The Improviser's Guide to Destroying Trust

In the book Truth in Comedy, Kim “Howard” Johnson describes an incident involving a well-known comedian that illustrates many of the themes I’ve been developing in the Daily Improviser blog.

The comedian and her onstage partner Del Close were improvising a scene in which they were playing a married couple. In the scene, the character of the wife told Del that she wanted a divorce. Del responded as an emotionally distraught husband might, in hopes of getting her to reconsider: “But honey, what about the children?” The wife responded, “We don’t have any children!”

As Johnson writes, “Naturally, she got a huge laugh. Naturally, she had completely destroyed the scene. [Her] laugh was at the expense of the scene, and she lost the trust of a fellow player.”

The real problem was that she violated the cardinal rule of improv: Full agreement with the “reality” asserted by your onstage partner at all times. As I said in my very first post, an onstage performer can find many ways to get a laugh – mugging, telling jokes, using puns – but that’s not improv! In improv, the laugh is a byproduct of the process of the players creating a believable scene on the fly, which requires supporting each other by saying “Yes and.” Going for the joke at the expense of your partner is (as Johnson writes) “an act of desperation, done to control the scene or to try and look better.”

This onstage incident nicely sums one of our major Daily Improviser Guiding Lights: It ain’t what you do, it’s [b’dup] how you do it! In other words, how you go about getting a result is just as important as the result itself. You may make your deadlines and your target numbers, but if you’re doing it by stepping on the backs of others, grinding them down and elevating yourself in the process, you can’t be considered a success. (And this reality is becoming increasingly recognized in business. As more organizations acknowledge the importance of Employee Engagement, the “how” part of the equation is becoming just as important as the “what.”)

This message applies at the individual level as well, again as illustrated by our now familiar activity Color-Advance. Are you focused primarily on advancing as quickly as possible to the “what” and the “where” of your journey? Or are you also attending to the “how” by periodically taking an exit and exploring some of the sights  along the way?