I do an improv warm-up exercise called “Age Walk.” As the players move randomly around the stage, I start to call out different ages, side coaching as the actors play themselves at age – three, then six, then twelve,fifteen, twenty and so on all the way to about eighty-five. Then they end up back at age three. (By the way, I don’t leave them at three – they get to return to their actual age).  One day, I was working with a group of Older Adults, roughly age seventy to eighty-five. They went through the exercise, and when they were playing themselves at “fifty”, they were trying their best to do all the physical exercises they’d done at fifty. Half of them were doing jumping jacks!

The next day, I ran a class of young improvisers ranging in age from eighteen to about mid-twenties. I did the same warm-up exercise. This time, when the twenty-ish ones reached age fifty they slowed down, had more trouble walking, had achy bones, shaky hands, and yes, even used imaginary walkers! The old folks did jumping jacks at fifty and the young ones did walkers.

It seems to be easier being fifty “the second time around.”

On this subject — I was recently emailed this video. Full disclosure – I do not eat red meat.

It is so predictable the way most people who are “doing improv” will play children. They immediately start arguing and whining in fake “kid talk” playing annoying, dumb and argumentative, spewing conflict and denial all over the stage. It’s the most obvious, most boring portrayal of children imaginable. It’s yucky and it’s gross! Once again, as so often happens in improv, when there’s the desperate rush to be funny, there is a separation from your own best instincts, from the other players and from the space. As always, it can only help to focus on what’s your relationship not only to the other players, but to the space. Think about it. You’re a kid. So you’re always looking up. The reality is, most kids are really smart, based to a great degree on the fact that they spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to negotiate their status in a world where even if they’re the smartest one in the room, usually everyone is two or three times bigger than them. Not only that, they haven’t been around as long as us older, more cynical humans. So they’re also exploring a wonder-filled world where there are new discoveries happening all the time, where the other little kids can be your allies as well as enemies. Kids play together. Sometimes they fight, but kids like to get along, to share, trust and feel trusted. Playing the positive qualities in a kid makes for a much more interesting character who can move forward in a scene exploring, agreeing and creating. Every improviser should know that any character you play has to be played at the top of your brains, including playing little kids. And playing that way allows you to truly access the playful kid in you. And isn’t that what improv is really all about?

So, the “funny” and the change go hand in hand.  Which leads to a bigger point regarding the “long view” of improv.  That is, a belief I have that improv is, in fact, a very important and appropriate tool in an evolutionary shift that is taking place on our planet and in each of our lives.  I have already blogged on the remarkable statement of Nobel laureate James Watson and his belief regarding the next step in the evolution of mankind. And more recently, I saw a three-part documentary hosted by former improvisational actor Alan Alda called “The Human Spark” which documents his search through neuroscience, psychology, anthropology and biology for clues as to what sets us apart from other animals.  Chimpanzees he shows (with the help of a top researcher of chimp behavior) have large brains that can process a lot of tasks, but what they do not have is the amazing ability that humans possess to share information.  The human species has the power to collaborate, and that is one of the things that sets us apart and makes us human.  The implications for this of course are immense, especially given the explosion of new media and their convergence.  As a perfect example, take a look at the use in the last couple of weeks of text messaging as a tool for donating money to the relief effort in Haiti.  As Jeremy Rifkin points out in a new article in the Huffington Post, the combination of the media’s reporting of the Haiti earthquake and the ability of people to use mobile phones to donate money has led to a historic and unprecedented ability to make an “active choice” (improv term) and make good on a feeling of empathy from millions of people to the tune of millions of dollars in aid to “our brothers and sisters” in Haiti.  This is about collaboration and empathy and is a perfect example of the use of the tools we have at hand, both emotional and technological, to collaborate more powerfully than ever before in the history of the world.

Improvisation is all about collaboration.  The tools of improv are more important now than ever.  We have the tools to make (and I believe we are in the midst of) an evolutionary leap that depends on collaboration and community building, trust and compassion, honoring our own creativity and the creative abilities of all of our fellow citizens on this planet.  Improv teaches those lessons.  Laughter for a Change is based on the belief that the games we play allow us to practice the skills that can save our world and make it a more livable place, a more humane and healthier place, and, happily, a funnier and more fun place to live for us and for future generations.

In the workshop we talked about how comedy comes out of pain – Chaplin and, as one of the guys pointed out, Richard Pryor (“King Richard” he called him) were not that far apart.  We talked about how universal physical comedy can be.  We also talked about Chaplin bringing his years of experience as a vaudeville and burlesque comic to the screen.  Set against the vast backdrop of the Alaskan Gold Rush, Chaplin keeps it simple and uses what he knows to bring his Music Hall experience to the screen.  Great comics like Chaplin or Richard Pryor use themselves, their own experience, and their own pain to create comedy.

Though I’m not a psychologist, it’s been my experience with Laughter for a Change, that no matter who the workshop participants are, from young Rwandans to PTSD Vets, if a safe environment is created, they can access themselves and their own experience (and no one is ever forced to make fun of something that is too painful).  They can connect to a place that exist beyond the trauma.  Using improv comedy and play, people can connect to a creative, more intuitive side, the part that is able to say “yes,” the part that is, in the end, bigger and more alive than what has happened to them.

There was much good stuff and a lot not so good – improv full of conflict, denial and just not listening. In a theater form that celebrates the legacy of Del Close, there were numerous choices made throughout the festival that would have had Del literally storming the stage to physically eject the perpetrators (or at least screaming obscenities so loud, they would have shriveled up and left the stage by themselves through sheer intimidation and embarrassment). I saw several office scene ended abruptly when the guys playing the boss screamed “You’re fuckin’ fired!” (the “fuckin’” was in there to assure a laugh). Each time, “You’re fuckin’ fired!” ended any attempt to explore potentially interesting scenes.

There’s an awful lot of screaming in long-form improv. Once again, not listening is the culprit. Not listening brings with it that horrible feeling that you’re not being heard. You “project,” to use a psychotherapeutic term, your lack of listening onto the other person. And you react — you raise your voice and scream in the hopes of being heard. And the screaming makes true listening even harder. It’s a vicious cycle. The opposite of that, and a very positive version in improv, which thankfully I also saw lots of at the marathon, is, the more trust you put in the other actor, the more trustworthy they become. That’s improv at its best. And the contrast over 72 hours of improv is quite instructional.

The best consistent work I saw during the three days was a two-man long form team – Scheer and McBrayer. Paul Scheer and Jack McBrayer (Jack plays the network page on “30 Rock”) did some of the best improvisational comedy acting I’ve seen in years. They were a case study in listening, calm playing, great character work, egoless support, true “behavioral comedy” without the need to pander to the audience in any way. And most memorably, they did a bit within the improv where the two of them played four soldiers on guard duty in a foxhole. It was funny, smart and contained some of the best and most effortless presentation of character transformation I’ve ever seen.

The logo for the Del Close Marathon was a bobble head toy of Del, created especially for the event. If I had a time machine, I would love to go back to the ‘70’s, when Del opined, “My reputation will never get out of the neighborhood” and tell him that in the future there would be a bobble head toy of him, just to see and hear his reaction.

I had a great time in NYC and watching all that improv. I highly recommend The Del Close Marathon. The 12th Annual will be here sooner than you think.

Charlie Rose asked them their thoughts on the next evolutionary step for mankind.  They both agreed that evolutionary science is moving in the direction of the coming together of cultural, biological and psychological science.  Watson theorized that mankind as a species, even though it doesn’t seem like it sometimes, has gotten less violent over the last 20,000 years.  He goes on to say that for the first time in history more people live in urban areas than in rural and that natural selection favors people who can get along in communities.  To paraphrase one of the greatest improvisers of all time, Elaine May, “… And that man is a Nobel Laureate!”

So, in thinking how this applies to the work we do in improvisational theater, it seems to me that playing agreement rather than conflict, trusting each other, working as part of a team, and the idea that “you do your best work by making the other player look good” can help us not only have fun on stage, get laughs and meet new people, but also puts us on the right side of natural selection and squarely in the middle of an evolutionary trend.  So the next time you say “yes, and…” think of it not only as good improv in the moment, but also as a long-term evolutionary survival mechanism.  Don’t play conflict, play agreement – it’s your responsibility to the other players, to the improvisation, and to our offspring fifty generations from now.  Having said that, just relax and play.  No pressure.

such as “Why can’t people just be happy all the time?” I would usually end up at the base PX (my father was a career Air Force officer) in front of the magazine stand, where one day I discovered MAD Magazine. In one issue, I found THE POEM THAT CHANGED MY LIFE. It was an absurd riff on something I had been made to learn in school, and it read:

“Thirty days has September

April, June and No Wonder,

All the rest have peanut butter,

Except for my grandmother

Who has a little red tricycle.”

And there was a goofy little picture of a grandmother on a tricycle. This poem was a revelation! Deep in my DNA I recognized a “masterpiece” — a simple piece that turned conventional logic on its head and… made me laugh. Made me happy! I could do stuff like this I realized! I could make other people laugh. Maybe people can’t be happy all the time, but helping them laugh, as my grandmother would say, “It couldn’t hurt!” And I imagined her on a little red tricycle, and I laughed again.

The other night, I was talking to a new student (a wonderful addition to the school with a natural talent for listening) who also plays drums. He studied jazz in school. I talked about how I’ve been influenced in my work in improvisational theater by the music of John Coltrane. “Listen to Coltrane” I said. “You can hear him reaching for the next new sound in virtually every note.”

This morning I found out that, after a brief illness, a dear friend has passed away. Now, a few hours after this sad news, I am writing, while I’m listening to another great improviser, Johann Sebastian Bach – Janos Starker’s version of Bach’s Cello Sonatas.

As the music fills the space, I am moved, comforted, and grateful for the music in my life. Laughter is music too. When we improvise, we must play like musicians. Filling in the spaces when we are needed, supporting each other because – because life is too short for anything else.

Anyway, I had a really exhausting week last week — too much to do, too little time to do it. Sound familiar? Not enough time to think, to ponder, to let the creative juices flow of their own accord to some new insight. NOT ENOUGH TIME!! That’s when a new insight hit. It’s not that I don’t have enough time. I DON’T HAVE ENOUGH SPACE!

That’s a great way to look at it. Space is more generous than time. Time is unrelenting. It marches forward. I have no control over time. But space – space is available. I can pay attention at any instant, be in the space that I’m in and honor it. Supported by the space inside me and the space around me, trusting in the space to reward me for my attention, I can open up to my own intuition. Confident that when I return to it, time will have moved forward and I will be more “here” than I was before, when I thought that I was a victim of time, rather than a participant in space. The old cliché in comedy is that “timing is everything.” But think about it. Comedy timing is as much about space as it is about time. An improviser, in order to find the right “timing,” is really being informed by the interplay in the space between him/her and the other players and, to a very large degree, between performer and audience. In that space is the intuition regarding how to “time something.” By “playing” the space, the great comic actor gets his “timing.

Today is my birthday. Tomorrow Del Close would have been seventy-five years old. For years, until Del’s death, no matter how far away we were from each other or how long it had been since we’d spoken, Del and I would have two phone conversations in the space of two days, one on March 8^th and one on March 9^th — happy birthday phone calls. I miss those calls.

As a young improviser at The Committee, my favorite moments were being on stage and hearing Del’s deep, loud laugh coming from the back of a full house, laughing at something I’d said that I didn’t know was going to come out funny. Today and tomorrow there will be no birthday phone calls. But I thank Del for continuing to challenge me to play harder and dig deeper to hear, however faintly, his laugh, still cutting through the crowd from the back of the house.