Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

This weekend I started a nine-week beginner's improv course with ComedySportz in Center City, Philadelphia.

We were told to get there early so the instructor, Dave, could show us all down to the basement area room, which is hard to find. When I arrived, several people were already there. Dave was checking people off as they arrived and making small talk, starting with the weather, which had turned chilly after a week or more of unseasonably warm weather.

"It's my fault," I said, explaining that I'd been telling people for the last two weeks that it was too warm. In turn, he took the blame, saying that cold weather had followed him back from Chicago.

The woman sitting on the floor next to me spoke up, a 20-something brunette with her hair pulled back, accentuating dark eyebrows. She was delicate, but bundled up in a puffy jacket. She said she was a great fan of Amy Poehler and thought there had been an increase in interest in improv because of her and Tina Fey.

I mentioned that Saturday Night Live's association with improv went back to the early days, with many of the original cast coming from the Second City Players. I mentioned that my first big exposure to improv was when I interviewed members of the Second City touring company in college, including Stephen Colbert.

As it was, she could have also dropped some names, but it wasn't until we were heading downstairs that I turned to her and said, "So, you must be a real Saturday Night Live fan, a real Amy Poehler fan," that she revealed a number of her friends are actors in New York and she'd gotten to meet Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Wow. Pretty cool. She told me her name was Ciara.

Downstairs, we found ourselves in something of a storage room. As Dave explained, that's exactly what it was. A number of theaters use the performance space upstairs, and some of them are always storing props in that room. So there were a couple boards leaning against the wall, and on one end of the room were articles of furniture, like desks and chairs.

On the wall hung a flyer that said, "Get Out of Vietnam Now," advertising a March taking place in, I think, April. It didn't look old enough to be vintage, so I figured it must be either a prop for a play or something of an in-joke.

The first thing we did was get in a circle and play a name game, the same sort of thing I used to play with kids at camp. We went around the circle and everyone said their name with an adjective while doing a motion. So I was Awesome Alyce, and I made muscles with both arms like a strong man. We went around several times and then tried to remember everybody's name.

There was Dancing Dave, the instructor, who's shorter than average with spiky brown hair and a friendly face, wearing a T-shirt and jeans; Lovely Lori, in her mid- to late 20's, average body build with long wavy dark hair and an aquiline nose, in a loose sweater; Jolting Gerry, in his 60's, a somewhat stocky guy with gray hair in a button-down shirt; Secretive Steve, 30-something, athletic with a receding buzz cut, in faded jeans and a sweatshirt.

There was Lying Lindsay, a petite 20-something in a green sweater with shoulder length brown wavy hair; Fabulous Fran, a quiet, slender woman in her 50s, wearing glasses and brown bobbed hair; Dying Dennis, a 20-something guy in sweaters and jeans, with longish wavy brown hair and an earring.

Next was Cheerful Carol, in her late 50's or early 60's, a short, voluptuous woman with dyed blonde hair and sensible looking glasses; Roaring Ricardo, a slender dark-complected guy with thick, wavy dark hair, dressed in a black button-down shirt and black slacks.

I was next. Then came Crazy Ciara, who looked even thinner out of her puffy coat and was wearing a Prince "Purple Rain" ringer T-shirt and jeans; Cavalier Colleen, a tall and curvy 30-something woman with dark hair pulled back in a ponytail and a very expressive face; Gregarious Geoff, a tall, beefy guy in his late 20's or early 30s with a receding hairline, wearing a sweatshirt and jeans; and Activated A.J., a tall, wiry guy in his late 20's or early 30's, with short reddish hair, glasses and a constant grin, wearing a polarfleece shirt and jeans.

Then Dave had us sit back down while he told us more about how ComedySportz started and what to expect from the class. According to him, the group had been around for about 12-15 years, starting in another city and then spreading all over the U.S. and in two international spots, as well.

He explained what improv was and the difference between short form and long form. We would be doing short form, which was four minutes or less and based on a challenge or game. He told us to enjoy ourselves and not worry about what came out of our mouths. The truth is, you wouldn't remember most of it. Unless, like me, you have an online journal and are recording it for posterity. Hi, posterity!

Then he called on people to explain their background and what got them interested in the class. Colleen volunteered first. She said that she's a professional actress focusing now on doing work in front of the camera. Someone had recommended taking an improv class as a way to expand her skills.

I volunteered next and talked about how I'd been interested in improv ever since I discovered, from doing research in college into my favorite comedians, that many of them started with improv. When I mentioned I'd been in the Penn State Monty Python Society, and Dave spoke up and said that he'd gone to Penn State and had heard of us. I told him that we'd sometimes done theater games at meetings but never with any instruction, and now that I saw a chance to do it, I wanted to go for it.

There were a lot of similar stories around the room. Gerry, for example, who's a retired doctor, was a longtime comedy fan who had discovered many of his favorite comedians started in improv. Similarly, Geoff became interested in improv when he found out about Del Close, widely considered the father of improv. Fran, who has an office job by day, relished the idea of trying out improv because she was a comedy fan, too. Carol, a lawyer by day, had always wanted to try improv and was finally taking a chance. Lori, also a Penn Stater with an office job relating to medical insurance, wanted to get involved in something fun.

Some people had more professional reasons. Ricardo, an outspoken guy, said that all his life he'd done the practical thing and was currently holding down a business job and a bartending job. But really, he'd always wanted to be involved in the arts and saw this as an opportunity. Steve had a similar story. He'd spent most of his life following practical career paths that didn't excite him. But recently, he'd broken into standup comedy in local comedy clubs and was planning to go to film school. Ciara, just out of school, was an actress who also had an album coming out. She said she was taking the class to get back in touch with herself, so that she's more authentic onstage.

Dennis had started with an acting background in school and then got interested in photography. He was hoping to go to grad school for photography but still longed to do some work with his first love, acting.

Some had more unique reasons. Lindsay, interestingly enough, had heard about the class from a friend who used it to cope with her grief after her mother died. Since her friend talked so highly about it, she decided to try it out. A.J. has a stuttering problem and was hoping that getting in front of a group and being spontaneous would help him make a breakthrough.

Finally, Boris, who walked in late and whom Gerry amusingly dubbed Belated Boris, is a computer programmer by day who was tired of his clever office mate getting all the attention at the water cooler. He was hoping that this class could help him get some attention, too. He hoped, also, that it might help with the ladies. He said he preferred the nickname Banging Boris.

Dave joked, "Oh, if only it helped with the ladies."

The first exercises were pretty easy, like a game we used to play at camp, Zip Zap Zop. You go around the circle and, in random order, point at someone, meet them in the eyes and say, "zip," "zap" or "zop," in that order. Ultimately, you're supposed to try to go as fast as possible. At camp we always played this as an elimination game, but here, when someone messed up, we all stepped into the circle, raised our hands to the sky and said, "Ohhhh!"

We moved from that into a word association game, which I found surprisingly challenging. We stood in a line and thought of words, which we'd throw out to someone walking down the line. They'd respond with a word of their choosing. It didn't have to make sense; you just had to keep going. And after we got started, more than one person progressed down the line right after each other.

I found myself almost panicking about what word to say, feeling self-conscious. The first time I went down the line I kept hesitating and couldn't come up with words to respond, rather than just saying the first thing that came into my mind. When I went through the second time, I said whatever came out of my mouth, even if it happened to be "elephant."

I have never had the word "elephant" come out of my mouth so many times, but apparently, it's my panic word. Or maybe it's just because I was trying not to say "elephant."

After we did that, we did a circle game where we did similar process to Zip Zap Zop. But instead of saying "zip," "zap," or "zop," we said whatever word came into our head. That was easier, because with the whole group there, I didn't feel as much pressure, even though everyone was listening.

When we'd gone through this game several times, Dave praised us for how quickly we were picking up. He said that most classes take awhile to catch on to the concepts he was teaching.

We did some ice breaker games, then. For one of them, we had to find everyone who had similar colored eyes and gather in groups. We blue eyes were a smaller group than the browns. Geoff stood off by himself, looking dejected.

"What's wrong?" Dave asked.

"Green," he said.

"The blues will welcome you," I said, and waved him over. From there, Dave paired us off with someone and had us, without talking, create letters within three seconds. First was an "H" and that was easy. But then we had to do it differently, which was harder.

Dave had us swap partners, and I got Carol. We had to come up with a secret handshake. Then we were supposed to walk around the room in slow motion. We were all shortsighted, so we'd approach someone thinking they were our partner, then realize they weren't and shrug them off. When we found our partner, we were supposed to do the handshake in slow motion. This was just very silly, and Carol really got into it. She was very expressive.

When we were done, Dave told us, "just hang out." Carol and I did the twist slowly, and then two other people joined in. Dave thought that was great.

Then we were supposed to find other people born in the same season by communicating nonverbally. I saw Ciara, who kept falling down, and figured out she was born in autumn, like me. I started falling down next to her. Then I got tired of falling down, and when other people fell down, I tried raking them up.

Then he had us sit down and asked for four volunteers. I popped up, along with Ciara, Colleen, and A.J. I was surprised and pleased to see A.J. taking the plunge, so I said, "Hey, A.J.!" Then Colleen continued the enthusiasm, applauding him and then every one else, and soon everyone was giving each other high fives.

This game was called Mr. Know-It-All. Four people stand shoulder-to-shoulder to make up one person, who's an expert in a topic chosen by the audience. Everything the expert says, however, comes from all four of us in turn. I started, since I was on the end, and we each added one word at a time until the sentence was over. This game was pretty easy for me, because I'd done this sort of thing before with my friends in the guise of creating a verbal composite story, although usually more than one word at a time.

We were Betty Crocker, an expert on cooking. Dave started by asking us the secret of our cooking skills. We started out with a long, rambling sentence, a list of things that contributed to her skills, but at the end of it, I saw an opportunity and ended the sentence with the word "pharmaceuticals." The class laughed.

Dave stopped us and pointed out that if you wanted to end a sentence you could just drop your voice, like I had, but someone after you might decide to keep going anyway. Really, the questioner was there to help guide the process along.

He asked us, "Pharmaceuticals? That's interesting. How does this factor into cooking?" We got into a long rambling sentence about how you have to start in a dark, dank, smelly, nasty basement.

"That sounds sort of illegal. So tell me how pharmaceuticals play into your cooking." We got into a long rambling sentence about how you can take flour and do various things to it and then add Vicodin. Again, I was the one who seized the opportunity to end the sentence on a punchline, to laughter.

We sat down and watched other groups, then. Some of the sentences were just long and rambling but others were very funny. One group was supposed to be talking about farming and got distracted talking about dirt and the moon. "My dirt is the best dirt," they claimed. And when asked what was their inspiration, they said that one night they went out and looked at the moon, and "the moon hit my eye like a big pizza pie."

Gerry's group was an expert in childbirth, and he kept ending sentences with "delirious." As in, "How did you get interested in childbirth?" "When I realized I was going to have a child, I became delirious."

The final game we did, because we had just enough time, was Spelling Bee. This is a very similar game. Four people stand shoulder-to-shoulder, to make up one speller. They're given a word, chosen by the audience. You start with everyone taking a breath and saying the word. Then you spell it, letter by letter, take a breath and say the word again, and then say a sentence with the word in it.

One hilarious response was: "Table. T-A-B-L-E. Table. I once was on a table. Table."

I watched some people do this, and it seemed fun, so I volunteered for the second group. We started out with an easy word. Then we did "Department," and the sentence was great: "Once I was alone in a department store, so I went naked." Lindsay gave the last word of that sentence and broke up laughing and covering her mouth.

Then Carol gave us a harder word, "licentious." She had previously given "algorithm" to a different group, so Dave told her she was cut off for the rest of the night with suggesting words. We spelled it out and then said, "Don't ever be licentious unless you are going to the prom." Here again, I was the one who seized the opportunity to end the sentence on a joke, which made people laugh.

While I was up there, my phone started ringing. "Whose phone is that?" Dave asked. I admitted it was mine and I'd forgotten to turn it off. He said, "That's OK. It can be background music." After it shut up, it rang again! Background music, the refrain.

I knew who it was: The Gryphon, who expected the class to be over 15 minutes earlier than it actually was, because of me giving him bad information. He was also downtown at that hour and was going to meet me out front. As soon as the class ended, I called him back. He was a few blocks away, so I caught up with him and walked him to his gaming group.

On the way, I couldn't stop talking about how well it went and how much easier it was than I'd thought. If you look at it more like a game than a performance, that makes it easier. Also, when you have other people up there with you, that takes the pressure off you as an individual. When we did the games where four of us were up there, I felt as if they had my back.

Throughout the night, as we did different games, Dave stopped to talk about the principles he was teaching, such as be in the moment; don't think too hard, just do it. Also, the very important mantra: I forgive myself. If you screw up, don't sweat it. Just move on. Other principles included making sure to enunciate clearly, make eye contact with fellow performers, and communicate both verbally and non verbally.

All of which can also be applied to life, if you think about it. Bonus! Well, except maybe the elephants.

More Musings from improv class:

Improv Class Musings Index

Copyright 2005 by Alyce Wilson

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