C&C 12: The Gift of Discomfort, Part Two

In which, saints preserve us, I complete an improv class

Aug 30, 2023

Class #2. Of course I’m back.

Our focus on character starts with the physical, and as someone who largely lives in his head I again find this liberating. We walk around and our instructor Beth1 calls out a body part for us to lead with. (For fun, try leading with your knees.) We then vary emotion and speed.

Beth has us choose a body part ourselves. I uncharacteristically throw out my chest, becoming one of the jocks who gets his comeuppance at the end of a teen movie. (Or, considering my age, an ex-jock.) I’m primed to dislike this guy, but walking like this automatically makes me feel better. As we layer in emotion and speed, the bastard’s confidence never wanes. Beth instructs us to give our character a mantra, saying it aloud. I flash on every cheerfully oblivious finance dude I’ve sat next to at a cocktail bar, the kind who congratulates himself for buying his entire party fifty-dollar shots of whiskey. I then greet everyone with “Only the best, bro!” He’s a fuller and potentially funnier character. We repeat the exercise, with Beth assigning the class a mantra that often works counter to our choices. It’s fun and illuminating, and I feel like I’m getting the hang of this.

The night’s last game underscores that we still have a way to go. In Story Conductor, five volunteers tell the titular tale, with whoever Beth points to taking over the narrative. She asks for a prompt and gets “airplanes.” The first person begins “9/11 is hard to talk about,” and I rebel instantly. We haven’t established enough trust to charge into the darkest material, I think. It’s week 2, for Christ’s sake. Another volunteer adopts a Valley Girl inflection and tries to broaden the subject, but soon we’re back to melting steel beams. Beth regularly reminds us that “first idea is best idea,” but I think about improv guru Del Close, who told his students, “Wherever possible … Slow down. Choose the second thought.”

During the class’s run, I attend a writing seminar taught by novelist S. J. Rozan. She effortlessly defuses the long-running, pointless debate in the crime fiction community between “plotters” and “pantsers,” those who outline versus those who fly by the seat of their pants. (Full disclosure: your boy is an inveterate plotter.) “We’re all doing the same thing,” Rozan says. “It comes from your subconscious. You’re not channeling anything from the universe. It’s all there. And you get at it the way you can get at it.” It’s about accessing the stuff, as she calls it. Those who outline are simply bringing the stuff into their consciousness without needing to use it, while Rozan “can’t get at it until it’s just about coming out of my fingers.”

We’re all doing the same thing. I keep circling that thought. I write regularly with collaborators, and the defining act of those relationships is sharing an idea or a draft and saying, This is not ready, but I trust you to focus on what works and make it better. Improv, I am beginning to suspect, is exchanging first drafts and editing before an audience. We’re all doing the same thing.

Class #3. We’re down six people this week, the smaller class size loosening everyone up. This week’s subject is relationships. Beth explains that scenes work better if the characters know one another, and that shared history has to be communicated efficiently. We also play with hierarchy in an exercise that I find hugely enlightening. Each person picks a card from a deck and holds it to their forehead without looking at it. We then mingle and try to guess what card we have based on how others treat us. At the end, we line up based on what we think our rank is. Amazingly, we put ourselves in near-perfect order. (I finally understand why improv is used in corporate team-building.) Next, we pair up and perform three-line scenes informed by the status of our characters. It’s an invigorating session, and I have to admit I’m enjoying myself.

Beth suggests that we see some improv during the class. I take in a show while Rosemarie is out of town. As part of our “Put Up or Shut Up Summer,” we’re each doing something we’ve long wanted to do. I study improv, she goes on a multi-day silent meditation retreat. People who know us undoubtedly find this hilarious: Rosemarie’s activity requires her to say less, while mine demands that I talk even more.

The theater restrooms are distinguished by gender with photos of Mike Nichols and Elaine May. The show is musical improv, something I would have known if I’d read my ticket more closely. The cast makes up songs based on audience suggestions. There’s a mock opera about a computer science engineer playing matchmaker, a Glen Campbell-style ode to Salt Lake City’s Mexican food built around repetition of the word “guacamole.” The musical element ups the difficulty level: What the hell was that chorus we ad-libbed? A few songs don’t come together. The cast gets one huge laugh out of me during a country-western version of Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ when one of the players commits fiercely to a hambone solo.

Everyone is improvising, not only the performers and musicians but the tech crew, who are grabbing and in some cases creating images to throw on screens. I pick up on the cues the singers throw each other, the steps they take to help each other along. Second City veteran Eugenie Ross-Leming told Sam Wasson in Improv Nation that the rules of improv “are just good manners.” That plays out in front of me, live.

I then rewatch Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky (1976). I take homework seriously.

After the retreat, Rosemarie asks how the show was. Fun, I say, and offer to take her to a show. I mention that they’re doing improv film noir soon.

She cackles. That’s what you’re taking me to.

Class #4. The session includes the most ridiculous warm-up so far, and thus my favorite: Kitty Cat Career, where you pantomime doing a job while only saying the word “Meow.” This has to be the genesis of the Cat Game in Super Troopers (2001).

The main exercise, Bus Stop, demonstrates the importance of objectives. It’s our first extended improv in character. One person sits on a bus bench. Another deploys one tactic to gain their objective—the bench—then switches to a second, which works. Person #2 claims the seat, and it starts over.

What happens when I tag in remains … hazy. I know it involves a cane and a bad Peter Falk voice—blame Mikey and Nicky—and I apparently discuss killing werewolves? I’m only certain of that because my next partner riffs on this as the devil. Still, my bit rates a mention from Beth when we end the class citing “rock star moments;” it turns out reciting a litany of woe in relentlessly upbeat fashion is a good choice. I’m tempted to pull a George Costanza and exit on a high note, never to return, but I don’t want to get a big head. Besides, I know I’ll fall on my ass next week.

In Improv Nation, there’s no greater evangelist for the form than Stephen Colbert. “You’ve gotta learn to love when you’re failing,” he says. “The embracing of that, the discomfort of failing in front of an audience, leads you to penetrate through the fear that blinds you.” As he trained, Colbert sought humiliation everywhere, singing in crowded elevators and paying his bus fare in pennies “to feel the embarrassment touch me and sink into me and then be gone.”

It’s a lesson learned by legends. Wasson relays how Bill Murray repeatedly died on stage during his early Second City days. “But after dying enough times, Murray realized that he was actually still alive, and that the feeling of so-called failure was just that, only a feeling, one of many, and came as soon as it went.” Alan Arkin, another Second City alum, eventually “permitted himself to plunge, feet first, into certain failure” because, as Arkin said, when performers “allow that to take place, and to be gone, and empty, it’s gold.”

Accepting disaster is a tough principle to put into practice. Maybe that’s why I love a warm-up called Loserball, where one person “throws” a ball to another only to have the recipient not catch it—to cheers and applause from the entire company. It not only normalizes failure, it celebrates it, removing its sting. We also learn the “failure bow,” which you take when you realize that your misunderstanding of what’s happening is throwing the scene off. I want to start taking failure bows in everyday life, like Colbert paying his bus fare. We should be taking them everywhere.

Class #5. Subject: conveying where and when. We break into four-person teams. One person steps onto the stage and wordlessly commences an action that has not been discussed in advance. The next person on stage interprets that action and adds to it. Our first person begins washing dishes. I’ve been powering through season two of The Bear, so I jump in and fire up the oven, reading tickets as I go. Next, we have a waiter and a customer and … scene.

When we analyze it afterward, I learn that the first person’s intent was cleaning up after a family dinner. I’m the one who turned it into a restaurant, and the rest of the team filled in the picture. The dynamic plays out over and over, each group not always starting on the same page yet quickly and quietly building a shared reality.

Wasson isn’t alone in comparing improv to religion. Here’s Tina Fey in his book: “For many of us, improv was close to religion.” Of Paul Sills, a cofounder of Second City, Wasson writes:

Sills had seen goodness burst forth from so many kinds of people so many times that—without devolving into a cheerful individual—he had started to cultivate something like faith. Not in God … but in something God-like that manifested from the communal experience.

Emma Allen’s 2016 New Yorker article on the rise of Upright Citizens Brigade touches on the cult-like aspects of improv. There’s an entire BoJack Horseman episode about it.

Still, I sympathize. Improv forges a sense of community. You’re with people who have heard you say and do unexpected things and responded with support, not judgment. Seeing them reminds you that you are the person who said and did those things.

Class #6. Covid puts a damper on our finale. Beth, who taught the entire course wearing a mask so she can still perform, was exposed to the virus and has opted out of the last session. Jacob2 fills in, coming straight from leading a corporate training seminar. Our class feels like one, a touch hectic and impersonal. There’s no sense of culmination as he puts us through exercise after exercise, promising to make us sweat. Given that it’s the hottest day of the summer, the threat is unnecessary.

Feeling my week-one guardedness return, I have to push myself to participate. I’m in the first pairing tossed into a new exercise; each area of the stage is assigned an emotion (in our case, anger, enthusiasm, and sadness), my partner and I letting these feelings animate our relationship—nemeses—as we move. I come around a little.

We close with a debrief. Jacob says that improv creates space for silliness and play, which helps prevent you from getting ground down by the system. One student laments that she has no outlet for the creative part of herself at work. Another says every person in the class made him laugh out loud at least once, and I realize that that’s true for me as well.

A text thread is started, and there’s chatter about follow-up classes. I’m not taking any; my curiosity is sated, and if anything I have even less of a desire to perform. I make my traditional Irish exit, slipping out without saying goodbye. It’s not in keeping with the principles of improv, but it seems fitting for the sad trombone of our last class. And old habits die hard.

I edited a magazine about film noir for fifteen years. I still write for it. I cohost a noir film festival. By rights, I will hate improv film noir. But come opening weekend, there we are.

A cast member delivers a solid summation of noir and makes it plain that they’ll be working the James M. Cain side of the street: stranger blows into town, falls for a married woman, and they plot to eliminate the husband. He asks the audience for only a handful of prompts, meaning the shape of the piece is already determined and the fun will be in the details.

Our show is about sleep apnea and alligators. Much of the company is around my age; I idly think my Dan Duryea material would kill here. The cast shows affection for noir along with a sharp eye for its tropes. One performer, doing an Agnes Moorehead turn with shades of Gale Sondergaard in Christmas Holiday (1944), scores laughs for her entrances alone. Mistakes are made, acknowledged, and folded into the show. Everyone picks each other up.

After the show, Rosemarie says, that was silly and very entertaining. We should go again.

Yeah, I say. We should.

All names improvised.

See previous footnote.