The title of this essay (and the last one, for those of you paying attention) pays homage to the X-Men, and for good reason, the most important of which is that when discussing team dynamics, you can't invoke any member of the DC universe. When you have Superman, who is essentially a god on this planet, fighting next to the Green Lantern, who once destroyed and remade the universe, standing next to the Flash who can run through matter and time, all being glowered over by the Batman, who can defeat all of them, you're not really looking at people who really need to fight side by side as a team. The DCU probably better describes stand-up comedians, as that's an art form that really shows off how awesome a person is by themselves, whereas improv is all about teamwork.
The X-Men, even though Nightcrawler could take on an entire battalion, Iceman I once saw get a hole blown through his stomach, and Wolverine can, apparently, do anything, is much more about teamwork. They're not invincible (except Wolverine), they're not all powerful (except Wolverine), and they do appear to actually need each other (except Wolverine). Because they each can't do everything all alone, they rely on each other to work together to see their way around obstacles. They figure out ways that their powers complement each other to solve problems. But you see these kind of dynamics in all aspects of story-telling, across all mediums and times where a group of people work together: members of a team aren't all about being cookie-cutter carbon copies with no discerning features. (A great example of this is “Porky's”, which has about a dozen friends, but only three of them really stand out from each other.) A good improv group has group mind, and the power of five minds working in concert is way stronger than any of them as individuals – a much better match to the X-Men.
The concept of “group mind” gets thrown around a lot, and its the idea that the members of a group are all plugged in to some common consciousness that informs their individual decisions. If everyone is trying to do their own thing to get from “A” to “B”, the group as a whole will never get there. The zero sum effect of everyone pulling in their own direction results in nothing getting accomplished. Imagine a Viking Ship where all the oarsmen could row their oars in any direction. Without a big Viking to come in and command them to all row in time and direction with each other, that poor knarr would never go anywhere and some little English hamlets would go unplundered. Of course in improv, the idea of someone coming in and taking control is against the concept. Instead an improv group is supposed to work like a headless swarm. The big Viking in this case is group mind, a voice followed by all the members of the team that keeps the ship on course. The idea of group mind is usually met by either fear or skepticism for seeming a little new agey. The big reason in my mind as to why group mind terrifies people is the same reason that “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” terrifies people: the idea of an army with no discernable features or individuality is the exact opposite to the celebration of the individual that is so common in western cultures. Drones strip away free thought, making the individuals unimportant compared to the group, but more importantly, they dissolve love and sorrow, which we feel makes us human.
(As a particularly interesting demonstration of some kind of group mind in the real world, my research into this topic coincided with an article by Bill Arnett on the subject and the concept coming up in a recent “Dollhouse” episode I watched.)
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