Who's Good at Improv

"People aren't good at improv or bad at improv. They're easy to work with or hard to work with."

Here’s yet another essay based on yet another unattributed quote I pulled from the ether.

I think I largely agree with this assertion.

If you’ve been in the game long enough, you understand this phenomenon: sometimes you’ll be at a jam, or after a fresh round of auditions, and there is someone there who absolutely has no clue what improv is. And they absolutely crush. Not beholden to any sort of expectations, sometimes you see someone fully blossom onstage, the way you might see a child at wedding reception display preternatural dancing ability. If you’re like me, your first thought is this must be preserved. Hopefully this person doesn’t have these glorious instincts drilled out of them by a Beginners Scenework class somewhere. Many times people have the comedic instinct or writerly instinct but have to be taught to project, to cheat out, to consider stage picture.

Perhaps you’ve seen/known/been the inverse: a person who has taken many classes over the years, done a thousand shows, and has had all the pointy bits and rough edges sanded off over time. Or worse, a person who cannot draw the straight line from mentorship to good scenework. Sometimes you meet someone and you think they are the fresh newcomer, and then later you find out they’ve been around longer than you have. You might even find out that this person is an active leader of a theater organization! How did they dupe so many people into thinking they could lead? I would much rather work with someone boring and by-the-numbers than with someone who might not understand that they’re in a performance.

I feel like I see this a lot when standups try to make the jump. I did standup for a few years and I didn’t like it because it was too repetitive, and my heart had always been in improv. The truly successful crossovers were people who understood that it was a completely different sport. You are part of a group, you are not doing setup-punchline, you are not trying to pull focus. The unsuccessful crossovers maintained an aloofness about the stage, as though they knew audience would not willfully suspend disbelief for them. It sounds pretentious and kind of mystical, but they didn’t trust themselves enough to fully give themselves to the scene. There had to be an additional layer of “look how dumb this whole thing is” that they laid on top of everything. And I think deep down, the successful standups realized that standup is also dumb so there’s no need to be pretentious going the other way.

The subject of this essay is pretty nebulous but at heart it is this: being “good” is not the same thing as being “technically proficient,” which is not the same thing as being “entertaining,” which is not the same thing as being “creative.” And being “bad” is not the same thing as being “unprofessional,” which is not the same thing as being “boring,” which is not the same thing as being “generic.” When we talk about who’s good and who’s bad, we’re all operating off of a different rubric. But the real spectrum has “I would like to play with this person” at one end and “I would like this person to leave the improv world entirely” on the other. There are many nebulous factors that influence how we place others on this spectrum. But at the end of the day I also believe that people are either easy to work with or hard to work with and everything else is just window dressing.

Part of what drew me to improv and what continues to draw me to improv is that it’s a big group of weird people. I, too, am weird. And we weird people can all congregate and revel in our weirdness and there’s that sense of relief when you know that all your brains work the same way. However, there are people whose brains work in ways that I could never fathom. And for me, that’s what makes people hard to work with. It’s possible that they’ve had their weird response stifled through years of practice. Those pointy bits and rough edges I talked about. Maybe our weirdnesses are incompatible. Maybe they have their own idiosyncrasies offstage that make us incompatible. They can be perfectly adept, and possibly even put Butts in Seats, but our perception of them is negatively colored. Sometimes we think someone is bad at improv and it ultimately boils down to our dislike of them as a person. I know that I am that guy to a number of improvisers out there.

If you’re reading this, then like me you’re probably interested in talking academically about improv. It would be greatly advantageous for us to reframe how we think of the quality of shows and performers. But this then raises the question: what are the criteria for determining the relative “goodness/badness” of a performer, and how many criteria does a performer need to satisfy? How much of it is onstage and how much of it is offstage? How much of it is the performance, and how much of it is personality? How much of it is art, how much is money, and how much is our own personal misgivings? Can we quantify goodness without first quantifying funniness, acting ability, stage presence, friendliness?

What exactly do we mean when we talk about who is “good” at improv?