The course

Learn improv, properly, for free

Improv is taught almost entirely in person, which is wonderful for the people in the room and useless for everyone else. This is the curriculum written down: what gets taught in a good beginner sequence, in the order it gets taught, without the workshop price tag.

You can read these in order like a course, or ignore the order entirely and go straight to the one thing you came here to understand. Both are fine. Nobody is grading this.

One honest caveat before you start: reading about improv will not make you good at improv. It is a physical skill learned by doing it badly in front of people until you do it less badly. What reading can do is stop you wasting your first year misunderstanding what your teacher is asking for — which is what most beginners actually do, and what these pages are for.

Part one — The ground

  • Chapter 1

    What improv is, and what it is not

    The form defined honestly: what is actually unscripted, what the audience is really watching, and why the sketch-comedy comparison misleads almost everyone.

  • Chapter 2

    Yes, and

    The most quoted and least understood idea in the form. What agreement actually requires, why "yes, and" is not a rule about being nice, and how it fails.

  • Chapter 3

    Listening and the second line

    Why the second line of a scene decides more than the first, and why almost every beginner is planning instead of listening.

  • Chapter 4

    Base reality: who, what, where

    Establishing a world solid enough to break. Why a scene with no reality has nothing to heighten, and why object work is not a mime exercise.

Part two — Scene work

  • Chapter 5

    The game of the scene

    The engine of modern long form. How to find the first unusual thing, why you play the pattern and not the joke, and how good scenes escalate.

  • Chapter 6

    Heightening and exploring

    Making it bigger versus making it deeper, and knowing which one the scene is asking for.

  • Chapter 7

    Character and point of view

    Why a strong opinion beats a funny voice, and how character emerges from behaviour rather than decoration.

  • Chapter 8

    Edits: how scenes end

    Sweeps, tag-outs, split screens and the art of leaving while it is still good.

Part three — Forms

  • Chapter 9

    Short form

    Games with rules, why they are harder than they look, and the long shadow of televised improv.

  • Chapter 10

    Long form and the Harold

    The structure Del Close spent a career refining: an opening, three threads, three beats, and the group games between them.

  • Chapter 11

    Other formats

    The Armando, the Montage, La Ronde, the Deconstruction — and when a form helps rather than hinders.

Part four — Lineage

  • Chapter 12

    A short history of improv

    Viola Spolin's theatre games, the Compass Players, Second City, Keith Johnstone in Calgary, and Del Close in Chicago.

  • Reference

    Glossary

    Every bit of jargon your teacher will use in week one without explaining it.

  • Reference

    Games and warm-ups

    Thirty games and exercises, each with its own page: how to run it, coaching notes, and what it is actually training.

Found an error, or disagree with something here? Improv pedagogy is genuinely contested — reasonable teachers disagree about nearly everything below chapter two. If a page misrepresents how you were taught, tell us and we will say so on the page.