Long Form Improvisation and American Comedy

The Harold

M. Fotis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137376589
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Arti performative

Long form scenic improv began with the Harold. The comic philosophy of this form started an era of comedy marked by support, trust, and collaboration. This book tells of the Harold, beginning with the development of improv theatre, through the tensions and evolutions that led to its creation at iO, and to its use in contemporary filmmaking.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The first time somebody asked me about improvisational theatre, I had no idea what they were talking about. And like many others, once I started training and performing improv, I suddenly understood its fundamental relationship to theatre and creativity. Now the shoe is on the other foot, and over the past fifteen years, most people I talk to about improvisational theatre have no idea what I’m talking about, including people that make theatre for a living. Because most people are unfamiliar with the history and practice of improvisational theatre, they tend to place it on the fringes, where it has been “percolating near the edge of being the next big thing for years.”1 Its ostensibly never-ending “percolation,” however, may stem from the misunderstanding of scholars, practitioners, and audience members about the art form. Many artists and scholars still only recognize improv as a rehearsal technique, devising tool, or character-building exercise and not as a legitimate performative art. Even within the improv community, there is tension about what exactly is true improvisation: is it the games of short form, the scenic style of long form, or sketch comedy derived from improv? In part because of its muddied meaning, everything from mainstream commercial theatre to the avant-garde has had an uneasy and sometimes unacknowledged relationship with improv. Yet when we examine the philosophical tenets of improvisational theatre, it quickly becomes apparent that improv is not at the fringe of theatre—it is at the very heart of theatrical practice, pedagogy, and theory.

I didn’t grow up in the theatre—I thought I would be teaching high school history and coaching baseball by now. My first real exposure to theatre was through improv as an undergraduate student. Its main theoretical concepts—support your partner, agreement, yes-and, active rather than passive choices, collaboration, and so forth—shape and permeate the way that I view, teach, and practice theatre. Yet it wasn’t until I began to formally study theatre that I realized two things: (1) the core principles of improvisational theatre form the bedrock of theatre training and practice in virtually any setting and can be applied to nearly any creative project, and (2) the general ignorance about improvisational theatre results in its being pushed to the margins. Despite all evidence to the contrary, many see it as something done for fun or to make silly jokes, but not something central to “real” theatre.

After I had formally trained at iO (formerly ImprovOlympic) and The Brave New Workshop and been performing improv in Chicago and Minneapolis, I went back to school to get my master’s. While there I began coaching and performing with the campus improv troupe. When I first arrived, many members of the troupe were dismayed that one of the school’s most venerated acting teachers was urging them to quit improv because all it did “was teach bad habits.” He suggested that they’d be better served spending their time “focusing on real acting.” Luckily those students stayed in the group, and during my two years at the school, the dozen or so members of the group were consistently cast in leading roles during the university’s main-stage season over the hundreds of other students who were only focused on “real acting.” They have all gone on to successful performance careers in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. How was it that other people didn’t see what I was seeing? Why weren’t they making the connection that being in a group that preaches ensemble, collaboration, and trust was making the students better actors and artists?

I wish that the erroneous assumptions about improvisation were limited to this one example, but for the past fifteen years, I have routinely fought the same battles, insisting that improvisation is not a silly sideshow, but that its principles are fundamental to creating art. I routinely find myself making the argument that training in a form entirely dependent on collaboration and creativity is central to an art based on collaboration and creativity. Training in the creation of theatre helps students and artists develop the ability to think creatively and theatrically—to deeply understand the creative process, storytelling, and performance. It helps them become better listeners who are more understanding and supportive ensemble members. It not only makes them better spontaneous performers, but it also allows them to be better prepared to interpret and interact with scripted drama.

Yes, improv can be painful to watch at times. I’ve seen and been in more failed Harolds than I care to admit. Yet its principles have been fundamental to my artistic career (and personal life), and the times I’ve seen or participated in a Harold that has worked have been transcendent. And I’m not alone. Tina Fey says that “improvisation as a way of working [makes] sense to me. I love the idea of two actors on stage with nothing—no costumes, no sets, no dialogue—who make up something together that is then completely real to everyone in the room. The rules of improvisation appealed to me not only as a way of creating comedy, but as a worldview. Studying improvisation literally changed my life.”2 Countless improvisers speak to the power and influence of the Harold, including some of the most influential comedic minds of the twenty-first century.

Therefore, I am studying improvisational theatre to help illuminate why it has been so instrumental in the development of comedy in the twenty-first century, thus allowing improv to take its rightful place in the theatrical lexicon. The best way to do this is by studying the Harold—the foundational structure of long-form or scenic-style improvisation. The form’s major concepts—agreement, yes-and, suspension of judgment, listening, justification, making active choices, truth in comedy, and support your partner—are fundamental to all forms and styles of improvisational theatre. Furthermore, the Harold has served as the bedrock for Tina Fey and the majority of the most significant comedic performers, writers, and directors of the past quarter century who are transforming the way we make, view, and interpret comedy. Critics and audiences are beginning to pay serious attention to improv comedy as well, with Rachael Combe summing up current opinion when she says, “Almost everything I see in theaters or on TV that makes me laugh these days was written, performed, or directed by someone who has a background in improv.”3 Understanding the Harold’s development, philosophical tenets, and implementation will allow us to understand not only improv but also the ways in which comedy has been reshaped into a system based on collaboration, connections, and trust.

While many popular and influential comic performers have come out of improvisation, training in the Harold specifically, there has been very little scholarly attention given to improv or the Harold. Improvisation is barely a footnote in the three-volume Cambridge History of American Theatre. Likewise, Arnold Aronson does not mention improvisational theatre in his book American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History, even though he defines the American avant-garde theatre as a movement beginning in the 1950s with a “bold spirit of experimentation—a rebellion against the mainstream commercial system and the utter rejection of the status quo . . . it was an approach that rejected beliefs and expectations of traditional audiences and radically altered both the aesthetic and organizational basis upon which performance was created.”4 When one looks at the history of contemporary improvisational theatre that began in the 1950s, as both a politically and aesthetically radical alternative to the scripted theatre of the time, the omission is striking. The above quote could easily have been attributed to The Compass Players, the first completely improvisational theatre in the world. The Compass was created as a sort of populist theatre, an alternative to stagnant traditional theatre: “it was a theatre intended for people who had no theatre.”5

Despite a glaring hole in improv scholarship, a few scholarly works have focused on improvisation. The first historical study of improvisation, Jeffrey Sweet’s Something Wonderful Right Away, is a compilation of interviews with many of the founders and early members of The Compass Players and Second City and has been wildly influential for many improvisers, including iO cofounder Charna Halpern and Annoyance Theatre founder Mick Napier. But because it was written before the Harold came to prominence (it was first published in 1978), it obviously does not include much information about the Harold. More recently, Jeanne Leep’s Theatrical Improvisation focuses on a broad view of the three genres of improvisation, and Amy Seham’s Whose Improv Is It Anyway? provides a basis for the history of improv by focusing on issues of race, gender, and power structures in improvisation.

Leep’s and Seham’s books have provided some recent scholarship; still, improv and the Harold have been largely ignored. The general lack of critical scholarship, as well as the variety of popular viewpoints and assumptions about improvisational theatre (mainly, that improv is the same thing as ad-libbing or winging it), has led to the mislabeling of contemporary improvisational theatre as a “secondary art form.” People continue to overlook improv despite its overwhelming influence on contemporary performance, in particular on ensemble-based comedy onstage and onscreen. David Patton defends the form, arguing that “the Harold is perhaps the most important theatrical innovation since the American Musical . . . the only distinctly American theatrical forms.”6

Some would contend, however, that since the Harold, improv has been a relatively stagnant form. Prior to the Harold, performance-improv did not have a set structure, leading Deborah Frances-White and others to argue that the Harold’s standardization actually stunted performance improv, despite the fact that before the Harold there really was no structure, and most improv consisted of disconnected games or rambling, loosely connected scenes. Frances-White argues that for the past thirty years “improvisers have mainly spent their time arguing over which work done between the fifties and seventies is the best, and re-creating it without much progress. Most groups still present some version of . . . the Harold, rarely deviating . . . in any significant way. They may find a different way of beginning the Harold . . . but essentially the form is the same and the quality of the work has not improved from all accounts.”7 Rob Kozlowski, in celebrating the Harold, remarked that practically all long-form improvisation is simply “the Harold with a new coat of paint.”8 Israel Savage recently commented in “Is ‘The Harold’ for Improv Cheaters?” that following a structure like the Harold leads to “stereotypes and clichéd scene work,” arguing that it can be akin to an artist using a “paint by numbers set.”9

Therefore in this book I will be exploring how and why the Harold came into being, the ways it has evolved (and the ways it hasn’t), and how people are using the Harold to help legitimize improvisational theatre. Furthermore, the Harold not only transformed improvisational theatre, but has also been highly influential in the development of an ensemble-based comic aesthetic featuring a highly collaborative system of creativity and performance, seen not only in improvisational theatre but in more mainstream entertainments, such as television’s 30 Rock and the improv-based filmmaking found in contemporary cinematic comedies like Anchorman and the Oscar-nominated Bridesmaids. Studying these developments and their roots in the Harold will allow us to more fully understand how the Harold revolutionized the way that comedy is created and further legitimized improvisation.

But first, what is improv? Contrary to your “funny” Uncle Herb’s definition, improv is not ad-libbing, winging it, or flying by the seat of your pants. According to Charna Halpern and Del Close, the pioneers of the Harold and scenic-style or long-form improv, “Real improvisation is more than just a garnish, thrown like parsley onto a previously prepared stand-up comedy routine . . . True improvisation is getting on-stage and performing without any preparation or planning.”10 The most prevalent form of improv performed today is what Amy Seham has classified as Chicago-style improv-comedy that originated in the 1950s with the advent of The Compass Players. Seham defines Chicago-style improv-comedy as “a form of unscripted performance that uses audience suggestions to initiate or shape scenes or plays created spontaneously and cooperatively according to agreed-upon rules or game structures, in the presence of an audience—frequently resulting in comedy.”11 Or as The Annoyance Theatre founder Mick Napier more simply states, “Improvisation is getting on stage and making stuff up as you go along.”12 While all true, these definitions do not encompass improv’s full range. Simply put, improvisation is a system of creativity, a mindset that focuses on the cooperation of a group of players to create completely original performances based on set structures and rules that can be performed spontaneously in front of an audience (performance based) or used as a means for generating material. Despite the raging debate between process and product, improv can exist as both a tool for creating and as a means of performance. Its implementation in both ways has made the Harold one of the most important forms of contemporary performance.

While it is popular to celebrate the unlimited freedom of improv, in reality like most modes of performance, it is usually most effective within set parameters. As Nicolas J. Zaunbrecher argues, “Limitation in improv is not just a fact—it is essential and valuable.”13 Much like theatrical innovator Vsevolod Meyerhold felt that putting limitations on actors oftentimes freed them artistically (by giving them very little playing space or highly stylized movement patterns, for instance), improv has several set structures that allow players focused freedom (the Harold being the prime example). Thus, improvisational...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Before the Harold: How Did We Get Here?
• 3 The Training-Wheels Harold
• 4 The Flexible Harold
• 5 Reactions, Transformations, and Combinations
• 6 Improv beyond the Theatre: The Harold’s Influence on Television and Film
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index