I was in Boise, Idaho for a wedding this past weekend, and had the opportunity to play Euchre with some old friends. For those of you who are familiar, you should message me about getting together to play sometime. But for the vast majority of you who are probably unfamiliar, Euchre is a trick-taking card game played with 4 players, 2 teams of 2, and you sit across from your partner. It is very popular in the Midwest (or with transplants who have moved away from there, or with anyone who has known anyone from the Midwest for a substantial period of time). Euchre is a great way to meet new people and, surprisingly, has a lot in common with improv.

1. As with any trick game, you have to trust and support your partner. Sure, in Euchre you can choose to “go alone,” but this only works to your advantage in rare circumstances. In improv, you have to give your scene partner the opportunity to use their ideas, and trust that they will help grow the scene.
2. Sometimes you have a great hand, maybe even a loner, and your partner calls trump. Sometimes you have a great idea and your partner makes an offer and your idea doesn’t fit anymore. Let it go. Having both bowers of a trump suit is awesome; having two jacks is garbage.
3. Read between the lines. Table talk is prohibited, but there is a significant difference between a partner who mulls over picking up a trump and one who snatches it up the moment it’s their turn. Pay attention to body language and how things are said, and give meaning to them.
4. You have to be aggressive. At the beginning of each round, you have the option to choose the trump or pass. Picking the trump is scary, because if you don’t take a majority of the tricks, you get “euchred.” But passing every round is a great way to lose very slowly. Taking risks wins hands; great scenes come from taking chances.
5. Sometimes hands go awry. Sometimes you get euchred. Sometimes a scene goes bad. Best to do your best going forward, and take time to learn from your mistakes, but not while you’re still playing. Get your head back in the game.
6. Pay attention. Remember what’s been played. You should always know what trump cards are outstanding. In a scene, the best endings come from something that happened in the beginning.
7. Sometimes, if you are making an obscure reference, it’s best not to explain it. The audience members who don’t get it won’t care, and the ones who did will feel cheated instead of feeling in on it.

*This views expressed regarding the taste of Pepsi products are held by Randall Reed, Jr alone**, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Automatic Improv or any other cast member.

**And anyone else who has tasted both Pepsi and Coke.

There are a lot of principles encapsulated in this phrase – agreement, support, building something together, advancing the scene. Most of the other rules are derived from this fundamental axiom. (Don’t ask questions. Why not? Because you are not saying “yes, and” and you are stalling the scene.)

Tina Fey has said, “To me YES, AND means don’t be afraid to contribute. It’s your responsibility to contribute. Always make sure you’re adding something to the discussion. Your initiations are worthwhile.”

I think it could be even simpler. The REAL first rule of improv is “Be Courageous.” Not “Don’t Be Afraid,” because fear is something that we feel, and it is outside of our control. Courage is how we choose to respond to fear – by continuing forward anyway; saying “yes, and” forces you to add something that moves the scene forward.

The rest of the rules of improv are techniques for being courageous on stage when you are frightened; for when your lizard brain is telling you to go with the blandest, safest choice, and get off stage and out of the spotlight as quickly as possible.

Fortunately, we can use higher thinking to override the lizard brain, and pursue something more meaningful than our basic needs. Something like creating a meaningful scene, or connecting to our audience with a story that makes them feel something.

There is a quote by William James that I really like:

Do something everyday for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.

Yes, William James woke up everyday and did not shave his beard, BECAUSE he would rather be clean shaven. Eleanor Roosevelt eloquently summed it up when she said, “Do something every day that scares you.”

The cool thing about doing improv is that you have opportunities to do something that scares you multiple times in a single show. The downside is, sometimes you let the fear get the best of you. Mick Napier, in Improvise. Scene from the Inside Out, says that fear is the reason that bad scenes happen. According to Napier, not only does learning the rules NOT prevent you from doing bad scenes (as any early-intermediate improviser can attest), but it may actually CAUSE bad improvisation, because it makes you think. You retreat into your head and you stop playing. You become afraid to make a choice, because it might violate one of the rules, or it might not be “good enough” for the scene, and that fear paralyzes you.

Unfortunately, we cannot simply say “F*** fear!” and go do good scenes. We must condition ourselves to move toward the fear, to put ourselves into danger and steel ourselves against the outcomes…to jump and let the net appear, to continue into the unknown, damn the consequences! We must learn to be comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. The best part is, as you train yourself to not be stopped by fear on stage, you’ll notice that you will also be less and less controlled by fear in life. You can confront fears on stage to learn to face fears in real life, and you can seize opportunities to do things in real life that frighten you, so that you will be better prepared on stage!

Stop being cautious. Stop thinking, and judging, and trying to find the best alternative for every choice you face. Just choose something, and choose the next thing, and keep choosing until the end, and be happy with wherever you arrive, knowing that it was your choices that got you there. And if you want to end up somewhere else next time, have the strength to make different choices, but never relinquish your right to choose. Otherwise, you will become a boring bystander in your own scene, or your own life.

As promised, I would like to share a technique for creating new characters for each scene you do. I’ve heard many improv instructors provide this simple instruction for creating a character: make a physical and vocal choice. It took me a long time to realize just how powerful that advice was.

Every improv scene is a series of choices. Similarly, creating your character boils down to two choices: a physical choice and a vocal choice. As you step out onto stage, or in the seconds you have while the lights are down, change something in your body. Then decide to change the way you speak. The vocal change can be derived from the physical choice or can be unrelated. This doesn’t have to be something dramatic or attention stealing, or a refined accent. Your choices aren’t for the audience, they’re for you. They are gifts you give yourself, allowing you to experience the inputs you receive during the scene through a filter different from the one you use by default everyday. When I first started trying to put this into practice, I struggled because I felt like my ideas weren’t “creative” enough, or were too similar to something that someone else had just done. That doesn’t matter. How your audience or fellow improvisers perceive the change in your body or your voice isn’t the point. The reason that this works is that it changes your mind, and therefore your reactions.

There are two ways to create a character. Choose a character, then infer what his physicality and vocality would be like, which was my default when I started out. Or the opposite, which seems counterintuitive – choose a physicality and a vocality and let the character emerge. The first approach is invention; the second is discovery.

It is a common misconception that emotion starts exclusively in the mind, and correspondingly that characters start by choosing personality characteristics and working backwards to determine their physicality and vocality. However, studies have shown that the opposite process can work as well (here is a great blog article about this phenomenon). I like to call this character induction. In Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Blink,”  Paul Ekman discusses an intensive study that he and a colleague undertook in the 1960’s to break down and analyze the various muscular components of facial expressions. After working to make expressions of anger and distress, Ekman recalls “…one of us finally admitted feeling terrible after a session where we’d been making one of those faces all day […] What we discovered is that expressions alone are sufficient to create marked changes in the autonomic nervous system.” The autonomic nervous system is that part of the body that controls and regulates involuntary things, like heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure – some of the key components of emotion.

Dr. Susana Bloch took this a step further when she developed the Alba Emoting approach to express emotional states on stage, incorporating facial expression, posture, and breathing patterns to evoke a particular emotion in a given scene.

Even this site (among numerous other sources) lists using good posture as one of the “top 10 ways to instantly build self-confidence.” If you want to feel more confident, utilize good posture. The reason that people who are confident have good posture may be a chicken/egg situation – practicing good posture can make you more confident.

“But I thought we were talking about characters, not emotions,” you might say. True, but by making these changes to your posture, facial expressions, and breathing patterns through a physical choice and a vocal choice, you can change your character’s baseline emotional state, a constitutive element comprising their world view. Also, emotion is a central component to relationships, the entire point of having a character in an improv scene.

When you are first starting out with this strategy, it can feel overwhelming to make both a physical choice and a vocal choice in a space of about 2 seconds. I have found three keys to implementing this approach successfully:

1. Stop judging your choices – it doesn’t matter how “believable” your accent is. Remember, we’re more interested in the end product anyway. Love your choices. Also, both of these changes can be very subtle, like “my character is going to walk out with a single finger in his belt, and he is going to take a deep breath in every time before he speaks.”
2. It may be helpful to have someone who watches you improv often, or interacts with you in real life on a regular basis, to point out some of your “-isms.” These are idiosyncratic movements, gestures, or other tendencies that you have, that are largely unconscious and may be of a soothing nature. For example, while on stage you may have a predilection to avoid eye contact, touch your face, or rub your hands together when you speak. When creating a character, you want to start from as neutral of a place as possible so that the character you create is derived from choices you make, not habits you cannot break.
3. Practice being in tune with your body, so that you recognize the physiological changes that occur because of your choices; explore these and extrapolate what they might tell you about your character. Of course, these are up to your interpretation, so don’t worry about being “right.”

There are two exercises that I think can both demonstrate the versatility of this technique and help you put it into practice as you are starting out. I don’t know the real names for either of these exercises, so I’ll call them The Walkabout and The Chair Exercise.

The Walkabout

Have a coordinator lead the group in this exercise, and verbally prompt the group to ask themselves the questions mentioned below.

In an open space, start walking around. Try to get as neutral as possible. Then choose a part of your body and do something unusual with it. You can either move it in a way that is unusual for you (swing your arms more than normal, pull your shoulder blades together) or lead with that body part (adjust your posture so that your chin precedes the rest of your body, or start your walk with your knees in front). As you walk around like this, let it affect you. What kind of walk do you have? Slow and confident? Unaffected? Nervous? Begin to notice how you feel, how you might nonverbally interact with someone. If you’re doing this in a group, how do your fellow group members make you feel? Are you warm and open, or insecure and closed off? Begin to go delve deeper into your character. What kind of job might they have? What is a normal day like for them? Where are you going to or coming from? Next, verbalize something. Don’t force this, just open your mouth and let a sound escape. It doesn’t even have to be a word or make sense. Is it different from your normal speaking voice? Higher or lower? Strained or more relaxed? Finally, as you pass the other people in the room, speak to them. Just a couple of words. Never stop moving. Don’t worry about having a conversation or starting a scene, don’t worry about what they are saying to you. Once you try this for a minute or so, return to walking in silence, then finally go back to a neutral body position and slowly come to a halt. This entire exercise can stretch over 5-10 minutes or so, and should give you great insight into how a simple physical choice can inform a character. For bonus points, repeat the exercise and make a different physical choice.

The Chair Exercise

This is one of my favorite exercises because people always do surprisingly impressive work.

Set up the room so that one chair is in the front, facing the “panel,” and the rest of the group is sitting in a row of chairs facing the single chair. Have one improviser leave the room (offstage in the wings is fine, but they should be out of sight). Give them about 30 seconds to make a physical and vocal choice, then come out as that character and have a seat. It is crucial not to preconceive anything about this character beyond your two choices. The rest of the group will be sitting in the row of chairs, and ask the character questions. Start with background stuff – have the character name himself or herself and give a little bit of background information, then explore whatever comes up. As the interviewers, be especially attentive not just to what the character says but how they say it. If he mentions that math is his favorite subject and his face lights up, explore that. Or if you ask her about her friends, and she smiles when she talks about Trey, delve deeper into that relationship. As the character, follow your instincts, and you will be surprised at how well your verbal responses will match both your physicality and your voice. Try to have specific answers, but don’t get hung up on the details. Answer with confidence – this is your “life” and you are an expert on it. Draw from personal experience if you need to, but never break character. If you commit to the process, you will be amazed at how easily you can answer any question that the panel throws at you, because you will have a defined world view. That is the paramount goal of this entire process, to define a world view. After the exercise is over (we usually go about 7-10 minutes with a 3-5 minute discussion afterwards), you will have a flushed out character that you can bring back for future scenes if you want.

I have also done a more advanced variation of the chair exercise, where the group starts out by choosing a location, then each character is someone who could logically exist in that location. As new characters are introduced, they may share details about the characters that have gone before them, and how they might know each other or interact. Finally, once everyone has gone, we do a series of scenes in the chosen location, and bring in different combinations of those characters to interact in a long form set.

If you implement these strategies, you will have an infinite supply of new characters to try out, without finding yourself limited to the same archetypes you always play, or feeling overwhelmed by analysis paralysis. If you’d like to share your results using this technique, or have any questions, post in the comments below!

And thanks for sticking around to the end.

Here’s a cool video that some of my improv friends showed me. It’s a reminder of how important good object work is. Enjoy!

Here’s an excerpt from “The Art of Listening to Your Lover,” published by Psychology Today:

In our fast paced society, with both partners working, we barely have time to talk, let alone listen to each other’s stories. I see couples in such a hurry to respond, they don’t listen to everything their partners have to say. Instead they are in their heads planning their response. As a result, they have information but no knowledge of their partners. Mankell writes that people confuse information with knowledge. Knowledge means that you listen and interpret the information your partner conveys.

Get out of your head. Don’t plan your response when your scene partner is talking. Listen, watch, and interpret. Surprise them, yourself, and your audience with the knowledge you gain. Then do the same thing when you are with your significant other.

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Improv comedy is first and foremost about telling stories, and at the heart of these stories is a relationship. Or several relationships, in a longform set. When we are starting out as new improvisers, everything is new and exciting! Even a mediocre scene is enthralling simply because we can feel the rush of running into the unknown and blazing the trail as we go. We are told that, because of our unique series of life experiences, we are each funny and can create vibrantly unique scenes. But what happens when the initial shock of fear chasing wears off, we settle into a newly defined comfort zone, and we start creating “stereotyped characters” interacting in “hackneyed situations”? That is when we need to start reaching beyond ourselves to find new perspectives to explore.

When you utilize different characters, it is easier to internalize different world views, allowing your character to react differently from how you, the improviser, would. These reactions are not non-sensical, or “original,” but rather grounded and consistent with the character you are playing, in the reality in which they exist. This provides variety in the show, along with the opportunity to explore different thematic elements in a deeper, richer way. Although it is possible to do this without creating vibrant, distinctive characters, they are just a tool to help realign your consciousness. They also help keep the experience fresh and fun for you, encouraging a sense of play that is infectious to any audience.

In my next post, I’ll talk about a simple technique to create a veritable menagerie of characters.

Piedmont Park is a large park in Midtown Atlanta, bustling with activity during the day, but that night it was dark and desolate, and closed. I entered anyway because that was the route I had planned. I was a little scared – this was a secluded place where I could easily get accosted, or where a security guard could throw me out for trespassing. Not rational fears, but ones I get anyway when I’m where I’m not supposed to be late at night, in the dark (it probably didn’t help that this song was playing on my iPod at that moment). Almost immediately, I noticed a change. I felt closed off, defensive, and unwilling to connect with anyone. If I had passed someone, I would have hurried past with my eyes downcast and my arms folded across my body.

Connection is at the heart of improv. People come to see scenes about relationships, to see human behavior played out on stage. We need to connect with our fellow improvisers when we are doing a show in order to portray these relationships, and having fear makes forming those connections much more difficult to do.

If you  are afraid of going on stage, you will struggle with doing solid, grounded scenes. And you have two choices – be courageous (acknowledge the fear, then venture forward anyway) or become fearless (actually stop being afraid). I think that the second one is less a “choice” and more a product of experience. Do enough shows and you will either become confident that you can improvise yourself out of any situation and escape failure, or you will fail hard enough that you realize that life goes on and it’s really not something to be afraid of.

Consider the source of your fear. If you are afraid of performing, of getting in front of an audience, hopefully that is something that a successful show can help you with. If you are afraid of being on stage with your fellow improvisers, then that needs some reflection. If you are part of a jam or a theatre with a large troupe, then you will constantly be performing with new people and unknown elements. Focus on supporting them, on doing your best to make them look good, listening super hard, and not getting too attached to your ideas during a scene, as your partner may not be willing to go along with them if they don’t know you yet.

If you are in a more established ensemble and are still struggling with fear, that could be fruit growing from a seed of a lack of trust. Do you not trust them to support you and commit on stage? Do you not trust them to accept you as you are and love you no matter how good or bad any given scene is? You should not feel like you are performing for your fellow troupe members (they aren’t the ones paying to see you), nor should you feel like you are constantly trying out, trying to prove something – your worth or value as a performer or a person. No matter what you do on stage, you still have value as a person. If you feel these things when you perform, some ensemble building exercises might help. You could have everyone share meaningful stories from their past, or bring in and present objects that have special sentimental value to them. Once you and your fellow improvisers see each other as people, once you have been humanized, then you are more likely to look out for each other and take care of each other on and off stage.

For a similar story, check out the blog “Simplicity by Sunny.”

For the few of you who may not have seen it yet, here is a very entertaining clip of Liam Neeson trying out some improv on Ricky Gervais’ show “Life’s Too Short.”

Update 1/27/2025: Will Hines wrote a terrific article on stand-up versus improv, including this insightful quote:

Improv feels primarily REACTIVE, and stand-up feels primarily PROACTIVE.

Stand-up is like “Here’s what I’d like to talk about” and improv is “here’s my reaction to what’s happening to me.”

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