5th
Guest Writer: Sean Michaels (Montreal)
Sean Michaels is a writer and improviser based in Montreal. He has been doing improv since 2000, including performances at festivals in Toronto, Ottawa, Chicago and at home - most recently as a member of the duo VENEZUELA. He founded the music-blog Said the Gramophone in 2003.
Sometimes I am at a party with improvisers, and it is late at night, and each of us has drunk ten thousand beers, and little swallows are flying circles around our heads, and our bellies hurt from laughing, and at this juncture - dumb, drowsy, with salt-and-vinegar-flecked lips - we get heady. We talk shop. We talk shop at other times but it is especially at this time, in the weeer hours, that the headiness becomes earnest, spirited, divisive. Arguments waft from our minds. Counter-arguments are made. Sneers are sneered, retorts are torted, the house falls down. Shit gets real.
One of the biggest arguments of all is this one: WHO IS THIS FOR? By THIS we mean improv. By FOR, we mean what is the telos, the purpose of this on-stage tomfoolery. For whose benefit is it? Who must be entertained? When you get down to brass tacks, sometimes, it’s this: Is the customer always right?
Everyone has had this discussion. The audience didn’t laugh. Was it still funny? Or, worse: Were we being self-indulgent? Sometimes it is a debate about laughing at yourself, or breaking character; sometimes it is about experimentation, the avant garde. It has a thousand manifestations, but it comes back to that fundamental question: WHO IS THIS FOR?
I have heard four different answers to WHO IS THIS FOR?: it is for the pleasure of the audience; it is for the enjoyment of the performer; it is for the benefit of society & the world; or some combination of the above. All have their problems. Let’s dig a little deeper.
THIS IS FOR THE AUDIENCE
For most improvisers, this is the first instinct. Try to make the audience laugh. It’s harder than it seems. In improv, the biggest laughs aren’t just from a string of self-defeating gags. Story, character, rising stakes - this stuff adds traction to the jokes, helps them kill. It’s easy to imagine that the best improv is the kind that tries to serve the people watching it; what better (and more pleasurable) barometer to your success than people’s fun?
At the same time, audiences always laugh at swearwords. They laugh at toilet jokes, gay jokes, gags about getting your genitals stuck in revolving door(s). They’re sometimes oafish or drunk, and often impatient. Certain audiences feels like the worst possible judges of improv. If improv is for the audience, if it’s just a populist art-form, then it risks being reduced to the lowest common denominator. The stuff that’s truly beautiful, provocative, or funny in a different way - not everyone likes it. And as soon as you start spurning some members of the audience, you’re rolling down the slippery slope to…
THIS IS FOR US
Most of the world’s great artworks are understood as works of self-expression. The Tempest, “Billie Jean”, Annie Hall, Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”, Satie’s Gymnopédies. An original spirit, set down in paint, in ink, on wax. The mingling of experience and invention. Sounds good, right? Improv rarely aspires to this: it’s a form reared in comedy, not theatre. (As opposed to, say, modern clown.) But it gets there sometimes. For a beat, for a scene, for an entire show. Sometimes it’s about speaking to our deeper hearts, sometimes it’s about skimming some high strange funny. When improv is for the performer, it forces you to challenge yourself, search yourself, experiment. To figure out what excites you and the way your vision is different than every other performer’s. It risks failure, breakdown, an echoing and awkward crowd.
And so it isn’t always funny. Sometimes it’s deliberately not funny. Which sounds OK until you realize the corollary, in the eyes of your audience: Sometimes it sucks. Pretentious, self-satisfied bullshit. Performers in their little bubble, entertaining only themselves. Arrogant. Indulgent. Masturbatory.
So, I guess, was Shakespeare?
THIS IS FOR SOCIETY
I don’t think I’ve met anyone who has argued that improv should serve society - that somehow it should serve the world, make it a better place, through laughter, story and spontaneous invention. But it seems like one of this craft’s possible purposes. It’s high-falutin’, aspirational, sorta absurd. But it’s possible. So I leave it here, to consider.
THIS IS FOR THE AUDIENCE, FOR US, AND/OR FOR SOCIETY, i.e. SOME COMBINATION OF THE ABOVE
Like all wishy-washy answers, this is the most boring option. Compromises are sometimes muddier than the problems they aim to solve. But there’s something seductive in taking the best of two answers, and none of the problems. (All the same - Is it a cop-out? Yes!)
IN CONCLUSION
In conclusion, I have no fucking idea what improv is for. I will continue to argue about it, before, after or during the consumption of ten thousand beers. I lean toward the proposition that improv is for the performer, just because I feel that at its best it is a mode of self-expression, of individual artistry, more than just tickling the crowd. But I also feel that improv deliberately sites itself, most of the time, away from high art. Most of us like slipping on banana peels, or yelling a swearword from time to time. So I’m not really sure.
More important than the philosophy or teleology of improv is what we do with these thinkings. How do you take your theory of purpose and apply it to your craft? For me, these meditations manifest in a couple of ways. I try to play on stage, experimenting with my partners (& challenging myself) in a way that is, I hope, infectious for the audience. And I prefer when an improv show is a real performance, a cohesive whole that’s just-professional-enough. From the format to the backing music, a complete iteration of someone’s precise & private vision. Something for us, presented to you, with sincerity and love.
Previous guests: Kareem Badr, RobYn Slade, Ian Parizot, Rachel Klein, Dave Morris, Alex Wlasenko, From the old blog
