I’m not a New Year resolution kinda guy, doing pretty well at setting directions for myself without the need for an arbitrary deadline.  But one desire, which came out of a couple of workshops I attended in December, was to take up classes in impro comedy.  And come January, that’s just what I did.  I did the second session last night.

What are my motivations?  Well, it’s partly about becoming more spontaneous in groupwork, which I’m sure will be useful in leading my own creativity workshops.  And with two coming up between now and early March, might as well hit the ground running.  Besides, being more flexible in the moment has got to be useful in any context.  Never know when I might get kidnapped by deranged gunmen and have to get out of it by improvising a ragtime song about Bin Laden.  Plus, coming up with ideas on the spot might help generate material for stories that I want to devote more time too.  And, somewhere in there, I feel the glimmer of an urge to do stand-up comedy, for the sheer hell of it rather than as a new career direction, and this can only help prepare me.

Last week’s class had three more people.  This week we just had three.  Plus the tutor, a New Zealander doing a Philosophy PhD.  Which may or may not help you answer the question of what kind of people run impro classes.  Anyway, Charlotte is a kind and good-natured philosopher, and her feedback as we went through the session was very helpful.

Broadly speaking, the class consists of exercises and games, the former preparing you for the latter.  One exercise was to stroll round the room pointing at objects and giving them the wrong names.  Sounds silly, but doing it with confidence takes a certain swagger, as you point to a cushion and declaim ‘Baby rhino’.  Finesse that for a few years, and you’ll be well equipped for work as a spindoctor.

The games you’ll be familiar with if you’ve seen Whose Line Is It Anyway? They’re tremendous fun to do, as long as you can rely on your colleagues to support you and play fair; ie accept the ridiculous propositions you make rather than putting them down.  The alphabet game is one classic, our first featuring two astronauts whose sentences begin with subsequent letters of the alphabet and magicking from nowhere a twisted scenario in which one astronaut’s oxygen is running out and the other refuses to share.

Our favourite game was one in which we created a poem on the spot as a trio.  The theme was to do with a character and their wish to achieve a particular goal, and our contributions had to rhyme.  I found my natural home as the third contributor, doing my best to wrap up the preceding lines to create something along the lines of a story.  And we managed that more often than not, which while not up there with the invention of the Swatch was nevertheless an achievement of sorts.

The biggest stretch for me, not surprisingly, were the games when physical rather than verbal skills were called for.  In one game we had to relay the death of poor Mrs McGinty to another player, and could only convey the means of her demise physically.  Sounds easy?  Well, each person adds to the sequence and has to remember and act out again what happened before.  By the end, she’d died as a result of shooting herself, having her eyes explode, injecting a lethal dose of heroin, being run over, having a safe fall on her, being strangled, subjected to eletrocution, attacked by a shark, and experimented on by aliens.

If you’re looking to limber up your imagination, and have a lot of fun with likeminded people in the process, I heartily recommend that you give impro a go.  And if you don’t believe me, think about some of its leading exponents: Stephen Fry, Josie Lawrence, Ken Campbell, and Greg Proops to name a few.  Sure, you won’t make it look as effortless as they do, but achieving that effortlessness takes a lot of effort.  And that starts with finding where your local impro class is.