Comedy and improv are different things. Related — but different.
At the core of comedy, there is a certain ruthlessness. There has to be. Every joke is a punch aimed at someone. Every new comedian needs to show how funny they are. There are only so many stages and so many laughs to get. Thus the competitions: Kill Tony, Funny or Die, cagematches.
However, as you may know, when improv was invented by Viola Spolin and her mentor Neva Boyd in Chicago in the 1920s, it was to help orphans and immigrant children develop social and emotional skills, creativity, and self-confidence.
Spolin’s son Paul Sills was one of the founders of Second City and brought improv to the professional stage, where it was co-opted by the highly competitive world of acting and comedy. This turned out to be a very good thing. Comedy became the vehicle by which improv was distributed.
Humor is a compass that helps us find truth. Play drives personal growth. It is possible to have each without the other. In improv, you can have both, and the combination of humor and play allows truth to drive growth. In this way, improv is like meditation or yoga. It is a practice where you discover yourself and the world around you.
At Santa Fe Improv, we absolutely care about comedy. We teach it using best practices from Second City, Groundlings, UCB, and Theatersports. But we aren’t trying to turn our students into professional actors. Our objective is to use comedy to train our students in courage, listening, and teamwork.
If you are courageous, if you listen well, and if you put the team first, your natural sense of humor and authentic perspective will emerge, you will get laughs, and you’ll help your teammates get laughs. Over time, the improvement in your work on stage translates to your life off-stage.
Most especially: you will become a better listener. Listening is a core skill to leadership, management, relationships, sales, therapy, coaching, negotiation, facilitation, and more. Improving listening skills even a tiny amount can have a massive impact on your life.
The problem is that it’s not to easy to train to become a better listener. In a general sense, it’s because it’s hard to recognize when you’ve missed something. If you’ve listened suboptimally, you don’t know in the moment, and it’s not like someone pulls you aside later and tells you all of the things you didn’t pick up on. You can leave a conversation or a meeting and think you listened well. This is why so many people think they are good listeners… and they’re not.
Improv provides near-immediate feedback to your listening skills in the form of laughter (or the lack thereof). When you’re creating something in the moment, in the spotlight, with other people, and without a script… good listening results immediately in harmonious play and often in laughter from the audience, and poor listening throws things out of whack and cools off the audience.
Improv rewards good listening and provides those rewards rapidly. There is no better way to train what is arguably the most important human communication skill.
We believe the world could use more listening, more empathy, more play, and more humor. We know that improv is a fun way to develop ourselves personally and professionally, and we are intent on bringing the best of this art form to as many people as possible.
If that sounds like fun to you, you’re in the right place.