by Tina Fey
The rules of improvisation appealed to me not only as a way of creating comedy, but as a worldview.
Studying improvisation literally changed my life. It set me on a career path toward Saturday Night Live. It changed the way I look at the world, and it’s where I met my husband. What has your cult done for you lately?
When I first started working at The Second City, there were two resident companies and three touring companies. The resident companies would write and perform original sketch comedy shows for packed houses in Chicago. The touring companies would take the best pieces from these shows and perform them in church basements and community centers around the country. We traveled by van to all kinds of destinations, from upstate New York to St. Paul, Minnesota, to Waco, Texas.
In the touring company we were paid seventy-five dollars per show and a twenty-five-dollar per diem. Of course, sometimes you’d have a show in Kansas followed by a show in Texas followed by another show in Kansas, so you’d have to ride in the van for two days to get to your seventy-five-dollar gig. It wasn’t lucrative, but it was show business!
There were three touring companies: Red Company, Green Company, and Blue Company. I was in the Blue Company, or BlueCo as we called it to be unbelievably cool. I still feel affection for the members of BlueCo like we served in the military together. Specifically the French military, because we were lazy and a little bit sneaky. For example, they once sent us on a tour of Texas and the Midwest, and the moment the van pulled away from the theater, we all agreed to throw out the “best of” sketches we had been directed to perform and replace them with our own original material. Amy Poehler in particular was tired of being handed dated old blond-girl roles where all her lines were things like
“Here’s your coffee, honey,” or “Mr. Johnson will see you now,” or “Whattaya mean a blind date?!”
Each night we’d pull out an old sketch and replace it with something of our own. My friend Ali Farahnakian, who is a genius in many ways, wrote a very funny monologue about the McDonald’s Big Mac. During the course of the monologue he would eat an entire Big Mac Extra Value Meal onstage.
Because the meal was technically a prop, he made the stage manager buy it for him every night and he kept his twenty-five dollars. These were the kinds of skills you learned touring for The Second City. By the time we returned to Chicago ten days later, the “best of” show was completely gone and we were in big trouble, except we didn’t really care.
The Rules of Improvisation That Will Change Your Life and Reduce Belly
Fat*
The first rule of improvisation is AGREE. Always agree and SAY YES. When you’re improvising, this means you are required to agree with whatever your partner has created. So if we’re improvising and I say, “Freeze, I have a gun,” and you say, “That’s not a gun. It’s your finger. You’re pointing your finger at me,” our improvised scene has ground to a halt. But if I say, “Freeze, I have a gun!” and you say,
“The gun I gave you for Christmas! You bastard!” then we have started a scene because we have AGREED that my finger is in fact a Christmas gun.
Now, obviously in real life you’re not always going to agree with everything everyone says. But the Rule of Agreement reminds you to “respect what your partner has created” and to at least start from an open-minded place. Start with a YES and see where that takes you.
As an improviser, I always find it jarring when I meet someone in real life whose first answer is no. “No, we can’t do that.” “No, that’s not in the budget.” “No, I will not hold your hand for a dollar.”
What kind of way is that to live?
The second rule of improvisation is not only to say yes, but YES, AND. You are supposed to agree and then add something of your own. If I start a scene with “I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,” and you just say, “Yeah…” we’re kind of at a standstill. But if I say, “I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,” and you say,
“What did you expect? We’re in hell.” Or if I say, “I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,” and you say, “Yes, this can’t be good for the wax figures.” Or if I say, “I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,” and you say, “I told you we shouldn’t have crawled into this dog’s mouth,” now we’re getting somewhere.
To me YES, AND means don’t be afraid to contribute. It’s your responsibility to contribute. Always make sure you’re adding something to the discussion. Your initiations are worthwhile.
The next rule is MAKE STATEMENTS. This is a positive way of saying “Don’t ask questions all the time.” If we’re in a scene and I say, “Who are you? Where are we? What are we doing here? What’s in that box?” I’m putting pressure on you to come up with all the answers.
In other words: Whatever the problem, be part of the solution. Don’t just sit around raising questions and pointing out obstacles. We’ve all worked with that person. That person is a drag. It’s usually the same person around the office who says things like “There’s no calories in it if you eat it standing up!” and “I felt menaced when Terry raised her voice.”
MAKE STATEMENTS also applies to us women: Speak in statements instead of apologetic questions. No one wants to go to a doctor who says, “I’m going to be your surgeon? I’m here to talk to you about your procedure? I was first in my class at Johns Hopkins, so?” Make statements, with your actions and your voice.
Instead of saying “Where are we?” make a statement like “Here we are in Spain, Dracula.” Okay,
“Here we are in Spain, Dracula” may seem like a terrible start to a scene, but this leads us to the best rule:
THERE ARE NO MISTAKES, only opportunities. If I start a scene as what I think is very clearly a cop riding a bicycle, but you think I am a hamster in a hamster wheel, guess what? Now I’m a hamster in a hamster wheel. I’m not going to stop everything to explain that it was really supposed to be a bike.
Who knows? Maybe I’ll end up being a police hamster who’s been put on “hamster wheel” duty because I’m “too much of a loose cannon” in the field. In improv there are no mistakes, only beautiful happy accidents. And many of the world’s greatest discoveries have been by accident. I mean, look at the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, or Botox.
Bossypants Lesson #183: You Can’t Boss People Around If They Don’t
Really Care
The producers tried to punish BlueCo by giving us the worst gigs. Prom shows were held at one A.M. after a high school prom, and attendance was mandatory. It was basically a way to keep kids from drinking or having sex on prom night, and the performers hated doing these shows almost as much as the kids hated watching them. Imagine how mad you would be if you were missing out on a toothy knob job to watch some cult members make up a song about the 1996 election.
There were other terrible shows. Brightly lit hotel ballrooms with broken microphones. College shows where the kids were all drunk. Charity buyouts where the audience was very, very sober.
Corporate gigs at eight A.M. for employees who were there to be told about reductions in their health care benefits. Basically, any time you were performing for an audience that was not there voluntarily, it was a rough show.
After seven or eight months of touring, we started to wonder which of us actors would get promoted to one of the main companies. The Mainstage cast and the “Second City e.t.c.” cast got to stay in Chicago and earn a unionized living wage. They would develop their own sketches by improvising in front of an audience, then keeping the ideas that had worked until they had a full two-hour show. It was the dream job. However, of all the places I’ve worked that were supposedly boys’ clubs, The Second City was the only one where I experienced institutionalized gender nonsense. For example, a director of one of the main companies once justified cutting a scene by saying, “The audience doesn’t want to see a scene between two women.” Whaaa? More on that later.
In 1995, each cast at The Second City was made up of four men and two women. When it was suggested that they switch one o
f the companies to three men and three women, the producers and directors had the same panicked reaction. “You can’t do that. There won’t be enough parts to go around. There won’t be enough for the girls.” This made no sense to me, probably because I speak English and have never had a head injury. We weren’t doing Death of a Salesman. We were making up the show ourselves. How could there not be enough parts? Where was the “Yes, and”? If everyone had something to contribute, there would be enough. The insulting implication, of course, was that the women wouldn’t have any ideas.
I’m happy to say the producers did jump into the twentieth century and switch to a cast of
“three and three,” and I got to be that third woman in the first gender-equal cast. However, I must say, as a point of pride, that I didn’t get the job because I was a woman. I got the job because Amy Poehler had moved to New York with the Upright Citizens Brigade and I was the next best thing.
But this was the first time I experienced what I like to call “The Myth of Not Enough.”
When I worked at Saturday Night Live, I had a five A.M. argument with one of our most intelligent actresses. It was rumored that Lorne was adding another woman to the cast, and she was irate. (In fairness, she was also exhausted. It was five A.M. after writing all night.) She felt there wouldn’t be enough for the girls and that this girl was too similar to her. There wouldn’t be enough screen time to go around.
I revived my old argument: How could this be true if we made up the show? A bunch of us suggested that they collaborate instead of compete. And, of course, that’s what they did, with great success, once they were actually in a room together. But where does that initial panic come from?
This is what I tell young women who ask me for career advice. People are going to try to trick you. To make you feel that you are in competition with one another. “You’re up for a promotion. If they go with a woman, it’ll be between you and Barbara.” Don’t be fooled. You’re not in competition with other women. You’re in competition with everyone.
Also, I encourage them to always wear a bra. Even if you don’t think you need it, just… you know what? You’re never going to regret it.
My dream for the future is that sketch comedy shows become a gender-blind meritocracy of whoever is really the funniest. You might see four women and two men. You might see five men and a YouTube video of a kitten sneezing. Once we know we’re really open to all the options, we can proceed with Whatever’s the Funniest… which will probably involve farts.
My Honeymoon, or A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again Either*
My husband doesn’t like to fly. He does fly now because he doesn’t want our daughter to grow up thinking he is a Don Knotts character. But when we were first married, he didn’t fly.
I made him fly once before we were married because he was offered a free trip to Vienna, Austria, to direct a sketch comedy show for an English-language theater. If you know anything about Vienna, you know that they love Chicago-style sketch comedy!*
Anyway, not knowing then the depth of his fear, I bullied him into taking the free trip to Austria, assuring him that I would be with him all the way and talk him through the flight. To get to Vienna from Chicago, you fly to Zurich, drop through the bumpy air pockets around the Alps, land, and then take off again. This is the worst thing for fearful flyers because they all cling to that same fact nugget like Rainman: “Most planes crash during takeoff and landing!” We were doing twice as much taking off and landing as he had agreed to. This was unacceptable. He was miserable the entire week we were there, distracted by worry about the trip home.
I swore I would never make him fly again.
Just years later, we get married. Marriage leads to a honeymoon, which traditionally involves travel.
For our honeymoon, we book a cruise to Bermuda because the ship leaves from New York. (We don’t have to fly to Miami to get on it.) We board the ship from a giant hangar on the West Side of Manhattan. There are guys playing steel drums and handing you drinks. They don’t ask if you are a recovering alcoholic or if you are on any medications that might interact negatively with alcohol. This is maritime law! You get a drink without asking. After a brief “muster drill” where no one pays attention to where their lifeboat station is, the fun begins. And the first few days are pretty fun.
We have a little room with a balcony. The couple next door has a balcony about ten inches away. They don’t introduce themselves, but they are comically drunk most of the time and the wife wears a spangly American-flag bikini, leading me to believe she is a retired stripper.
There’s a pool, kind of. It’s more like a big sloshing kiddie pool, and if you get in it, you feel like you are taking a bath with strangers.
There are some wonderful Filipinos who fold your towels in the shape of a different animal every night. It might be an elephant wearing your sunglasses, or a duck wearing your sunglasses. It’s just fun. Don’t overthink it.
There are fun activities hosted by our cruise director, who calls himself “Dan Dan the Party Man.” He has recently replaced the previous cruise director, “Pete Pete the Party Meat,” who replaced
“Guy Guy the Funtimes Person,” who had recently died of autoerotic asphyxiation. No, that part’s not true! That’s a joke-lie. I’m not going to lie to you in this story because I want you to know that the rest of it is true.
Dan Dan the Party Man leads poolside games that include: People pretending to be horses in a steeple chase. A dance contest. Something with beach balls.
At mealtimes we sit at an assigned table. The other two couples at our table are middle-aged in-laws from the Delaware Water Gap. Richard and Barbra, Betty and Bernie. We talk about dog breeds and fishing; my knowledge of both topics is equal. We agree that the ship’s food is as good as any restaurant in New York (between 48th and 50th Street on Seventh Avenue). Betty and Bernie say they wanted to take this trip as a do-over of their honeymoon. Apparently, they had honeymooned in Bermuda thirty-five years ago and the whole trip had been a disaster because Betty broke her arm falling off a scooter. “Never rent a scooter in Bermuda,” Bernie says. Betty overlaps him, “They always tell you on these cruises, don’t rent a scooter when you get to Bermuda. You’re not used to it. You’ll have an accident. But people don’t listen.” We all agree; people just don’t listen.
While our little six-top gets along fine, we are all silently jealous of nearby table twenty, a mix of young couples and stray gays who are hitting it off big-time. Every lull in our discussion of “German shepherds we have known” is filled with a boisterous drunken laugh from table twenty.
It is worth noting that at this time, I had been doing Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live for two full seasons. I am not recognized by anyone. Well, I am recognized by the guy who refills the soft-serve ice cream machine by the pool, but not for being on TV, just for lingering. For O! The desserts!
Rows and rows of pastries laid out cafeteria-style. Some of them are unidentifiable squares of pink stuff.
I think we called it junket back in the seventies. They don’t taste good; but like a schoolboy at his first coed dance, I am drawn not so much by their beauty as by their unlimited quantities.
On day three I am very excited to attend one of our special excursions for which you pay extra.
We are going to get off the boat early in the morning in Bermuda, where we will be given bicycles. We will ride our bikes around the island with a guide to a special secluded beach where we can swim and have rum swizzles and then we will be taken back to the ship by a party boat. Sounds pretty good, right?
That’s what I thought, too. I wouldn’t shut up about it. For weeks before we left I bragged about how I had chosen the best excursion. It was fun and fitness combined! It was a great way to see the island! My husband and I wait at the designated pickup point at 8:30 A.M. No one else shows up. A quick check of our itinerary reveals the heartbreaking truth. The bike trip was yesterday. In my excitement, I memorized it wrong. I cry. I cr
y like a three year old who just wants to take her toy cash register into the bathtub. I cry in a way that reveals that I’m not finding the rest of the cruise that fun.
This is definitely the low point of the trip, until the fire. Oh yes, there’s a ship fire coming in this story. Wait for it.
Once my fitness-and-fun dreams are dashed, I start to lean hard into the food. Soft serve, hot dog time at the pool, a nightly aperitif called the Chocolate Mudslide, which is basically a twenty-ounce chocolate shake with a thimble of Bailey’s in it.
The last night of the cruise is formal night. My husband, who for legal reasons I will call Barry, is wearing a suit that he had custom-made for him by a Portuguese tailor in Pennsylvania. I am wearing a dress that was foisted on me by some aggressive Russian salespeople on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Needless to say, we are feeling very continental. Photographers come to the tables and take formal photos of us all, as well as novelty photos of us being menaced tableside by a woman dressed as a pirate. During dinner there is a passenger talent show. And sure enough, the little gay from table twenty does a tap dance, cheered on by his new best friends. Those assholes.