Some of these posts will be about improvisational comedy, an art form in which I have participated for a very long time, and which I love very much. It’s very easy to mock, and people do, all the time (rare is the situation comedy on TV these days that doesn’t have a joke or scene that points up the silliness of improv, or its nightmarish pervasiveness in a certain subset of the population—I attribute this to the constantly increasing number of writers on staff who are, themselves, improvisers) but I have a deep and abiding love for it, which may or mayn’t come through in what I write. If you do not care for improvisational comedy, feel free to skip these posts; you will be bored, quickly.
If improvisational comedy is of interest to you, read on, and feel free to disagree with whatever I have to say. This is all just my opinion. I’ve taught improvisational comedy for almost as long as I’ve done it (I mean, decades), and I find that many students just want to know the right answer. What is the right way to acto or react in any situation? What are the rules? They want to be told the right way to do things. And some teachers present themselves as the ones with the right answers, the ones with the rules. But improvisational comedy, like Western medicine, is an art, not a science. There are no absolutes.
And this causes a problem for me when I say something to a student, and the student says that Professor X said exactly the opposite (I use the term “professor” in the colloquial sense of someone who is an instructor, someone who is ostensibly an expert in the subject matter they profess, not in the technical degree-and-title-having sense, and the letter X in the sense that it represents a variable, something {in this case, the name of the hypothetical professor} which is not yet known; I am not using Professor X to refer to the mutant, pacifist, and founder his own school for gifted youngsters—although the idea of learning improvisational comedy from Professor Charles Xavier is appealing- if you know any movie executives please tell them I would be happy to pitch them my take on X-Men: Improvisation). This places me at odds with someone, usually someone I know and respect, who has a different take on whatever the idea is.
To make it clear to the student that I respect the person they are quoting and bear them no ill will, and am not trying to undermine their teachings, I will usually respond by saying something along the lines of “Tell Professor X they are wrong, and I said they can go fuck themself.”
I then try to explain that the only right way to do things is whatever is right in the moment. So rather than think of improvisational comedy as a specific way of doing things (which really makes no sense if you think about it), you have to use whatever will work for you in any given situation.
Zip zap zop, anyone?
After that, it’s pretentious, but so am I: I like to quote Bruce Lee, who wasn’t talking about improvisational comedy, but could have been:
Don't get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.
Put that in your pipe and eat shit, Professor X.
I shouldn’t have said that about the pipe- it’s a clue.
