Hidden Constraints in Improv

Performing improv is very freeing. For 20 minutes, you are fully present, living moment to moment and acting on impulse.

However, that same freedom comes with some constraints. It’s hard to build complex structures one line at a time among 6 people on a team. The ideas you can explore are limited to the ideas that everyone on stage can quickly grasp and understand. You are 6 performers acting out an unrehearsed play written by 6 directors who didn’t talk together beforehand – if you diagram out all the scenes you did and how they relate to each other and what the exact relationship was, you likely won’t be able to find any complex structure. Most sets will degenerate into a collection of loosely related scenes with a couple callbacks. So, improv sets tend to look pretty similar structurally, even if the content of their scenes is different.

But the content of the scenes is less different than you’d think. Every improviser goes through a creative rut where they feel like they’re doing the same scenes over and over. I think this is a matter of acting on habit as opposed to impulse. Habit is our default behavior, the most obvious choice in a moment. Impulse is sublimely creative and novel and somehow just arises in your mind out of nowhere, but to notice it and act on it, you must have a calm, clear, and present mind that is open to many possibilities. When you have a room full of strangers who left their houses that evening and paid money to sit in chairs and stare at you because they expect laughs from you, and you are someone who got into improv because you needed validation and have always gotten social validation by being the funny one, then you are probably not going to indulge the risky question “what is a really new and creative idea here?” Instead, you’re going to do the most obvious thing available to you, a habit, something you’ve done many before. And then, as you develop a reputation for being funny and people want you on their teams, you feel even more pressure to act in accord with your habits, and further eschew risk. Understandably, improvisers wind up making variations of the same choice over and over, and they commonly wind up in ruts.

So, we are constrained both in the structure of our sets and the content of our scenes.

 Freedom through Intentionally Chosen Constraints

Given that we’re already constrained by the structure of our sets, what if we chose to intentionally constrain it by making it conform to a blueprint or template? This gives us the opportunity to pick something more interesting than an anything-goes montage. Sometimes constraints breed creativity. We won’t dictate the content of any given scene, but we’ll define a blueprint or template for the way different scenes will relate to each other. This blueprint or template used to foster creativity is called a form.

But how do we choose a suitable constraint? Let’s start with a goal then come up with a constraint to help us achieve that goal. If our goal is to build a small world of characters, then our constraint could be “The following scene always has at least one character who was established in a previous scene.” Using letters for characters, an example of an improv set following this constraint would be: A & B -> B & C -> C & D -> D & A -> B & C -> A & C … You might recognize this form as The La Ronde. The constraint imposed by The La Ronde makes us wind up seeing the same characters over and over, which then gives us opportunities to develop them in multiple social contexts. This constraint that limits the characters we can see actually lets us delve further into character work.

Here are some more examples of forms:

 Intuition: Designing The Harold from Scratch

Let’s design a form with the goal of weaving themes together. Broadly, we’ll need to do three things: create themes; develop themes; connect themes. For simplicity, let’s do them in that exact order.

This gives us our proto-form: Suggestion -> Create -> Develop -> Connect.

But how many themes should we have? Things usually tend to work best in threes, so let’s do three themes.

Our form updates to: Suggestion -> Create 1 -> Create 2 -> Create 3 -> Develop 1 -> Develop 2 -> Develop 3 -> Connect 1, 2, 3.

But how are we supposed to create three different themes from one suggestion? That sounds hard… What if we introduced a new element called an Opener that took a single suggestion and brainstormed a lot of ideas from it? Then each theme can be based on an idea generated in our opener instead of directly from the suggestion. That would make it easier to generate three distinct themes.

So now we have: Suggestion -> Opener -> Create 1 -> Create 2 -> Create 3 -> Develop 1 -> Develop 2 -> Develop 3 -> Connect 1, 2, 3.

But it’d be nice to clearly delineate to the audience when we’re creating vs developing vs connecting, so let’s throw in some palette cleansers between creation, development, and connection. We’ll call these Group Games.

Now we have: Suggestion -> Opener -> Create 1 -> Create 2 -> Create 3 -> Group Game -> Develop 1 -> Develop 2 -> Develop 3 -> Group Game -> Connect 1, 2, 3.

And that, more or less, gives us a Harold.