For the past few weeks, some of my GED students have been participating in a workshop that uses improv comedy to teach about job interviewing skills. As someone who’s taken improv in the past, and really loved it, it was interesting to me to see how this played out.
One thing I find really interesting about improv, particularly the process of learning it, is that it has a pretty explicit philosophy about trust and interactional support. For example, if you are onstage, and another member of the team does something you are going to respond to (this is called “making an offer”), you have a few choices as to how to respond. One is that you can shoot the offer down (i.e., your teammate says “I am a penguin,” and you say “No, you’re not.”) Another is that you can shoot the offer down while adding a competing one (i.e., you say “No, you’re not, you’re a gorilla!”). You can also agree with the offer (i.e., “I agree, you are a penguin.”) or agree with it and add something (“Yes, you are a penguin! And you have a milk mustache!”) The first two options, shooting down a teammate’s offers, is actually a big improv faux pas. It might get you some laughs (because conflict can be funny in a limited way), but it also doesn’t facilitate you and your teammates continuing to build a scene together. The third option, just saying yes, is better, but it also kind of stops the scene, because it doesn’t give your teammate anything back to work with. The last option, which is called saying “Yes,and,” is the optimum one, which theoretically is what you want to be doing all the time. You support your teammate’s offer, and give one of your own so that the scene can keep going. The reason “Yes, and” is so important, improv teachers usually say, is that improv is not about one person being funny on purpose, like standup comedy. There is some of that, of course, but the goal of improv really is to get to the kind of funny that happens when a group of people play together without a script. In order for that to happen, everyone has to mentally commit to the interaction as a whole, not just or even primarily to their personal part of it. When I first was taking improv, a few years back, I remember thinking that this is really a code of ethics for how to live in a supportive community. (Of course, the danger of doing this offstage is that many communities are not supportive. While performing in an improv team, or learning as part of one, the nice thing is that it’s kind of required).
For students who live in confrontational environments, I think one thing that makes being in a classroom (or an interview) hard is the fear of losing face. If, in most of your life, admitting to being wrong could be a sign to other people that you’re weak, then it’s really hard to risk giving an answer in front of other students, or to allow a teacher to correct you, or to ask a question when you don’t understand something. By the same token, interviews definitely depend to a certain extent on deference to someone you don’t know, which can feel a lot like losing face. I wonder all the time about how big a role this kind of cultural gap plays in the difficulties some of my students face, and I worry about the fact that it seems so underdiscussed (particularly when the high expulsion rate of young male students of color comes up). Improv seems to offer a neat way to teach students how to switch modes-because it explicitly does NOT say, you are doing things wrong, or, you just need to put up with feeling disrespected to learn things or get a job. Instead, it teaches you to think about the success of the interaction, rather than the success of your role in it. It still is a switch, obviously, and it can’t apply to all situations, but it seems to me like an empowering way to rethink the appropriateness of conflict. And the truth is that every group of students (even those who are less often in trouble because their ideas of culturally appropriate behavior match their teachers’) could probably use a way to do that.
