If there is one thing that fascinates me about improv and that is how it is portrayed in Television, books and Film. This is becoming more and more apparent in recent years because the comedy art form is sort of in fashion. There are some interesting topics that we can gain from these ways they are displayed so every so often we are going to look at different scenes from different shows and films.

Family Guy is one those shows that I have seen a few episodes of but never committed to it. It was only recently I decided to watch it from the start and the other day I came across an episode that mentioned improv and I had to speak about it.

In season 8, episode 3, Peter and the guys want to impress Chevy Chase and Dan Akroyd by becoming an improv group. Quagmire is a ‘pro’ at improv and tries to teach it to them, it is important to mention from here that this aired originally in 2010.

Anyone who has been following this site will know that I have been tracking how America portrays improv as sometimes it is positive and sometimes it is negative.

This is a mixed bag. It feels like the whole show is mocking it, the way that Family Guy always does things like this. However, in between the mocking, there are some pieces of gold to be discussed.

There are some really fun scenes where Quagmire tries to explain what improv is – he comes onto the stage saying he was at the bank and Joe joins in to the scene and Peter decides just to do his own thing. The energy of Quagmire in this scene is hilarious because it reminds me of people I have met on the scene and this means you can enjoy it on two levels.

He then does a game to ‘warm up’ peter called ‘Go Bananas’ and this is where I think it creates a negative vibe around improv. Whilst it may be a fun warm up game, but for a viewer that has no idea it looks like it is mocking it and weird.

Quagmire then teaches them the one word game and Peter just keeps saying the word ‘and’ – he doesn’t understand how to push the story on. Peter finally gets it and instead decides to tell his own story.

Later in the episode, Quagmire is at the improv show asking the audience for suggestions for the improv groups show – their team name is Room For Improv-ment. As like all improv shows, there are a lot of crude suggestions and picking the best ones that is the most clean.

When Quagmire introduces Peter to the stage he steamrolls the show, takes over and does how own story and turns it into a stand up show. This ends up getting more laughter. Quagmire goes up and tells them to end the show as he is really annoyed with Peter.

Yes, it has a mocking part of it in relation to improv but I really liked the representation of the games and the little bits on stage where it shows elements of improv you can relate to. It is a fun episode.

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