When I first started improvising with
my friends in college, we improvised one night a week – every
Thursday, in the Student Union building on campus. When we wanted to
do shows, we just canceled practice and had the show in the same
room, same time – which is much easier to do at a suitcase college,
since there's not really anyone around, ever, on the weekends. We
loved improvising, but for us, one night a week was enough. We saw
the Second City TourCo when they came to town, and traveled to
Starkville, MS one weekend for a comedy festival (where it turns out
MSU is not a suitcase college at all), but that was about it for
extracurriculars. We liked improv, but we had other things, and it
was never more than just a hobby for any of us.
What I've noticed in my time since then
is that improv's hobby roots are starting to not even touch the
ground anymore. (Now I should point out that most of my friends are
hardcore or aspiring hardcore improvisers, so my point-of-view is
little skewed for analysis of the greater “scene”. And I do have
two blogs, a podcast, classes, and more improv than time, so I'm one
to talk.) I was reading Matthew Sweet's “Something Wonderful Right
Away”, and he points out that the original improvisers from the
University of Chicago were all hard science and philosophy majors,
and while a number of them went on to successful careers in
television and film, they did it in the more traditional pursuits of
writing or acting – not improvisation. Now there are a lot of
people whose comedic (and dramatic) pursuits are isolated to the
improvised arts, and I find very few (and vanishing number of) people
who have only a passing interest in improv.
This is peculiar because a whole bunch
of other crafts have people who are casual or hobbyist practitioners.
I can think of a bunch of people (my mother included) who will knit,
sew, crochet, or needlepoint for fun, but none of them talk about how
much they wish they could do it seven nights a week, and maybe one
with a good keyboardist. My father was a skilled woodworker, and
could make lots of things like chairs, desks, shelves, and bassoon
stands, but he never talked about a great carpenter who you could see
on the mainstage on Tuesday nights. What I'm talking about here is a
kind of ontological threshold where something exists as a result of
it's own independence as a thing, with it's own heroes, language,
momentum – it can stand on its own. Nowhere but improv, it seems,
are there so many people not willing to settle for anything less than
all improv, all the time.
Here's a great example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duhU_fZu7P0
For those that didn't watch it, it's a video called “Shit
Improvisers Say”. Here's another good example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkxFbz1a3As
It's called “How to Spot an Improviser”. They are both
hilarious, but only if you know improv, otherwise they are some
incomprehensible Dada-esque pieces. (I'll also point to the acutely
hilarious @ImprovCoach twitter feed.) We are rapidly losing (or not
gaining, perhaps more appropriately) participants in our art who just
hobbyists. Instead, we have an overabundance of people who have
in-jokes, peculiar language, and who want to be in 50 different
groups (the most common complaint I've heard in the last year is that
all the groups in town are just different combinations of the same
twenty people with different team names).
While nothing not taken in moderation
is a good thing, I should point out that this is great in a lot of
ways, people taking what we do seriously (and not just neutral
seriousness either, but a fervent, zealous, passionate sincerity) is
the gateway to mainstream understanding and acceptance. Such
devotion is the kind of problem you want to have. It does create two
issues, 1) a prohibitively high cost to entry – a need to have
years of workshops and classes, and the ability to participate all
the time, else imps face having to remain on the outside while a
cultural elite dominates from within and 2) a feedback mechanism that
chokes out external influence (See the above videos for indications
of our craft inbreeding. Or let me put it another way – we can do
anything we want, and I have seen a dozen scenes where characters
discuss improvising, but not one scene set an airport baggage
carousel.). And if there's one thing I've learned from ComicCon,
it's that no matter how nerdy you are, there's always someone nerdier
– and that kind of geekular brinkmanship is terrifying. (Which by
the way, if you thought you sacrificed for improv, read about this
guy who drove 1700 miles a week to take classes in Chicago:
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2009-11-16/news/0911150456_1_classes-drive-time-miles).
The positives are terrific though – a driving momentum that
demands new, interesting, creative energy all the time, and virtually
guarantees that someone will always be doing something new.
But I suppose most interesting is the
question of why – what is it about improv that inspires such
fervent devotion? Is it that improv feels so close to real life, and
is so instantly expressable? Or that it feels so tantalizingly
analyzed and un-tamable at the same time? Or even just that it
requires no preparation (by design) and is therefore attractive to a
generation of short-attention spans and little motivation? Just
saying that it is fun seems insufficient, there are lots of things
that are fun – but maybe it's because it feels like it's a new
frontier. A wide open wilderness with lots of room for imps to find
their place in, and just like any explorers, we can sense the call of
unknown.
