Let's do the show right here? The pros and cons of improv

Written by: Graham McCann
Published: Sunday 9th March 2025

Peter Ustinov was no fan of performers who liked to improvise. When, as director, he was rehearsing a play one day and a cast member suddenly started ad-libbing a few lines and gestures, Ustinov's instinctive response was to shout: 'Don't just do something - stand there!'

That's the divisive thing about improv in comedy: to some, it is considered an almost magical kind of creative activity, while to others it is little more than a series of stabs in the dark being played out under a full set of lights.

Those who favour the latter stylisation might cite, by way of a playful comparison, the old Monty Python 'novel writing' sketch, which saw Thomas Hardy ('very much the man in form') sit down outside in front of a large and expectant crowd and ('body straight, shoulders relaxed, pen held lightly but firmly in the right hand') start scribbling The Return of the Native while an excited commentator and his accompanying pundit reported on the great man's progress:

COMMENTATOR: He dips the pen in the ink...and he's off! It's the first word...but it's not a word - oh no, it's a doodle! Way up on the top of the left-hand margin - it's a piece of meaningless scribble... And he's signed his name underneath it! Oh dear - what a disappointing start! But he's off again, and here he goes: the first word of Thomas Hardy's new novel at 10.35 on this very lovely morning! It's three letters...it's the definite article...and it's...'The'! - Dennis?

DENNIS: Well, this is true to form, no surprises there. He's started five of his eleven novels to date with a definite article. We've had two of them with 'It', there's been one 'But', two 'At's, one 'On', and a 'Dolores' - though that, of course, was never published.

COMMENTATOR: I'm sorry to interrupt you there, Dennis - but he's crossed it out! Thomas Hardy, here on the first day of his new novel, has crossed out the only word he's written so far! And he's gazing off into space!...Oh...Oooh dear - he's signed his name again!

DENNIS: It looks like Tess of the D'Urbervilles all over again!

A cynic thus might say: we all do 'improv' - it's really just called 'getting started'. Coming up with the initial ideas and the first few words - that's improv; it's just that most of us do it in private, by way of preparation, instead of in front of an audience, in place of a proper performance.

If you want to examine ordinary, unpretentious, run-of-the-mill 'improv', then just have a shufty in any writer's desk-side rubbish bin. 'You see all those screwed-up balls of paper?' the cynic would say. 'That's "improv", mate - fresh off the skillet!'

A cynic might also say that, for all of the 'Look, Ma - no hands!' show-offery of improv, it is actually less challenging to achieve than conventional, fully worked-through, comedy, because it substitutes the scruffy first part of the process for the polished end-product. Whereas written and rehearsed comedy stands or falls on what audiences think of it as a finished work, improv can get away with far more misses than hits because of its 'that's all folks!' air of experimentation.

This is surely one of the main reasons why some writers, and performers, resent improvised comedy. They see others get applauded merely for starting something that they always have to labour to finish.

Once one gets past the novelty of seeing someone (at least appearing to be) thinking on their feet, these critics might complain, one is left to face the fact that one is actually being served up far more mess than magic - because that is what a first draft usually is. Why, then, when most consumers resent being served up under-prepared fare, do some of them keep coming back for more of the same when it comes to comedy?

It surely has something to do with the suggestion of risk, and the vicarious sharing of the experience of that risk. Like watching a tightrope walker teeter and totter as they try to move forward while avoiding the dreaded drop, there can be a sense of morbid fascination in seeing a comedian step out of their comfort zone and expose him or herself to the danger of drying up, as well as, perhaps, an instinctive and unusually acute feeling of sympathy for - and even identification with - them as they do so.

There is also the anticipation of seeing and hearing something genuinely new and spontaneous, for a change, rather than sitting through the kind of tried-and-tested material that merely gets repeated from one gig to the next. The more the stadium comics keep phoning it in, the more refreshing the club improv artists will seem.

There has actually always been an element of improv since public performances began. It was certainly a major part of the Fabula Atellana farces of ancient Rome, as well as the Italian commedia dell'arte during the 16th to the 18th centuries, and was also a major feature of the Romantic movement's rebellion against the rigidities of rationalism. As more of a self-conscious and self-contained enterprise, however, it has a more recent origin.

Improv, at least as a publicised commercial enterprise, probably first became a 'thing,' in this sense and for these reasons, back in the early 20th Century, in Chicago, when a drama coach called Viola Spolin devised a series of games designed to stretch her students by forcing them to react spontaneously, either separately or in groups, to certain themes and cues. Sensing the potential of such sessions for use outside of the rehearsal room, her son, Paul Sills, adapted the techniques at the start of the 1950s and founded the Compass Players, which later on in the decade became The Second City in Chicago.

It was here that audiences would come to watch comic performers test themselves with such technical templates as 'Yes - and?' (which forces two comics to see-saw their way through a sketch by reacting to each other's sudden choices and challenges); 'Heightening' (which obliges one or several performers to take a situation and keep building it into something bigger and funnier); and 'Game of the Scene' (where any number of comedians conspire to create their own set of rules and patterns to shape their dialogue and demeanour in a subsequent skit).

There can certainly be no denying how big and broad the impact of these improv institutions would be for several generations of American comedians and comic actors. Among the Compass Players' alumni would be Alan Alda, Ed Asner, Shelley Berman, Valerie Harper, Elaine May, Mike Nichols and Jerry Stiller, while Second City would help inspire the likes of Alan Arkin, John Belushi, Steve Carell, Tina Fey, Eugene Levy, Bill Murray, Mike Myers, Catherine O'Hara, Amy Poehler, Gilda Radner and Jason Sudeikis.

It was no real coincidence that one of the things that such performers shared was a versatility, and degree of spontaneity, that made even their later work in more conventional scripted comic productions significantly fresher and less formulaic than many of their more traditionally-trained contemporaries. Thanks to their improv backgrounds, they knew how to loosen up for a scene, bring their own ideas to the situation, try out bits of physical and verbal business, and, while sticking to the script when the writing was really good, they were able to depart from it, and replace sections of it with something better, when what they had been given failed to inspire.

While many performers thus went through improv as a kind of rite of passage, storing away its invaluable tricks and techniques for future use, whenever and wherever the circumstances suited them, in their mainstream careers, a few others would continue to treat the means as an end. Improv, for them, became their identity, and their all-consuming art.

Full-time improv artists became fixtures at several clubs in and around Chicago, bringing a regular improv-eager audience with them, too. Other improv clubs and troupes would soon spring up across the rest of North America during the next few decades, including those based in New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Atlanta and Toronto, until a veritable micro-improv industry was up and running all over the continent.

Similar activity, during the same period in Britain, would be rather more modest, but it would still have a noteworthy impact on the country's comedy. From the mid-1980s, London's Comedy Store served as the centre of improv activity, with such performers as Paul Merton, Josie Lawrence, Neil Mullarkey, Lee Simpson and Richard Vranch establishing themselves as some of the most accomplished exemplars of the art.

Improv's influence on the UK comedy circuit accelerated rapidly once Whose Line Is It Anyway? emerged as a popular panel show, first on BBC Radio 4 (in 1988) and then on Channel 4 (running for ten series between 1988 and 1999). Hosted by Clive Anderson and mixing Comedy Store regulars with a range of British and North American guests, it proved not only one of the decade's most solid entertainment formats but also, in an unusual instance of comic cross-fertilisation, inspiring a US TV version from 1998.

Improv, more recently, may have returned to a less prominent, more niche, position on both sides of the Atlantic, but not before its ideas and attitudes were assimilated more deeply into mainstream comedy. From sitcoms such as The Office (both the UK and US versions) to panel shows like Mock The Week and Would I Lie to You?, there has been at least a hint of improvisatory techniques included along with the more traditional ingredients used in the mix.

Some movies, such as Christopher Guest's superb string of spoofs and satires, crowned by the pretty much perfect Spinal Tap, and TV shows, such as Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm, embraced the approach with particular commitment to, and understanding of, the craft. David's co-star Jeff Garlin told The Vulture that all the Curb cast ever received by way of a script was 'seven pages long and is essentially the story of the show, and not very much of it is dialogue'.

The rest, he explained, relied on the additional input of the actors: 'I may get one line that Larry will write per episode that he wants me to say. Other than that, I know the story and I know what has to be said and I just say it'.

If the success of Curb Your Enthusiasm stands out as evidence of how effective at least a degree of improv can be, there are rather more, rather less impressive, examples that suggest how it can far too often serve as a cause of, and an excuse for, sloppiness, over-indulgence, unevenness and incoherence in comic productions ('So many television shows have picked up that form,' Eugene Levy has lamented, 'and just destroyed it'). It also might well be questioned how much, if at all, of a 'progression' such projects actually represent in terms of programme-making, given the huge amount of additional time, energy and expense that tends to be required at the editing stage to track down the needles of inspiration hidden within the haystack of misfires and mediocrity, and, in effect, belatedly 'write' what has not yet been written.

To adapt the infamous response of Laurence Olivier, to Dustin Hoffman's seemingly never-ending hit-and-miss exercise in method acting during the shooting of Marathon Man - 'Why don't you just try acting?' - a critic could ask of the film or TV improviser: 'Why don't you just try writing?' It's not a suggestion likely to go down well with the most romantic of comedy's practitioners (even though one of them, the Second City alumnus Dave Foley, once admitted, 'Most improv could do with a rewrite'), but it's not a question that can, in good conscience, be brusquely cast aside.

This leads us back to the original sceptical position. Heidegger (at least outside of the 'Bruces' sketch) might have tended to steer clear of the field of comedy, but he did at least ask a pertinent question when he pondered how much of something really does come from out of nothing.

The problem with improv, in this sense, is that it is one of those arts whose claim to authentic originality appears to atrophy under serious analysis. The effect it aims for is that of pulling something out of nothing like a rabbit from a hat, with only an instinctive wit where a studied script normally is.

How accurate, however, is this as an account of what the creative process of improv really is, and does, and how much, in truth, is it merely an illusion akin to that conjured up through smoke and mirrors? A sceptic would surely contend that improv relies far more than it cares to confess on each performer's repository of old gags, lines, characters, sketches and gestures, as well as the treasure trove of tried and tested tricks that the training has already supplied.

The most accomplished at the art of improv, one might go on to argue, are, traditionally, the ones who are best at faking spontaneity. All the top comics have an elaborate and easily searchable database of material buzzing away inside their brains; anything that appears to be a sudden ad-lib is far, far, more likely to be a quick cut and paste from a well-curated mental catalogue.

Look beyond the local hype, indeed, and one will see a much broader comic heritage. Most comedians, from music hall onwards, have been able to think on their feet, dress up new gags from old stock, and fake the rapid arrival of fresh comic inspiration. Some of the smartest amongst the 'old school' comedians, such as Bob Monkhouse, made excellent use of a bespoke mnemonic system to appear to pluck fresh jokes out of thin air when in fact they were merely digging them from out of the depths. Any half-decent improv performer, therefore, arrives on stage ready and willing to plunder their own private archive.

In addition to this access - sometimes conscious but probably more often unconscious - to a personal comic data mainframe, the improv artist can also call upon their even more special cache containing a huge amount of memories of their and their co-performers' old improv. It's practically Pavlovian, the way that just the sound of certain words, or the sight of certain props, will trigger the memory of certain past routines and exchanges, and then off they go, far from fresh, and far from off-the-cuff, but impressing an audience that assumes, as usual, that they are witnessing something being created from out of nothing.

So much of improv, then, is really just glorified recycling, with a dash of upcycling, and, predictably enough, the more experienced the improv artist gets, the more resources they have for recycling and upcycling, and the more the instinct gets attuned to doing just that. This in turn, somewhat ironically, makes it increasingly hard for them, as their improv reputation grows, to stay true to the original spirit for actually doing improv.

None of this, however, is meant as some kind of cruel debunking of improv as either an idea or an activity. True, once light has been let in upon the supposed magic, it seems far more mechanical than mysterious, and actually rather more contrived than it is genuinely creative, but should we really care that much if the wonderful Wizard of Improv turns out to be just an ordinary little jobbing comic who knows the right buttons to press to work all the levers and pulleys? If you really like the sausages that get served up, it's probably best not to ponder too much the process whereby they were made.

What could be deemed constructive by way of a critique, however, is the stressing of the importance of being far more alert to the dangers of repetition and routinisation. Even with improv, the sense of excitement from being put on the spot, the adrenaline rush that comes with the sudden arrival of each new challenge, will end up being compromised by the growth in one's own competence. Practice does not make perfect, but it certainly trains and tames (an improv show such as Whose Line Is It Anyway?, for example, did not end up losing much of its appeal because the participants got worse at it; it did so precisely because they got better at it).

Improv, newcomers are told, stops being so stressful once you get used to doing it - and that, essentially, is its problem. Improv always needs to be stressful - if it isn't, you're simply not doing it right, and it gets harder and harder to keep doing it right the more accustomed you become to doing it.

It also needs, perhaps most importantly of all, to remain keenly aware of the fact that, outside of drama schools, it is there, primarily, to entertain the audience, not the improv artists themselves. Improv only grew out of the rehearsal room because of a desire to transform its techniques from something that merely benefitted the performers to something that, as such, also benefitted their audience.

You like improv purely because of how it makes you feel? Then get a room and enjoy it, on your own, like coffee or cocaine. You like improv also because of how it can make your audience feel? Then you need to take it much, much, more seriously, and think much, much, more clearly and coherently about the execution rather than just the conception.

So try whatever you can to protect the fluidity from the formulaic. Guard against what Adam Smith, that barrel of laughs (and obsessive re-drafter) from the 18th Century, referred to as the 'mental mutilation' that accompanies, whether you like it or not, the chronic repetition of your day job. Keep bringing in fresh blood to the troupe, seeking out new challenges, finding new audiences and fighting against the temptation, in sad TV cooking show fashion, to settle for presenting 'something I prepared earlier'.

Improv comedians, just like performers in any other part of their profession, should never rest on whatever laurels they have been loaned. They need to keep it fresh, keep it fluid, keep it funny and - please, please, please - keep it real.

The message should always be: Don't just do something - do something really worth doing.