How to Become an Awesome Improviser

by Michael Brunström

Are you an awesome improviser? Of course you are – all improvisers are awesome people. But are you an awesome improviser? Don’t lie. You’re not, are you? Well, it’s OK. There’s no need to be ashamed. I’m not an awesome improviser either. Like you, I have – on the odd rare occasion – been awesome on stage. But that might have been a fluke. Who are we kidding? You and I both know who the truly awesome improvisers are, and that compared to them we’re just a pair of schmucks.

(To be brutally frank, I sometimes have misgivings about certain improvisers who are generally acknowledged to be awesome. Likewise, I can think of one or two improvisers whom I personally consider to be awesome, but wouldn’t feature in many people’s Top Ten. I’m not going to name names. This article isn’t about who is and isn’t awesome. Buy me a couple of drinks and I’ll tell you privately.)

Awesome improvisers achieve miraculous feats of stage athleticism. Their antics transcend the usual rules of improv that our teachers attempt to drum into us – all that boring who-what-where, yes-anding and platform building. They’re awesome in an inscrutably brilliant way. They seem to read each other’s minds, float inches off the ground and travel through time. They’re lithe, clever and goddamn sexually attractive.

How did they get to be so awesome? How? What is it that they do that makes run-of-the-mill improvisers like us think “Well, I might as well give up. They’ve cracked it. There is no way on God’s sweet earth that I will ever be as awesome as them.”?

The answer you don’t want to hear is . . . they’ve worked incredibly hard. They’ve performed in acres of duff shows, handed over pots of money to dubious self-styled improv gurus, rehearsed week-in-week-out in cold, damp meat warehouses, emerged from greasy pits of self-doubt, built and maintained a productive ensemble, sacrificed their egos on the altar of improv and gained oodles of toughly won experience over years and years and years and years.

There is another way, however. And I’m about to tell you what it is – a way of becoming an awesome improviser without going to all that time and trouble. And it’s so simple, I can sum it up in a pithy two-word slogan: “Just pretend.” That’s right – just pretend to be an awesome improviser. After all, every improviser is in the pretence business. If you’re on stage pretending to be a cow, you might as well pretend to be a witty cow. Half the battle of improv is in jumping up on stage in the style of someone who already knows a brilliant thing they’re going to say. Bullshit it.

I much prefer it when improvisers embrace what they do, even if they’re in a haphazard show full of directionless headbound scenes in the location of nowhere. I’ll give you an example. The other day I saw an improv show. It was neither tediously good nor gloriously bad. But from about a third of the way through the actors were clearly looking unhappy and tentative about it, and at the end they gave the audience nothing but apologetic nods before scuttling off the stage like cockroaches disturbed by a sanitary inspector’s torch. What a shame, I thought. If only they’d saved the diffidence, humility, regrets and recriminations for their post-show postmortem, and just pretended it was going brilliantly, I might’ve bought it.

But – and here comes the big but (I cannot lie) – how far will pretending alone take us? How many shows that are full of joyful rubbish will an audience put up with before they think “These guys have a charming, breezy self-confidence, but where can I see the awesome improvisers perform?” In other words, how long can improvisers survive on a diet of sheer hype?

This perhaps isn’t an entirely fatuous question. Improv in the UK is undergoing a pubescent growth spurt at the moment, and an increasing number of young groups are hungry for recognition. Many of these have an enthusiasm that, pound-for-pound, outweighs their audience numbers by a factor of ten. They’ll do anything to achieve that tipping-point of popularity that will see the work they’ve put in begin to pay off, and they're in a hurry. In my years, I’ve seen more than one group fade and expire, simply because they were unable to sustain the bubble of their own pretend awesomeness. All their promotional material boldly declared them to be the next big thing in the world of stuff, and they bounced about on stage in a chaotic expulsion of raw energy. The more their audiences dwindled, the more extravagant their claims to awesomeness became. At this delicate age in improv’s adolescence, there is a danger that we will start believing our own hype and forget to live up to it.

There’s clearly a finely balanced bridge to be built between the patience, humility and self-awareness of rehearsal and the cock-out, in-yer-face ebullience of performance. To be as awesome as the awesome improvisers requires an intelligent mix of discipline and bravura, patience and balls, talent and pretend talent. But it’s worth remembering, the next time you’re watching them do their effortlessly awesome thing on stage, that these guys aren’t getting hung up on any of this. They’re not trying to be awesome. Trying to be awesome is worse than pretending to be awesome – and it’s one of the most common mistakes improvisers make. If you're worried about how awesome you are, you've already fluffed it. Awesome improvisers just get on with it, performing in and for the moment, supporting their fellow improvisers and having fun.