage in front of an audience mean absolutely nothing when you speak of any of those experiences without the other components.  In other words, the laughter, the memories, the stories that we contrived or the jokes that we told, were all impossible without the team of improvisers AND the audience.  One of the biggest travesties I’ve found in the improv world is when people say “X was so funny that night” and then X accepts the compliment and bathes in it.  The truth of why X was so funny is almost always because of the team and because of the audience.  Yes, X delivered the line.  And yes, X is incredibly funny and potentially, the most talented.  But the truth is, without the team or the audience’s suggestion, X is nothing.  And this is why improv is so much like real life.  Very rarely is anyone successful, triumphant, or even talented without the help of a supporting cast or an audience to receive feedback from.

Now I’ll stop there because I don’t want to make this about how improv has the most metaphors for real life and how if everyone studied the philosophies of improv, we’d live in a much happier society.  I agree with that, but I don’t have the time to write that right now.  Not to mention the metaphors are going to be so easily made that I won’t have to spell them out for you.  What I do have the time for is to write about improv, and why it has changed my life. 

Recently, I had lunch with a good friend and we spoke about all of the different improv teams we’ve been on.  For the record, I’ve been on two.  He’s been on like 7.  Moving on, as we talked more and more, he touched on something that really struck me.  He said that he found the greatest joy in his improv career when he knew what his role was on the team and how it complemented the other team members’ roles.  On his team of three, there was the witty one that the audience loved, there was the dumb one that the audience loved for a different reason, and he was the younger brother character (his words) and he too was loved by the audience for, again, completely different reasons.  And most importantly, all three guys knew how to work well with one another, how to set each other up for success, and how to carry on if one of them should fail. 

This too is why improv is beautiful.  It accepts everyone.  Everyone has a place.  And everyone can be loved.  But they will also certainly fail.  And so while it’s important to find your audience, it’s even more important to find the right people on your team.  Because that way, when you fail, your teammate can both save you and then hopefully win the audience back over (I told you the metaphors would scream through this thing).  But knowing that this is the case, this is also why it’s important that no one takes full credit for winning or losing.  Because when it’s your night to win, it’s more vital then than ever to remember that your teammate saved you last night from falling flat on your face.  It’s also why it’s vital to surround yourself with people that have the capability to save you.  Note that having the “capability to save” doesn’t necessarily mean they will succeed 100% of the time.  It simply means that you trust them enough to take risks.  The truth is that everyone has a role to fill and sometimes, your number will be called to take charge, sometimes it’ll be called to support, sometimes it’ll be called to say one line and then leave, and sometimes it’ll be to save- and in each of the roles, the success/fail rate wavers.  But surrounding yourself with the right people makes failure bearable and success even more rewarding.

Okay, I think that’ll be the last touchy-feely thing I’ll write.  The rest of this will probably be just fun.  Because after all, when it’s all said and done, that’s what improv is really all about.  Fun.  Laughter.   And Joy.

While the teamwork, the reliability, the creativity and the philosophies of improv fascinate me most, the joy of improv is what sustains me.  For the past six years, I have found joy in the strangest and most wonderful, made-up scenarios.  These scenarios have included:  The most death-defying Tic-Tac-Toe matches that used real life gnomes instead of X’s and O’s and always ended in Cats games, Tandem Sky-Divers that jumped face to face and decided that it was best to jump on “No” and pull the ripcord on “Don’t”, mothers giving birth simultaneously to two children- one via natural birth and one via C-section, listening to the world’s most cynical war veteran give a five minute monologue on “how it used to be”, having two federal agents live in the same cul-de-sac as elementary students who are competing popsicle vendors and watching the antics that ensue, trying to resolve the relational problems that having a uni-breast can cause, avoid falling in love with the White Witch from “The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe,” coping with those at a therapy session for giving their grandmothers sponge baths, and of course, trying to find a cure to Quad-rabetes  (Diabetes x2).

It’s true that I love improv so much because stories like these can exist and then can be explored.  But it’s more true to say that I love improv so much because of the laughter and joy produced by these ridiculously strange stories.  We live in a world where more and more people are becoming less and less happy.  Improv, for me, is a cure.  It’s a cure because it helps remove people from where they are in their life and temporarily allows them to live and laugh in the stories that are based off their suggestions. 

Recently, I watched a movie called “Happy.”  It’s a movie based off of the new academic trend called Positive Psychology.  In this movie, there’s a part that says we are often taught two things:  that money will buy us happiness and that money can’t buy us happiness.  It goes on to say that both are somewhat true; just ask the homeless man living under the bridge and then ask Bill Gates.  The homeless man wishes he had more money to feel secure and thus feel happier.  Bill Gates will say having all the money in the world hasn’t brought him happiness at all.  The real truth, however, is that while happiness is predicated on some things, it’s mostly a choice.  It’s something that we can all choose to have.  And for me, every time I do improv, I’m choosing happiness.  I’m choosing a role and learning how to work well in it.  I’m choosing to surround myself with people who I love and trust.  I’m choosing to create something new (and potentially abnormal) based off of other people’s ideas.  And I’m hopeful that amidst all of these choices, I can help bring others into happiness as well.