What Improv Class Taught Me About Human Conversation

Improv wasn’t something I ever imagined being interested in when June brought it up. I couldn’t think of anything I’d be worse at. My sense of self has always been carefully constructed through reason. If I engage with someone, there’s a reason. Reason anchors my behavior. Of course, that’s a defense mechanism, but in improv, it doesn’t work. So what happens when it fails? That’s what I wanted to find out.

Most human conversations are torturous. It’s like watching someone get a massage: am I supposed to join in and massage the same person, or do I massage the masseuse? Either way, why? While trying to answer that, I realize I’ve already lost track of what they were saying.

After taking the class, I can’t help but see every conversation as improv, and every improv exercise as rehearsal for real conversations. I expected the class to be full of extroverts, but it’s mostly nerds like me.

I still don’t understand why some scenes are engaging and others fall flat. In small talk, people often intuitively follow the famous improv rule “Yes, and,” but it doesn’t help much. Viola Spolin only meant it as a rule for a particular game, not as a universal principle. And anyway, when people use the term small talk, they’re usually referring to conversations that are, by definition, unengaging. Nobody likes it.

Engaging interactions just happen; they emerge. Neither person can force it. The real question is how to let it happen, not how to make it happen. In that sense, the process feels subtractive, not additive. You don’t contribute something; you remove something, your own blockage. If either party is blocked, it won’t happen. All you can really do is unblock yourself and then watch as the conversation unfolds on its own, like it belongs to someone else.

What matters isn’t a rule like “Yes, and,” but the desire to engage. The trouble is, none of us ultimately knows what we want in life, because we don’t know what life is. Improv, like all conversation, is trial and error, a way to uncover our desires by watching them play out in real time.