Why I Improvise

Joan Didion, George Orwell, Chris Gethard and 3D movies

“The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”

- George Orwell “Why I Write”

Wisps of hair and ears are, in my observation, the most difficult images to render 3D. They often appear to float in front or behind of the being they are attached to. But with practice they can be matched to the dimension. This suggests care and passion. Again, in my observations.

The title here is a riff on a talk given by Joan Didion and later published in her book of essays, Let Me Tell You What I Mean. Didion, herself was riffing on an essay by George Orwell of the same title, “Why I Write.”

Orwell outlined four motives for writing: i) sheer egoism ii) aesthetic enthusiasm iii) historical impulse and iv) political purpose. Didion claimed to like the phrase “why I write,” because “i” is present in every word. She said that was what writing felt like. “I.” It was her way to process the world. She attempted to trade it in for more abstract and intellectual writing, but in the end, writing for her was about what she was observing and why those observations burrowed in her brain. She couldn’t will herself to do it for any other reason.

Chris Gethard is someone I knew about mostly through reference. He was referenced as an example of the kind of career a successful improviser could have when his show Big Lake premiered on Comedy Central. I’m not sure it lasted a season. Then his public access show turned late night show or stage show turned public access show was referenced as a comp to “We’re Gross,” the late night show my friend Gilli and I created. People would say “this feels a lot like ‘The Chris Gethard Show.’” It was said as a compliment. I never watched the show because I was worried it would influence the show I was making. That was ten years ago. The references stopped. The next time I would hear about Chris Gethard would be people sharing links to a clip of him criticizing the current comedy landscape.

Recently I was a guest on a panel for UCBLA’s 20th Anniversary. The panel invited spokespeople from different improv theaters in Los Angeles. When I started taking improv classes, it was not uncommon for classmates or friends or mostly family members to ask why I was taking them. My response was consistent. They were fun and I liked being able to schedule time in my week to goof around. It was never as a means to running a theater, fostering community, or having the experience to be asked for my advice to improvisers.

As anyone who has talked to me in the last year knows, I purchased a used 3D television. It quickly became an obsession and its scarcity and obscurity made it the kind of obsession I like most; rigorous yet obtainable. 3D movies are still released in theaters, but they rarely get a physical release. If you want to watch 3D movies at home, your selection is limited to the physical releases between 2012 and 2022. There are of course the exceptions. There are the classics that have been reproduced, Friday the 13th Part III, Dial M for Murder, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and the Japanese releases, Thunderbolts and Fantastic Four. After amassing all the titles I was interested in, I continued to scour the internet for any potential rarities and that’s when I stumbled onto a site where one person is single-handedly converting 2D movies into 3D. It’s not by request and the selection is vast but still limiting. However this has allowed me to obtain some of my favorite movies in 3D; John Wick: Chapter 4 and Die Hard for example. The service costs money, and judging by the number of members in the Telegram, I think this is how the 3D architect makes their living. I suspect however, this was not the intention of their foray into 3D conversion. There was nothing to suggest there was a market. They were just meeting their own needs.

Chris Gethard made some comments guest hosting “Going Down with Ella Yurman,” a satirical political podcast/public access show where he said that the comedy model he came up through no longer existed. He said that DIY was being weaponized by corporations to thrust the financial responsibility of production onto the artist for the suggestion that they might license the final product. He complimented Dropout TV for their profit share model, but also said their content was limited to games and interviews and that a comedian should not have to depend on their knowledge of tabletop games to make a career. Clips of the manifesto made the rounds and as a result Gethard was interviewed by Vulture at length. Gethard used the spotlight to underline his points and further celebrate what Dropout was doing. Gethard talked about his history with the industry and said how he had a public access show, a podcast, wrote for SNL, and was cast in TV and movies. He revealed he lost his health insurance shortly after becoming a father and got a job for a non-profit to get health insurance and pay his mortgage. Gethard points to the days of Funny or Die and The Onion News Network and early YouTube as a way for comedians with little resources to get exposure and then opportunities and guidance. The sun has set on those days.

The landscape today demands comedians work tirelessly to produce never ending content and/or produce high quality content that can be licensed. The days of Derrick Comedy or Paul Rust videos or Channel 101 are gone. The content no longer serves as proof of concept. The content is the concept and if you’re lucky, you’ll get paid very little with the little being the ceiling. Podcasts are dominated by A-list celebrities, content creators don’t own their content, and nothing that is created can be emancipated from its host for any chance at viability. Reading the interview was a cathartic exercise. I felt like someone was saying what I had been seeing. That the avenues to sustainable artistic vocations had been blocked off and squeezed down to one lane owned and operated by tech giants. Prior to Gethard’s impressions it felt like creators and producers were saying the industry still looks like a duck and walks like a duck, so it must be a duck. But I hadn’t seen it walk. I think we’re looking at a dead duck. It was a masterful examination, but I also think it missed a critical element of the comedian’s plight.

Didion says in order to graduate from Berkeley she had to talk about the cosmology of Paradise Lost to demonstrate a proficiency in Milton. Recalling it later, she admits she remembers more about the train down to Sacramento and what she saw and smelled than anything about what she spoke on. It’s here Didion says “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

I never saw improv classes or practices or the shows as a means to an end. They were the end in themselves. Once I learned about Harold Night, I suppose the intention changed. I was doing it to get on Harold night. However, I didn’t have a clear answer as to why I wanted to be on Harold night. I think I thought it was because I thought I was good enough to be on Harold night. Then when I started coaching, the answer to desiring Harold night was to legitimize my side hustle.

I started coaching long before I got on Harold night. Coaching improv became something I was able to do because I was a teacher. I recently got my masters in Instructional Strategies and was a special education teacher. I had enough teaching tricks in my bag that I could compensate for not having the improv bonafides. But it was still a mark of deficiency I was looking to erase.

Without much more than the old adage that if you do what you love for a living, you’ll never work a day in your life, I sought to coach improv as my main vocation. It seemed like wishful thinking, but truthfully it was more wishful than thinking. I never gave it much thought. Improv wasn’t something I hoped would lead me to financial sustainability. It was already how I was sustaining a soulful existence.

The 3D movie maker creates imperfect 3D movies and people pay him for it. I hope he does not feel trapped. There was no way to measure the demand for his service. His service was to himself. There was a time before YouTube made sketches profitable, before podcasts sold ad time, before podcasts existed. What Gethard doesn’t mention is that all those examples of success weren’t people following a blueprint for a creative career. They couldn’t have known. They were making videos and putting up shows because it was something they had to do. For ego or aesthetic or history or politics. The money wasn’t part of the equation. I predict there will be a time in the future where we can look back and see that the only people who made money and harnessed careers from their creative relationship to the internet where the first people to do it. Everyone who came after that was trying to follow a model, but they were missing the first step. Make your own model.

The way I see it is if you improvise or write or make art, you have two paths: you can follow the trail forged by someone else or you can follow the reason you are doing it. You might be able to see the former, but the latter requires you listen to your gut. Didion wanted to be a writer so she pursued a degree in English. But she didn’t need a degree to write. She needed to write to answer questions. Didion wrote Play It As It Lays because she saw a woman in an airport and that picture led to a narrator in her head who knew things she did not. She wrote the novel to know what the narrator knew. She forged her own path and quite figuratively, played it as it lay.

Orwell admits his writing became more digressive because the motive of political purpose was stronger than ego or aesthetic. Orwell wanted to soothe his ego and capture aesthetic experiences so he wrote novels. But it was the Spanish Civil War, Hitler, and other events of 1936 that made him acutely aware that “every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.” He received criticism for his work that leaned more journalistic than fiction, but he could not betray his motives for acclaim.

Our mysterious 3D technician enjoyed the aesthetic experiences of 3D movies and they trained themselves on the process. They weren’t perfect conversions but they were scratching the personal need for artistic expression and appreciation. They improved their skill set and the appreciators of the work started to show up. I subscribe so I can get more 3D movies, but I like to think even if I didn’t, even if no one did, homie would still commit to their craft because there is an internal hunger being fed.

So why do I improvise? It wasn’t to be on a panel answering questions about improv theory. It wasn’t to run a business or own a theater or foster a community. It wasn’t to make a living. And it wasn’t to get on television or be in a writer’s room. Thank goodness.

I improvise because I’m highly sensitive and introverted and desperate for connection. I don’t know how to take up space or advocate or make friends. I need to express myself without fear of rejection. I need to make choices that aren’t steeped in anxiety over the consequences. I need respite from the stresses and heartbreak of societal tragedies. I need to connect with my peers and neighbors by asking them questions and inviting them to collaborate without judging my approach. I need to learn about human experience through vulnerability. I improvise because I need to be creative and fail and get back up.

Everything else came after I met those needs. And that seems to have always been the case for creative people. I know it feels like money and security are the needs. Those are the ones that consume most of my energy, but I think that’s maybe because, and I know this is a stretch, I’m lucky. I don’t think you can trick yourself into making art to satisfy monetary needs. And conversely monetary gain will not satisfy your need for conscious expression. Think about it. Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg have billions of dollars that they will never be able to spend. But they can’t let it go. Why? Because they cannot meet their actual needs and so they amass a fortune because they think that maybe if they have the thing that everyone else purports to “need,” that value will somehow compensate for an unmet internal desire. It never will. There is literally not enough money in the world to buy what those goons need. How blessed am I that I can get what I need from fifteen minutes of using my imagination to be a ghost at a frat party?

That’s why the comedic content Gethard cited took off in the first place. Investors could feel that people were getting something immeasurably valuable from the art. But second-hand salvation will only get you so far. The golden goose has been slaughtered because people realized it’s not the universal vessel for self-actualization and the land could be better used to harvest magic (artificial) beans (intelligence). Those stalks (stocks) too will only lead to an oxygen-poor atmosphere.

What we think is a model is actually a mirage. The content creation, the podcasts, the scripts, the influencing are all well and good, but Gethard is right. They will not lead to the careers of the past. Because the people who made careers off of them were meeting their individual needs to be seen or heard or to make a statement. They were not chasing health insurance or brand deals. How could they? There wasn’t data to observe. Almost as soon as the ecosystems became monetized they began to dry up. That’s because they weren’t designed with profit in mind. They were vessels for self-discovery. If you want out of the desert, you can’t drink from someone else’s bottle. You have to fill yours up. Drink from that.

“And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.”

- George Orwell