Improv is Serious

Part III

While there is some criticism approaching, I offer this in full breadth as an appraisal of improv’s inherent value, and a reminder. A reminder for anyone on the outside or disappointed by what they find on the inside. Art does not need to be big, flashy, approved, co-signed, or profitable. It need only be serious.

Improv is serious. Yes, every absurd scene about ghosts getting on a family phone plan or hypnotizing your family into making you sandwiches or being a bird toilet is serious. It’s serious because improv can’t be anything but serious. I would argue even me, the Daniel Day Lewis of breaking on stage, is serious. It can’t be faked. You can’t write an improv scene. Anyone who has seen Don’t Think Twice knows this. And anyone who hasn’t seen it is proof improv can't be commercial either. It can barely sell itself.

Improv exists in the moment. There are no revisions. You can’t take it again, or put a filter on it, or post only the best parts. Now, of course, people do this. They take pictures and videos and post them to social media, but that’s not improv. That’s a retelling of improv. And that is not substantial enough to be serious or interesting enough to be marketable. That is just for the people posting them. Which is fine. Improv is something you make for you. What an audience is getting when they go to an improv show is an unfiltered, unapproved, honest performance. Even when someone is playing a giraffe posing as a panda or a magician who accidentally made his penis disappear, that performer is making a choice that hasn’t been vetted or polished or rehearsed. It’s a serious attempt at something unreal. If the term serious still bumps for you, especially when applying it to improv, try sincere, or effortful, or honest. My thesaurus said any of those will do the job.

There’s no choice an improviser can make on stage that isn’t their own. Even if they are mimicking the choices of more experienced improvisers that they have seen, they are pulling from their experience. They are helpless to make a choice that isn’t influenced by their experience. You can’t fake what you’re doing on stage any more than you can fake what you’d do in an emergency. You will respond and that will tell us about who you are and where you’ve been. Even if it’s not what you wanted to do, or if it’s just what someone told you to do, it’s your genuine response to a situation informed by the life you’ve lived. Even fake lives are real. You can pretend to be someone else, or gifted to play a character, and still your choices about that situation, even if they are inauthentic to who you are when executed, are absolutely genuine to the person you are who led you to that choice. In a culture where everything gets edited and noted and refined and computer generated and AI-assisted and sponsored, improv remains repulsively sincere.

Advertisers won’t touch improv because the quality is not consistent enough to attach to. And there’s not a competitive component that generates fandom that could translate into merchandising. Before the suggestion, there is nothing. No pre-show, no “brought to you by,” no analysts, no behind the scenes. Then there is a suggestion (usually). Then there is the stage, the performers, and the choices they make. Then there is nothing again. Everything that the art is exists only for the people there to see it. For all the hits and all the misses. It is human experience aimed at expression without consequence. In my mind, that is true serious expression.

It is not about survival or profit or image or branding or winning. It is nothing special. Which makes it priceless. Improv is a contradiction. It is beautiful because it is ugly. It’s risk taking because there are no stakes. It is serious because it is stupid. It isn’t fake because it isn’t real. Improv is accessible by all and beholden to none. In these unserious times, there is a real appetite for something that feels unpackaged. I believe that improv is and can be an antidote to unserious content. People have a bad taste for artificial slivers of perfection on social media, or mountains being made of molehills. Everyone has a handle. OnlyFans creators pay men to pose as them in direct messaging. Tell-alls and biopics and documentaries are now produced by the subject. Students are using AI to write papers and teachers are using AI to grade papers. Nothing is as it seems. Commercials have been slipped back into our content and they’re telling us we’re bald, overweight, sexually dysfunctional, and suffering. Free shipping is a climate choking, small businesses killing lie. We’re all being fucking Catfished! But in improv, what you see is refreshingly what you get, even if the person is playing a catfish.

Big tech and private equity have strangled music, movies, television, books, image, personality, you name it. Until now, improv has been too slimy to be crushed by non-serious actors. It’s been a little sincere worm wiggling around in the dirt, consuming human waste and shitting out rich soil. But I’m worried I’m going to find it squished under the boot of sexy Santa.

Imagine for a second, you made an art piece and hung it up at an art gallery. The gallery owners pay rent on the space. They hire someone to curate the art that goes up, someone to manage the building and someone to keep it clean. They also employ someone to market and advertise for them. Without your art in there, the space would be empty. Without them you’d have no place to put your art. That was the experience during the pandemic, but you kept creating art. Now because your art is in there, people come in. Some people enjoy your art. Some people do not. Some people see your art and take the art classes that the art gallery offers. The owner of the gallery says you can hang your art up, but you will only get paid for the art you sell after the gallery makes $500. You could sell a $499 piece every month and never get paid for your art. That’s not serious. That’s the model I see when I look at UCB.

Near the end of the Pandemic, Venture Capitalists bought the UCB Theater. Now VCs are not typically the same rotten apples that Private Equity often is, but they’re interested in the same outcome. Profit. And being serious about profit usually means you’re not serious about art. Being serious about art means you want to grow art. Being serious about profit means you want to grow profit. They are two distinct ecosystems.

If I was going to grow an improv scene in a sealed off black box two-liter bottle, I would put in comfort, trust, “yes, and,” encouragement, inclusion, honesty, and fearlessness. That’s all I think you need to build a reality, a relationship, an unusual premise, heightening and exploration. No materials, equipment and the space can be relatively small.

One could use those same resources to grow not only a single improv scene, but a collection of improv scenes. Those scenes could grow a larger scene that reaches beyond the stage and into the audience and into classrooms and living rooms and backyards and parking lots. Teams could form, shows produced and a community cultivated, much the way the residents of a neighborhood transform an empty lot into a garden. Everyone just brings what they have and that will be enough.

But when I look around at the larger improv scene, the one that includes performers and audiences and teachers and students and theaters and shows and artistic directors, I see a vastly different system at work. I see money, exclusivity, opaqueness, fear, and corporate interests being planted and tended to. These are not the resources I associate with comedy or art. Art and comedy don’t need money or exclusiveness to grow. Those seeds of capitalism grow businesses, profits, power and privatization. For private investors, inclusivity, creativity, and community are weeds. They take away from the surface area that could be used to maximize profit.

I believe that creativity comes from confidence and confidence comes from comfort. If you want people to take risks and express themselves, create a space where they feel safe to step out from behind their walls. It’s not a radical idea. Of course I suppose you could make the argument that necessity breeds innovation and if you starve people of opportunities of creative expression, that will force them to come up with new ways to be creative, but is that really the environment we want our creativity to be born out of? Even if the answer is yes, do we really need to outsource that fear factory to private money? People have enough insecurities on their own. Doesn’t seem like we need to pay someone to infuse more. Take a look at this.

It’s a comment left by someone on the UCB Instagram criticizing the selection process for one of the house teams. It’s a thoughtful critique that, based on personal conversations I’ve had, is not as unsupported as the lack of engagement would suggest. The only other person other than myself who liked it is a private account. The person who posted it is almost nearly anonymous. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s a dummy account created just to leave the comment. This suggests to me that there’s a genuine fear of a backlash from the theater. Now what kind of art ecosystem can one expect to have when the artists are operating out of fear and not encouragement? To be fair, the theater has never said directly that it would ostracize outspoken individuals, but it also has done none of the work to calm those fears. So much is done behind closed doors. Which is their right. But what possible artistic reason could there be for making people guess as to why they were or were not selected?

Lack of comfort breeds lack of confidence breeds lack of creativity. Committed to serious art means being committed to fostering exploration and evolution. When UCB came back it trumpeted transparency, a rotating schedule of shows and varying artistic directions. These were pillars to build serious art on. I have to believe that if those pillars remained in place, I would be seeing new and exciting shows. And people wouldn’t be hiding behind aliases to express frustration with a system operating in the shadows. The practices of the theater have led artists to fear there could be performance consequences for voicing dissent. Stifling voices is stifling creativity. It is absurd to be serious about supporting art while destabilizing the ecosystem in which it lives. It is fake. It is not serious.

If UCB was serious about art, they would take the artists seriously. They would support the performers through opportunity and compensation. How many performers have not returned to that stage or never got the chance in the first place? How many ideas have we not seen because the theater deemed them unprofitable? With its dominance, improv shows that might otherwise be intriguing or inspiring face obscurity if UCB doesn’t put them up. A serious theater would nurture its student body, not neglect it. They have students pay outrageous fees to learn improv in literal echo chambers, and then perform their class shows in those same echo chambers. When I was coming up through the UCB school, our classes were at theater and rehearsal spaces all over the city. Each one structured for performance, meaning there was some sort of stage and the acoustics kept the sound isolated. I’ve coached in three classrooms at three of the locations UCB has set up, and I had to literally quiet my laughter so I could hear the performers. Now I’m a generous laugher, so maybe others haven’t encountered the same issue, but when you consider class shows are now being held in those same rooms, it feels unconsidered, or say it with me, unserious.

I was fortunate to come up when regardless of where your class was, the shows were on the main stage at Franklin. Now class shows are in the same classrooms where the classes take place. No stage, no lights, no sound. Is there a more on the nose example of art not being taken seriously by the people investing in its infrastructure than a space where the performers can’t be heard or seen and the laughter must be silenced? Just because someone is learning doesn’t mean they shouldn’t get the chance to take their art seriously.

What is perhaps the most alarming signal that improv is not being taken seriously by the people running the biggest improv theater is the hints ant endgame strategy. As Ted Gioia lays it out in his piece on rising subscription prices, endgame is a practice most commonly employed by Private Equity when the business they own sees a decline in demand, so the “strategists” reduce investment in new products and services, while steadily raising prices.

Endgame is not serious. Endgame is one of those serial killer nurses that terminates their sick patients. It is pocketing the money for groceries while keeping the subject alive on diet pills like the doomed victim tied to the bed in the movie Se7en. More breakdown from Mr. Gioia:

“Profit per customer is now the key metric driving your business. It’s more important than innovation or growth or artistry or any of those old fashioned ideas.” In the world of streaming content as mentioned in Part I, there’s an overload of low quality content coupled with price hikes, saying nothing of seriousness. These businesses rely on their loyal and passive customers who don’t or won’t take the action to severe ties. Think back to Spotify manufacturing songs for background playlists. Netflix purchasing an old library. Or go beyond streaming and look at Amazon collecting its annual Prime subscription from you while cloning cheaper versions of the products it sells.

The lack of investment in classroom conditions, and rising ticket prices are symptoms of a potential UCB endgame. There’s also the fact that they have lost relationships with more seasoned performers to other theaters where the pay structure is more equitable. Be on the lookout for increases in class costs, restructuring performer payouts, and investment in more live-streaming technology with a continuing decline or neglect in infrastructure, training, curriculum, and talent investment. If this happens, just remember, your participation is optional.

Endgame is why I reject the premise that improvisers, other schools, and smaller theaters benefit from UCB’s presence. I do not subscribe to trickle down improv-onomics. UCB is not taking improv seriously. UCB is taking profitability seriously. Improv, as it always has, will be just fine without private money. Improv’s strength is that it’s unappealing to capitalism and extremely appealing to creative individuals looking for connection. Venture Capitalists have not improved the improv in Los Angeles. Improvisers have. VCs have contributed to classes and shows costing more, talent equity disparity, declining experimental and fearless scene work, and a perceived gap between what is happening on stage and what is happening in the classrooms. The creative community in Los Angeles is more than capable of building and fostering a bold and inspired improv scene. It does not need UCB to survive. It was alive and kicking during the pandemic while UCB hibernated. It turned out we didn’t need the gallery to showcase the art.

UCB wants you to think the relationship they have with you is mutualism. They are the rhino and you are the little bird atop. But the relationship looks more parasitic. Like a dog with fleas. And you’re the dog.

I have found the improv ecosystem I described earlier. I have been doing a podcast where I interview people from all over the world who are part of improv communities. I accidentally stumbled into decentralized open sharing. Like Napster but for improv. What I have found in talking to people from the Philippines, Australia, Iceland, Austin, Ann Arbor, San Francisco, and Scotland is that improv is not only alive, but hiking peaks and reaching new plateaus. It is being cared for by thoughtful, passionate, and serious people. I have learned so much about theater running, show programming, inventive forms, teaching strategies, and collaboration. I was operating on an outdated model from when I didn’t live in Los Angeles. The lack of a UCB didn’t make these cities improv deserts. It made them innovators. Without a celebrity centric, perceived pipeline, improvisers appeared free to focus on the improv. Now of course I’m only getting the choicest slice of the geographically distant scene, but there was plenty of reason to believe that what I was hearing about was a sample of how seriously people were taking improv. So many people talked about finding improv through podcasts. That’s extraordinary. That’s revolutionary. The distance has been eradicated. If UCB wants to be the powerhouse for improv, it needs to take the art form seriously, but I don’t think it can do that and take its investors seriously. One is for a bunch of idiots who have no idea what they’re doing and the other is also that, but usually poor.

My theater recently ran an improv fantasy league. Not my idea at all. Something I learned about from the Austin comedy scene. I didn’t even implement it. My partner organized and ran the whole thing with an impressive vision. Improvisers from all theaters and all experience levels came together to be drafted onto mash-up teams and to compete. It was without a doubt one of the most successful endeavors my theater has played a role in.

The shows were extraordinarily funny and supportive. I got more positive feedback about those four nights than the entire rest of the year of shows. One person said they felt free on stage because the show “didn’t count.” A draft put together the teams. The signup ensured everyone got to play. The teams only existed for the tournament. They didn’t exist before and they wouldn’t be under scrutiny after. No one was getting cut from their team, so there was no internal competition. No teams would get broken up by an artistic director. It was about having fun while you had your time in the spotlight. It was about building something with someone who was eager to build with you. It was improv without the hierarchy, or exclusivity or moving goal post. Which is to say it was improv.

People could take improv seriously without the interference of fake stakes. It was a community of people coming together to make something they couldn’t make on their own for their own personal and artistic development. At one point, I believe UCB took improv seriously. Now I believe they take business seriously. At one point, UCB made improv in Los Angeles possible. Now I believe UCB makes improv in Los Angeles unserious.

There’s been concern over UCB no longer being cool. That’s not the issue. UCB was never cool. It was serious, which can be cool. But it was also exclusive, mostly white, mostly young, and mostly male. Which is uncool. Art can’t evolve without diversity. The origin point of improv today is much more reflective of and receptive to new voices. That is excellent. That is serious progress. Unfortunately the big name in town has become less serious. For most of its existence UCB was a place where artists could perform for hungry audiences who felt fortunate to have access to such a creative incubator for only $5. Now the theater aims to be as profitable as possible, meaning the audiences don’t feel fortunate. They feel fleeced. That’s fake. That’s uncool.

Seriousness is cool. Lifting people up and creating space and opportunity is cool. Seeing your investment through, even when it means stepping back, just so the customer base at your establishment can have the magical experience you had is cool. Leveraging your establishment’s brand so you can extract more money from your customer base is not cool. Uplifting rappers in Atlanta for your own personal gain is fake. Giving Santa a glow-up is fake. Owning a comedy theater and putting the growth of the business over the growth of the art is fake. Letting your child believe that a giant old diabetic elf is going to come leave presents for them if they are kind is serious. Making a banger of a song calling out fakeness and using it to build momentum for an album to showcase lesser known rappers from your city is serious. Building an improv community in your city because you value improv is serious. Being effortful with someone on stage in a scene about shooting a hole in the moon to make bottom half werewolves when you know the whole thing “doesn’t count” is stupid serious.

In short, if UCB is Drake, you be Kendrick.

I don’t care how sexy they make him, I ain’t letting Santa fuck me.

You can always build your own Casa Bonita, but once you’re famous, you might only be able to settle for take-out.

Be seriously stupid about your art.

I leave you with this lyric from a serious artist.

So life is what you make it, I hope you make a movement

Hope your opportunity survives the opportunist.

- Nipsey Hussle “I don’t give a fucc”