The course
Learn improv, properly
Improv is taught in person, because that is the only place it can be learned. This is the vocabulary and the reasoning written down, so that when you walk into a class you already know what your teacher is asking for — and so the hour you paid for goes on doing it rather than on definitions.
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.
Be clear about what this is for: 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, and nothing on this site substitutes for a room, a teacher and seven other people who showed up. Books and pages like these are the map. The class is the territory.
Part one — The ground
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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Chapter 6
Heightening and exploring
Making it bigger versus making it deeper, and knowing which one the scene is asking for.
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Chapter 7
Character and point of view
Why a strong opinion beats a funny voice, and how character emerges from behaviour rather than decoration.
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Chapter 8
Edits: how scenes end
Sweeps, tag-outs, split screens and the art of leaving while it is still good.
Part three — Forms
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Chapter 9
Short form
Games with rules, why they are harder than they look, and the long shadow of televised improv.
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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.
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Chapter 11
Other formats
The Armando, the Montage, La Ronde, the Deconstruction — and when a form helps rather than hinders.
Part four — Lineage
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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.
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Reference
Glossary
Every bit of jargon your teacher will use in week one without explaining it.
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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.
Do the thing
Reading gets you ready. A class gets you good.
Work through these chapters and you will walk into your first class already knowing the vocabulary. That is all they are for. The learning itself happens on your feet, in a room, with a teacher stopping you mid-scene.
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.