Chapter 12 — Lineage

A short history of improv

The form you are learning was invented to help immigrant children in Chicago play together. Almost everything strange about improv makes sense once you know that.

People have improvised performance for as long as there has been performance — commedia dell'arte worked from scenarios rather than scripts, and every oral storytelling tradition involves composing in the moment. But the specific thing taught in classes today has a traceable and surprisingly short lineage, and it does not begin in comedy.

Viola Spolin and the theatre games

It begins with Viola Spolin, in Chicago, in the 1930s.

Spolin had trained under Neva Boyd, a sociologist who used traditional games as a tool for group work with immigrant and working-class communities at Hull House. Working for the Works Progress Administration's recreational programme, Spolin needed a way to get children who did not share a language, or a culture, or any theatrical training, to create together.

Her solution was the theatre game: an exercise with a clear objective that solves an acting problem sideways. Rather than telling someone to be more spontaneous, you give them a game whose rules make hesitation impossible. Rather than instructing them to commit to an imaginary object, you set a task that only works if the object is real to them.

She published this body of work as Improvisation for the Theater in 1963, and it remains the closest thing the field has to a foundational text. Two things about it are worth sitting with. It was pedagogy, not performance — the games were never intended to be watched. And it was not about comedy at all. The laughter that dominates improv today is a downstream accident of a method designed for access, presence and group cohesion.

The Compass and Second City

Spolin's son, Paul Sills, took the games to the theatre.

In 1955, near the University of Chicago, Sills and David Shepherd founded the Compass Players, generally recognised as the first professional improvisational theatre company in the United States. Shepherd's ambition was political — a people's theatre, made for and about ordinary working audiences, drawing its material from their lives.

What the Compass actually produced was extremely funny, largely because the performers it attracted were extremely funny, and the political theatre gradually became a comedy theatre. That tension — improv as social project versus improv as entertainment — has never fully resolved and turns up again in every generation.

In December 1959, several Compass veterans opened The Second City in Chicago. It used improvisation primarily as a writing method: material was improvised, then refined and performed as sketch. Second City became a comedy institution and, eventually, a pipeline into American television — which is how improv acquired both its industry credibility and its complicated relationship with careerism.

Keith Johnstone and the other tradition

Meanwhile, and largely independently, Keith Johnstone was developing a parallel body of work in Britain.

Working at the Royal Court Theatre in London, Johnstone became preoccupied with why adults are so much less spontaneous than children, and concluded that most training makes it worse. His teaching attacked the problem directly: be obvious rather than clever, accept offers, stop trying to be original.

His most exported idea is status — that every human interaction involves a continuous negotiation of who is higher and lower, and that playing it deliberately produces instant, legible drama. His book Impro, published in 1979, is still the best thing ever written about why improvisation is difficult.

He later moved to Canada, teaching at the University of Calgary and founding the Loose Moose Theatre, where he created Theatresports — a competitive format that spread internationally and is, by volume, probably how most people on earth have encountered live improv.

Del Close and the long form

Del Close passed through nearly every institution above — the Compass, Second City as performer and later director, and The Committee in San Francisco in the 1960s, where the earliest versions of the Harold emerged.

His enduring work happened at ImprovOlympic in Chicago, later iO, which Charna Halpern had founded in 1981 with David Shepherd and which Close joined in the early 1980s. There, over roughly fifteen years, he built the case that improvisation was not merely a writing tool for sketch but a performance form in its own right, capable of sustaining a full evening — and he taught a startling proportion of the people who would go on to define American screen comedy.

Truth in Comedy, by Halpern, Close and Kim "Howard" Johnson, appeared in 1994 and put the long-form argument in print. Close died in 1999.

The Annoyance, the UCB, and the argument

Chicago produced its own dissent. Mick Napier's Annoyance Theatre, founded in the 1980s, pushed back against rule-based teaching with a deliberately contrarian emphasis: take care of yourself in the scene, do something, stop waiting to be given permission. It remains the most useful corrective to a certain kind of over-polite improv.

And a group of Chicago improvisers — Matt Besser, Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts and Matt Walsh — took Close's ideas to New York as the Upright Citizens Brigade in the 1990s, where they built a theatre and a training centre and codified the analysis of game into something teachable at scale. Their comedy improvisation manual, published in 2013, is the most systematic statement of that approach and the reason the vocabulary in chapter five sounds so much like engineering.

Now

Improv is currently two things at once, and they sit awkwardly together.

It is an industry on-ramp, in which people pay significant tuition to training centres partly in hope of a career, with all the incentive problems that implies. And it is a genuine global amateur art form, played in hundreds of cities by people who will never be professionals and do not want to be, in the tradition of every other thing humans do in rooms together on Tuesday nights.

The last decade has been turbulent for the institutions. A reckoning over harassment and safety forced overdue changes to how theatres are run, the pandemic closed venues that had seemed permanent, and several long-standing organisations shut, restructured or changed hands. Much of the teaching moved online, then partly back.

What survived it best, generally, was the amateur layer — the jams, the community theatres, the teams that rehearse in someone's basement. Which is roughly where Spolin started, with a room, some rules, and people who did not yet know each other.

A method invented so that children with no common language could play together became a comedy institution, then an industry, and is now mostly practised by adults who do it for nothing on weeknights. It has arguably gone home.