Books and Shirts

The Upright Citizen's Brigade Theatre (UCB) published an improv book recently, though more likely than not, if you're reading this blog, you already know that. This book was obviously groundbreaking in a number of ways: one, the first book to completely encapsulate a theater's approach to improv (as opposed to a person), and from a theater that is very much having a moment right now in the improv zeitgeist. It also was a book that was years in the making, and was the first one to propose to be a toolkit that could completely guide an improviser all the way from neophyte to functional. But I think the biggest thing about the book was more than the content of the book itself – it was that nearly every improviser I knew pre-ordered it and started reading it right away (and also posted a picture of themselves reading it with a cup of coffee). This happened again very recently with the TJ & Dave book, although apparently to a lesser degree.

I'm a bit of an improv bibliophile; I have improv books occupying over an entire shelf, and going back to the 60's. Improv books actually come out pretty often, but this was the first “big” one to come out while improv is on such a huge swing. The interesting thing about improv books is that they are a static, tangible totem in a craft that is absent such adjectives normally. We don't create things that can be shown or kept in perpetuity. Even our improv shows, when recorded, never quite recreate the experience of watching it live. This is kind of one of the magic sauces of improv, that live is what people truly come to see.

The downside is that we have very few totems that we can hang on to as a community; outside of a cluster of improv books (and even fewer really great ones), the TJ & Dave movie, a few team, theater, and festival t-shirts, we don't really have anything that we can hold in our hands. Even most of the great philosophy and writing is mostly in the land of the easily shared, but also easily forgotten digital (like this blog!). Improv is dangerously ephemeral.

I had a student ask me a great question recently: “what is improv?”. Some context as to why this is a great question is that she was explaining to her sister what the classes were about and was looking for a response to give her that described what we were doing. What we do may seem obvious to us as improvisers, but it's always worth remembering to think about what we look like to our audience, and the uninitiated. How would you describe improv to an alien that had absolutely no frame of reference? Hell, how do you describe the majority of what we do even to people who've seen “Whose Line”? (Which, on a related note, can we all bow our heads for a moment and thank God that a show like “Whose Line” exists and was relatively well played on ABC Family, because seriously how would we describe what we do to our families otherwise?)

The answer I gave my student is that it is “theater that is unscripted and unrehearsed”, which is a definition I rather like in that it is accurate, fairly all-encompassing, and concise. But it's not really a precise answer. It does say what we do, but doesn't really give you an idea of what that looks like. I always liked the poetry of the iO description of the Harold – saying that it was like a jazz band, which again, nails the artisanal, flexible, and complicated nature of it, but still doesn't really tell you much. You could of course recall its scene/game/scene structure, but that tells you even less about it. My student's follow up question is: “is it always funny?”, which we as improvisers I think have matured enough to be able to say the truth, which is: most of the time, but not always. But more importantly, that it doesn't have to be.

What is improv? It's something we can't write out easily. It can't be described in a sentence that fully captures what it looks like, what it means, and what it is composed of in a single sentence. This is its inherent beauty. We get to participate in something that we can only share by being present, in the moment with each other. Our entire art is a summer memory, fondly recalled.