A shock it may be, but I know very little about the logistical intricacies of selling cocaine in Virginia. But what little I do know has come almost entirely from fraternal hip-hop duo, Pusha T and Malice, aka Clipse.

With some lengthy hiatuses (hiati? That can’t be right) since 2014, Clipse have made music almost solely about coke, crack, ‘selling weight’ etc for a quarter of a century. They are the archetype act in the ‘coke rap’ genre. I don’t think Spotify lists that in Wrapped, but let me know.

This definitely sounds like it would become pretty tiresome. And yet it’s routinely excellent and very entertaining. Turns out there are a LOT of creative euphemisms for selling cocaine out there.

Clipse’s latest album: Let God Sort Em Out is superb. It includes meditations on grief, familial misunderstandings, animosity towards other rappers, expensive taste in fashion, and fertility challenges. Every single song also references selling cocaine at some point.

Again, I can’t stress enough how little I actually know of their world. They are certainly not making this music for me. I have never been to Virginia and if Clipse’s vivid descriptions of the local illicit markets are to be believed, I won’t risk it. My working day is more white collar than white powder. That suits me just fine.

And yet, I’ll check for every Clipse album and bob my head along, despite understanding less than half of a typical sentence in their lyrics. Importantly, they understand. They’re drawing from their authentic experience before becoming musicians, and that’s mainly all that matters.

To be clear, I don’t condone or endorse the highly illegal behaviour, but I do condone their myriad poetic ways of describing it. They’re also routinely quite funny.

Here’s some highlights across their career. I have learned that all of these refer in some way to trafficking drugs across borders, selling them in large quantities, or associated violence in order to maintain territory:

• “Twenty plus years of Johnson and Johnson” - this is not about two decades of brand loyalty for your talcum powder.

• “I done packed the blizzard in Honda Civic” - this is not about putting a toboggan in the boot of your car.

• “I was 16, eyes full of hope. Baggin up grams at the Hyatt ,though. The news called it crack, I called it Diet Coke” - I too was addicted to sugar free Coca-Cola when I was 16. Needed a few rounds with the dental hygienist to put that right. That’s not what this is about.

• “They call me Pusha for one reason, cause I keep that sniff all seasons” - ever had a head cold during the Summer? That’s not what this is about.

• “Gem Star razor and a dinner plate, Arm and hammer and a mason jar, that’s my dinner date’ - this is not about spending an evening with your beloved, jointly decanting toothpaste into a millennial’s favourite ornament.

• “The black Martha Stewart, let me show you how to do it. Break down pies to pieces, make cocaine quiches” - This is not a fresh take on the buffet at a corporate conference centre.

• “Date I stop still has an asterisk after it. After all I can make a call. I can baptize a brick. As I wash away my sins like a catholic” - This is not about diligently partaking in one’s religion, though Clipse’s Malice did have an evangelical conversion and de-conversion in the mid-2010s.

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So why does this work? It does help that mega-hit-making geniuses and fellow Virginians The Neptunes provide them with A-grade beats. They’re also part of some of Kanye West’s best production before he became a raging National Socialist and we had to retire his work forever.

But even so, it’s Clipse’s consistent point of view, sense of their own voice and biography, and smart wordplay that makes their music work. They’re credible because they’ve lived and studied what they’re describing, and as a result it’s really compelling.

I think there’s a lot to learn here about performing comedy: whether that’s a performer with a clear sense of their own identity, or if you’re playing a character with an immoveable perspective. The audience doesn’t have to deeply understand your point-of-view, but they do need confidence that you do, and that it feels consistent. Relentlessly consistent.

ENDNOTES

Check this episode of Song Exploder for a breakdown of the opening track from Let God Sort Em Out. Reflecting on the deaths of both their parents within months, it went straight onto my playlist of the saddest and most wistful hip-hop songs, alongside APIDTA from Jay Electronica & Jay-Z, Pete Rock and CL Smooth’s They Reminisce Over You, and ‘therapy rap’ modern GOATS Dave’s Psycho and Kendrick Lamar’s Count Me Out.

This episode of Dissect also looks at the best bars from the album.

SHOW KLAXON

Fri 13 February: I’m back with m’colleague Tim Grewcock for a show with The Homunculus at State of Play Improv at The Market Theatre in Hitchin. Tickets here.

Sat 2 May: The Wunderkammer by Do Not Adjust Your Stage returns to the beautiful Machynlleth Comedy Festival in a bigger venue than ever. Fascinating guest speakers inspire the improv Tickets here.

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I recently read Spark - a fun short novel by Naoki Matayoshi.

Big wow - you can read, no-one likes a show-off. You’re right, I didn’t even read it in the original Japanese if that makes you feel any better.

Anyway, Spark is set in the world of Manzai comedy in early-2000s Tokyo. Manzai, like many aspects of Japanese culture, can feel a bit esoteric from a Western perspective. It originated in the Heian period (roughly our middle-ages) as a New Year tradition purportedly spreading messages from kami (mythological spirits in the Shinto religion), hewn into a two-man stand-up comedy act.

Big wow - Japanese history, no-one likes a show-off. You’re right, I cribbed that off wikipedia, if that makes you feel any better.

In Spark, young performer Tokunaga is taken under the wing of experienced and respected Kamiya. Kamiya is apparently an auteur with crazy self confidence. As the novel progresses though, Kamiya’s life unravels in booze and gambling addictions, he loses his partner and home, while the careers of both Tokunaga and many of his peers begin to surpass his own. By his late 40s, Kamiya is still struggling to make a living doing the same work, and is consumed by jealousy of other performers who he believes his skill exceeds.

It got me thinking how little is actually unique about any particular comedy ‘scene’.

Even from the seemingly very niche starting point of a medieval New Year entertainment, Manzai has clear parallels with British comedy culture. The two-performer dynamic follows really closely a ‘straight man, crazy man’ set-up (or for improvisers - ‘voice of reason/unusual point of view’). Sets essentially involve one performer gamely trying to get some serious business done, while another can’t help but derail it.

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In Manzai there are a range of core routines that acts place their own spin on to ultimately create something original to them - think Vaudeville’s re-use of gags, the combination of comedy of manners and slapstick in British farce, Commedia del’arte’s stock characters, or house twists on improv formats

Much like the Edinburgh Fringe, club comedy circuit or now, social media, there are ‘trade-fair’ style shows to get spotted and climb the ladder to ‘success’ (6,000 - SIX THOUSAND - acts competed in this one in 2021). Talent scouts and agents mine the live Manzai scene to pluck out acts for heavily formatted TV shows (hello, panel shows, …Got Talent, etc). Manzai acts, like sketch groups, improv teams or stand-up comedians, build a reputation in their niche world for a particular style or tone, before being thrust in front of a bigger audience to adapt what they do to the rules of different medium. Here, they can easily trip up or thrive. Some acts rise quickly, others plug away for years without ascending beyond a loyal small fanbase.

There’s a learning and apprenticeship stage, ‘finding your voice’, helped by mentors or inspired by other performers you admire. There’s different tiers of venue, levels of pay and skill to work through as a professional act. Some folks will be ‘discovered’, some will move into surprising adjacent fields, and some will fall out of performing altogether.

Less positively, it seems like any scene will have dubious gatekeepers, bitterness at others’ success, judgement about peers’ work, and environments that facilitate or are oblivious to mental illness, addiction or other harms. In Spark, Kamiya is initially revered by Tokunaga as some sort of ‘guru’, despite some dubious behaviours, and opinions he presents as fact being highly subjective. Improv has a particular predilection for this kind of hero worship, as if some deity-like theatrical wisdom has been bestowed upon a succession of schlubby and otherwise unemployable 30-somethings.

It also seems sadly universal across countries that large portions of the professional ranks are open only to a narrow clique of society, a clique that’s also most likely to be interested in seeing it. Amen to Daniel Day Lewis on this recently: “Theatre relies on people having had the privilege of an education that allows them to believe that they’re entitled to go to the theatre. It’s a relatively small group of people that is available to, and that is just quite wrong. Much as I loved my time in the theatre, we were essentially performing to a group of more or less privileged people.” Who am I to disagree with DANIEL DAY-LEWIS? No-one. And I don’t disagree for improv either.

Recognising that these things are as true in Osaka, London, New York or wherever, it seems wise to focus on the one thing you can actually control: the work you make and where it fits in your wider life. Be a bit more Young Tokunaga and a little less Kamiya!

Anyway, give Spark a read. It’s a way more fun read than I’ve just made it sound. BIG WOW.

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END NOTES

Not here for class-based or global critiques of the arts?

• That’s okay, I still appreciate you. Just enjoy this absolute jam by funky pop witch Caroline Polachek and the cover by Stockport flared trousers aficionados Blossoms. I’m obsessed with both.

• Cricket’s ancient rivalry, The Ashes, is about to start and I, for one, am EXCITED. Here’s an oldie on what the prosaic Forward Defensive shot can teach us about improvising stories.

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Many teams warm-up with ‘boring scenes’, intentional scenes where nothing happens: no interesting relationships, no emotion, and no unusual points of view. It’s risky to drill before a show for literally tens of paying customers, but can be helpful for giddy Crazytown-loyal teams to give them a chance of a grounded, relatable start.

Sometimes though, some reverse alchemy happens where otherwise creative improvisers produce very boring scenes without even trying. At least in rehearsal, there’s usually an excuse. The improvisers might be working on some new skill or brain-heavy format where the priority isn’t the outcome, but practicing the process.

Worst of all, a boring scene might escape when the improvisers are actually trying for interesting. In good faith, they define some specifics early on. Specifics are always funny, right? Not always.

In a DNAYS rehearsal a few years ago, me and an improviser whose identity I will protect, accidentally mined possibly the most boring improv scene of all time. It played out like this:

Me: Starts some generic fiddling spacework on the ground downstage. Player 2 knocks on the door. I answer.

Player 2: I’ve come to PAT test your VCR.

Me: Great, here it is.

Me: Shows Player 2 downstage. Player 2 starts fiddling around with what we now know is a VCR. Essentially the only specific we have.

Me: Do you want a cup of tea?

Player 2: I’m alright, thanks.

Player 2 finishes fiddling around with the VCR.

Player 2: That should do it.

Me: Thanks

END

Spectacular. It’s become DNAYS’ byword for when a scene is simply too boring: ‘We’re PAT testing the VCR here’. This pretty much applies to any ‘transaction’ scene where characters don’t know each other and are doing routine admin (ie buying something, maintenance, settings where we typically show no emotion).

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An explainer:

1. What is PAT testing1?

Glad you asked. Portable Appliance Testing involves visual checks and instrument-based testing to ensure electrical appliances are safe, with no risk of electric shock or fire. …. Have I lost you? Well, according to the Health and Safety Executive: ‘there are many common myths about portable appliance testing’.

I don’t disagree, mainly because I didn’t get past the first sentence of that webpage. ‘Myth’ also supposes that there’s some intrigue in the world of PAT testing. There isn’t.

2. What’s a VCR?

Imagine streaming The Lion King by printing it on a roll of parcel tape inside a plastic box, then putting it inside a bigger mechanical box attached to your very-non-UHD TV. You’ll then need to adjust the ‘tracking’ to remove massive fuzzy lines over the early strains of Circle of Life. No? Ask your Dad.

So you can see why it’s important your VCR is PAT-certified before you enjoy the antics of Pumba, Rafiki and the gang.

But what can you do if you’ve introduced this riveting slice of life into an improv scene?:

1. Overshare - a transactional scene about hardware maintenance is actually perfect context for characters to overshare something personal. Unlike most other scenes like this, it can work with either an unusual customer or technician. A customer still wants their VCR certified safe even if the technician is odd. A technician still has a job to do and the customer is king. It’s pretty fun to watch them deal with each other:

Technician: I’ve come to PAT test your VCR

Customer: Great, here it is

Customer shows the Technician downstage. The Technician starts fiddling with the VCR

Customer: Cup of tea?

Technician: Please. I was also hoping I could get your advice on my divorce…

Customer: Right…

Customer goes to make tea, then returns to find the Technician gently weeping

Customer: Everything alright?

Technician: It’s tough, she’s got custody of the kids-

Customer: With the VCR I mean.

Technician: Oh yea, of course. Seems okay so far.

Customer: It hasn’t been working right for months.

Technician: I’ve been there. You’ve gotta cut ties.

Or the same POV, but held by the customer:

Technician: I’ve come to PAT test your VCR

Customer: Great, here it is

Customer shows the Technician downstage. The Technician starts fiddling with the VCR

Customer: Cup of tea?

Technician: Please.

Customer goes to make tea, then returns….

Customer: Everything alright?

Technician: I just need to run a couple more tests. Shouldn’t take a second.

Customer: Cool. Since you’ve got time, could I get your advice?

Technician: Sure

Customer: Me and my wife are arguing a lot.

Technician: About the VCR?

Customer: Yea… and everything else. It’s like we’ve got nothing in common.

Technician: Er, yea that sounds tough.

Technician gestures to the VCR.

Technician: Has it been working okay?

Customer: Not for months. We sleep in separate beds.

2. You/I/We - Start a sentence with a You/I/We statement like ‘you look…’, ‘you seem…’, ‘we’re….’. Even better if this is an accusation (see Will Hines!). Ideally the other player accepts this offer and defines a reason why it’s true. This forces the scene to be about the characters rather than the invisible PAT test:

Technician: I’ve come to PAT test your VCR

Customer: Great, here it is

Customer shows the Technician downstage. The Technician starts fiddling with the VCR

Customer: You look tense.

Technician: I am tense, I’m in the online queue for Oasis tickets

Customer: Should you be doing that at work?

Technician (half looking at his phone): Don’t worry I can do both. It’s only a PAT test!

Customer: Okay, cool. Cup of tea?

Customer goes to make tea. The technician checks their phone. Bad news. They throw it across the room. Customer returns.

Customer: Did I hear something smash?

Technician: Sorry, I got bumped off the line. I’ll replace that.

Customer: You will. Can we just get the test done and you can get on with your day?

Technician: Definitely.

Technician retrieves their phone, logs back into the ticket site, sets the phone down carefully by the VCR and starts doing their job.

Technician: FUCK! Son of a b-

They smack the floor angrily

Customer: Are you okay?

Technician: £300!

Customer: For the VCR?

Technician: No you idiot, the tickets. I’m at the end of my tether here…

OR, a ‘we’ statement:

Technician: I’ve come to PAT test your VCR

Customer: Great, here it is

Customer shows the Technician downstage. The Technician starts fiddling with the VCR

Customer: How’s it looking?

Technician: Pretty good. Say, we’re such a great team, aren’t we?

Customer: How’d you mean?

Technician: I just feel like we’re in sync.

Customer: I guess. Cup of tea?

Technician: YES! I was just about to say that. Two sugars.

Customer: Already on it, pal.

Customer goes to make tea, then returns:

Technician: Sorted. I’ve also installed you a DVD player. Latest model.

Customer: Wow, Spring 2005?

Technician: You know it! Only the best for my buddy.

They high-five.

OR

Technician: I’ve come to PAT test your VCR

Customer: Great, here it is

Customer shows the Technician downstage. The Technician starts fiddling with the VCR

Customer: I’m glad you came actually

Technician: Having some trouble with the old video box?

Customer: I’m sad.

Technician: Sorry to hear that. We’ll get you tested and certified in no time.

Customer: I wondered if you had a bit more time…

Technician: Microwave need testing?

Customer: I’m lonely.

Technician: What?

Customer: Sorry, yes, microwave. And the oven. Basically everything. Please stay.

3. Make the process important or symbolic - A useful addition to a mundane detail is to make it symbolic of some grand theme or emotional stakes. Grandiose and pompous characters are always funny and reveal more than a normal person would:

Technician: I’ve come to PAT test your VCR

Customer: Great, here it is

Customer shows the Technician downstage. The Technician starts fiddling with the VCR

Technician: The humble VCR. 80s icon. A more innocent time. In a sense, that battle with Betamax was a phyrric victory at best. DVD soon came along to vanquish the humble video. Then streaming rode on in. Just ask Blockbuster, they never saw the end. Just like how, one day, we all went out to play with our school friends for the last time, but never knew it…

Customer: I just need it PAT testing

Technician: And I just wanted to watch Wind in the Willows. It’s never that simple. We can’t just tap into Ratty and Moley’s bucolic lifestyle as if the Industrial Revolution never happened. It’s the 21st century and this machine is testimony to the relentless march of technological progress. But is it really progress? Our planet is on fire, AI has rendered our very concept of humanity obsolete.

Customer: Sure… Cup of tea?

Technician: Ahh, the British fire blanket. We can’t just smooth over everything with a cuppa, you know. We pillaged tea from India. Scarred the landscape and cleaved divisions through ancient communities, but hey, at least the trains ran on time.

Customer: Coffee then?

Technician: Yes please.

If none of these help, it might be time to cut your losses. The scene was always destined to fail. We can’t be sure why, but it’s undeniable by the third time the players are studying the back of an imaginary and obsolete machine. In that case, your backline might need to mercy edit. Get out of there and initiate with completely opposite energy. Hello, moon president.

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In the last couple of weeks, improv sages Will Hines and Lloydie have been writing very excellently on what to do coming off stage from a show that felt bad. Read them here and here!

Do I have much to add? Let’s be honest, no. But, since the internet likes nothing more than an echo chamber, here’s my tuppence and some tips on mitigating the disaster-class that a post-show discussion can lead to. These should work even if your team doesn’t have a coach or a ridiculously open coach-less dialogue, but as ever, an external eye takes a lot of the tension and self-regard out of these discussions. That said, you could try:

Remember your experience of the show is just that: only yours

Look, I know sometimes a show is objectively bad. You stank the whole place out and everyone on the team knows it. I’d suggest that’s pretty rare. More common is that some of the cast personally had a good show (ie you got a few laughs for your precious ego), while some of you felt you personally had a stinker (ie you did a walk on that didn’t land, then recoiled in horror to the backline for the remaining 17 minutes). Both these things are often out of step with the audience’s experience - over which you have limited control.

Regardless, coming off the stage, be cognisant that your perspective of the show might not be the same as others. Negative post-show energy is especially contagious. It is way more poisonous to a team dynamic to hear a teammate say ‘that show wasn’t good’ when others thought it was, than the opposite. These things can become a habit for improvisers who err on the self-critical. So…..

If you must discuss the show afterwards, try to focus on the positive, or the neutral

In those visceral post show moments, everything is heard and felt at a very heightened level. It’s important to tread carefully with your teammates. It’s a ripe time for taking well-intentioned feedback personally and falling out. That post-show green room is probably the most important place to keep in mind ‘if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all’.

Better still, find something positive to say. Focusing on this is (a) a good thing to do for your friends on your team and (b) doesn’t leave much room for dwelling on the negative. Show time is finite, so might as well pack it with doing more positive things.

If you enjoyed the show, say so. Make eye contact with your teammates and say ‘well done’, ‘great show’ - yea, even if you secretly don’t really mean it. Tell your buddy something they did that you really liked. Butttt, if the room atmosphere feels a bit mixed, try not to grandstand about your own triumphs and the amazing time you had. If a teammate is sadly seething in the corner in a shame hole, probably leave them be for a little while.

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What do you (as in, all of you) want this show to be?

Teams can get themselves in a mess of their own making when they haven’t agreed what their show is aiming for beforehand. That applies, whether it’s a thing to focus on immediately pre-show, or in the rehearsal room. There’s many ways for a show to be good, but it’s useful to aim for a specific one/few. Is your show prioritising game, . Some fo these things can’t be separated from one another

If the goal for your team is just ‘turn up and see what happens’, it’s then kind of inevitable that 6 improvisers will later come off stage with 6 individual interpretations of what happened, 6 views on whether it was good or bad, and likely all based on individual expectations and anxieties, rather than the collective.

If you’ve agreed with your teammates what the goal of the show is that day, the post-show discussion becomes way less emotionally motivated. Instead, the only questions are: ‘did we achieve our goal?’, ‘when did we achieve or get closest to our goal?’ and if you’re brave ‘when didn’t we achieve it?’ or ‘when were we less effective?’. Highlight those moments, and if they feel like a pattern over multiple shows, or if you’re even still thinking about them next time you rehearse, work on them with a coach.

Be brave and stand at the exit

This takes some cojones, but you could skip the green room and post-show discussion altogether. Stand at the exit as the audience is leaving and thank them for coming. With DNAYS, we’ll hand out some badges or sweets so there’s something of a reason. Even for shows we haven’t loved ourselves, the vast majority of audience members are just really friendly, reciprocate those thanks and/or want to compliment you. CHOMP CHOMP yes please for my ego! Also, it’s just good manners. Those people have spent some hard-earned pounds in a cost of living crisis to come to your show. MIND YOUR Ps & Qs!

It’s only improv

It literally couldn’t matter less. Your destiny as a human being does not depend on how well your last Harold went. My deepest apologies if this is harsh news, but 99.95% of society are not going to improv shows. The slither of the population that do are either looking for a fun night out (if so, you’re only part of it) or raging improv nerds. The nerds, raging or otherwise, understand that not every show can be a home-run - they’ve been exactly where you are. They’ll only think less of you if you’re a dick about it.

Unless your show was the 1-in-10,000 that was either a transformative cultural moment or an utterly offensive disgrace, no specifics will be remembered even 2 days later. You’ll start again from scratch in the next show, except you’ll be an extra show wiser and more experienced.

Head to the bar for either a strong ABV salve or alcohol-free fizzy pop. Do some silly bits with your teammates. Promise you’ll feel better.

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ENDNOTES

• A British improviser nearly won American’s Got Talent. Congrats to Chris Turner for making a very hard thing look utterly effortless!

• If pressed, I’m Team Charli, Sorry Taylor. BUMPIN THAT

.

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell popularised the ‘10,000 Hour Rule’: that a prerequisite for mastery in any field is 10,000+ hours of purposeful practice. It makes sense. More practice = more skills. Gladwell, a smart fellow, has since dialled back a little on his ‘a-ha! You didn’t think of it this way, but I explain it so simply it must be true’ schtick.

Nonetheless, the cult of relentless hours lives on in ‘High Performance’ bullshit - CEOs waking at 4.30am after 30 mins sleep, to clear their inboxes while on a treadmill chugging Huel and so on. This is completely healthy and doesn’t at all glamorise a toxic side-hustle mentality where it’s not enough to simply have a hobby, you must also monetise it to achieve self-actualisation…. All shade intended to Jake Humphrey, Steven Bartlett and the YouTube life coaches selling financial independence and Better Help (sadly not proud sponsors of this post). 

Anyway, to improv. I once set out to perform a LOT more shows. Specifically, 100 a year. I managed it between 2016 and 2019, until someone smooched a pangolin and the world collapsed. I swallowed the Kool-Aid (Vimto for British readers), mainly from American teachers with multiple theatres in their home cities,  that this was the only way to get better at long-form improv. I’d already been improvising nearly a decade, possibly 7-8,000 hours already, but it wasn’t enough to be like the real improvisers in the USA. I HAD TO DO MORE and BE THE BEST. CHOMP CHOMP, GIVE ME THAT DELICIOUS STAGETIME.

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I did get better, and some of that was fun. But it was also pretty relentless and anxiety-inducing. I performed on a House team at a major London theatre (3 shows a month), did their additional headline shows (twice a month when I’d curried enough favour with the in-group), had my own two-prov team The Homunculus (monthly), and beloved DNAYS (peaking at 3-4 shows a month), plus the odd other guest spot on ‘indie’ gigs1. 

Helpfully in the UK, taking a show to Edinburgh Fringe is 30 gigs in the bag for your 100 show year. If not, you lose August in your schedule and combined with a Christmas break, you’d need roughly 10 shows a month (over 2 a week, every week). 

Writing this down, I now see how absolutely mental that is, added to rehearsal, teaching and coaching improv too. And oh yeah, *checks notes* A FULL-TIME JOB and LIFE. 

I definitely got better at the very specific skills of Harolds, Armandos, and two-person improv shows that mostly don’t collapse under their own self-indulgence (please come to our next show). But with hindsight, after a literal Excessive-Improv-Enabled Breakdown (™), it’s simply too much yucca-yucca goofing to live healthily. You are almost certainly neglecting other parts of your life, even if your loved ones are too kind to tell you might be TOO into this thing. 

Is it worth it? The jury’s out. I can remember about 5 of those shows.

Improvisers, especially within theatre institutions, tend to fetishise industrial-quantity reps, both to hone performance chops and prove your commitment to programming decision-makers. Of course, those reps must be at that same theatre, otherwise they don’t count (classes start at £300, multiplied by all 5 levels. HURRY!). 

I believed this too, both as an individual performer, and when casting and directing shows myself. I’ve sat in audition rooms where other panelists were blown away by a performer they’ve never seen before, as if they’ve witnessed some impossibly magical generational talent. Nope, that’s just someone who has a life outside the improv bubble, and therefore something interesting to draw on.

If you spend 4-5 nights a week on an improv stage or classroom, there’s not much time for anything else. Perhaps you’re an aspiring actor or writer too, so there’s the rest of your non-improv time gone. It’s great being all-in, but it does limit your craft if you don’t cultivate other interests. An alarming proportion of improv scenes in London in my 15+ years doing and watching are set in audition rooms, cafes, or stock settings from TV shows and movies. This is a product of homogenous casts of performers with ‘creative’ lives.

So how can you balance reps to get good, without burning out or becoming increasingly boring because you’ve initiated another scene with ‘please say your name and agent for the camera’? I honestly don’t know. But I do know cutting back shows has given me way more time for other things, interests and people, without wondering where I fit in the hierarchy and whether they’ll ask me to the prom2. I might be slightly worse at improv, I might be slightly better. Either way, it matters less. 

If you’re working through classes or an early improv ‘career’, try for balance. Improv is really fun, you’ll make fast friends and show adrenaline is very addictive. But you don’t have to do it constantly to be good. You can have fun being slightly less good. Other stuff in your life is just as important, mostly more important. Improv won’t give you that time back you spent in that workshop repeatedly putting on a spacework coat3. Improv will still be there when you want it. Less is more.

ENDNOTES

55 seconds of precocious jazz child Jacob Collier wisely explaining that you can only do less when you know what more is

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My wife and I can virtually recite verbatim The Muppets’ Treasure Island and Christmas Carol, the latter of which is now an annual tradition for us to visit the singalong at London’s Prince Charles Cinema. Highly recommend… also Save the Prince Charles. 

The Muppets are now responsible for 70 (SEVENTY) years of impossibly wholesome family fun, delivered by totally real felt-based lifeforms that absolutely aren’t operated by human beings just out of a shot. SHUT UP!

Like any good sitcom, or indeed improv scene, the Muppets character points-of-view are so clear and relatable. There’s also a healthy slice of chaos before things slip into being too sincere and saccharine. Whatever jeopardy the Muppets face, it’s always met with general positivity and teamwork. I think Gen Z call this ‘a vibe’ (shrugs in millennial). I like their vibe. 

That’s basically all there is to this post. A general sense that it’s good to aim for a similar vibe to The Muppets.

Here’s some of my favourite Muppets, just because. And I guess if you squint hard enough, there’s some kind of useful improv comedy takeaway for them:

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CLUELESS MORGAN

The rollcall scene in the Muppets Treasure Island slays me literally every time I see it, which is approx every 3-4 years, long enough to forget about it and be delighted by it again. 3-4 years is also the length of time it is acceptable to do a ‘callback’ in your Harold show by the way, stop forcing it in search of a blackout. 

Anyway, the scene is literally just a list of names and reveals (Key and Peele’s College Bowl sketch about 20 years before they did it). Apparently, the Clueless Morgan puppet later went missing, which is the reason this is his only on-screen appearance in the Muppets canon. I’m sad about this because he’s an excellent character, completely stupid, in the moment and desperate to be in a crew.

THE CHRISTMAS CAROL VERSIONS OF GONZO & RIZZO

Whoever decided Gonzo would be an omniscient Charles Dickens in this is a very smart human/muppet. Whoever then decided to give him Rizzo the rat as a sidekick is smarter still. Just joyful. LIGHT THE LAMP NOT THE RAT!

ANIMAL

Animal is the drummer for the excellently named Muppets House Band Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. He basically just loves drumming, very loudly and enthusiastically. That’s all there is to Animal. We love watching him drum, the tension is constantly building whenever he isn’t drumming. Perfect improv character.

BEAKER

With the very considerable constraint of only being able to say versions of ‘MEEEEEP’, Beaker is a great case study in really simple emotional and physical reactions to the utter idiots who he’s routinely surrounded by. Mostly Dr Bunsen Honeydew, his kindly but ultimately mad scientist friend. Wide-eyed, open-mouthed, quick to panic in response to other characters. Be more like Beaker. His Ode to Joy bests Beethoven’s and it’s not even close.

STATLER AND WALDORF

These guys shouldn’t work. Two old dudes sitting on the sidelines in the good seats, dressed like Wall Street stocktraders, commentating on how poor the rest of the show is. You would not want your improv teammates doing this, and yet it works for The Muppets. I guess you need someone to watch out for Fudge McGirk, he went berserk.

KERMIT

Obviously. Not much more than a sock with frills on it, the depth of Kermit is pretty astonishing. The world accepts him as a real kindly soul, trying and mostly succeeding to keep the whole show together. I’m honestly not sure what he sees in the needy Diva Miss Piggy, or what exact affront to God is going on with their kids in the Christmas Carol, but their decades-long on-off romance is a core part of The Muppet universe’s heart. His hilarious lockdown facial workout is now a core part of my pre-show routine, and this is one of the most beautiful little ballads of all-time. Kermit is a king.

Alright, let’s have it. I want to know your favourite Muppets and why? Go!

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ENDNOTES

Yea, it’s just more Muppet content:

• This will be in your head for at least a week (sorry) MAHNA MAHNA

• Seymour and Pepe, they’re two of a kind. Does Pepe have to explain everything to you people? UNBELIEVABLE.

• Steve Martin and Kermit’s Duelling Banjos

In DNAYS’ show The Wunderkammer, we often find ourselves performing for audiences that don’t see lots of - or any - improv. While the show has taken us to festivals full of eager improv nerds, we just as often perform at non-improv focused venues, museums, galleries and education institutions. The show uses TED-style talks from guest academics, experts and enthusiasts as the inspiration for improv scenes. As such, we’re often handling both some pretty esoteric ideas from the talk, plus packaging them into a performance style the vast majority of the audience has never seen before.

With two tricksy concepts to wrap around, the main recurring note we give ourselves pre-show is to ‘be obvious’. That means pulling really direct initiations from the talk. One idea at a time, with care taken to establish the absolute fundamentals - who, what, where - before layering on any overt comedic idea.

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Audiences need - and want! - to see the mechanics of the show. The same is true for shows that use audience suggestions. A purist might complain that this ruins the ‘magic’. I think it has the opposite effect. For a ‘lay audience’, being obvious and nodding to the opening directly ‘proves’ that the show is truly improvised. It brings audiences into the creative process and therefore invested in the outcome. Ultimately, a really obvious initiation and game makes the audience feel clever and funny themselves: that they too recognise and remember the thing they heard at the start of the show. It goes a really long way.

As improvisers you can earn the right for less vanilla improv moves later in the show, but until that point, you want to bring your audience along with you and assure them they’re in safe hands. If all they know of Harolds is old Kings and Neighbours characters, they aren’t going to appreciate a Sound-and-Movement or Invocation opening, putting it lightly.

Here’s some exercises and approaches to help keep it obvious in improv:

• Literally repeat verbatim a line from the monologue or opening. It doesn’t need any interesting new context or spin, just repeat it. Ideal if it’s an opinion or feeling, or starts with ‘I think/feel/believe…’

• Treat your scene partner like they’re…erm, let’s say, ‘intellectually challenged’ (The word used when I first encountered this from an American improv teacher was unfortunately rather more un-PC. You’ve heard it. The Black Eyed Peas used it, then knew it was bad so changed tack). Basically, use really simple words, short sentences, be loud, repeat yourself. It all helps keep a scene super simple, focused and obvious.

• If your show has an especially long opening where you might need to remember multiple initiations for a long time, try giving them a 2 or 3-word title. It might help boil down a game to its most basic points. So a long anecdote about putting broccoli in a homemade birthday cake might become ‘gross dessert’. This kind of thing is especially helpful in DNAYS’ Wunderkammer shows where we’re often trying to retain some pretty complex scientific concepts and WE ARE NOT SMART. In fact, its better for us to essentially be dumber than our audience. If your initiation feels a bit too complex with a few moving pieces, its probably not simple enough yet. Or there’s nothing there.

• If the audience laughs in the opening, that’s your best pull. Hopefully all your teammates will have seen it too, but don’t assume that. The audience is either going to expect that moment to come up in the show, and they’re going to have forgotten it and be absoultely delighted to be reminded. Have more than one initiation in your head so you’re not too sad when your brilliant casemates use the idea first.

• Set your scene in a really obvious setting the audience will definitely know. Lots of comedy is essentially unexpected behaviours in familiar contexts. I just tried to define comedy in one sentence. BIG MOVE. You’ll find an improv scene or any sketch really far easier to execute if the set-up location is . Audiences need to get the grounded, normal code of behaviour, in order to find anything else about your scene unusual or funny. Everyone has been to the doctor, sat in a restaurant, been in a car, on a date etc. They know how you’re supposed to behave in those settings, so you can crack on fairly quickly with something unusual.

So there you go, be obvious. Sounds dumb, is smart, will be fun.

ENDNOTES

I’m usually plugging something here. Let me plug this: going outside and enjoying the sunshine. Pop your phone down. Go for a walk or a little run without it. Promise you’ll feel better x

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All live theatre requires a pretty heavy suspension of disbelief on the part of an audience. Setting aside the construct of sitting in rows gazing through a Proscenium Arch (™ Ancient Greece), we know we’re not actually watching real people in a real life scenario, but for the sake of a good time (FOR GOD’S SAKE) we’ll go with it as if we are.

This feels even more important on an improv stage. Any show could require the performers to set a scene a wide range of locations from an office break room (yawn, again!), via a science lab, inside a dog’s mouth, to the surface of a rusty coin. All perfectly normal improv settings. There’s generally not much in the way of props, sets or costumes to conjure these - even the most ‘produced’ genre shows necessarily do this in a light way to give the performers as many options as possible (usually, hats or a costume that can be many statuses of character). If we’re going to enjoy watching a show, we need to let go of a few of those details not being 100% there.

In fact, it’s probably improvised genre shows that depend most on the ‘Suspension of Disbelief’ (™ Ancient Greece, top theatre lads). Audiences obviously know they’re not watching an actual authentic Harry Potter story, Studio Ghibli film, medical drama, or whatever else the show is leaning on to shift some tickets. If they don’t know that, pray for them.

But they’ll go along with some pretty wild and implausible storylines and happening, as long as they can recognise some cornerstones of the genre generally. A romcom needs a meet-cute, we’ve got to see some wands being waved around in the Wizarding World, a sports show needs a training montage and so on. 

The idea I pitched for improvised cop show The Badge in 2019 came from the massive number of police taped interview scenes I was seeing as a go-to in normal long-form shows - usually as a nice off the peg second-beat option. You’ll need some of those interview scenes in the mix of any show set in a police world. Ironically the eventual genre show we devised had very few of these. They’re pretty one note and not necessarily great for improv once you’ve done 10 of them: cops struggling to work the tape, good cop/bad cop, perps denying what they’ve done, the scene summarising stuff we’ve already seen etc. 

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For St Doctor’s Hospital, we tried to approximate an opening credits sequence a la Grey’s Anatomy, with an earnest voiceover narration over some silent vignettes of swooning Docs taking things very seriously. Directing Winner (improv sports biog), I re-purposed a monologue style opening so it looked like a supercut of talking heads in a classic sports documentary like The Last Dance. Yes, we took it personally. 

You’ve got to be careful though. One thing that can puncture a nicely crafted Suspension of Disbelief is a lack of commitment from the performers to the honest truth of the genre. We all know what we’re doing is ridiculous. Pratting about with fake American accents pretending to study crime scenes or use a defibrillator to crank ourselves before hitting the gym is not serious behaviour.

But there’s a fine line to straddle for the performers between acknowledging that silliness, or puncturing it by an out-of-character, fourth wall breaking, comment on the show from within, or on another improviser’s mad choice. This particularly happens near the end of shows aiming for coherent narrative, as ever more convoluted attempts to tie things together are made. The Fourth Wall (™ Ancient Greece again, AND they have great souvlaki. Those guys…) can quickly disintegrate with unguarded responses in-scene like ‘Really?’, ‘Are you sure?’, or some quip that the characters themselves could never say, only an improviser judging their own show.

The Suspension of Disbelief show requires that you stay in the conceit you’ve created, for the benefit of the audience and the show’s continuity (yummm continuity, so fun). I like to see it as ‘honouring’ the scenes and show you’ve created, and ‘honouring’ the choices of your teammates.

On the other hand, most of the time we’re ultimately trying to do a comedy show. It’s not my tempo, but it can be a legitimate approach to do anything it takes to get laughs in the moment, even if it ‘harms’ the overall narrative. Why not take your Charles Dickens show to space if it feels fun? An improv show can sustain that in a way a novel or TV show wouldn’t usually attempt, so we can make a virtue of that freedom. 

So I don’t actually know: What do you think? How much or little of the performers’ real selves do we need to see during a show? When does it help and when is it a problem? Go off!

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ENDNOTES

Performing: Do Not Adjust Your Stage are taking a couple of Wunderkammer shows to the excellent Great Exhibition Road Festival at Imperial College on Sat 7 June. It’s FREE! Sign-up here.

Another thing:

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Game is a pretty nebulous concept in long-form improv. Whole training schools and courses are dedicated to it, or approaching it with a bewildering array of synonyms and related concepts like ‘the unusual point of view’, ‘the thing’, ‘a repeatable pattern of behaviour’, ‘peas in a pod’, ‘what’s fun about a scene’ etc. Game is the sort of thing improvisers know when they see, but struggle to define in a clear way.

We definitely know when a scene doesn’t have it, after which we get to whip ourselves with a million different theories as to why it didn’t work. Unavoidably in classes and post-show notes, game of the scene can become an academic exercise, or some kind of maths puzzle to solve: Do X + Y, get a hilarious scene.

For students, teachers and experienced performers alike, this ultimately often just sucks a ton of fun out of performing. Furrowed brows on the backline while your teammates figure the ‘correct’ game out so they can help (or butcher) it. Or a pair of improvisers selflessly establish a base grounded reality to no laughs for an uncomfortably long time, so others can pick out something ‘shiny’ or ‘unusual’ to explore in that context. Usually this means the mere suggestion of a playable fun ‘game’ is piled on aggressively before its has a chance to take off, and a scene being swept on the first laugh.

This all makes Game feel like something we’re not quite ever in control of, or that there’s some perfectly formed version of ‘The Game’ that we have to mine from every scene. ‘Finding the Game’ is presented as some kind of virtue, something that good improvisers do quickly and bad ones struggle with.

None of this is quite true and ignores tons of scenes that are no less enjoyable for having a messier mix. In the right hands, scenes can sustain multiple games at once, or focus on one for a while before pivoting to another, all while keeping the essential essence of the characters up to that point. Or they don’t really have a game that’s easy to define at all - maybe a character is just rocking unpredictably back and forth in their seat with some weird energy that’s never explained (credit: DNAYS’ Tim Grewcock in a recent rehearsal). In those cases, the improvisers might not be ‘finding the game’ at all, but just ‘choosing’ what’s fun to play.

I like ‘choosing the game’ over ‘finding the game’. It demystifies the game being something to hunt down like Atlantis, puts way more agency in the hands of the improvisers and also speaks to the wealth of possibilities at any point in a scene. There’s lots of possible, valid and honest choices improvisers can make in a scene, many of which will work just as well as any other, particularly if we commit to them.

We don’t have to solve some equation to make a scene work, we just need to choose what we want to play. There’s many ways to skin an improv cat.

Of course, while the long-form ‘cool kids’ are doing all this navel gazing about what the essence of improv comedy is, very many successful short-form acts are cracking on just fine playing games of their own, with clearly defined parameters we’re all on board with from the get-go. Sounds like heaven (See Susan Harrison’s great article about this). Audiences love it. Everyone goes home happy instead of whimpering over esoteric notes about the tag run in the second beat. Great choice.

What do you think is best to do with ‘the game’: find it, choose it, bop it? Let me know in the comments!

ENDNOTES

Delighted that a short I appear in - Bitter Pubs #049: Purgatory - will be showing at Loco Comedy Film Festival at Brixton Ritzy Cinema on 11th May. You can pick up a ticket here, or if you can’t make it, watch the film here!

Props to director Jack Harris for masterfully shepherding the full range of my acting skills as I lie silently on the floor of a pub.

From the archive: You're absolutely insane, but I still love you - Some tips on playing a ‘voice of reason’ character that helps the unusual point-of-view play its game

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On a weekend in the German capital recently, I was struck by its contradictions. Obviously Berlin spent 40 years divided by a literal wall, but its duality is still surprising. Two, or more, things seem simultaneously true wherever you look.

Berlin is popularly ‘the least German’ of Germany’s major cities. And yet a big stein of beer and a giant sausage await EVERYWHERE. That’s no ordinary sausage though: for some reason it must be drenched in curry sauce.

On the same day: I saw both a textbook Oompah band, and a leather jacket-clad 50-something man beautifully crooning 80s power ballads in a traditional market. All these very different things seemed simultaneously pretty German to me.

Berlin’s streets are covered in graffiti and worn concrete, but also immaculately clean. I was there doing a half marathon (BARF) - the start/finish area had plentiful toilets and even showers, and yet leagues of runners were merrily popping a squat in the surrounding parkland. Top tip, double layer your picnic blankets in Tiergarten.

Berlin’s young people seem really cool, but also carry themselves awkwardly and almost apologetically, like anywhere else. In 2025, many rock a moustache and mullet combination befitting the era of Rudi Voller, but this is also somehow completely up-to-date. I felt totally square in my millennial London normcore kit (cord overshirt, slim jeans, nice trainer. Check check check).

More seriously, Berlin is painfully re-united, with a complex and very visible history. It wears its scars with dignity, but also has a young, creative population that doesn’t seem to give many shits about conforming to expectations.

It’s phenomenally ugly, but the Brandenburg Gate, Alexanderplatz TV tower, remaining Wall segments and various memorials are all impressive in their own way. The Reichstag building alone is a glass Norman Foster masterpiece smashed into a neoclassical government building.

Basically, Berlin is the capital of opposite land. I’m not sure what to do with that, except there’s mileage in approaching improv with that spirit too. I’ve written before about a 15-minute improv city, but there’s something specific about Berlin’s ‘vibe’ (Again, I have no authority to be commenting on the vibe of anything, unless its a branch of Gail’s)

Improv is often messy and unstructured, but has a million different ‘forms’ to guide performers towards something watchable and coherent. Between tag-outs, sweep edits, Canadian crosses, revolving doors, pattern games, organic edits etc there’s tons of odd ways to navigate through a show. And yet audiences figure out pretty quickly how it works.

Improv can reward cheap laughs (literally fart gags and a well placed ‘FUCK!’), while also being capable of legitimately profound or moving moments. You can get more from a silent piece of spacework than a crafted verbal initiation. You’ve seen a thousand fun narrative shows, but how many of those stories do you remember?

We improvisers can simultaneously seem quite cool and esoteric, but also insufferable dorks drunk on in-jokes. It’s the least ‘comedy’ of the comedy arts. In the UK, it’s perceived as way below sketch, sitcoms, panel shows and stand-up in the respectability stakes. Bad improv is the worst, but the good stuff often feels far beyond what sketch can do.

Improv is at once very accessible (no props, costumes, sets etc), while having layers of impenetrable barriers to stage time.

What’s left? Berlin is not some hyper-planned genteel museum to urbanity. It’s got all the chaos of city life in primary colours. Improv is similarly feral and untamed, but its best performers are still studied in the technical principles that make it work. Like Berlin can’t and shouldn’t be Rome, improv can’t and shouldn’t be scripted theatre. Accept the contradictions and limitations as essential parts of what makes them work.

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ENDNOTES

Berlin Veterans, by the ever excellent Meditations for the Anxious Mind.

I had a blast teaching improv in Woking over March with my old mucker Nick Oram of DNAYS. Pip and team have built a lovely community there. If you’re nearby, get stuck in

From the archive: I may be bricking myself ahead of running Manchester Marathon on 27th April, but I’ve also learned lots about myself and creativity: 9 things running taught me about improv.

More names of improv teams coming to your local venue soon: Wonderclunk, Not for me Clive, ALF 2.0, Airtime Remorse, Spider Monkey Squad, Cocked Up: the improvised prison drama, Artemis Howl, and Giggly Gibbon

Tussauds is undeniably one of London’s authentic cultural jewels, alongside historic sites of M&Ms World and Winter Wonderland. Don’t be put off by the location next to the disgusting wasteland of Regents Park, Madame Tussauds is well worth queuing for hours in London’s famously fantastic weather to visit.

Anyway, as any group chat does, the discussion went off-piste, turning up this crackers observation…

This tickled me A LOT. So many specifics, so efficiently delivered, rooted in truth.

A well-trodden comedy note is that specificity is king. Perhaps counterintuitively, being more specific makes your scenes, stories and characters more relatable to more people. Vague and broad is unhelpful. Rather than ordering a coffee, have a large, iced caramel macchiato with almond milk, extra caramel drizzle on the bottom. Instead of your character going for a walk, they can go for a steady pootle. Instead of blandly addressing your scene partner as ‘son’, what about ‘champ’? All of these give us more information about the characters, and get closer to how real people talk, rather than how scripts think they talk.

So back to the text, why did its mad array of specifics make me laugh so much, and how can I use the same principles in any scene?:

1. The specific combo of Luther Vandross and the Pope. I don’t know if Luther Vandross was religious, but certainly he moved in different circles to the Holy Father. I date this scene to 2005, meaning it could be either Pope John Paul II or Pope Benedict XVI. Google’s AI search says ‘There's no known connection or interaction between the singer Luther Vandross and *any* Pope’, which even widening the Pope Scope (™) is good enough for me.

2. The extremely narrow parameters under which the texter’s mother is willing to visit Madame Tussauds: ONLY if they had waxworks of both Vandross and the Pope. What has led this woman to this point? Will she not be satisfied with photo realistic waxwork replicas of any other celebrities?

3. Now, 2005 is the year both Vandross and John Paul II died. So, I can somewhat understand the clamour to see them in wax form. However, it takes Tussauds 4 months and £150,000 to create a waxwork. Even if they started making them the day Luther Vandross passed - two months Post-Papal-Partum (TM) - the earliest both models could be on display simultaneously in one Tussauds location is November 2005. All to say, it’s a demanding timeline for Tussauds to honour the pair. Unless, of course, they already had them on show. For all Dance with my Father was a return to form for the velvet-voiced balladeer, that feels unlikely.

4. The slim possibility that she means the real Luther Vandross and the Pope. At no point is the word ‘waxwork’ mentioned. This feels like a fun and playable point-of-view: being oblivious to Madame Tussauds being a very specific type of attraction, and/or believing they have the real celebrities on show in some kind of tourist purgatory.

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5. The very teenage, primal and relatable quality of feeling embarrassed by your parents encroaching on your life, transposed into an adult workplace setting.

6. A tiny detail, but calling your child’s workplace is a nice specific too. Not their private mobile. Their direct work line.

7. Leaving a message with the request. Not only does this person see the contents of Madame Tussauds apparently vital to clarify ahead of a visit, they also expect their adult daughter to interrupt their working day to Google it to find out. Unable to speak to them directly, they’ve left a message, to guarantee its done. This needlessly wastes a colleague’s time too.

8. The fact that the parent couldn’t just Google it themselves, or better yet, use the time spent on this phonecall to ring Madame Tussauds instead. Given my own exhaustive and unsuccessful googling to investigate their current stock, I definitely think calling them directly is the way to go. They do appear to have a section called ‘Impossible Festival’ which feels the most likely place to see Vandross and the Pope together.

9. Specifics are sticky. The texter held this completely frivolous memory for 20+ years. It took this specific chain of human brains, and an uncle desperate to connect with their teenage nephew, to unlock this dormant memory two decades later.

10. Ending with ‘true story’. I have no reason to believe it’s not true. The specifics are so bizarre and the stakes so low that making them up seems unlikely. That’s one of the main reasons the most popular (unoriginal?) long-form improv format is some version of a true story from a guest monologist or audience member being used to inspire scenes. Your local theatre definitely has this show. The audience can see the mechanism of the format and exactly what the performers are using to improvise with. But it only works to spin comedy at it if it isn’t trying too hard in the first place. We need to believe the story is true.

11. Taking everything together, that text is surely a totally original sentence in the English language (more here). I had to be in that whatsapp group at that exact moment to experience it. The magic of improv crystallised.

Endnotes:

• Marvel at the contents of Madame Tussauds knock-off - Louis Tussauds

• I don’t know about the Pope, but Luther Vandross truly has an immaculate singing voice. Revel in this silky 10 minute display

Performing:

• At the beautiful Machynlleth Comedy Festival with DNAYS’ Wunderkammer, 3rd May. Tickets

From the archive:

• Succeeding in improv auditions

British improv is worse. End of article? No, sorry. I can’t speak on intersectional aspects of this (Others have so well from their own experience). However, from any angle, improv has serious social mobility issues. There is a vast over-representation of privately-educated, upper-class, performers in leading positions in UK improv, theatre and comedy generally (all worsened by Covid). We have ignored and/or failed to address it for years.

The performing arts are a hard place to feel welcome if you’re outside a narrow privileged clique. Only 7% of the UK population were privately schooled, but they represent 60% of performing arts workers. SIXTY PER CENT. You might say ‘but the arts are really left-wing and liberal. Other industries are worse’. Wrong:

• Law (21% private)

• Architecture (10%)

• Medicine (21-50%) .

• Politics? Nope, 23% of MPs are privately educated. Of 25 Cabinet members, only one was.

They look like bastions of inclusivity versus the arts. What excuse does improv have, other than not caring enough to fix it?

The impossibility of an arts career

I grew-up lower middle-class (NRS/ONS social grade C1, sociology nerds). I didn’t want for anything, nor did we live in luxury. I grew-up in a terrace in a diverse, deprived Northern mill-town. We had a football team once. At school (state comp), many kids had tougher backgrounds, more were wealthier. Someone’s Dad had TVs in his Range Rover headrests like Pimp My Ride.

I loved comedy growing up, mainly working-class comedians like Morecambe & Wise, John Candy, Bury local Victoria Wood was a glimmer of ‘you could do this too’. Even then they all felt like throwbacks. I also liked stuff by the higher-ups (Blackadder, Monty Python), not that you could avoid it. TV shows like Are You Being Served and Allo Allo felt like something Thatcher would like, and somehow I knew Tories didn’t share my interests.

Theatre is not something the vast majority get to see or do. I don’t recall seeing a play until adulthood, outside a school panto trip. I genuinely thought you had to wear a suit to the theatre.

At Uni in Sheffield (US-readers, all the glamour of Pittsburgh with better music), the idea someone could be privately-educated yet not at Oxbridge seemed bizarre. “If you’re so clever, how did you end up here?”.

I had no lectures in my last term (I know, lucky), so I had time to find student societies, and eventually improv. We hustled for shows in the Union bar and other pubs, organised a charity comedy festival and convinced the Alumni fund to send us to Edinburgh Fringe for 2 weeks. We had an amazing time, but had to stay 3 to a bed and feed on £2.50 sarnies from Baguette Express. The rank privilege at the Fringe was already so visibly off the charts in 2008, let alone now.

After graduating, I got a day job, before the broken economic gravity led me to London, where the streets are paved with tenants’ tears. With absolute respect to the many thriving improv scenes in other parts of the UK, London’s confluence of creative industries and investment means it unavoidably hosts the largest concentration of improv schools, venues and performers. I don’t like it either, but here we are.

Devouring as much improv as I could for a decade, a few alienating things repeatedly came up.

You can afford to do improv or act IN LONDON without a dayjob?

I luckily moved to London with a job line-up in 2012. It was a short contract, but enough for some security without parental backing. Fully planning to move back after 9 months, a bunch of extensions made that 11 years.

I made improv friends who simply didn’t need a ‘day-job’ to make ends meet. They had the best education money can buy, and remained bankrolled by asset-owning families. Many owned flats (or HOUSES!) in a famously overheated property market by their late-20s. Some are landlords.

Being frank, any money they make from improv is largely for ice cream. Improv is not lucrative - but we’re compounding the problem if the few paid teaching and performing jobs are hovered up by already privately wealthy improvisers. They might still work hard and be good at what they do. But, that’s much easier with the security to be bad and earn nothing from it, in one of the world’s most expensive cities, until that point.

By 2023, I felt confident enough to leave that job and focus on creative work. I then chowed down savings RAPIDLY and the financial precarity contributed to a catastrophic mental breakdown. In total, that’s 13 years of a 9-to-5 combined with a 5-to-9, to get partially competent in improv. Good luck sleeping, eating or anything else resembling self-care.

They know these warm ups already?

You get used to confusion if you aren’t from the dominant social clique. Some improvisers went to schools with THREE professional standard theatres. I’d done 100s of shows in the corners of bars, above pubs, tents etc, but I still didn’t perform in anything you’d call a theatre until 2013. I was 27.

As a high-school governor in a deprived London neighbourhood, I’ve sat in school board meetings where a normalised strategy is not offering music, drama or art as a subject at all, because the school isn’t judged against it, they can’t find a qualified teacher, or enough students simply aren’t interested to make it financially viable. If they aren’t doing this stuff as children, they’re not going to be queuing up as adults for your Level 5 Advanced Harold class.

Even if they somehow find it, improv workshop groups can be pretty isolating. So many times I’ve seen a privileged few derail that already know their silly warm up games from theatre school, or prep-school production of The Mikado, derail a class by cutting straight to breaking rules, before they’ve done it properly or explained them to anyone else. An apt reflection of class in the UK. Failing upwards. Zip-Zap-Feck Off.

More tea vicar? Their improv scenes are very safe

I have to use this word: posh. Posh improvisers play safe, navigating scenes like Victorian parlour games. Without adversity or any outsider perspective, word-play and overtly sexual content are go-tos.

Using pop-culture is also an easy relatable substitute for lived experience. Except the cultural shorthand references for upper class improvisers are things like Narnia, Beatrix Potter or nuances of Oxbridge college rivalries. I’ve tried, but it’s hard to care about Jemima Puddleduck flagging-down the Flying Scotsman as it charges through the Chilterns for tea and cake… Was I close?

Reared on a rigid class-scaffold: British improvisers tend to play scenes with a limited emotional range between “jolly-good sport” and “I’ve never been so insulted”. Improvisers have little chance of widening the audience by leaning on bizarre comedies of manners 90% of people can’t relate to.

They love regional accents as shortcuts for comedy characters

Anyone who has visited Didsbury or Tower Hamlets knows the North-South divide is a crude definition of class. But it’s still useful. Important things happen outside the M25: 50 million people live there.

I’m SO tired of watching improvisers from extraordinarily privileged backgrounds put on regional accents as a shorthand for an interesting ‘character’. Great that you’ve honed a passable Northern accent, but what is the joke exactly? That we have strong ‘U’ sounds, drop our Ts, make you feel a bit scared on a night out, or write the best music? Talking like a Yorkshire steeplejack doesn’t equal comedy.

If you’re in the top 1%, the sphere of characters authentically available to you is tiny. I’ve lost count of scenes I’ve watched set in audition rooms or generic white-collar offices (great, you temped in one for a few weeks).

At one London’s improv theatre, from a pool of 150+ performers, there were *seven* Northerners. This generously counts Stoke as Northern (lads, it’s the Midlands). They had to create their own team to get stage time. There’s no shortage of Northerners in London, they just don’t see improv as welcoming or relevant to them. Ask yourself why? Then consider how that applies tenfold to people of colour, LGBTQIA+, disabled or any other marginalised group.

Who you know matters

Class is a mostly invisible identity, but it’s baked into our society’s power dynamics. Britain’s powerful got there through generations of networking and entrenching a monoculture. That monoculture also defines what ‘good’ is on stage and the codes for who’s included in decision-making off-stage.

Modern long-form improv was invented by white college intellectuals: we don’t have to follow their definition of good or acceptable use/abuse of power. Without purposeful steps to avoid them, echo chambers are quickly created that reinforce each other’s views and are overly resistant to challenge.

WOW. Those chips on your shoulder must be heavy. But what can anyone do about it?

Improv should be way more accessible. There’s no props or sets required. No scripts should mean fewer academic hoops to jump through. But courses are expensive and deliberately hierarchical to milk cash from students. Vague ideas of progression and promises of stardom are sold down the pyramid. 5 levels, 8 week courses, plus electives. That’s £2k+ before you’ve seen a stage.

Aspiring performers: Institutions come and go. I’ve got football boots older than every improv theatre in London. You don’t need permission. Start your own shows, build your own audiences.

Improv leaders: The same people with the social and economic capital and motivation to set-up improv theatres are unlikely to be the best equipped to sustain them. Work harder to ensure the pipeline of performers reflects the communities where they perform. Remove unconscious and affinity biases from your syllabuses, create flatter paths to stage-time. Build more inclusive environments and address the ways your monoculture leads to exclusion. You could (should) surrender some of your own many performance opportunities and powers.

You didn’t choose your background. It’s okay. Wear your privilege well. It’s great you love improv, but earn your place. Be better than you were yesterday: You’re probably not prodigiously talented, but have been indulged with luxuries of more access, time and financial security to do the hours. If you have the power to make casting and programming decisions, address your blind spots. Make room for people from outside your experience. Champion them. And by ‘eck, please stop playing working-class Northerners unless you are one.

Endnotes

Listening: a palate cleanser from the Geordie Bruce Springsteen

Performing: DNAYS are bringing The Wunderkammer to Imperial College ‘Future Cities’ Lates this Tuesday, 11th March. TED-style talks from guest academics will inspired improvised comedy. Join us

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1. It’s not cool, so chill out

You’ve found the elixir of life in improv/running. The endorphins have made you high and evangelical. But, outside this serene cultish bubble, most people are utterly baffled at your dedication to a niche pursuit that’s famous for being bad. They’ll never get it.

Nervous runners lose speed when their body wastes energy on tension, rather than propelling forwards. Nervous improvisers trapped in their own head can’t listen to or support their partner.

Running Parkrun each week won’t make you a rippling adonis. The chance of you being picked up for a lucrative TV career from improv is nil-point-zero. About 20 people in the history of time have done it. Someone will always be faster and funnier than you. Free yourself of being cool by knowing your personal ‘why’ for doing it. You’ll have way more fun.

2. Work on your weaknesses, then your strengths

If you hate hills, run them in training. If you hate spacework, focus on it in rehearsal. Aim to be a little better, a little more adaptable, than you were last week. Add strings to your bow. Repeat.

3. Carve your own path

Don’t accept gatekeepers or wait for a theatre to give you stage time. Plenty of ‘hit’ improv shows started as indie shows for pals. DNAYS’ first Wunderkammer shows started there, then friends-of-friends, then new people entirely. Put on whatever show you want. Enter whatever race you want. Or do neither. You’re the boss of your life.

4. Not all successes are measurable

Sure, you can measure race-times or audiences, but they tell you nothing about how things actually felt. Turning up consistently is a success. Having fun is a success. Nudging at the edges of your comfort zone is a success. Or stay in that comfy zone if you like. I won’t gatekeep!

5. Find balance

There’s more to life than running. Cultivate different types of energy and resilience: You’ll get faster. Competing in a cross-country race alongside an 11 year old boy and 80 year old granddad is humbling. It chucks your ego in the drain and connects you with people you wouldn’t otherwise meet…. before you eat their dust in the race.

There’s more to life than improv: Cultivate other experiences to draw from. How many scenes about auditions, coffee shops or TV-cliches can you tolerate? When was the last weekend you didn’t visit an improv venue? Perform in new places, with new people or learn a new skill entirely. You’ll be far more interesting to watch.

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6. Turn up

Confession time: I’m a terrible rehearser. I struggle adopting a performing mindset in an empty rehearsal room. But I still turn up. My group DNAYS rehearsed weekly for years. Steadily, we got better. We could afford iffy rehearsals, because we showed up week-after-week, committed to the same goal. Any decent running training plan says not to sweat each workout if you’re committing to the whole.

7. Look after your body.

You need rest. You can’t sprint a 10k. 80% of your running should be low intensity. Train slow, race fast. This protects you from injury and helps recovery from harder workouts. Equally, don’t burnout doing too much improv at top intensity. Our bodies aren’t designed for show-level adrenalin multiple times a week. Improv will still be there after you have a break.

Booze/ drugs/ tons of fruit pastilles won’t help. Drinking the night before, your morning run will be slower and less fun. While I’ve never run juiced like Ben Johnson in Seoul 88, I know from multiple Edinburgh Fringes that a post-show drink is nice, but makes being present and energised the next day far harder.

Improv environments with normalised binge drinking and substance use suck. It’s admittedly hard to avoid when most UK venues are in pubs. Put whatever you want in your body, but it’s a tough place to improvise from, risking show quality and how included people feel around you. Imagine the hilarious characters, dynamic space work, or deep show-closing connections you could create with a fresh mind.

8. Flow state is real

Things worth doing can be hard. When you first start running, every step is an effort. Running to the end of the street feels like Superhero territory. Then, over time, you’ve done a bunch of Parkruns, 10ks or longer. They’re still challenging, but you’re having fun: time flies.

When you first start improvising, every second is excruciating. You’re constantly confused and pulling-off a Harold feels like Superhero territory. Then, over time, you’ve done a bunch of 15 minute sets, mad tag runs and flopped more than you care to remember. Improv is still challenging, but you’re having fun: time flies.

For fleeting moments, things feel effortless. Flow State. Enjoy it. Normal service of screaming lungs, legs and ego will resume soon.

9. Get some super shoes

All hobbies have plenty of magical marketing mumbo-jumbo about products to make you better. Snake-oil classes on ‘game’ with Len Lee from East Portland Improv Attic don’t come cheap. They might help. They might not. One thing definitely works: carbon-plated shoes. Proven to improve performance by 4%. You’ll be flying round your local Parkrun and your sweep edits. You can’t blaze a PB in Converse Chuck Taylors.

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Endnotes

Watching: This lad is very fast. Head to your local athletics track and try run his average one-lap time of 64 seconds. Then consider he did that for ANOTHER 56 MINUTES

Limmy with a warning about what could go wrong merging running and improv. True story.

A real, totally fictional list of improv teams in your city: Plush Gumbo, The Johnny Five Experience, Struwwelpeter, Mike & Sally, Shut That Door!, Donkey Garage Rock, and A-OKAY-SLAY

My fellow Improvisers. I speak to you today as your Moon President. Summoned again to perform my most holy and inconvenient duty - the third beat of your Harold.

I am a busy person. The Moon doesn’t preside itself. There are minerals and water up here, things that you can mine for more than just scene initiations. Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to look, called as I am again to your pub theatre to heighten your idea for a scene to its wacky conclusion at the end of your set.

Let me say this, my duties are very serious. There is nothing funny about being president of the moon, especially after the 15,000th time I have closed a Harold. I am just trying to do my job here.

The limits of my deputy - the regular Mr President - were expended during the first line of your first beat. I get it, you need some stakes for this initiation. Start strong. There’s no higher stakes location than the White House, where than one man (always a man, sigh) can command the full might of the US military. Unfortunately, your setting for your first scene was so unusual that we were left with few places to go. You were taught that your Harold should heighten from beat-to-beat. How can you heighten from a President who is more concerned with vanquishing the evil of Rubik’s Cubes than violent threats to the territorial United States?

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The Moon, that’s where. Can’t go much higher than the Moon. A moon landing is very big stakes, definitely more than a regular boring President doing their day job. No doubt that the moon is a fun place for your second beat. Where better to place this insane character who believes Rubik’s Cubes are literally the devil’s work than to take them off-planet? Hilarious.

Alas once you’ve gone to the Moon, I - the Moon President - am the logical next step for your third beat. There’s no-one else here to help. Since you labored a little too heavily to ‘heighten’ the stakes, you spent little time exploring and discovering new elements to the game you set up. All you’ve got to play with are (1) sinister Rubik’s Cubes, (2) presidents and (3) the moon.

Even if I was the Moon President who thinks Rubik’s Cubes are the devil’s work, I’m not sure what an audience is supposed to do with that. The job of Moon President must seem already pretty unusual to an Earth audience. It’s not an especially grounded, relatable job, that everyone has had some insight on. And I’m sure that someone thinking Rubik’s Cubes are the demented design of Beelzebub himself is also pretty unusual to them too.

What’s so shiny and fun here that it’s worth bringing back in your third beat - the triumphant crescendo for your whole show? It’s hard to tell because the whole scenario is insane. There’s no way someone who believes in the latent malevolent power of a children’s toy would ascend to become a President (actually, I’ve seen who you guys seem to enjoy electing down there).

As I, the actual Moon President, know better than anyone: Moon President is too much. It’s literally not grounded. ‘Heightening’ doesn’t mean a trip to the Oval Office, the Moon or the Oval Crater. These are artificial higher stakes. It’s easier and funnier to put an unusual point-of-view where it’ll get a chance to do more of its thing, and where it remains unusual on its own, rather than one of a thousand mad things in the scene. There’s always more than 3 options for these to build through your Harold, certainly more than the President, the Moon and the Moon President.

Far simpler to place Satanic Rubik’s Cubes in a much more grounded settings throughout, where we can frame it as unusual - bringing it up in a work appraisal, in a chat with your spouse, at confession, while doing the laundry, in a driving lesson, etc etc. These heighten by showing this point-of-view to be unusual in a number of unrelated, grounded settings. That’s the unexpected thing that will delight your audience, in settings they can understand and relate to. Rather than trying to ‘heighten’, think instead of ‘deepening’. As yourself what settings you can bury this unusual point of view in a scene, so the audience won’t see it coming, but where your character still can’t help themselves.

If we work together, united as one group mind, we can rebuild the soul of the improv nation. Yes, our scenes might never visit the moon again. But then I might have more time to discharge the duties of my powerful lunar office.

Thank you, may God bless your improv team and vanquish the diabolical creators of Rubik’s Cubes.

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Endnotes

Performing: Braving Storm Eowyn for the 93rd edition of DNAYS’ Wunderkammer at Bristol Improv Theatre, tonight - Fri 24 January, 8pm. TED-style talks from an IP-lawyer-come-circus-rigger and a poet-come-Charles-Dickens-educator inspire improvised comedy. It’s a blast. Buy tickets

Also catch us back at comedy Glastonbury, Machynlleth Comedy Festival, on Sat 3rd May. Buy tickets

Watching: Like the entire UK, The Traitors. The cleverest and stupidest of society flung together in a Scottish Castle to play a Victorian parlour game. They all forget it’s just a game. The most oblivious simple souls often win.

Listening: Brooklyn bedroom pop artist, and curly haired wistful sad lad with a tinge of optimism, Darwin Deez’s new album ‘Of Course I Still Love You’ is a beaut. 'Lower me down, into my silo, I know I left my heart around here somewhere, it’s dry though'

The British reboot of Saturday light-entertainment show Gladiators is the greatest TV show of all time. WHAT. The Wire? The Sopranos? Breaking Bad? Haven’t seen them. I’ve heard they’re decent, but some shows are more decent than others.

A cracking mix of nostalgia, muscle and seriously inspirational humans, Gladiators tests essential skills: 

1. whacking each other with foam

2. bumping into each other very hard with foam 

3. scrambling through an arena-sized obstacle course, made of foam

The ‘Glads’ are named to project strength & machismo: mainly mangled Greek & Roman mythology, or materials from the Industrial Revolution. The public contenders are named after regular humans. So Tony from Sheffield must scramble up a wall faster than Electric Zeus… from Olympus, I guess.

What’s this got to do with improv? Well, with absolute sincerity, the Gladiators are masters of playing simple, effective, points of view. You should be watching it every week to hone your appreciation of character, comedy and huge pieces of foam. But, just how would the Gladiators fit into your improv team? Yes, all 16 of them.

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Apollo - Everyone fancies him. Behind your seething jealousy, you do too. He’s simply ‘okay’ at improv, but his Hotty Halo ensures he’s invited to do every show without audition. He will routinely get laughs simply for labelling a character’s name as John. It’s show-business kid, looks matter. 

Athena - completes 90% of shows without initiating a single scene. Comfortable doing the third move in a group game, neither heightening, nor clarifying the game. At the bar afterwards, you notice she’s still upstairs on the backline, furrowing her brow for the perfect move. Athena always thinks she’s had a terrible show, which might be true had she said more than 3 lines.

Bionic - Has no comedy heroes, pop culture references or expert topics to draw on. The fact he turned up on time is your only clue that he knows what day it is. Bionic routinely ends up playing hilarious low status characters, mainly because every scene flies totally over his head. More meat than man, the confused tears rolling from those vacant eyes aren’t water, they’re Huel. 

Comet - She’s in the team, but no-one is sure if she still wants to be. It’s awkward when she turns up 5 minutes before a show expecting to seamlessly perform the elaborate reverse Harold you worked on during the 15 rehearsals she missed. Keeps saying she’ll make the next one. Never does.

Diamond - Very well brought up. Good-Manners is her double-barrelled middle name. Not 100% clear why she made the team other than rank privilege and peppy enthusiasm. Happy doing admin as long as she can cast herself in every show. The girl scout exterior masks her growing realisation that while money can buy you training and time, it can’t buy actual talent. Still, she’s booked a free weekly rehearsal for the next 6 years at the office she temps in, so you’ve gotta keep her around.

Dynamite - Your favourite improviser’s favourite improviser: No nonsense and good at every supportive move in the book. Audience will think she’s done nothing, when in fact she’s unselfishly done all the necessary grunt work for the rest of you. When you can’t pinpoint why your team had a bad show where nothing lands, it’s because Dynamite wasn’t there. Doomed/blessed to be teaching improv until she’s 95 years old. But unbeatable in Duel.

Electro - Far too cool for this shit. You just about understand these words in isolation, but Electro is their Shakespeare. She can string together entire paragraphs with: ‘boujee’, ‘bussin’, ‘cheugy’, ‘gas’, ‘rizz’, ‘drip’, ‘hits different’, ‘swag’, ‘bet’, ’fit’, ‘mid’, ‘sus’ ‘hypebeast’, ‘steezy’ & ‘lit’. The five Gen Alphas in the audience cackle with approval at every line. While your brain decodes things in total confusion, best to just keep quietly miming cleaning glasses in the background. No cap.

Fire - slotting improv between weekly commitments to yoga, pottery making, play writing, human rights law, marathon running, volunteering at an animal hospital, teaching orphans to read and cleaning the local canal with a special net she invented. Never misses a show or rehearsal. Seemingly perfect until Xmas party karaoke reveals she’s a lightweight drinker, unloading her unguarded, but ultimately benign, opinions on whoever settles in her eyeline. No-one lets this go, initiating scenes in bars, offering refreshment or mentioning being thirsty every show. She gamely takes it in her stride.

Fury - A rare comedian with emotional intelligence, since she’s actually overcome some adversity in her life. Even rarer, she’s Northern. Backstage pre-show, Fury spends as much time checking everyone’s okay as warming up. The sort of kindness you’d have, if you ever stopped thinking about yourself. She will elevate any scene with a simple ‘what’s this really about? Are you okay love?’, even if it’s about big swinging donkey balls. Especially if it’s about big swinging donkey balls.

Giant - improvising to keep his heart rate up between his 3 daily gym sessions, Giant is a true believer in playing what you know. Yet to do a scene where he doesn’t pump iron - gym, prison break yard, library, ironmongers, foam forging factory. Giant will willingly lift any teammates entering his wingspan above his head. Looks so uncomfortable in the plaid shirts, skinny jeans & converse your team agreed on, so reluctantly permitted a vest. Welcome to the gun show: are you ready to pump iron?

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Legend - a master of playing the same point of view in every scene. Never has one improviser eked out so many subtly different takes on their go-to character: an arrogant villain who doesn’t realise he’s losing. It works every time and he knows it. Why try anything else? If ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Sidebar: the real ‘Legend’ is actually amazing at this. Totally ‘on game’ at all times and genuinely surprising and funny.

Nitro - The audience’s favourite. You can’t do anything about it, just give him the ball and let him play. Disgustingly naturally talented & likeable, Nitro has ‘always just found improv really fun’. Stage fright is an alien concept to this mensch. He can do everything, except sombre slow-burn improv, which never gets any laughs anyway: Nitro isn’t interested in chin stroking nods. He’s here for a good time, not a long time. Zero use getting any essential group admin done, but you can’t hate the guy, he’s got charisma for days.

Phantom - will do some average, aloof and ironically detached improv for a total of 3 shows over an 8 year period, then somehow get cast in an international hit sitcom. Can he act or is he just lucky ‘mumblecore’ is still a thing? Phantom will never mention improv in a single interview or bring any improvisers up with him. He climbed the ladder on his own merit (and a famous dad), but makes sure it’s firmly kicked away anyway. Ambitious beyond belief, would murder his own brother for a BAFTA.

Sabre - determined to make every scene about sex. More than willing to play a talking animal, tree or fridge, but will not deviate from her natural Scottish accent or risque content. Mistaking lewd choices for charisma, the audience loves it, only reinforcing their absolute belief that 5 seconds of audience silence must be addressed with ‘a bit of blue’. The castmates who have to ground things anc keep it PG, less so.

Steel: Nice guy, really understands the rules and mechanics of good improv, turns up for every show & rehearsal, diligently taking notes that he shares round afterwards. Steel remembers everyone’s names and details about their life. The kind of guy you’d be happy taking home to meet your mum, he brought cake to the last rehearsal, then spent the next 2 hours laughing and saying ‘Brilliant’ to everyone’s moves. Unfortunately, despite all that, he just isn’t funny.

Viper - A total nutjob. ‘Drama is conflict’ compressed painfully into one man, Viper can play the full spectrum of emotions: frustration, anger and rage. Once silenced an audience & received a mercy blackout from the tech desk after threatening to ‘strangle the little c**t’ while playing a nursery teacher. Straws are pulled every week for who has to tell him to play a little less intensively. I’m not doing it.

They’d make for a tough audition process for your house teams. So maybe just give them a pugil stick each and see who prevails.

Endnotes

Performing: I’ll be performing with Do Not Adjust Your Stage at Bristol Improv Theatre on Friday 24th January in the 93rd edition of The Wunderkammer - TED-style talks from amazing guest speakers will inspire improv comedy scenes, sketches and characters. Tickets here

Watching: The second season of Gladiators starts on 18 January 2025 on BBC One. Catch it and previous episodes on iPlayer. For those of a 90s vintage, most of the ITV series (Fashanu, Ulrika, the Wolfman) is on YouTube.

Listening: to the banging Gladiator theme song obviously. Extended mix with full verses and leather jacket & perm rocker vocalist? Yes please.

Enjoying: Everyone’s favourite elf Timothee Chalamet rocked up at the UK premiere of his new movie on a Lime Bike. Why? He’s just so kooky. Then, he claimed he got a £65 fine. Except Lime don’t do fines that big, and why would they fine anyone for the superb publicity they just got. None of the other local authorities are claiming responsibility for trying to shake out Wonka’s wonga. Someone is lying. Could it be silly Chalamet? He’s already pretending to be Bob Dylan. What else might he lie about? The plot thickens.

‘15 minute cities’ is Carlos Moreno’s technical planning principle that kicked around the public policy circles I work in for years, before bored conspiracists got hold of it in 2020. Somehow1, they extrapolated it into a bizarre and abstract global conspiracy by vague ‘elites’ to control people into zones, ‘something something 5G’, forced vaccinations , low traffic neighbourhood ghettos etc, fuelled by the World Economic Forum’s unfortunately titled ‘Great Reset’. 

It’s none of those things. 15 minute cities is the simple idea that essential services (healthcare, groceries, leisure activities, work) should be within 15 minutes of active travel or public transport from their home - ie by foot, bike, bus or train, but not private car - for everyone. Not much to object to, though few places have pursued or achieved it (there’s interesting work in Paris, London and Copenhagen (a *5* minute city). Mostly, it rebalances 70+ years of prioritising cars in urban planning, with all that’s dangerous and unpleasant about that from filthy air to thousands of avoidable deaths.

Having briefed many politicians for the WEF’s Davos event since 2013, I assure you there is no conspiracy. It’s mainly a bland industry conference in a Swiss leisure centre and some 3-star hotel lobbies. Imagine LinkedIn wearing North Face puffer jackets and snow shoes. Good luck booking a table at a Davos fondue restaurant in late January, let alone building a New World Order2.

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The 15-minute improv set

Anyway, what has this got to do with perfoming improv? Well, what could be more improv-like than to exaggerate a simple premise into an implausible fantasy with no basis in reality (honk!). But no, I got thinking: What if the principles of 15 minute cities were applied to an improv set? Like a stand-up’s ‘tight-five’ or a sketch groups best 3 sketches, what if your improv team could give an audience everything they need in 15 minutes? It’d be more convenient and fun than struggling through silence in half your set towards a couple of polite chuckles.

When my group Do Not Adjust Your Stage (DNAYS) started in long-form improv, we performed a lot of short performance slots on mixed-bill nights in pubs, sometimes alongside stand-up and sketch acts. That was where we could get stage time. We did so many bad and unfulfilling sets, then they gradually got better.

How? In weekly rehearsals, we relentlessly practiced 10-15 minute sets so we could confidently nail them for audiences who may be new to improv and impatient to its rhythms. Instead of outstaying our welcome, we’d hopefully leave them wanting more at our own fuller length shows (plug!). Even now, with the privilege of longer sets, fellow performers highlight how quickly we cut to the chase. This owes a lot to those 100s of 15 minute drills a decade ago.

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Why can’t I have more than 15 minutes to show off!? Gimme that stagetime. Chompchompchomp. yummyyummyyummy.

Real talk. 99% of long-form improv sets have no business being 30, 40 or 50 minutes long. Too many talented performers have tried and failed. There is no audience alive that can tolerate an hour-long Harold, Deconstruction or whatever format you half-learned second hand from an iO/UCB team you’ve only seen on the NY Comedy YouTube channel. Your sound-&-movement invocation opening is too weird for anyone who hasn’t heard of Del Close… and most of those who have. No-one will ever be as impressed with it as you are with yourselves. Being polite to other, the fellow acts on your bill will not appreciate your 45 minute-long Harold, while the audience bakes in the increasingly hot room. 

I think I heard this from Adam Meggido of Showstopper, but if not, I’m sure he’d agree: You are charging people to watch a show, ‘put on a f*cking show’. Respect your audience and their time, and put consideration into what a specific show needs from you. Warm up properly. Just because it’s improvised, doesn’t mean it’s okay to roll on the stage off no warm-up, mail your show in while you catch-up, then get sad when it flopped. No-one has a right to that stage time. If all you have is 15 minutes, it’s smart to make that 15 minutes the best it can be3. 

But I can’t do my improvised Squid Game parody in 15 minutes!?

To be clear, in the right hands, I do think a *good* narrative show or a genre parody show can still be fun for 45 mins+. There’s a reason they are the most sellable and successful improv shows, other than the ones crammed with TV comedians. The Edinburgh Fringe programme is packed with improvised musical, sci-fi, TV genre or Harry Potter parody shows every year.

However, if we’re honest, these lean heavily on the audience’s knowledge and enthusiasm for a popular genre or structure, rather than a love of improv per se4. Familiar tropes prop up attention through the more esoteric aspects of improvising. Will Hines’ blog on gimmicks speaks to this better than I can.

In an ‘15 minute improv-city’, performers have to be assertive. They have to make clear choices, supporting the hell out of ideas, while keeping scenes as accessible and relatable as possible. With 5 or 6 performers, teams have to edit decisively if all performers are going to get any time on stage at all. Your local improv theatre charges £100s to teach you these impulses, because they tend to make for good improv shows.

In a 15-minute set, you can still do a sad scene, a slow scene, or an angry scene, but you quickly learn the need to cleanse the audience’s palette with something different immediately after. Alternatively, if you choose it, a short set gives you leeway to do loads of similar scenes without outstaying your welcome. 

Either way, performers need to be receptive and connected to their audience for that 15 minutes. Keep them within walking distance of what they need! Also, don’t be stupid, vaccinate your kids before the illuminati turns them into electric cars. 

Endnotes

Where have you been? I literally forgot this exists: Thanks for asking. I’ve hugely rebalanced my life for my long-term happiness. That means much less improv and a far healthier lifestyle. I recommend. I’ll still be writing here sporadically. But, without performing and teaching 19 times a week, you’ll also get other snippets I think you’ll enjoy. Hope you stick with me when it isn’t 100% niche improv observations.

Watching: Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is very funny and a masterclass in making art that appeals across generations. ‘NEAT & TIDY’ has become an instant catchphrase in our household. 

It also stole a march on mine and Tim Grewcock’s as-yet-unmade short film ‘Das Barge’ (‘Apocalypse Now on the canals of Brexit Britain’). In the meantime, you can enjoy a high stakes, slow-speed, narrowboat chase across the Pennines in claymation form instead.

Listening: ‘​​Young man with a bruised old soul, One snap to bring you back’

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Picture the scene: a bad scene. A really bad one. Totally insane, with a thousand moving pieces, a crazy-capers plot that’s going nowhere, where nothing is moored to the ground.

Everyone knows something isn’t right. The improvisers, the audience, probably the people in the pub downstairs. And you, stood on the backline watching. You feel it more than anyone because an improv show is ultimately about you and your feelings*.

But no worries. You are a mercurial improv talent, at one with the current pop-culture discourse of crapping on things from a healthy distance. You’ve got the perfect move to save the situation. Simply tag out the idiots doing the scene and set your next one in a cinema. A cinema showing a really bad movie. Turn to your scene partner and state: ‘This is a really weird movie!’. 

Fantastic - Improv saved!

I promise this move will always get a big laugh. You’ll feel good….for about 2.7 seconds. Because it’s a hollow, dirty and high-cost laugh. It’s a relief laugh as the audience releases energy. They knew the scene was bad too and now they get to bask in it. A WEIRD MOVIE! That scene was insane because we were actually watching a weird movie! It wasn’t bad because the improv was bad...hang on...was it?

With ‘This is a weird movie’, what you’re actually, and very literally, saying is ‘what my teammates are doing is terrible. I’m going to point out it’s terrible and also get a laugh for myself in the process’. 

Enjoy that hollow dirty laugh, because you’re about to pay for it. Now, in an artform where you have no props, set or costumes to establish a believable reality, you’ve established that what the audience has just watched isn’t even real in the canon of the show. It’s fiction even for the characters on stage. 

It’s very hard to convincingly pull off ‘This is a weird movie’ for two reasons, both of which leave us in the same position before we made the move - needing the scene to end. 

Firstly, once you’ve made the move, you have nowhere else to go. Like any improv scene, we’re asking the audience to suspend their disbelief. Except they don’t trust you now. Last time they trusted you to create something out of thin air, they had the wool pulled over their eyes - IT WAS A MOVIE ALL ALONG! Safer for them to wait and see what happens, sitting there cross-armed and furrow-browed until they’re comfortable again. 

Secondly, you just tagged out two or more teammates in such a way that their ‘movie’ must still be happening in the background, since your new characters are reacting to it. So do they still have to carry on from the backline? Or have you paused the movie (you can’t do that in a cinema)? Or is it some mix of the two. Either way, it’s a lot of work to re-establish the reality of the scene for an audience.

Ultimately ‘This is really weird movie’ is a move out of fear and ego, two very unhelpful places to improvise from. Fear that the only way to end a scene is with a big laugh; ego that unless you personally acknowledge that the scene is bad and get your laugh, everyone will assume you think it’s good and therefore you aren’t funny.

‘But this scene is horrible? I love these people and I want to help!’. 

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Of course you do, here’s some ways you can: 

1. Mercy edit - support your teammates by sweeping their scene and starting something new. This is fully pulling the ripcord, the sharpest knife in the block. It draws a line fully under the scene. You might get no laughs (horror), or no applause (terror!). But it’s for the greater good. Frankly your teammates in the scene will probably thank you for ending their pain. Ideally you will then get in the trenches and initiate the next scene, as a courtesy more than anything.

2. Enter the scene in a constructive way, by supporting what’s actually happening. Enter to help clarify something, frame the game, ground the chaos, establish a relationship that matters - anything really that actually engages with the content, rather than commenting on it from outside.

In both cases, your next scene, even your whole show, might still be bad. That’s okay. You gave your team a fighting chance. You kept the suspension of disbelief alive enough that you could build something good again. Most of all, you didn’t throw your pals under a bus. 

A good team doesn’t need to be best mates, but they do need to trust each other. To trust that their choices will be supported, not undermined. Actually have each other’s backs. Jump in to support, and you might make a good movie instead.

*It isn’t

You’ve finished courses at your theatre and you’re ready to audition for a house team. Fantastic! Welcome to the terrifying world of competitive improv auditions: an artform you were assured was mainly about collaboration. 

It makes no sense. But like democracy, auditions are the worst form of whittling down potential cast members, except for all those others that have been tried. It is somewhat useful to see how people play together and how they handle the pressure of doing a show.

Even so, every show, audition panel and audition itself is different. As an auditionee, you’re not in control of any of those things, but you are in control of your approach to the whole process. 

Here’s some observations from 16 years on both sides of the audition room, from Harold teams, to narrative shows, to short-form teams, to high-concept genre shows, and low-concept bar-prov. These things that give you a better chance of either getting on a show cast and/or making your peace with it not happening this time.

1. Do you actually want this?

There’s no money in being on an improv team. It will be a significant time commitment. You will be expected to continually promote and invite people to see shows. You will receive notes from a coach on your performances, some of which you’ll disagree with. You will have to enjoy performing. You’ll have to be comfortable with jealous unsuccessful auditionees seething in the front row of shows. If this doesn’t sound like fun, it might not be for you.

On the upside, you’ll meet a bunch of brilliant people, improve your craft and voice, get regular stagetime and contribute as a leader in your performing community. You’ll make friends and lifelong memories. If the show isn’t in your natural wheelhouse of interests, it can’t hurt to be proactive by doing some research on tropes and genre beats that the panel might be looking for. Auditionees that exude enthusiasm always stand out.

2. The odds might be long

If your theatre is in a position to host house shows, it likely has a very large community of students, performers (and hopefully audience members!). Having sat on a ton of casting panels over a decade, most audition call-outs at London’s The Free Association, attracted 150-200 auditionees. Often, that was for only 8-10 slots. I heard the UCB in LA had 800 auditionees for their recent Harold call-out.

There will always be many more capable, talented and lovely improvisers who would do a great job, than there are available spots on teams. You probably did a great job in the audition. Unfortunately, so did loads of other people.

Don’t be discouraged if you don’t make it on a show this time. Arithmetic is against you. 

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3. You’re nervous. You’re not alone.

Nobody enjoys auditioning. Your fellow auditionees are just as nervous as you. Try to convince yourself that nerves feel the same as excitement. Nerves are infectious, so is joy. People like to be around confident people. Fake it if you need to.

4. Trust that the audition panel are humans trying their best

They might be nervous too. They might still be figuring out the show itself and what it needs. It might be the first time they’re making these decisions. It might be the thousandth time. It might be their eighth audition group of the day and they’re flagging. It might be just before lunch and they’re hungry. They might have got into an argument with another panel member. They might be worried they left the oven on at home. 

None of this is anything you can control. Trust that no-one relishes the always-difficult decision-making process of casting a show. It means letting down lots of performers they are friends with, have taught or coached, performed alongside, looked up to, etc. If they actively enjoy making these decisions, you don’t want to be in their show anyway.

The audition panel truly want you to be great. They want to put the best possible shows up on stage. That depends on people doing a great audition. It’ll be a painful decision for them, but they’d rather have too many castable people than too few.

5. Wear comfortable clothes that you would wear on stage

As important as auditions might feel, it probably isn’t the time for ball-gowns and dinner jackets. Dress for the job you want: a moderately professional improviser. You could end up playing pretty much any character in the audition. That probably means comfortable pants, shoes and a shirt (plaid and Converse is optional). Sorry, that’s really lame, but this isn’t the Met Gala and a vain improviser won’t play the disgusting space slug character that this scene demands.

It can’t hurt to wear a somewhat bold colour to make you more memorable, but if that’s all you have, you have bigger worries. Avoid clothes with distracting messages (your funniest t-shirt isn’t that funny).

6. Be on time

I can’t believe this needs clarifying, but be on time for your audition. It’s unsettling for fellow auditionees when someone hasn’t turned up, or turns up late. It also means repeating introductions, warm-ups and instructions. Mostly. it doesn’t look great for your reliability if you were cast and if you’ve rushed, you won’t be in the best place to do your best work.

Arrive early, meet fellow auditionees, warm-up properly (this should be led by someone from the panel. If not, just be polite and try to relax, or whatever it takes to get in your show headspace without troubling others).

Obviously, emergencies happen, but being late because you just didn’t allow enough time or didn’t double-check where the location of the venue isn’t cool.

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7. Don’t be a dick

An extension to being on time. Show directors want to work with nice, dependable, people. They don’t want to handle difficult energies in the rehearsal room. Other cast members don’t either. 

Nobody is so talented that they can overcome being a dick. It’s just improv: I can afford to take a punt on one of the other capable (or even less capable) auditionees who are actually pleasant to be around. Putting together an improv team is as much about group chemistry as it is about individual skills. In fact, group chemistry is probably more important than anything else. 

This also applies to the initial audition call-out. If you’re asked for a summary of your experience, fill it in properly. It isn’t the place to do bits, the panel needs to shortlist somehow and to be fair to everyone, they have to do it based on what they see. Give your best availability for audition slots and once you have, guard it against all other avoidable diary commitments. 

It’s likely that you will be able to swap if you need to, but frankly it is such a pain to shuffle round audition slots on this scale, why would you want to annoy the decision-makers? Don’t ask for it because you double-booked for a lunch date, football game or somehow, a 3-week holiday. These are all real excuses I’ve received: none of these people made it on those shows, funnily enough.

Audition panels can correct for strange behaviour based on nerves. They won’t correct for you being an arsehole.

8. Make choices

To stand out against those odds, you have to do something. Initiate a scene early so you’re not increasingly stuck to the backline, do spacework, respond emotionally to offers, play a proactive voice of reason. 

Play to the top of your intelligence. Don’t lazily label characters with stereotypes (see ‘Don’t Be A Dick’). Be especially careful that your nervousness doesn’t manifest in choices that might hurt others, punch down or play the same scene you’ve played a thousand times. Make fun positive choices. Try to enjoy it.

9. Be supportive

This is the hardest one to pull off. It will mean passing up some opportunities to go for a big gag or huge character, which is easier said than done when you only have a short amount of time to make an impression. 

Remember, the panel is trying to build a balanced ensemble. They can’t pack a show full of the same type of players, and especially a team full of joke fiends. The panel will be just as keen to find improvisers that play supportively, edit well and play grounded reality in scenes. This is valuable work. The panel are likely experienced improvisers who can recognise it when they see it.

10. Listen

This is also very difficult to pull off in the melee of strong choices, trying not to be a dick, not to be nervous, being supportive, etc. Listen to what’s happening on stage, what other improvisers are doing and what the set requires. The initiation you wanted to do 4 scenes ago about the murderous robot with a human heart? It’s gone. It wouldn’t be wise to ram it in towards the end. The audition panel want to see improvisers who listen attentively and contribute well to the whole.

11. Audition, then move on

You’ve done your job. Well done for putting yourself up for the show! Now, there is literally NOTHING you can do to affect the decision (don’t contact members of the panel after the fact to explain what you did and why, probably don’t ask for feedback unless it was offered or you closely know the panel member you’re asking). 

Don’t beat yourself up about any choices you made. This stuff is hard and you can only play the scene in front of you - it’ll never exist again. Chalk it all to experience, reward yourself with a little cake or similar, then move on to the next thing.

Make your peace with the outcome before you find it out. Keep doing what you love, make your own gigs, contribute to your community of fellow nerds, audition again in future if you still want to.

Support the show when it happens. I know you’re sad you didn’t get on, but your friend/s probably did: they’re bricking it and could use your love. Improv is still young and niche enough that it needs the nerds to show up for it. A rising tide raises all ships. Your ship is out there too and kindness is repaid by the people in this community. 

Shoutout to theatre-maker, actual genius and my esrtwhile fake-doctor colleague in St Doctor’s Hospital, Haley McGee for suggesting this topic. You can find out more about Haley’s superb solo work here. 

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How your team warms-up has a huge impact on how you perform a show. The time you spend together pre-show is an opportunity to connect and get on the same page, to shake off whatever else has been going on that day, and get in a mindset to put on a show for a paying audience.

Purposeful warm-ups make for purposeful shows. Here’s some things to try to embed some good warm-up practice for your team:

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1. Decide a time for warm-ups

Decide as a team a 10-15 minute window to do warm-ups undisturbed. Keep this time sacrosanct. If your team likes to use the bathroom before a show, allow enough time between the warm-ups and the start to do that. You’re adults, you can hold it for 15 minutes.

If you’re performing with another team on the bill, but your teammates haven’t arrived yet, respect that other team might want this time to themselves. Only join them if expressly invited. If invited, consider saying no and waiting for your teammates.

2. Be on time

This should just be basic manners. Turn up at the time your team has agreed for warm-ups.  Can’t make warm-ups? Don’t play the show. Your commitment is to the full time from warm-up to the end of the show. A team that was missing players in a warm-up risks playing very disjointedly. Obviously, unexpected things come up and journeys get delayed. Plan for this as best you can. Showing up on time shows you respect your teammates’ time and have their back.

3. Have your coach lead warm-ups

You’re paying a coach to run rehearsals, to be an outside eye and to help improve your show in the long-term. If they attend your shows to give notes, ask them to warm you up pre-show too. They can take the pressure over choosing what to do and will know objectively what helps your team do your best improv (sidebar, turn up on time for your coaching sessions! Value the time someone else is giving up to help you develop your show. It’s not a great start if the first 20 minutes are spent waiting for people to turn up and re-introducing the session each time someone arrives).

4. No coach? Make one of your team ‘warm-up captain’ for each show

Assuming you’ve collectively agreed a goal that you’re aiming for in your shows, this should be an easy job. Assign one team member each show to choose warm-ups to help meet that goal. Decide who before you all arrive for a show, give them no other preparation jobs. Most importantly, listen to them and do the warm-ups faithfully. The time to say ‘can we do this exercise instead?’ was before you arrived.

5. Choose warm-ups that relate to your show goals

If you’re the sort of team that wants to play very connected, emotionally-driven improv, make time to get connected and express emotions pre-show. Choose exercises that come with tons of eye-contact, have you mirroring each other, melding minds, Meisnering (eg ‘you look happy’/’I am happy! I’m happy because I won the lottery’).

If you play fast-paced game-driven improv with lots of tag moves, warm-up with exercises that encourage that. Categories help establish a shared understanding of what’s grounded and what’s shiny for the team that day. Practice grounded scenes with tags. Play an actual real-life game. 

If you like playing lots of group scenes, warm-up with group exercises. Make an object together, soundscapes, follow the follower, chuck a ball around, etc.

If you’re performing a complex format, practice the format. Do warm-ups that get your brain doing the sort of thinking you’ll be using in the show.

In all cases, choose exercises that get you connected and used to agreeing with each other. Positive vibes only pre-show.

6. Choose excitement over nerves

If you tell a teammate you’re nervous, you’re telling them that you’re worried about yourself. That you’re afraid of hurting your ego. That means you’re not going to be looking after them on stage, that you’re not focused on making others look good. They now need to worry about you.

Worry is infectious. So is excitement. They feel pretty much the same. Choose excitement. Always tell your teammates you’re excited. It’s way better to play from.

7. Get each other’s backs…and mean it

We’re taught to say ‘Got Your Back’ to each other pre-show. No-one is quite sure why. Maybe Del Close did it. Rarely is it done with meaning. Make proper eye-contact with each other, and really mean what you’re saying. Come-up with your team’s own phrase for ‘Got Your Back’. Something to connect with pre-show and let your teammates know that you’re going to look after each other. 

8. Finish on something fun

Regardless of the show, make the last thing you do together before going on stage something really stupid and fun. Carry that energy on with you.

What does your team do pre-show to put you in the right place to do a really good one? What kind of warm-up is useful to you as an individual improviser? Let me know in the comments below!

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Most improv schools train performers to avoid teaching scenes. It’s understandable why a scene with one character teaching a skill or process to another becomes a go-to. They clearly set out a game, and they come with a setting and status that we all understand and relate to. A-grade for you.

However, more often than not, these scenes tend to be somewhat transactional and lacking an explorable relationship beyond what’s being taught. Invariably they involve one improviser controlling the scene while the other has to struggle playing being bad at the task in hand. This is never an ideal situation to find yourself in - always better to play a person who is competent at what they do, but with an unusual point-of-view.

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In rehearsals for Winner - the improvised sports biopic at The Free Association - we knew that coaches are an archetype in sports biopics, and that we’d have to find an interesting way of playing a whole lot of teaching scenes. We struck upon a useful scaffold for the arc of a teacher, coach or mentor in a narrative show.

This works in 3 stages:

1. The coach meets the mentee - who is either skeptical or captivated by this expert. Usually the coach, grizzled and worn-down by a life in their sport, either doesn’t want to get back into the fray or thinks the protege is not ready 

2. The coach reluctantly agrees to train the mentee - for a ton of valid reasons: they see something of themselves in the mentee, they catch wind that their own rival is training another competitor, they need to restore their reputation (see John Candy’s character in Cool Runnings).

3. The mentor has to die, either literally or figuratively, in order for the mentee to fulfil their destiny: “I’ve taught you everything I know”. “You must do what I could not!”, “Avenge me” etc etc.

That’s all well and good for a longer narrative show, but how can we best approach a standalone teaching scene when it happens? This is Stage 1 and a bit of Stage 2 of the mentor’s arc above. 

Repurposing Will Hines’ excellent ‘You Asked To See Me’ exercise, we can inject a fun dance into a teaching scene, with a bit of jeopardy about whether or not this relationship has any legs. You can run this as an exercise to get a bit more depth The basic gist is:

• Mentee: Teach me how to be the best ‘XYZ thing’.

• Coach: Ahhh, you wish to become the best? Why?

• Mentee: A personal reason why they want to be the best ‘XYZ thing’.

• Coach: (either accepts or rejects the reasons) You may fall short / You’re not ready.

• Mentee: I don’t care. I want this.

• Coach: Ahhh, fire in the belly. That’s good, but in order to master ‘XYZ thing’, there are three things you must do.

• Mentee: Just 3? I’ll do anything!

• Coach: Good. Here are two normal things you’d expect to have to do to get good at ‘XYZ thing’, and a third very unusual one.

• Mentee: Wow, that third unusual thing is really strange. Why must I do that?

• Coach: Some personal justification for the third unusual thing.

• Mentee: That’s a lot.

• Coach: *Shrugs* Fine. Try it your way. But you will fail.

• Mentee: Ok, I’ll do it / I can’t do it (but I will eventually once my way doesn’t work).

Navigating a teaching scene in this way requires having a precise awareness of status in a scene (see more on that here). It can work with either an unusual student or an unusual teacher, but as in any scene, playing both at once is harder.

A student with an unusual point-of-view is fun to play. They’ll frustrate the teacher, but ultimately they will have to show some potential, otherwise the teacher simply won’t agree to teach them.

The student can still be convinced that this potential coach is an oracle, a legend of their craft, even if they’re a bit odd (See Yoda’s introduction in the Empire Strikes Back). If we treat the teacher as too crazy, the student has no reason to stay in the scene. The grounded response is to find a different teacher (unless they have no other option, like Luke). 

If they do stay, the game of the scene can easily become ‘this teacher is terrible’, which is pretty limited compared to ‘this teacher is very unusual, but ultimately brilliant at what they do’. The teacher’s uniqueness should be what makes them great, and why we’re watching a scene about it in the first place.

Also, famously, the student teaches the teacher. If the teacher has an explorable flaw, they also have a game to play, or a journey of growth to go on themselves. In a full narrative show, this helps rest having to play our protagonist’s plot and story constantly. In a stand-alone scene, it’s something else we can explore to learn more about the relationship between student and teacher, or just mine for comedy.

Improvisers: what do you make of teaching scenes? Have you struck on any other ways to make them sing? Let me know below!

By happy coincidence, the narrative improv comedy show I’m directing for The Free Association: Winner - the improvised sports biopic - is in monthly residency at The Museum of Comedy from July to December 2023. Details and tickets

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