The cliché about improv that’s familiar to people who don’t even practice it is the following mantra: yes, and. Roughly, it means ‘agree with what’s being offered, and then add something else’. And like many things about improv in popular culture, it’s often misrepresented.

First of all, no one stands around agreeing to everything like an idiot. “This jacket is blue.” “Yes, and it’s made of wool.” “Yes, and it’s slightly overpriced.” Even the youngest children I’ve taught are more articulate than that. So the first misconception is that this mantra is literal. But agreeing is important in improv: in fact, it’s probably the most important thing.

Improv is fantasy, and moreover it’s a fantasy where the audience is subject to the whims of the performers. After all, there is no set, no script, and no pre-existing agreement between the players on whether the jacket is blue. The audience will believe whatever you tell them. They’re on your side, and they will create the reality of the scene together with you — that is, until you break that reality by disagreeing with your fellow actor. If one player says the jacket is blue and the other player says the jacket is red, all logic gets thrown out the window and the audience will go and find something else to do. So the players must agree. That doesn’t mean, however, that the characters agree.

Here starts a distinction that I will maintain for the rest of the article. Improv is a magic trick: the stories that people will see on stage often contain contradicting viewpoints and conflict. It can therefore look like the players are working against each other. But this is a trick: improv is not a competition — it’s always a cooperation between the actors, even when it’s an argument between the characters. In improv, we’re constantly working on these two levels.

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Your mind may immediately wander to theater sports, a subgenre of improv devised by Keith Johnstone where teams ‘battle’ each other to win over jury members and come out on top. The truth is that it’s not terribly important who wins to either the jury or the players, as long as the audience are having a good time. I’ve been a jury member, and I’ve awarded points based on whoever’s taller. Don’t take it too seriously.

So while it’s important for the actors to agree on the color of the jacket, they can disagree about everything else: whether it’s too expensive, who it actually belongs to, or whether it makes them look cool. The reality of the scene isn’t broken by these disagreements: in fact, these disagreements will often give us insight into the characters. And that, of course, is just another way for the actors to work together.
For many years, I’ve taught improv courses at Usva, and in one of the first weeks, we present an imaginary rope to two groups of students. We position the students on opposite sides of the room, ‘hand’ them the rope, and let them engage in a tug of war. Most times, both teams will pull on the rope and move backwards in an effort to ‘win’. At this point, we stop the game and apologize for handing them an elastic rope. Then we offer them a ‘proper’ rope, which is thankfully all they need to understand that they can’t both win. They start again, and one team dutifully falls over while the other team celebrates. Then we point out to them that imaginary ropes aren’t a great indicator of actual physical strength. The competition was an illusion, and not only was it secretly a cooperation, but that cooperation was the only way in which we could make the whole thing look like a competition. That’s improv in a nutshell.

The second misconception is the ‘and’ part of ‘yes and’. We don’t have to keep talking about the jacket. In fact, we can talk about anything at all, as long as it doesn’t contradict the color, and as long as whatever you say next adds something else to the scene. Improv is a tennis match. As long as both players keep hitting the ball, neither of them will feel like they’re doing too much work. In fact, I encourage students to not launch into monologues or try to establish too many things in one go, whether it’s the location or the object or their characters. Why bother? Improv is for lazy people. Just give the other player something to work with, and they’ll hit that ball back to you. At some point, the audience is sick and tired of hearing about the jacket, anyway.

So, in a nutshell, here are ground rules number one and two:

Agree with your fellow actor.
Add something of your own.

It’s not quite as pithy as ‘yes and’ but at least it avoids the pitfalls of the mantra.
This solves the problem of how to react, but it doesn’t explain what to say in the first place. After all, someone has to start the scene.

In improvisational theater, the audience often gives a suggestion, to both highlight the improvisational nature of the show and keep the actors on their toes. It’s common for this suggestion to be a location, or an object, or a relationship between two people. To the beginning improviser, it’s important to emphasize that this isn’t a challenge. It’s actually really helpful.

Improv is not different from any other form of storytelling. The actors and the audience need a certain amount of clarity at the start of a scene so that they can agree on other things. Only then do we figure out what we’re going to do. We refer to these basic things as the foundation, and it simply consists of the who, the what, and the where: who are these people, what is the scene about, and where does it take place? If we can all agree on these basic things, then the rest of the scene, I promise you, will be much easier. It’s the most comfortable way to play.

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This little aside is for more experienced improvisers, so if you’re just starting out, ignore this bit and come back to it later. Advanced improvisers, often those coming from long form, will point out that you don’t need a suggestion at all, and that the delay and then reveal of an important piece of information can actually be a great moment in a scene. I agree. However, consider what the audience is reacting to: on one level, it’s a piece of a puzzle clicking into place. But movies and theater don’t often pull this trick: in fact, common storytelling wisdom is to get the basics out of the way as soon as possible so we can focus on the good stuff. What audiences are really reacting to is the proficiency of two players that have no knowledge of what the other person is thinking, and then find a way to make all preceding information fit with the new reveal. We’re applauding their skill, not the scene. It's great on a meta level but not necessarily good scene wisdom, especially not for beginners.

An easy exercise here is to pair people up and make them perform the first three lines of a scene. The goal is simple: at the end of these three lines, we want to know who these people are, what they’re doing, and where this is all taking place. This will often result in clumsy, awkward lines as everyone tries to squeeze that information into three sentences, but that doesn’t matter. Of course, in a real scene we’d have more time to establish these things, but the point is to activate your muscle memory, so that when you’re on stage and the lights are blinding you, you’re not overwhelmed with any thoughts, except for: let’s get the basics out of the way, first. So, rule three:

Establish the foundation as early as possible.

That solves the problem of what the scene should be about, at least at the start. But it doesn’t fix the other problem that most beginner improvisers have, which is how they should talk about it. Once players know where they are, who they are, and what they're doing, they might still panic: what next? The answer is surprisingly simple. When a player doesn’t know what to say in any situation, I ask them: well, what would you say?

This question is one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of a teacher working with beginning improvisers. In every class, there are people who like to fall back on jokes, or try to be creative. Let’s put two characters in a supermarket, and let’s make them a robber and a cashier (they could have gotten these as suggestions from the audience, or thought of this themselves as part of the foundation). A jokester cashier might respond like this:

A: Give me all your money!
B: Oh no! How will I ever support the lifestyle of my dog Fufu now!

The bizarreness of the response might get a chuckle from the audience, but it feels inauthentic, and moreover, impractical. This might be a conversation I’ll have with student B:

Me: But the dog’s not here, right? This is a scene between the two of you.
B: The dog might be here. It might be take your dog to work day.
Me: Is that what the scene is about?
B: No, it’s about me getting robbed.

There are two things to unpack from this conversation. One is that the student (perhaps slightly defensively) provides a reason for why their response might have included a dog. One scenario is that they thought of the dog beforehand, realized they were getting robbed, but still wanted to include the dog in the conversation. The more likely scenario is that they panicked, didn’t know what to say, and got creative. The other thing is that they did realize what the scene was really about: if you’re getting robbed, there’s not much time to think about the economical circumstances of your dog. So instead, I ask them what they would say if they got robbed. We try again.

A: Give me all your money!
B: Don’t shoot! Just take it.

This seems predictable and simple, but it’s actually a great answer. For one, it’s easy to follow, and we don’t have to worry about an imaginary dog that’s not there. It also provides the audience with a dose of realism: it grounds the scene, which is important at the start. And finally, it creates empathy with the audience, who would probably react in exactly the same way.

Creativity and jokes come from players who are insecure and want to put something good out there as soon as possible. This habit comes from a good place, but it’s counterproductive. Fufu would never have been as interesting as the robbery, and more importantly, the scene should be between the two players, not between one of them and their imaginary dog. As I mentioned before, improv is for lazy people. To that effect, we now have rule four:

You don’t need something good. You just need something. We’ll make it good later.

This is why ‘What would you say’ is such a good question to a beginning improviser. It absolves them from any obligation to be clever, funny, or creative, and forces them to be natural instead. After a while, they will realize that they don’t need to work for it at all. This is the true secret of improv, and one that’s so hard to explain to people who never practice it. The comedy and creativity emerge from the scene based on simple, natural reactions and an adherence to these basic rules. The players themselves often have no idea where these great moments come from, because they are always created together with the other actors. Let’s take the example above and add a few more lines, keeping in mind that the only thing players have to do is agree to the offer and react:

A: Give me all your money!
B: Don’t shoot! Just take it.
A: What, just like that?
B: Yeah, it’s not my money, it’s the supermarket’s money. I just work here.
A: Is it too much to ask to have a little company loyalty, though?
B: You’re robbing the place!
A: Yeah, but now I feel bad about it. If I knew how terrible its employees really were, maybe I would’ve picked someplace else.

Of course, this would be a scene between more experienced improvisers who know how to play characters, but the point of the dialogue is that the scene very quickly becomes interesting after a predictable opening. As a matter of fact, the more simple the opening, the better the scene often ends up being, unburned by expectations and free to go wherever it wants. Keep it simple. Stay lazy.

The final ground rule, and perhaps the most essential one, is this:

Listen.

It’s a deceptively simple statement, and in order to indicate its importance in improv, we’ll have to take a quick trip to the world of science. In a fun experiment, psychologists wired up people to machines and let them have conversations with each other. The machine then measured how long it took for a person to process the information they received, and how long it took them to formulate a response. The kicker: the time their brains needed to formulate a response was shorter than the time it needed to process the other person’s sentence.

One way to explain this result is that we as people are remarkably good at predicting where a conversation is going. This enables us to have a response ready without any sort of awkward pause between sentences. In other words, we respond to what we think the other person said, and we’re often right. The other explanation is that we don’t actually respond to what the other person said at all, and are simply injecting our own information into the conversation.

Both these explanations have important implications for improv. First off, it’s not good enough to respond to what you think the other person said. This may work well in real life, but in improvisation, where nothing is certain and we have to work together to define our scene, our predictions are suddenly worthless. We have to respond to what people actually said.

The other issue is when we inject our own information into a conversation (like poor Fufu). I’ve already talked about the dangers of creativity and jokes at the start of a scene, but moreover, the funniest moments in a scene are always responses to what’s happening or what’s being said. In order to be funny, you have to respond appropriately, and in order to respond appropriately, you have to be able to listen.
One exercise that you can do to train people’s brains into actually listening is to put students in pairs and let them play out a basic scene. There’s only one rule: you have to repeat the last few words the other person said, as literally as possible, and then add some words on top of that (there’s yes, and again). They will, to their own surprise, find that their brains are constantly rewording what the other person said into what their brains think they said, but not what they actually said. They will miss words or even entire phrases. We’ve done these exercises with so many students from all over the world, and we’ve concluded that this is just a basic feature of the human brain: we’re bad listeners. So listen.

You might have gone through this article and thought that the basic principles of improv — listening well, establishing clarity early on, cooperating instead of competing, reacting simply and appropriately, and making sure you’re both equally contributing to a conversation — are also excellent cornerstones of normal communication, and that the principles of improv seem like good life skills in general. You’re not wrong. Keep reading.