God, Improv, and the Art of Living

Introduction

It plays among the arts.

It’s indispensable in parenting.

It shows up in business, science, and sports.

It can help sharpen memory, stave off dementia,

and combat writer’s block.

It’s improvisation, and according to Tina Fey’s book Bossypants, it will change your life and reduce belly fat.

Lamentably, the fine print assures us that improv does not really reduce belly fat.¹ But the life-changing part is true.

***

Think for a moment about a time in your life when everything went according to plan.

I’ll wait for you to stop laughing.

Those moments seem rare, but I bet you can think of an experience when things fell into place as you expected. A great road trip. The perfect date. The career goal that came to pass. Moments like these can be wonderful gifts of grace.

Now think about a time when the plan got completely derailed—when life threw you a curveball—and how you responded. The marriage proposal never came. The fertility treatments didn’t work. The company downsized.

Chances are you had to rely on your wits and your community to get through it, making the best of the circumstances life handed you. Fumbling your way along, you surrendered to not knowing what was waiting for you around the bend. You improvised.

And you learned that your well-laid plans don’t always rule the day. There can be gifts of grace in those unplanned experiences too. Sometimes.

We’re all improvisers, often without realizing it. We improvise in order to get through the day. We improvise when life surprises us. We do it without even thinking about it.

This book will help you do it better.

***

Chances are the word improv evokes certain images for you, not all of them positive. Most of us think immediately about comedy shows like Whose Line Is It Anyway?, and the thought of getting up onstage without a script might make you break out in virtual hives. You may wonder why you ever shelled out money for this book, or why your sadistic friend chose to give it to you.

I can relate.

As a high school and college student, I took part in a number of plays and musicals. I loved every moment of the process, but I remember the relief I felt when the rehearsals were over and I finally had the lines memorized. I knew what to say, what to do, and when to do it.

I come to this topic not because it comes naturally to me, but because it doesn’t. Efficiency and organization are my twin superpowers. But live long enough and you realize that even the most bulletproof plans and expectations can get thwarted. Over time I found my way into this strange world of improv as a way of coping. Through meeting people who pursued improv as both an art form and a life practice, I began to wonder whether there was a better way to live than by clutching the plan ever more tightly. And now that I’ve discovered improv, I can’t get enough of it. As Amy Poehler told The New Yorker, We all think we’re in control of our lives, and that the ground is solid beneath our feet, but we are so wrong. Improvising reminds you of that over and over again.²

Many of us are intrigued by improv but bring a set of misconceptions about it. Maybe we think it’s about zaniness, being funny, or thinking quickly on our feet. Certainly a good improv show can contain all of those things, but those aren’t the building blocks.

In my explorations with improv, I’ve had to unlearn a lot about myself, and what I thought it meant to do improv. Let me save you some time. Here’s what improv is not:

Improv isn’t about being clever or witty. As we’ll see, the primary goal of improv isn’t to be funny. The biggest payoff comes when two or more players create something authentic and real together. A scene. A project. A life.

Improv isn’t spontaneous. There’s an effortless quality to good improv, such that you can sometimes think it’s plucked out of thin air. But behind each improv performance is a great deal of preparation—sometimes years. This book will help prepare you to do beautiful improv.

Improv isn’t a free-for-all. Sometimes an improv show or scene can seem like a madcap bundle of manic energy. It’s totally outside the box. But if you watch improv long enough, you see an underlying structure. There’s an internal logic at work. We’ll look more deeply at that structure together.

Improv isn’t frivolous. Improv gets written off as a frivolous pursuit, something that’s fun but light, a cotton-candy confection that lasts but a sweet moment on the tongue. But what could be less frivolous than learning how to navigate a complex world in which so much is out of our control?

So then, what is improv?

Improv is creative. Improv requires us to be light on our feet. It makes something happen. It creates. When we improvise together, literally anything can happen.

Improv is invigorating. Confession: as an introvert, I have to steel myself to get to improv class each week. It would take so much less effort to watch Netflix or putter around the house. But somehow, I scrape myself off the couch and get myself to class for two and a half hours of hard work. And I never, ever regret going. I leave energized and happy.

Improv is character-forming. As pastor Ashley Goff likes to say, Improv is the most fun you’ll ever have in therapy. I’ve learned more about myself in my study of improv than I have in almost any other endeavor. It’s on-the-job life training.

Improv is risky. With improv, you never know what will happen. That’s risky business. Several years ago, I led a workshop for a youth ministry event called Sacred Movement, focused on praying with our bodies through drama and movement. When I arrived to set up the workshop, I found a sign on the classroom door: "Scared Movement." There’s always a bit of scared in the sacred. It’s frightening to admit we’re not in control, to chuck the ten-year plan and live more intuitively, more improvisationally. It’s also a great adventure—strange and perplexing and wondrous.

Improv is play. When improvisers talk about what they do onstage, they almost never say, I work with so-and-so in this group. Instead they say, I play every Monday night, or She and I play together. Extraordinary! Life is deadly serious sometimes. And sometimes it’s play that creates a bridge to deeper understanding, self-awareness, and transformation. As G. K. Chesterton said, Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.

***

Each section of this book explores a principle of improv and, by extension, an improvising life. Woven throughout are examples of how I’ve seen these principles lived out onstage, in the real world, and in the Christian story. These seven principles aren’t just coping mechanisms or tricks we use to get by. They are also ways of seeing God operating within God’s world, in Scripture and in life, again and again. Although I write as a person of Christian faith and a pastor, I aim to offer insight to a wide range of readers. As I show how I see the world, I hope that these readers—actors, creatives, faith leaders, and others—will be helped in approaching the spiritual life with renewed vitality.

Because the lab of improv is on the stage, I’m going to be talking primarily about actors on a stage, playing a game, creating a scene, or performing a one-act play. While there’s a lot to say about improv in other art forms—for example, riffing in jazz or freestyling in hip-hop—I’m not the person to write that book. But what little I know of these other genres suggests there’s great overlap among them. And I suspect many of the same principles would apply.

Finally, I write this book from the perspective of a novice improviser. I’ve taken a bunch of classes in Washington, D.C., and at Second City in Chicago; I’ve taken part in showcases, performances, and jams; and I’ve shared these ideas on the road as a presenter at retreats, conferences, and workshops. But the more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know. I appreciate veteran improvisers who’ve read excerpts of this book and talked through the topics with me. But I’m no expert. And as a self-described control freak with a perfectionistic streak a mile wide, I can’t claim to have transformed my life into one of effortless ease and grace. What I can claim is that this book expresses my enthusiasm for a topic I’m only beginning to understand and embody.

My hope for you as a reader isn’t necessarily that you become a fan of improvisational comedy. It's OK if you never sign up for an improv class. Heck, it's OK if you never attend a show as an audience member. What I want to do here is to share what improv has taught me and explore how lessons learned onstage translate to tools and practices that guide our emotional, social, vocational, and spiritual lives. And my hope is that you’ll find those tools valuable.

In order to bring you a book that’s exploratory and practical, I’ve also included exercises for each chapter at the end of the book—some for individuals and some for communities, families, and friends. And I do hope you’ll try those. Don’t be like the people in the old New Yorker cartoon who encounter two heavenly staircases ascending to the clouds. One staircase is marked Heaven, while the other, much more popular staircase is marked Discussion about Heaven. Do the work. And for our purposes, the work is to play.

Principle 1

Say Yes

There’s a tiny word. It’s not a noun, it’s not a verb, it’s not an adjective—I don’t know what it is. But if you said it to me tonight, all this blackness would go away, and you and I would be connected by a tunnel of light.

—C. D. Bales, played by Steve Martin in the movie Roxanne¹

The word, of course, is Yes.

And it’s where all improvisation begins.

Chapter 1

Live Yes-ly

Many years ago, I worked with a church in Houston’s Third Ward, an economically depressed area of town. The neighborhood embodied a paradox, so common in some urban neighborhoods, of dignity mingled with despair. Although the people I met were proud of their neighborhood’s history and culture and worked to make it better, without significant opportunities for economic advancement, it was an uphill climb.

The local Episcopal church stood next to a liquor superstore—an example of the contradictions in the neighborhood. The door to the church office overlooked the side of the store, a bare wall that proved tempting for the young people in the area who frequently tagged it with graffiti.

Both the business and the church fretted over the defacement and had gotten into an arms race with the gangs. The wall was painted over numerous times. But the graffiti would return, the artists apparently grateful for the blank canvas. And on it went, world without end.

Finally the church decided to work with a local artist to design a mural for the wall. The storeowners, out of ideas, went along with it. The artist’s task was to make sure the resulting design incorporated the spray-painted tags—not highlighting them, but not hiding them, either. Instead, they would be part of the overall image. After planning a design, the artist invited children from the church’s day camp to help with the painting.

If you knew what you were looking for, you could see the original graffiti within the crazy-quilt of colors and patterns. According to folks at the church, the wall was a way to say, We see you. We see the despair and the acting out. We aren’t going to deny it. It’s part of the story of the Third Ward. But we need to move past this conflict. The church realized that the graffiti was not a problem that could be easily solved. So instead, they reached out to embrace the community, even the parts of it that were destructive and tough to love.

The church said Yes.

The church improvised.

Any student or teacher of improv knows the first rule of improv: say Yes. Actually, the first rule is Yes, And. But we’ll get to And in Section 2 of the book. And is the 200-level course, and most of us need to start with the basics. We need to deal with Yes first, get it lodged in our hearts and minds and bodies, because we live in a world saturated with No. Too many voices in our culture speak the language of safety, scarcity, and fear. Over time these No messages end up adhering to us like sad, misshapen barnacles, weighing us down with what seems impossible, impractical, or simply ill-advised.

Incorporating graffiti into a mural may seem ill-advised. It’s wrong to deface property. It sends the wrong message to let the vandalism remain there. Better to work with police to root out the culprits.

And yet the church staff told me with pride that once the mural appeared, the wall was never defaced with graffiti again. In fact, the mural project became a much-needed bridge to the young people in the community.

The church couldn’t change what had happened. Instead, the people there accepted it as the place they needed to start—the reality as it was handed to them. They said Yes.

***

Improv doesn’t happen without Yes. In fact, life doesn’t happen without Yes. Hopefully, each of us was nurtured by families and loved ones who said Yes to keeping us clothed and fed and loved. Teachers said Yes to teaching us to read so we could hold this book in our hands and comprehend it. However imperfectly they said that Yes, say it they did. Even those of us who had more than our share of No growing up had just enough Yes to bring us to today. Because we survived. We’re still here.

As a Presbyterian pastor, I sit in a lot of church meetings. (The joke is that Presbyterians do things decently and in order.) We have no bishops—the gathered community is the bishop—so we deliberate a lot. Many of these meetings end with a vote, usually a voice vote. And it’s striking to hear how different Yes sounds from No. (Sometimes we use Aye or Nay when we’re feeling fancy, but the phenomenon is the same.)

There is palpable energy when people say Yes. The word is crisp, sibilant. You can do a reluctant, lugubrious Yes if you try. But the essence of Yes has real power.

The word No can also carry a lot of force. Sometimes the No side prevails in these Presbyterian votes. But there’s rarely much vigor to it. No doesn’t get you out of bed in the morning. No doesn’t offer a jolt of spiritual caffeine when your energy is flagging.

Try it now. Say Yes. Stand up and assume a Yes posture as you do it.

What position did your Yes take? I’m guessing your stance was solid and strong. Maybe your hands were curled into resolute fists. Or planted firmly on your hips. Or perhaps your