Talking about Improv Teams
On Facebook - which I plan to link to from here - I asked people to tell me about NY indie teams they liked. And their was a huge, wonderful reaction. Dave Murray printed it out for Nicole “hates facebook” Drespel. And Pat Regan said “congrats on the thread to me” which I don’t fully understand.
So I pored over the thread today, and here are some general thoughts. First, I was not prepared for that level of enthusiasm. I assumed it would get about 50 comments, but instead it got over 200 comments. And that was in one day. It got 100 of those comments in the first hour. That is a fast, visceral reaction. I immediately stop reading it and just waited until that night when it settled down.
Yes, I counted all the teams. I did it fast, so these numbers are possibly wrong. And meaningless. Because some people didn’t mention teams that had already been mentioned a lot. And some teams only got mentioned because someone else mentioned it just before they posted. But counting stuff is fun and cool, right?
Bear Golf got mentioned the most (24). But Gulf Oil (20) and Schoolmarm (21) were right up there too. This non-competition was anyone’s game. Fascinating to me was that Tops didn’t get mentioned until about 100 comments into the thread, but then got mentioned almost as much as any of the three teams I mentioned. (19 times) So once the Tops fans came out they came out in force. 17 different teams got mentioned at least 10 times.
Even more astonishing is that 135 teams in total were mentioned. Sad stats: I had only heard of 30 of these teams. I hadn’t heard of over 100 teams, and that’s sad. Even sadder I’ve only see about 20 of those teams perform.
Team Names I assumed were bits until they got multiple mentions: St Louis Rams, JFK Rowling, Fart Police and Bush Administration.
Team names I didn’t count: Magic Suzie (mentioned by Shannon, this was my first indie team and one of the first performing indie teams in the UCB Community), Toast (mentioned by Sam Riegel, this was a team Sam and Shannon were on that I was added to right before the team retired. I performed twice with them. Their final show and a reunion show.), and all the fake names Patrick Noth mentioned. The only fake teams mentioned (that I could detect). Way to go Patrick!
Two team’s had apostrophes in their names: Matt’s Aunt Kim and NBC’s Whitney
There are teams named Scareface Danza and Scott Baio Wolf
My favorite team name: Together We Chill.
Also I am thankful that http://newyork.improvteams.com/ exists so I can look up teams on there and see who is on those rosters. What a great resource! Thanks Ben Apple! Thanks Facebook! Thanks improv community!
I followed this thread closely out of habit since it used to be my job. I’m like a ghost that watches all, unknown to you though you are known to it, and yah... it’s creepy for me too. Thanks for doing these numbers Kevin, it was impressive to see. I would like to add some insights of my own to the post. I’ve had a lot of interaction with the indie groups in NY over the last 4 years. I am a very analytical person, and based on patterns I see in show line-ups, show invites, and through the various interactions I see on my overly large improvisor network on social media, I have a pretty good handle of how the social circles in improv are overlapped, what and who the cliques are (generational, regional,the jammers, house team fetishizers, ‘the cool kids’ etc) not only at UCB, but at the other theaters as well. It’s an interesting thing to see it from from the top-down perspective. Being kind of a loner, it’s like I’m watching from a hot-air balloon. It can be beautiful. Like looking at a sunflower field where the seeds were all planted at different times using different fertilizers, like when you see great people and teams getting noticed and succeeding at various points in their career timeline, but also it can be ugly, like watching a wasp colony swooping in to kill all the bees in that field. Seeing how the architecture and mechanics of the improv scene works really does expose how human beings can seem to work together socially while simultaneously self-servingly, which is a lot of times sad or maddening since it often is at the expense of somebody else who might be under the social radar getting a deserved spot on a show, a team, a faculty or just some nod of recognition in a performance from a new set of heads..
I don’t have any inherent problem with this list, these teams are all fun and good and filled with good people. You should just know the sample that it is derived from is very specifically comprised of one particular social circle and I would wager people largely are supporting friends and trends here rather than by putting some considered thought into any personal artistic preference or abiding by Kevin’s criteria which was pretty clearly labeled but not so adhered to. Many of the teams listed are not very active, and I’d be curious as to how many practice every week, or do more than 4 shows a month or produce 1 fully well-thought out, original and professionally prepared for monthly show, and would certainly want to know if a team was managing to meet all of those criteria because that to me is a baseline for being considered in the exceptional category. There are many, many, many more great indie teams out there that got no mention.
But enough bullshit tenuous poetic analogies and trademark skepticism. I just wanted to build and add some info to contextualize some more. I’m not doing pure science here and I may leave a team out here and there by example so please forgive, am working quickly and focusing on active teams with more than just a handful of mentions.
Since Kevin has largely worked and helped build the UCB theater over the years and that is his main network, no surprise the teams listed are made up of ~95% UCB students. Specifically UCB students who have been in classes for 3-7 year range.There are some younger exceptions, I think, like Debaser or Pluto, maybe Schoolmarm for instance. Majority of the teams are less than 3 years old and were formed through meeting at UCB or were formed through Supernova. Almost all the teams are less than 5 years old, again with some exceptions (Formed outside of UCB Context that I know of- JFK Rowling, Punctual Drunks, Area 52, Funkle Todd +5 years include Funkle Todd, USNIT, Mannequin Room, Curtains, and of course Thank You Robot.)
This should tell you a little about how long indie teams typically last, and also how long it takes working together to get REALLY good.. Also, I could confidently say that this list of 135 probably represents somewhere around 20% of the total amount of teams that are currently active and playing right now. It’s a fucking big scene ya’ll.
Some stats and insights I can add are this (based on my experience):
QSIC had over 200+ players on 26 teams just from what we considered our house teams alone in three years. I estimate in the 3 years we were running, all told we had over 500+ different indie teams play there and literally thousands of performers.
The UCB generates the most indie teams by far, with the PIT and the Magnet distant seconds. I think this has to do with theater culture, personality, and real estate (2 stages at The Pit and less ‘comedy celebrity’ shows for instance means more spots available for student indie teams) The Annoyance is fledgling and has very few, however Mutual Slayer, Bruzas, and Hunks R’ Us were all mentioned on this list.
I noticed over time that the life cycle and health of teams that were playing weekly shows was much more robust than average, and those teams tended to either disband quickly after a run (a good thing I think, wastes less time for everybody figuring out if the team is worth the investment) or stayed together and either produced their own show or gigged hard if not hosting one.
I think this is important to note, especially if your team does not practice (which I imagine has a similar positive effect) If you don’t practice weekly, or perform weekly, your team is probably a waste of time and resources as it is very highly likely to disband or put up a long stretch of very erratic-in-quality shows, and then disband. A skill I picked up watching so many indie teams was it became fairly obvious for me to spot which teams practiced regularly and which did not, Nobody was fooling me about practicing, although they tried. I would encourage performers to play on less teams but on more serious teams. Debaser is a perfect example of this. Success in improv is more about quality and growth as a unit and less about quantity of personal opportunities. If you have someone on your team who is juggling so many commitments that they can’t prioritize the team as one, that is not great for your team either. And look, I get it, it’s only improv, who cares if this team or that team ends. The truth is not many people. But look at any of the teams people will talk about as all time greats, and I think you’ll see they share a lot of the same traits which would be: players are friends, rehearsed for a long time together before curbing them, still rehearsed once in a while or if they ever felt stale, played 1 show nearly every week with the whole or most of the team present, and had more fun as a result of doing all these things and are also respected as artists, not just comedians.
This is where the self-serving thing comes in. I feel like a current trend is to play on way too many teams. It has become a way to network while subjecting everyone to half-assed shows. Play on a team with so and so, and this person is hot right now, let me try to get team together with them etc. I don’t want to blow anybody’s minds, I know everybody’s social circle is always killing it all the time, but these teams and shows are usually not very great. Sure they are funny, and the players all have their moments, and they may have a killer set now and then, but as far as putting up a piece, well let’s just say piece is not a word I would usually describe those shows as. I think of it like performers panning for gold. If you end up landing on a golden team, I guess that is good for you. You’re gonna have to sort through a lot of rocks though that look like gold, but upon closer examination are just the grand delusions of a fool. I think this dilutes the overall quality of work going on. A team can only get so good without its players fully investing in each other. This is a trend that I don’t think can last, and is not great for improv in terms of getting more of the general public interested in doing what we do. We’re making it too insular and insidery, and that will only alienate our potential future consumers. There was an indie renaissance that happened over the last few years where the numbers just exploded and playing opportunities abounded. But with the still rising prices in real estate, and now with QSIC on hiatus or permanently gone, Treehouse turning into an official PIT space, and a number of bars and venues closing to performers or just closing, I don’t think that those high numbers are going to be sustainable again in a way that is good for the community.
(Too many teams/by not enough venues)+ the ratio of not enough rehearsing:dispersion of improv team investments-lower life expectancy(not enough venues)= Watered Down Improv and Disillusioned Performers
