In Improv, Getting There Is Half the Fun!

Back in the heyday of oceanic travel, the Cunard Line (which built and operated the Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mary, among other famous vessels) used an advertising slogan that endures in the language to this day:

Getting There Is Half the Fun!

Cunard's hope, of course, was that passengers would think of the ocean passage as being the first half of the fun (and would spend that half on a Cunard ship), with the destination being the second.

Denis Dutton, in his fascinating book The Art Instinct, makes a similar point about our experiencing of artistic works of any sort, but particularly performance art.  The emotional end-state of an audience member's viewing of the work, he says, is not the real aim of attending.  Springboarding off a scene in Woody Allen's Sleeper in which people of the future step into a phone-booth-size cylinder that provides instant sensual gratification, Dutton says:

"Imagine [a machine called] an 'aesthetetron.' Step into it, push the correct button, and you can achieve a pleasure-moment of a kind produced by Sense and Sensibility or Lucia di Lammermoor without having to actually read the book or sit through the opera. What makes this joke funny (if it is) is the absurdity of trying to imagine that there exists any particular pleasure state ... that a work of art produces. Every great work of art is, like climbing a mountain, about the specific process of experiencing it - it is not about inducing some momentary pleasure that results from experiencing it." [Emphasis added]

I think this observation goes double for the experiencing of an improv performance. The structure of a novel or an opera does provide some pleasure in and of itself, but ultimately the greater pleasure is in a "final result" - the emotional content of the work that is carried by the structure.  In improv, by contrast, a transcription of the content of the improvised scene might provide some enjoyment on its own to a person who later cozies up with it by a warm fire.  However, an audience member's real engagement with the work comes from the process of its creation - i.e., the realization that the scene is being created totally off the cuff, in the moment.

Throughout The Art Instinct, Dutton describes how content and process (I'll call it the "what" and the "how") go hand-in-hand in our experiencing and assessing of a work of art.  Next time, I'll connect this observation with another art form: The creating of results in an organizational environment.