Chapter 24
I am very fortunate to travel around the world working with groups and giving talks about improv comedy and my experiences in creating not only shows but companies dedicated to the art of making shit up. Recently I had the amazing experience of working in Shanghai and Beijing. The following is a transcript of a talk and the Q and A session that I gave deep in the old city section of Beijing.
I want to tell you a little bit about who I am and my background. I'm Norm Laviolette. I'm a co‐owner and cofounder of a place called Improv Asylum in Boston. We founded the company in 1998. So we're on our 20th year, and I've been doing comedy for 20, 23, 25 years, something like that.
I'm very fortunate. I'm doing what I love to do. It's my day job, it's my night job. It pays the mortgage and provides for the kids and the wife. And yet for me, the basic premise of all that hasn't changed, which is why I started doing this way the hell back when I was far younger than all of the people in this room. And for me, what matters is the love of the work.
What I mean by the love of the work is that the stuff that you're doing to get better is really the thing. Of course we love the shows. That is why we do what we do. We love to play the game, right? We love the shows. Who wouldn't love doing the shows and have people tell you you're funny, but, oddly enough, that will not sustain you. Because probably for most of you, you're not doing shows five nights a week.
So to get to where you want to go – we talk about professionalism, right? And what that means. Professionalism isn't just what you do on the stage. That's actually probably the smallest amount of what you're required to do. The professionalism is applying that same commitment to when you get amped up and you are ready and you're committed to do the work in your shows, and it's the same as your rehearsals, or in the other parts of what you're trying to do with your career, be it searching out and finding a venue, or trying to find an agent or a manager.
If you want to be professional, you have to treat it like your job, even when it is not your job. Right? And so for me, when I got started in comedy, I started at college. And I decided that for whatever reasons I was funny and I was going to start doing comedy.
I'm not saying I was funny, 'cause I wasn't. I just didn't know that. And it's kind of irrelevant whether you are or you're not, as long as you think you are, that's good enough. And so I started in college and I created a really shitty college TV show. It was called Beyond the Norm, but I loved it. It was really fun. I love puns. That's my Instagram thing, too: Beyond the Norm And.
I loved doing it. It was so fun. I had a great time. The quality didn't matter necessarily in the starting of it, but I had the drive to do it, to keep making it happen, and what I found very early on is that there's really nobody that's going to essentially help you make it happen.
Nobody owes your brilliance and talent anything. They don't really need it, and if you think about it, that's actually very liberating. Because if you accept that as a truth, it kicks you in the ass and you realize that you got to go do it yourself, and then oddly enough, when you start doing things yourself, people start to find you.
So as I started doing comedy in college, I applied that same thing to my career as I moved out of school and I started doing this in the city. I did improv. I did stand‐up, any kind of comedy where anybody was willing to let me. And I think that's how I started.
That's why I never developed a real adherence to any one hardcore improv philosophy. And even then when I started, when I started doing comedy, I was living in a five‐bedroom apartment in Boston. My room was a pantry. I kid you not, it was. I could touch the walls with my hands. I hung my clothes in a closet in the kitchen.
But I was doing comedy in the city. Not particularly well and not often, but I remember thinking to myself, clearly to this day, I can remember being in that room watching TV and I remember thinking to myself, I've made it. I was like, I got my own room in a big city, I'm doing comedy, like this is it, right? And even then, even when really nobody wanted me and nobody was paying me, I had decided and identified for myself that this is what I do and I decided for myself that I was a professional and that dictated and drove all my decisions going forward.
I treated it like my job even when it wasn't my job. And what that does is that I started to develop certain habits and ways of committing to what I wanted to do in comedy and in my career and it informed the steps I would take. Well, if this is my job, if I don't want to do anything else at some point in my life, then I really better treat this not as a hobby but like what it is I want to do.
Now I'm not saying there's anything wrong with doing this as a hobby. It's irrelevant. I've seen people who do this work as a hobby that are the most brilliant people in the world. That isn't a measure of whether you are good or not good. It's just for me from a professional standpoint, this is what I wanted to do. So, that's what I did. And by doing that, treating it that way, every step of the way, I started doing more shows and met more people and then the opportunities came. Then it was time to say, well, what is the next level to make it more professional?
And so for us, we formed a troupe and we did regular shows at the basement of the Hard Rock Cafe in Boston. And then what was the next step out of that, to be more professional and do more? That was to get our own venue, right? That was the next step, so we went out and we searched and we found our own venue, but each decision to answer the question “How can I be more professional” led me to the next level of how to be more professional.
We found a 200‐seat theater and bar in the heart of Boston's North End, which is the oldest part of the city. At the time I was 26 years old with my two partners and we decided, we'll try to get that lease. We had to sign on to a commitment to half a million dollars over five years.
So there is the point in your scene where you have to make a decision, right? What do you want to do? Do you want to try to do this and be professional or do you want to say, I'm going to walk away. I'm not going to take the risk. It's gonna be different for everybody, okay, but for me it was a question of what we talked about. One issue is that I was 26 at the time. Right? So we had said that at age 40 I would want to know if it worked, or I would want to know if it didn't work. But I don't want to be 40 wondering what would have been.
So we made the decision, we went and, and look, it's worked out so far and I'm just past 40. No, I'm not just past 40, and so that's the final thing I would leave for you. I really want more question and answer in the sense of, well, if you want to do this right, how do you treat it like your job when it's not your job, and how do you keep making those decisions that lead you to the place that you want to go, but you keep making those decisions and you will then come up to a point where you are like, oh shit, they will let me do this, and here's the cost of entry.
Then you make your decision and you live with it from there. So that just gives you my background. So now I want to hear from you. Do you have any questions about what I do, about what you want to do, anything like that?
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So one point we emphasized is details today, right? Like little things. Is it true that the longer we work together, the longer the team is practicing, the more we're able to notice these details? |
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Yes, that is true. You're talking about two different things. So the longer the group works together, the more in tune the group will be with each other. The attention to detail will be a more individual thing to start. You don't need a group mind to name the damn title of the book in your scene. Well, what will happen is if you start to pay more attention to detail and you named the damn title of the book, the people around you will start to be like, hey, they all laughed when he named the damn title of the book. I should do that more. So you have, even though it's a group mind, you have individual responsibilities. |
Second question?
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People's level of improv is different and maybe some people even if you keep telling them a thousand times, they still don't listen. They don't have those skill sets. A term that he uses is the maturity of the mind, like self‐awareness is one of those things. How do you deal with that? |
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Do you want the improvisational politically correct answer or do you want my answer? (Crowd laughs and calls out “Both!”) The politically correct improvisational answer is to continue to support them and give them tools and techniques to get them to a place where they can better execute what it is you're asking them to do. Would you like my answer? If they're not able to get it down after a certain amount of time, you probably need to move on from them, but that's the professional answer, right? If your goal as a community, a support center, or an improvisational collective is to keep everybody in at all different skill levels, well, then of course the first answer is the correct answer for that organization. The professional version of this is, this ain't a club, it's up or out at some point, you know, because you got to get better. |
Other questions?
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So how does a group get better when they're all at kind of a similar level and they don't have like a coach on the side or someone to help them along. How do they collectively get better? |
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Get a coach! (Laughter!) I don't mean to be a jerk about it, but like find somebody that you think is even marginally better than you. Maybe somebody who's been doing it like six months longer than you and say, hey, can you coach us? Can you put some things together? Because even that, just having that outside eye just a little bit, who maybe knows like two more exercises than you, can see more from the outside looking in. I look around this room and I look on the stage and I see plenty of people that would be fine for coaches. |
Next question?
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How do you practice without a coach? Just by yourself or as a group, are you just going to go down the wrong path by yourself? |
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I think if you practice by yourself, you'll plateau at some point. Like, it's a great way to start, but you will plateau because you won't have anybody calling you out on your bullshit. You're going to all be nice to each other and it'll be like, that's really great. And then you're going to go to the bar and we're going to be like, fucking Jesse, man, Jesse. And you're going to do that at the bar and it—(calling out to Jesse in the crowd) Sorry Jesse, I thought you did a great job!—and so at some point, if you want to progress past the “this is just fun and I'm working on my brain and we're having a good time,” you will need to get somebody that can kind of hold you to a plan. |
Another question?
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Do you have any plans to produce any books for the Chinese market? There are very few resources about improv in Chinese that have been translated. One of the few being Truth in Comedy by Charna Halpern. Uh, that's one that's like the bible that everyone has read, but there's not a lot of books out there. |
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Are you a publisher? Because I'm open to a deal! Oh, you know, everywhere we go, Bob, I get the “write a book” thing. I got to get off my ass and write the book. I do, I do. It is something that I think is in the future for us, but, but there are, there are books out there. Look, Charna's book is great for starters. I really like Mick Napier's book Improvise. UCB certainly in the past couple of years, put out a tome and that's pretty good. I mean it's pretty in‐depth. The caveat that I put on it is that UCB is one way to think about improv. It's not the only way to think about it. But functionally, that's one of the best books out there. And then also recently some good friends of ours from Texas put out a book called Happy Accidents. It's a group called Four Day Weekend. They are very good friends of ours and it's a fantastic book. |
Okay, great. So I know we had another question over here.
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Is there anything we can do in everyday life to practice improv skills? |
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Absolutely. The core of improvisation is fully listening to other people. You can practice that at every moment of every day when you are interacting with people. But make a game of it, right? To make a game of it, what I used to do and I sometimes still do when I'm in horribly boring meetings is I will try to play back their sentence exactly as they said it. Every sentence in my mind, sentence by sentence, to practice getting the entire line of dialogue down. This does a couple of things. First, it makes me not want to kill myself during the meeting. And second, it works on that muscle of listening to the entire line of dialogue and understanding it and being able to replay it. So I think that's like the easiest thing to do or most readily accessible. If you're alone, why don't you go do stand‐up or tell stories? I mean that very seriously. I really, really do. I get it. I come from Improv, but it's super culty, you know? Trust me, I know, I help it, I profit from it, I get it. But honestly, I think sometimes we focus way too much on improv. You know how you can get better at improv, go understand the mechanics of stand‐up comedy even if you're never going to use them. Find storytelling opportunities. In the states, there's a thing called the Moth. You have the Moth here? Great, that's the thing I tell every improviser do, is go do the Moth, go tell stories, learn to be on stage by yourself ‘cause that’ll inform your improvisational work later on. |
So five minutes for more questions.
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So there's a lot of different schools of improv in the states. How is Improv Asylum different, what is your style? What's the level of Improv Asylum? So they want to look for the right trainers to come and they don't really know what kind of criteria they should be looking at. So this is a chance to sell IA! |
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Sure, It's the absolute best and everybody else sucks. No, no, no, I'm kidding! So our style, our style is kind of what I said earlier. We focus on scene work and relationships. That's the main thing. There's other schools of thought that will focus on game or character. Our primary focus is on relationship within the scene work and then of course you will find game. You will find character within that. So that's number one in terms of what we focus on. The second thing that we do from a performance standpoint is we love talking and interacting with the audience. We just love it. So from a performance standpoint, we really, really emphasize that within our own shows. We do it not because it's dogma, it's because that's just what we like to do. Right? So, when we train and much like what you just saw, we will focus on really good relationship and scene work because we, and I firmly believe that if you have that, you can then apply it to however it is that you want to do it, be it improvisation, be it long form, be it short form, be it sketch, or be it the written word. Certainly we like to take suggestions from the audience to drive a lot of our work, but more so now our shows are like conversations. We love to just talk. We love to say, what do you do? What's your story? And we love to get into this conversation and people share so much crazy shit that you'd be shocked. People will start just emptying their soul to you in front of like 200 people and you can see in their eyes they are like, I don't know why I'm saying all this! What it does though is it certainly gives us rich material to mine on stage, but the exchange of the information really kind of brings the audience together, and we really enjoy that. The audience wants to participate, I don't see why you don't let them. |
I know we're coming up on the end. Any last questions?
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What's your best audience warm‐up to get them relaxed and ready for the show? |
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So we keep things real simple. Right, so our audience warm‐up is real quick and easy. We don't like to get too elaborate and too fucking crazy with all this. So honestly speaking, this is what a show looks like for us to warm up an audience: “Awesome. Give yourselves a round of applause. I'm psyched you guys are here. This is great. Hey, look, we want to warm you up real quick and ask you some simple questions. I'd like you to respond as a group. Can you do that? “Yes.” Excellent, So what's your first name? That was terrible. Yeah, cut that shit out. What's your first name? Where did you grow up? Who was your best friend in middle school? Who was the first person to ever break your heart? Shit just got real everybody! You think we're just gonna make laughs and stuff. No, we're going to dig down deep. We're going to make you cry. All right, you ready to go, you ready for a show?” There it is, that's the warm‐up. Okay. And the point is, the point is let's keep it simple. The audience is already going like, especially in a newer market like this, the audience is already saying “What is this? What's going on?” It's all individual or group aesthetic. The IA style isn't to nerd and geek out the audience, it just isn't. So that's kind of how we do it. |
So I know that we're out of time. I'm going to be hanging around if anybody wants to chat individually. I will say this. It was true last night and it is true tonight. You folks are fantastic, and not only are you fantastic, but you have an opportunity to manifestly change the dynamic of how your culture or a culture of a country works together and creates. And while you may feel like you don't have a lot of resources at your disposal, you don't need them. And that is a really, really huge advantage and bright future that you have. Just go make shit up and blaze your own path and people will follow.
AUTHOR'S NOTE ON “SHIT”
If you have read all the way to the end of this book, most likely you have either become immune to or annoyed by the constant and gratuitous use of the word “shit.” Sure, I've thrown in a few “assholes” for good measure, but mainly focused on the catch‐all curse word “shit.”
There are several reasons why I decided to use the word so liberally in this book. First off, whenever anyone asks me what I do for work I always answer flippantly, “I make shit up for a living.” It is intended as a humorous response to a general question and hopefully conveys that while I may take my work seriously, I do not take myself nearly so. Second, I am using it for affect. When I teach or direct improv, one of the things that often comes up is swearing. Should you or shouldn't you? Is it cheap or easy? Does it alienate an audience or bring them closer to you? The answer, of course, is in your own personal preference and also the audience to which you're performing for. You can be just as funny on stage working “clean” as you can working “blue” or “dirty.”
You do need to be cognizant of your audience. If you were doing an afternoon matinee show for families, one would rightly make the decision that we should be avoiding swears so as to make the audience comfortable and allow them to enjoy the performance. If you attend the midnight show on Saturdays at Improv Asylum called “Raunch,” then you can expect to see some really nasty shit, and if you didn't, you would most likely be very disappointed.
Whether you swear a lot or a little or not at all onstage, what we want actors to understand is that curse words are the verbal equivalent of the crash of a cymbal. It tends to be jarring and typically accents, in a loud way, other ideas. Used correctly swears can drive home points and ideas in a memorable way. Used constantly, they can drown out all of the other good stuff that is being said. It is hard to listen to a song that is accompanied by mostly cymbals.
I also wanted to attempt to write a book that sounds, at least to a degree, like the world I grew up in and the world in which I worked. There are many other books of similar subject matter that use lovely and gentle flowering language that is pleasing to the ear and goes to great lengths to offer no offense. That is not this book. There are exactly 108 times the word “Shit” is used in this book.
Did I use the word shit too much? You will have to be the judge of that. Ultimately, I decided to take a tone that was both true to myself as well as different from other improv/business books. I did this even against the advice of some smart and talented people. This decision is yet another example of how sometimes, hell, oftentimes, you just have to do what you think works best for you.
I can't thank you enough for reading this book and hopefully our paths will cross at some point, be it in real life at one of the talks or seminars that I do around the world, or at one of my theaters or clubs, or online. I am always happy to talk about things related to improv and comedy in the business thereof. If I have offended anybody with the relentless use of the word “shit” or any of the other curse words that have appeared on these pages I would just like to say: I don't give a shit.
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ETYMOLOGY OF THE WORD “SHIT”
The word shit entered the modern English language via having been derived from the Old English nouns scite and the Middle Low German schite, both meaning “dung,” and the Old English noun scitte, meaning “diarrhea.” Our most treasured cuss word has been with us a long time, showing up in written works both as a noun and as a verb as far back as the fourteenth century.
Scite can trace its roots back to the proto‐Germanic root skit‐, which brought us the German scheisse, Dutch schijten, Swedish skita, and Danish skide. Skit** comes from the Indo‐European root skheid‐ for “split, divide, separate,” thus shit is distantly related to schism and schist.***
**Oftentimes an improv or comedy scene is referred to as a “skit.” Oh, the irony.
***Snopes.com