IMPROVISATION: A Moment Embraced

For reasons that are not clear to me, my students come to my office asking me for advice.  The first thing to keep in mind is I don’t know what I’m talking about.  The second thing is I’m as confused as everyone else and anyone who tells you it gets less confusing is either lying to you or is better at life than I am.  

The third is sometimes my students leave and I think, damn, that was some good advice.

Here you go, unsolicited as ever!

1. It doesn’t matter what you major in.  My students are obsessed with their major.  I was obsessed with my major.  I was convinced it mattered incredibly for my entire future and I panicked and stayed up late and spent all of my sophomore, junior, and senior years of college worrying about this.  Here is the truth: No one has ever once – ever, once – asked me what my major was in college.  I’ve volunteered the information plenty of times.  But no one has ever needed to know.

In my current life: I think the lesson would be that it doesn’t matter what my job is as long as I’m doing something I like.

2. It doesn’t matter how many majors/minors/certificates you have.  Most students want to double major and minor and do all these other things but – only provided it adds up to a formal stamp that will show up on their transcript or diploma or somewhere.  When I was in college I triple majored, minored, and got a Certificate in something that no one has ever asked me about.  I wish that instead of taking a million classes my senior year and not retaining anything from them and never sleeping, I had instead taken one thing I really wanted to take, like linguistics or philosophy.

In my current life: Christ, man, I just clawed my way into getting a new title at work.  Why?

3. Relatedly, for heaven’s sake, take classes in things you like.  So many students are signing up for classes because they sound impressive or fulfill a major (see above).  I don’t know how to say more clearly that you will just do better in life at things you naturally like.  I spent eight years in my twenties trying to talk myself into having an innate skill for statistics.

In my current life: I routinely force myself into careers (cough) that sound good but I am not amazing at.

4. Use your summers to enjoy yourself a.k.a. stop freaking out about internships and summer school.  I did follow this advice in college with one exception of an internship in Bolivia, which actually was awesome, because I worked in microfinance and it was an important life experience and also taught me I never want to work in an office.  But otherwise I spent my summers working as a lifeguard.  Oh, crap, no, I spent another summer studying Chinese in Beijing.  Ok students, you win.

In my current life: I am right now unable to sleep because I am too busy panicking about how I’m going to fit in circus training with book writing with documentary filmmaking with performing a not-yet-existent one woman variety show.

5. Ok, New Rule: You can freak out about your summer as long as you are doing things you want to be doing (or to get very arty – “need” to be doing).

In my current life: Getting to this point was hard for me, and I’m still in the throes of debating what the “right” thing to do is.  But if you like it, and you can afford to, why not do it?  We are among the lucky small percent of this world who gets to choose what we do every day.

6. Take the class you’re interested in even if it doesn’t make any sense in your curriculum otherwise.  I can’t claim credit for this; it’s Steve Jobs through and through.

In my current life: Thank goodness I carried on with dance and movement in grad school or I wouldn’t have ended up at Cirque, which is the best thing I’ve ever done in my whole life.

7. Enthusiasm matters a lot.  We all have to do things we don’t want to do – calculus, a science credit, Chinese arts (everyone here has to take that).  Try to find the part of it you can be excited about.

In my current life: Teaching is hard and scary for me.  This semester I have been focusing on my enthusiasm for the material rather than on whether the students are bored.  I have enjoyed it more.  N.b. My students are probably bored.

8. Do the thing you want to do now.  Now.  No, seriously, stop reading this and do it.  Actually, a student taught me this.

In my current life: Nothing feels better than imagining the perfect version of the thing you want to do that you’re going to do tomorrow.  I try to indulge this less.

9. The thing that scares you but that you have to do – Do it as much as you possibly can.  No one has ever actually asked me about this, but I wish they would, as it’s the main thing I’ve learned this year.  Teaching was terrifying, circus was terrifying, standup is terrifying.  Literally the only cure besides not doing it (which feels crappy) is doing it constantly.  When it gets not scary, step it up.

In my current life: I did standup six times and then quit for a year.  I’ve just started going back and I’m doing it more frequently now and it gets a fraction of a percent less horrifying each time.

10. Focus on the present.  This sounds trite but I mean it.  Calm down!  I assure my students.  Stop thinking about jobs and grad school.  It will all be figured out when the time comes!  I’ve been there, and it will work out.

In my current life: Sure, I know my students are going to be ok because I’ve lived through the ten years they’re panicked about.  But obviously that logic cannot hold for me since no one has ever lived past 32 and could ever tell me it’s going to be ok.

Fig. 1. The best advice I’ve ever received is: Everything in moderation, including moderation.  A man who looked like Jesus said it to me in 2002 at a house party in Cape Town.  Here, I re-enact the scene.

BONUS!  DING DING DING!

Get a good night’s rest!  I am writing this at 5:41 AM China time.

Don’t be a business major.  This one I’m following just fine.  I am now accepting counter-arguments.

Seeing your first TJ & Dave show is a rite of passage, like a pilgrimage to Mecca or a baptism, or any number of other religious metaphors signifying a change from one state to another. Other improv groups are great, but few (none?) transcend the way TJ & Dave do, making us believe in the world they create and, maybe even more importantly for practitioners of the craft, making us believe in the work itself, in its capacity to transcend, to say something important, something necessary. TJ & Dave, at their best, make improvisation feel essential to the human experience.

To finally have a book that attempts to capture that transcendence and essence feels both exciting and frightening. How could they possible express anything near the beauty of what they achieve on stage in the pages of a static text? But lucky for us, TJ and Dave aren’t just improvisational geniuses; there are also smart. Like, smart smart. Brainy smart. Intelligent. Well-read. Thoughtful about their craft. Articulate about their thinking. You know…smart.

You might think, “Of course they’re smart! Just watch them on stage.” But it doesn’t have to be that way. I know many improvisers who are total savants at their craft but can’t talk about what they do in a way that really helps a reader or a student get a handle on it, much less learn from it in a practicable way. The lovely thing about The TJ & Dave book is how clear and precise and expressive the two of them are able to be about a process that seems so effortlessly brilliant in the moment.

It’s a nice thing for someone like me, who fundamentally believes that, although there is the rare “improv savant,” most improvisers, no matter how naturally funny or clever or interesting they are, only become truly brilliant through effort and thought and consideration of the craft. If TJ & Dave had said in their book that they are brilliant because they are special, and that the kind of brilliance they display is something you can’t explain, can’t teach, can’t learn, I would believe them, because they are just that good. But they don’t say that, and they don’t seem to believe it.

Instead, Improvisation at the Speed of Life seems to exude an expansive love for human beings and their capacity to listen, to collaborate, and to be affected by each other. “In short,” Dave exhorts, “live life mindfully.” We can all do that; or at least we can all try.

I think it bears pointing out that despite their almost symbiotic performing relationship, they do approach the work as individuals to some extent. Dave has a background in stand-up and scripted theater; TJ went a more traditional “Second City to iO” route. They are complementary performers, not identical, which anyone who’s seen a show can see. And they’re quick to point out how the other is the one responsible for the duo’s greatness. At one point, when Pam (their co-writer and an improviser and teacher in her own right) tries to compliment a bit of stagecraft she’d admired in a show she’d once seen of theirs, Dave is quick to assume the brilliance must have been something TJ did. TJ refers to seeing Dave in a Chicago production of Glengarry Glen Ross and being blown away by Dave’s skill as an actor. I’m sure it’s no accident that the two members of the greatest improv duo in the world each credit the other for that greatness.

The distinction between them does wear away a bit as their philosophy as a duo emerges more clearly, especially once the preliminary background material (How did they get their start? Where did they meet? With whom have they performed?) falls away, and we are left with a few simple and powerful admonitions regarding what they believe to be best practices:

Listen. Not to the words (which they argue should be kept to a minimum), but to the way your scene partner moves, the look in her eyes, the feeling beneath the words. Then respond honestly (which for them is about what all that listening has told you about the reality of the world of the scene). That’s it. Pretty much.

It gets a little more specific than that, of course—it’s a 200-ish page book. They talk about how the rules we all learn in improv classes are pretty much a load of hooey (with well-intended principles underneath, which they define). They say some great and instructive things about two principles that drive their listening and reacting: weight (the import and tone of the situation as you observe it in the scene from the moment it begins, not based on any contrived attempt to label it) and heat (the intensity of the relationship which can be discerned from body language, eye contact, and other non-verbal means of communicating). They explain how really listening for the weight and heat of the scene can lead you to each “next little step” of the scene in an honest, logical, meaningful way. They talk about how playing a character means truly inhabiting that person, and about how to inhabit the space in as authentic a way as one does a character. At this point, though, I’m just going through the chapters one by one, which you should do yourself, because each one is a unique revelation around a common theme: the simple axiom of listening—really listening—and responding with honesty.

This approach isn’t for everyone, and they’re the first to admit it. They explain that they are putting on a very specific show: 50 minutes, played out in real time, with only two improvisers playing all of the parts. But beyond the specifics of the TJ & Dave form (the specificity of which, to my mind, doesn’t undermine the truth of the general principles the duo puts forward) they remind us more than a few times that their style is not for people primarily concerned with getting laughs. Anyone who’s willing to call out Joan Rivers for doing a bad scene is clearly ready to smash the idols of laugh-getting to rubble, and they do. What they do isn’t comedy, they’re quick to point out, but they’re not opposed to laughter as a “byproduct” of truth and honesty and surprise and genuine relationship, and they give you plenty of arguments for why, at least to them, this is a more satisfying approach than a concern for how many laughs you get or whether the audience seems to be having a good time in the moment (their desire for a sound that humans might make that would indicate engagement is one that resonated deeply with me—how many false moves would we avoid if we could hear and trust that the audience was interested even if they weren’t laughing?).

Del Close’s ghost is ever present in the background of the book, his demand for a particular kind of improvised performance full of truth and crafted out of nothing less than the fullness of the human spirit seeming to directly guide TJ & Dave in their endless pursuit for the “Great show.” Like many great improvisers, Dave has his story of a death-bed conversation with Del, when he told Dave to “Keep this stuff going.” And although many others were influenced by Del and sought to carry on his legacy, it seems that Dave, maybe more than anyone else touched by Del, has made this request his earnest life’s work. In this way, knowing how he and TJ go about their work feels like the closest an improviser starting today can get to learning from Del.  

I, in particular, appreciate that aspect of the book, having begun to improvise a few years after Del’s death. I was particularly delighted to see them define the Harold as an attempt to “turn a single idea into a variety of themes and ideas through group exploration…A Harold explores themes, notices patterns and allows them to weave together.” As an admirer of their work, it was gratifying to me to see them defining a structure so dear to my heart in many of the same terms I myself use to attempt to convey the Harold’s magic and potential. On a personal level, those two little pages toward the end of an already inspiring book did much to reaffirm my beliefs about what the Harold (and long form improvisation) is and can be. The perfect dessert at the end of a satisfying meal.

Pam Victor is a lovely guide through the journey of the book, one part fan and admirer, one part working improviser and improv teacher trying to figure out her own values and goals and style. The interview sections with her sprinkled throughout the book dig deeper, clarify, or provide examples of the principles they’re talking about. They can be a bit tonally uneven in places (I got the feeling that some of the more bantery spots were full of spontaneous charm that didn’t quite translate into print) but they’re important for the way in which Pam’s probing can elicit a more precise explanation of an initial insight, and seeing that thought process unfold rather than just being given the final “answer” is the closest you can get to watching TJ & Dave improvise while reading a book where they explain how they improvise. TJ & Dave never treat Pam as anything but an equal in the quest to find that perfect improvised moment (It’s not a coincidence that Pam writes a blog called “The Zen of Improv”), which makes sense given their humility and belief that it is not their specific brilliance that makes them great, but listening, and truth, and following that next little thing.

As you read, you start to get the distinct impression that what TJ & Dave are aiming for is nothing short of improv nirvana. In places, they can get downright Buddhist, as when they describe the show as “a river we slip our canoe into and follow where it takes us”, as well as Platonic (referring to the “ideal” to which they strive). This “Great show” to which they allude—the one that would make them hang up their improv hats for good—seems to be so perfect as to be out-of-reach for a mere mortal, which is lucky for us, since it pretty much assures us that TJ & Dave will continue to get on stage every Wednesday night in a futile and beautiful attempt to reach it.

Okay, THIS is the last one. It's May and Nichols truly improvising, I think, on a show that Henry Fonda was hosting? This isn't as successful as their refined sketches but it's still GOOD. I like it because you see them truly making things up -- their eyes are locked on each other.

Elaine in particular gets a lot out of just repeating what Mike says but with more emotion. She's like sniffing around in the things he brings up for a funny, committed way to say them. You see this brilliant performer trying out different clothes, kind of.

Like how she agrees that the Quiz Show scandal makes her "SICK, just SICK."

And I love how she says "they're GETTING him... they're GETTING him..." -- you can see her settling into that phrase.

Or when he says "It's a moral issue" and she jumps on it "YES!" and she's so enthusiastic that it's somehow funny. And then after kinda feeling that out she says the thing about a moral issue being "more interesting than a real issue."

Nichols takes less from her, and he misses some chances. When she says "Oh, I keep up" that feels like it could be something. But I wonder if he felt the pressure of being on TV, that he had to keep injecting new ideas into it? Maybe that was how they worked? Or maybe he's waiting for something else from her to build on that doesn't come? His ideas are all very funny and smart and good, so maybe it doesn't matter.

They creep along the conversation, mostly agreeing but disputing a few things along the way. They find other examples of what interests them. 

They either had to stop for time, or else Nichols just thought that it was a good edit point. He gets water and looks right in the camera as if to signal "That's it, that's what we're doing" or maybe a producer waved them to stop.

4:50 -- Elaine stalls as she gathers her thought -- "here's the difference, you want to know the difference? here's the difference right here, the difference is..."  and then words it just right; she knows she's got to land a joke. There's no way they're not improvising this, it's so exactly like an improv scene.

They're instantly compelling, I think, in that they are smart and attentive and interesting right away. At 4:00, when Nichols points out that not all politicians write their own speeches, and Elaine smiles and goes "I see, I see your point" and the crowd laughs --- that's just them being compelling. That's not because of improv or rules, that's just people who are charming and great.