Some of the oldest most classic improv wisdom extols the virtue of having a rounded life, so that you have things to improvise about once you get onstage. I was recently in a scene about baseball, and realized quickly that I do not know one goddamn thing about baseball. I played softball as a child/preteen but none of it stuck. Normally I would have played “guy who doesn’t know shit about baseball” but one of the guys in the scene had already endowed me as a huge fan, so I decided to double down and endow myself as an ex-baseball player. It was fun skirting around my woeful ignorance but I felt on the inside that something was off the whole time.
I sold furniture and mattresses for several years. Once during a show we received the suggested location of “mattress store,” and I could feel myself psychically push everyone out of the way as I launched into my real-world mattress sales spiel. The actual specifics of the salesman were not important to the scene but I felt like an improv god for those three minutes.
I majored in the arts and humanities. Looking back, at my advanced age, it hasn’t really done a lot of good in terms of upward mobility. My life is very much like the Avenue Q song. What *do* you do with a BA in English? I can’t pay the bills yet because I have no skills, yet. The world is a big scary place. However, in my short time in college, I had to take a number of tangentially related classes to finish my major; including history, theology, ethnomusicology, marketing, theater, philosophy, physics, biology, urban planning, advanced calculus, and yoga/pilates. And looking back, one of the things I appreciated most about my time in college was having the chance to explore many areas of interest. I feel like I am a well-rounded adult, who *also* can read books real good and has a piece of paper to prove it.
I don’t think it’s any closely guarded secret that I think of myself as a “““smart””’ guy onstage. I pride myself on knowing a little bit about a lot of stuff, and I feel incredibly out of my element when I don’t know the particular specifics of a scene. E.g. how baseball works, what exactly a notary public does, anything from the Real Housewives series, what different alcohols taste like, ways in which the menstrual cycle can go wrong, Magic the Gathering, or any sort of anime things. I will say I’m also not quite adept at pretending I know about things either. I think this stems from a need to appear “““smart””” and a huge fear of getting details wrong.
Not to get too childhood-trauma-ish on all of you, but it was instilled in me at a very young age that the very best thing you could be was smart/intellectual/well-read. And it didn’t matter how useful the information was, as long as you retained it. Looking back I realize that I still sometimes live my life according to this lesson, and it’s taken a very long time to even recognize it, much less divorce myself from it. Improv is just one way in which I have reclaimed my dumbitude. It’s okay to not know things! You can be bad at stuff! You will survive failure!
The English degree also factors into this. My coworker briefly glanced over and read this essay as I was working on it. I told him that once upon a time, I planned to be a teacher, back when teaching was a good profession that meant something. Soon all of my teacher friends had to get second jobs and none of them could afford houses or cars and they seemed like they were incredibly burnt out, all day every day. So I knew leaving college that I would not be returning for my masters. By any useful measure I feel like a failure offstage, and I’m sure many of my peers feel the same.
And maybe it’s okay to be a failure too?
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