Improv: It's Character Building
Improv. We love it (obviously). We’ve extolled it’s benefits on numerous occasions. Improv can give you the confidence to face the ‘real’ world, help with your acting skills and even improve your relationships. But just in case you’re still unsure about the skills you could gain from inviting some Improv into your life, we’ve decided to pull that old teaching trick and incorporate popular culture into our relate our enthusiastic Improv related ramblings. That’s right readers. In order for you to get a clearer picture of the benefits of Improv, we’ve taken the time to set out how doing some Improv could help the characters on some of your favourite streaming and television hits. Binge this!
Everyone in The Bear could do with More Listening and less shouting
Improv is a great way to learn key active listening skills. By virtue of the fact that Improv involves making things up on the spot, it’s imperative that performers remain ‘in the moment’ and actively listen to their scene partners so that they can build upon and collaborate on a story. If performers fail to actively listen to each other, their scene will likely fall apart quickly.
The Bear is a show about a world renowned chef who returns to his home town of Chicago to run his brother’s deli and eventually turn it into a fine dining restaurant. If the show is anything to go by, then running a deli/restaurant involves a whole bunch of shouting over people. Like, a lot of shouting. Words cannot describe how much shouting. If shouting were an Olympic sport, the characters on The Bear would sweep the podium. One episode consists only of family members shouting at each other over Christmas dinner. There is so. much. shouting. It goes without saying that if you’re constantly shouting at someone, you’re probably not listening to them and it’s this failure to listen that leads to most of the interpersonal conflict on the show.
So if everyone on The Bear took a chill pill and did some Improv classes, they’d learn the value of listening and probably avoid a whole lot of misunderstanding, frustration and conflict. The restaurant would probably run better too.
Fallout could use some more teamwork
Improv is great way to foster teamwork and collaboration because it:
provides a low pressure environment that allows people to let their guard down and connect with each other; and
encourages participants to support each other, take risks, and collaborate towards shared goals.
Fallout is a show set in a post-apocalyptic future and follows various characters and factions as they seek to survive in and fight to assert their power over the nuclear weapon ravaged Earth.
Now, we aren’t suggesting that all the problems associated with a nuclear apocalypse could be magically solved with a bit of Improv. In fact, Improv is probably the furthest thing from your mind when you’re faced with surviving a nuclear wasteland.
However, we can’t help but think that if there were some Improv classes available in Fallout’s alternate future, the characters in the show would be more inclined to work together to build a better world, rather than continually try to tear each other down in a quest for power.
The Office (Australia) could use some more honesty
Honesty is one of the keys to successful Improv. Improvisers learn to not be shy about saying what they are thinking and to especially express their emotions or opinions about what is going on in a scene. This often leads to scenes evolving emotionally and dramatically (or rather, comedically) and allows performers to play with or build upon conflicting points of view. Scenes will wither and die if performers stop being honest.
Like its predecessors, the central conceit of the Australian remake of The Office is that employees submit to the drudgery of office life and suffer in silence at their boss’s zany and boundary pushing antics. There is also a couple of coworkers (Nick and Greta in the Australian version) who clearly have the hots for each other but are unable to express their true feelings.
If the employees on The Office took a leaf out of the improvisers playbook and expressed their honest feelings, they’d probably find themselves in a more enriching and fulfilling life. The could probably curtail their boss’s questionable behavior by pointing out that they are the most irritating person that everyone has ever has the misfortune of dealing with. And if Nick and Greta were honest and expressed their true feelings for each other, they could build a happy and fulfilling life together rather than suffer through the unfulfilling status quo.
As a side note, we would like to point out that in the U.S. version of the The Office, Michael Scott (as portrayed by Steve Carrell) was shown to partake in Improv classes and his character actually developed from a selfish to more generous leader over the course of that show. We do not think this is a coincidence.
NCIS could benefit from some more creative thinking
It’s no secret the Improv can improve your creative thinking. In order to improvise effectively, you’ve got to constantly generate fresh ideas, think outside the box and overcome challenges placed on you by others (such as fellow performers or the audience). Scientific studies have even shown that Improv can improve divergent thinking, which is the ability to generate many ideas in a short amount of time and explore multiple solutions to a given problem.
NCIS is of course a show which follows a team of federal agents investigating U.S. Navy related crimes and owes its popularity to mums everywhere (your mum is probably watching it right now). The NCIS team is so good at solving crimes that they’ve been doing so for almost 22 years (that can’t be right, can it?).
But wait, you say. If the NCIS team has been successfully solving crimes for almost 22 years (we’ve checked, it’s correct), surely they don’t need any help with their creative thinking skills? In response, we’d like to point out that an episode of NCIS usually involves the team investigating a violent crime committed against Navy personnel in the Washington D.C. area. Given the amount of crimes they’ve had to solve in their 22 year reign as your mum’s favourite show, it would appear that Washington D.C. is much more dangerous than any war zone that the Navy could be deployed to. NCIS could do to implement some creative thinking in order to come up with ideas as to how to reduce this particular rate of crime and keep the Navy safe from the horrors of the homefront.
Thanks to our inspired use of pop cultural references, we hope the benefits of Improv are now clear. If you want to introduce these benefits to your own life, we encourage you to check out our workshops. We look forward to seeing you!