It’s not just me who has had their life changed by improv, many people have and we are going to hear their stories!

Today we hear from Liam who has recently starting teaching Beginners lessons for Hoopla. Improv has been part of Liam’s life since he was at University and isn’t going to be leaving it anytime soon…

How Improv has changed my life

I’m always so cautious of being a snake-oil salesman when I talk about improv to friends and even other improvisers. Improv can change your life!

1. You’ll be more confident!
2. You’ll be funnier!
3. Get the promotion you’ve been after!
4. You’ll get laid more!

Obviously I don’t say those things to people (although honestly I think there’s some truth to those things) but there does seem to be something to improv that improves people’s quality of life even if it is at the expense of your bank account and free time. I don’t think it’s something magical. Maybe it’s just a really cool hobby or the punk-rock of the comedy world or a shared fever dream but there does seem to be gold in them there hills.

photo credit: Kate O’Connor

I was a comedy nerd from a young age, collecting script books of the sitcoms I liked and doing little comedy bits with school friends. At the time I wouldn’t have defined that as improv, with my first official introduction being; like countless others, the TV show ‘Whose Line is it Anyway?’ which I’d seen in passing. I got the chance to have a go myself at the University of Kent, when the Drama Society were auditioning new people for their own improv comedy group ‘Play it by Ear’ who aped the style of ‘Whose Line’. The group was made up of a rolling cast that got new people in each year to replace graduates and acted as the spiritual successor to the group ‘The Noise Next Door’ who wanted to leave an improv legacy after they had left a number of years before. Trying the improv games was fun, especially as I got to audition with my new funny fresher friends. I had a strong audition until they started auditioning us at improv singing games.

I completely bottled it. I flatly said no to giving it a go and watched as my new peers dived in (with varying singing quality). As a result, they got in while I was left watching them perform weekly at the student led Monkeyshine Comedy Club. I watched my friend’s devil may care attitude as they performed on stage over the year, committing wholeheartedly to looking dumb and having fun with the games and songs. They inspired me. So when auditions came around the next year (almost seven years to the day now) I came in with the attitude “Fuck it, I’m just going to have some fun” and ended up getting in.

Performing and rehearsing with Play it by Ear was the most fun I’d ever had and ended up being the highlight of my week. We were spoiled too, getting regular audiences of 60-100 excitable and drunk students. On special occasions like Fresher’s week, it was difficult to get to the stage as it was so packed. A year or so into this we had gotten quite lazy. We stuck to the games that we were good at and always ended with a boy band song. We would get an audience member up and sing a ballad to them, which always brought the house down (again our singing ability having very little correlation with the audience’s enjoyment). Our Drama module for that term involved creating our own research project based on our own artistic practice, so improv felt like a no-brainer and for the first time I actually discovered the improv world outside of the bubble we had created. One of our members showed us a DVD of the Upright Citizens Brigade’s ‘ASSSSCAT’ and it was incredible. The UCB explored the funny ideas that came about from truthful monologues at the beginning of each section and from them they created a hilarious scenes that came together to create what felt like a legitimate show as good as any of the sitcoms I’d obsessed over as a kid. The performers became my heroes and I couldn’t get enough of improv, pouring over books, listening to podcasts and taking a class that by lucky happenstance started around this time.

Photo Credit: Classic Andy

The class was lead by Lucy Fennell, a drama teacher who had started studying at Hoopla Impro in London and was taking the stuff that she had learned back to what looked like a Scout hall. Once again I found myself completely bottling it, my new found philosophy of “Fuck it, I’m going to have some fun” being severely tested. Luckily as a group we were much stronger than our individual doubts so we marched inside. We found ourselves in a room in which we were by far the most experienced, making my wobble beforehand seem all the more silly. Beginners were bravely throwing themselves in at the deep end and I realised that even if any of us drowned that nothing bad was going to happen. We were finally getting some actual training and we got so much better, breaking out of our mildly-laddish, quasi-nerdy and student-pandering sets.

The lesson that most stuck with me was performing a scene at a circus with my friend Ed Pithie (who now runs his own workshops under the name ‘Dingbats’ in Crawley and was always our boy band rapper) playing big, fun but vacuous characters. Lucy instructed us from the side to find a point for the characters to say ‘I love you’ to each other. I immediately bristled and going through my head was a variation of the thought “What the fuck, I just want to be funny, this is stupid.” We continued the scene trudging along, my heels firmly in the proverbial ground. At some point when I thought enough time had passed, I spat out the words “I love you”. Lucy wasn’t satisfied, made us carry on and I internally rolled my eyes (although if I’m being honest, I probably actually rolled my eyes too, I’m a much better student now, promise). We continued and starting getting into more of a grounded acting territory, while still maintaining these big and fun clown characters. We were still getting laughs from our classmates but while remaining emotionally truthful, we earned the right for the two clowns to say I love you and got a round of applause while Lucy called scene. It still took me a while after to realise how important it is to have some truth in your comedy but at least I had a bit of evidence to help me along the way.

I’m still learning hard lessons like this regularly and although I occasionally bristle, I really try to hold onto the “Fuck it, I’m going to have some fun” philosophy and try not shy away from things because they feel scary. Again I feel like I’m turning into the snake oil salesman but fuck it:

1. I got more confident.
2. I got funnier.
3. I got jobs easier.
4. No comment.

Most importantly these past 7 years have been much more fun than the 22 average to good years before it. So make sure to rub it under your arms before you go to bed and I’ve also got some never-melting ice…

photo credit: ClusterFox