One of my favorite moments at an improv workshop was one that Matt Besser taught in the summer of 2005, when he reminded us that it was okay to want to be funny.

It was in the UCB offices which at that time were three rooms over the Malibu Diner on 23rd street. The main office, where the artistic director and school supervisor and others sat, were in the middle. There were classrooms on either side to the north and south. The northern classroom stored all the costumes used for the UCB’s sketch show and had a cot where Besser would sometimes crash when he was in town from LA, like he was at this time. The southern room was smaller, a bit neater, and had what I remember as about fourteen radiators which pumped full blast year round including the middle of July. We were in that one.



This was during the Del Close marathon, the annual festival/homecoming at UCB where there are improv shows and workshops 24 hours a day for 3 days to honor Del, legendary improv director/teacher and patron saint of the UCB. It meant that the workshop had a mixture of UCB superfans, out-of-town newbies and a few teachers, of which I was one. We were all exhausted from having been up all night, many of us hungover.

Besser walked in, presumably having just grabbed a few hours of nap on his cot two rooms away. We all sat up a bit straighter, intimidated to face one of the UCB himself, a founder of our theater and a notoriously hard-to-impress teacher. He’d moved to LA so few of us had had him for a class.

Besser sat in a chair and lounged way back. He had on an Arkansas Razorbacks basketball team t-shirt, baggy jeans and beat-up sneakers, loosely tied. He looked tired and his expression seemed skeptical by default. Though he was technically facing the class, he seemed to be gazing at a spot on the floor just a few feet in front of him. It wasn’t clear class had started until he started talking.

“So why do you guys want to do improv?”

Silence, then someone timidly raised their hand. “I want to learn how to be in the moment.”

Besser nodded. “Be in the moment, okay. Anyone else?”

Answers started coming a bit more confidently. “To learn how to play it real.” “To support my scene partner.” “To have a group mind.” “To find truth in comedy.”

Besser nodded at all of them. After the answers stopped coming, he raised his eyebrows and said “No one here wants to be funny?”

We paused and stared back, then at each other, then back again. Besser seemed irritated. Were we in trouble?

“Nobody likes… comedy? Nobody was a fan of comedy and then saw an improv show and thought it was funny and said ‘I want to be funny?’”

We slowly nodded. Yes, we wanted to be funny. We liked funny things.

“I bet you all, before you wanted any of those things you just said, just wanted to be funny. It’s good. You should want to be funny. Improv is funny. Right? Okay, two people up.”

And we proceeded to have a Matt Besser workshop, which is an exciting, educational, inspirational and only sometimes terrifying experience. It was one of my favorites ever.

And it was the first time an improv teacher ever told me directly that it was okay to want to be funny.

Why Is Improv Teaching So Serious?

And that’s what I love about my time at the UCB theater: I was told that improv should be funny. Very explicitly. Along with all the notes about committing and listening and honoring group mind and supporting your scene partner was the very explicit directive: your show didn’t work if it wasn’t funny. This is a comedy theater. BE FUNNY.

I understand how the culture came to abhor the words “joke” and “funny.” That’s because improv is first and foremost an actor’s medium. It requires listening, agreement and commitment before all else. And since many people who get into improv have very little acting background, you must emphasize these things – listening, agreement, commitment – many, many times before your students can really start to do it.

And students who try to make jokes and who seem to want badly to be funny — well, at first they can only do those things by breaking reality, by selling out their scene partner, by making jokes that insult the integrity of the scene itself.

So you coach away from that and say “don’t worry about being funny, just support. Be truthful: say what you would really say, not some joke.”

But we go too far! We forget the ultimate goal: to come back from your time practicing good acting and to make a comedy show! To make a show that’s funny! Our favorite improv shows are, regardless of what tone they strike or what pace they set, FUNNY. Even if there are truly amazing and gifted acting chops afoot, the part you remember when you walk out of the theater is the funny part.

You can get there however you want. Fast or slow. In one scene or in forty-five of them. Use tag-outs, or keep it a monoscene. Have an opening or don’t. Two people, or twenty people. There’s lots of ways, all fascinating.

But if you’re putting a show up in a comedy theater, the audience should laugh or you didn’t do it right. That’s not heresy, that’s respect. Respect for the audience that came to see a show. Respect for how hard it is to make something that’s funny. Respect for the tradition of theater and writing and comedy in LA and NY and Chicago and every other place where someone put up a sign that said “improv show tonight.”