The House That Del Built

Improv Vs. Sketch

Views on the relationship between improv comedy and sketch comedy are varied and passionate.  When I was training at Second City, the story went that Viola Spolin, the mother of modern improvisational theatre, and Paul Sills, her son and founder of the Compass Players (the prelude to The Second City) had fundamental disagreements about the role of improvisation: Was it an end in itself? A way to workshop ideas into the “finished product” of a written sketch? A psychological and emotional exploration? A tool or political and social satire?

I guess where I’d like to start my argument is to talk about what I think improv isn’t good at. I know, it seems shocking for someone as obsessed with improv as I am to admit to any shortcomings in it as an art form. But, like any form, it has limitations. Just as sculpture is arguably better at capturing the shape and movement of the human form than painting, and paintings can do more with the interplay of light and color in a scene than sculpture, so, too, improv and sketch have their domains of relative artistic success and shortcomings.

What improv doesn’t do particularly well is tell a really tight, well-crafted narrative. Unless you set very clear parameters and outlines on your “improvised” story (and you can do this—by pre-assigning characters within an archetypical narrative, for example), it’s pretty hard to tell a compelling and emotionally-rich story on the fly in the thirty minutes or an hour allotted to your performance. And even if you do assign characters and set-up a narrative that follows an archetypical formula (say, the John Hughes film genre, or a reality show format), you’re not going to pull off anything near an Oscar Wilde-caliber of interwoven comedic narrative. And in the case of a concept-based improv show like that, the satisfaction comes from the audience recognizing those pieces of the formula, not from the brilliant story you’ve created. It’s just too hard to be in-the-moment, creating your art as you go, and still be able to attend to the kinds of details and structure that make a really amazing story. The kinds of elements you need—foreshadowing, a deliberate sense of pace and a conscious choice regarding what details to reveal when for maximum impact—can’t be done on the fly. Forget comedy: you think Lost was something that could have been improvised? Off of a one-word suggestion? “We heard ‘smoke monster.’ Thank you.”

Improv is also often not terribly efficient. Sure, you can learn skills to maximize your impact in a scene and minimize the excess or distracting content. But there’s a way in which one has to embrace the possibility—maybe even the necessity—of exploring and testing one’s way through a scene. The audience will generally be forgiving of that if they can trust that, eventually, and without too much delay, you’re going to get them somewhere worthwhile, a consideration they’re much less likely to make for, let’s say, a comedic film that seems to be taking its time in finding its focus. After all, when they’re watching you, they’ve paid for live, improvised theatre, and they know that the art comes with inherent risk. Not only that, but it’s likely they appreciate and enjoy the sense of real-time discovery that improvisation provides, enough to override their desire for efficient entertainment.

What improv does do well, though, is the very thing that sketch or television or film comedy struggles to achieve: the pleasure of spontaneous revelations and surprising connections and patterns. It’s a reason why so many filmmakers (many of whom were trained in improv themselves) have embraced improv as a tool in their movie-making process. Although, I’ll tell you what—if you want to watch something simultaneously awesome and mind-blowingly boring, watch the outtakes from The Forty Year Old Virgin with the 20 minutes of “You know how I know you’re gay?” footage they didn’tuse. But then why film it at all? Why not get two writers in a room to hash over the best “you know how I know you’re gay?” jokes and not waste Seth Rogen’s and Paul Rudd’s time with all that improvisation to reach a couple great lines? The answer is that the moment of surprise and discovery that the performers experience—both in the delivery of the line and in hearing it for the first time—cannot be replicated by a script. It can be simulated by the best comedic actors, the ones who can make moments feel completely discovered even though they’ve been saying the line for weeks, but the pure sense of discovery is a physiological phenomenon that can only be truly experienced in real time. It’s the difference between the first time you went on a roller coaster and every other time. It’s the law of diminishing returns.

Now, what if they took the same improvisational process that Rogen and Rudd used to come to those few great lines, tossed out the improvised material and rehearsed those lines until they got them down perfect, and shot that? I’d argue that shot wouldn’t be nearly as funny as the stuff that made it into the actual movie. It would be like a rough stone tumbled smooth: pretty but lacking its true and unique original character. Now, that doesn’t mean that all sketch comedy that uses improvisation as a means to workshop scenes and ideas is a diminished shadow of the original improvised material. Not at all. Sometimes that rough nugget of comedy does need to be shaped to reveal its beauty. But it does mean that we have to acknowledge that there is an artistic trade off when we cross between the two media. We sacrifice the pure joy of discovery for a more tightly wrought and focused form of execution. We lose surprise for stability. And that’s okay. It’s just different.

But I’ll add this, and this may be controversial to say, but it seems obvious to me: not every great improv scene can make a great sketch. How many times have you been in rehearsal and said to yourself, “That would make an awesome sketch!” only to write it out and have the comedy somehow lost in the translation? Sure, maybe you just wrote it lousy, but let’s assume you can write a good sketch, that the fundamental problem isn’t you. Because I would say, most of the time, if that improv scene isn’t finding its legs as a sketch, it’s not the material, it’s the medium. And that has everything to do with how much of the comedy of the improvised scene relied on those things that improv does best, and does better than any other comedic form. If the comedy truly came from that pure moment of surprise and discovery, it’s going to be hard to ever get that moment back.  Sometimes it just doesn’t translate. And maybe, sometimes, there is that kernel of an idea that’s both funny in and of itself, and can be curated to build a sketch around it. But knowing which is which means understanding the strengths of the media and working with them rather than fighting them or forcing one to be the other. That’s like asking Betty to be Veronica. There’s a reason Archie can’t ever decide. And there’s a reason we don’t ever want him to.

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