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My wife has ADHD. And I've taught enough improv classes over the years to know she's not alone in the room. A lot of the adults who show up to learn improv are walking in with brains that move different, and they don't always know that what they're looking for is a structure that finally fits how they think instead of fighting it. So when Chris Gethard's guest column landed in my inbox the other day, one line hit harder than the rest. He said improv unlocks ADHD in kids. He w

I was working with a student who had a big presentation coming up, the kind where the room goes quiet and every pair of eyes locks onto you like a heat-seeking missile. She told me her strategy was to "turn into someone else," a professional version of herself who didn't get nervous and knew all the answers. A mask, essentially. The kind we all reach for when the stakes feel high. Here's the thing about masks, though. They crack. Play the character, not the caricature The imp

I watched two improvisers walk on stage last week. The first one had an idea, you could see it in her eyes, that little plan she was carrying: I'm going to be a flight attendant, and the scene is an airplane. She opened with it. The second player accepted it, but the whole thing felt flat. The offers were polite but thin and the scene ended politely four minutes later with a weak button and a relieved audience. The second pair walked out and one of them just looked at the oth

You're standing at a door. On the other side's something high stakes, a presentation, a first date, a difficult conversation, a stage. And in that moment before you walk through, you have a choice. You can walk through as a mask, a polished performance of who you think they want to see, or you can walk through as yourself, just a little bit bigger than usual. Those are the two doors. Every improv scene starts the same way. Two people step onto a stage with nothing, and the fi

The Paradox You Feel First You can master chess, you can master guitar or public speaking or surgical technique, and each of those has a plateau, a point where the marginal gains shrink to almost nothing and you're just maintaining what you already know. Improv doesn't have one. The better you get at it, the more possibility you see, and that's not a poetic accident, it's structural, built into the very thing improv asks you to do. Convergence and the Infinite Pivot Most skil

There's a misunderstanding at the center of how most people think about improv, and it took me a long time to put words to it so I'll try now. The misunderstanding is that improv is about making things up. You get on stage and you invent a character, a voice, a personality, a whole person who doesn't exist. The audience laughs at the invention and the cleverness of it. That's the story we tell ourselves about what's happening, and it's almost entirely wrong. What's actually h

The Moment It Clicks There's a moment in every improv workshop where someone gets hit with the truth, the realization that they've been told to "listen harder" for years but no one ever stopped to explain that listening is only half the equation. And then they play Freeze Tag from the back line, and they understand. How Freeze Tag Works If you've never played Freeze Tag (it's a warm up game you'll find in most improv programs), here's how it works. Two players are on stage do

You're on stage your scene partner says something and you have to decide in a split second: do you go with it or do you push past it? Most of the time you know you should go with it but it feels like giving up your idea. What you're really doing though is listening. Not the kind of listening where you wait for your turn to talk but the kind that actually changes you in the middle of a scene. Not all listening is the same. There's a spectrum from the obvious adjustments everyo

Here's the scene: you're waiting for a text back, the message was delivered, and the little checkmarks have been staring at you for twenty-three minutes. In that time you've written the entire next act of your life, they're mad, they lost their phone, they finally realized what a disaster you are, they're composing the perfect goodbye paragraph. You've rehearsed your counter-argument, your defense, your dignified exit. You've narrated the breakup, the makeup, the awkward sile

You've been on stage your whole life, you just didn't know it. That sounds like a line from an improv warm-up or maybe a philosophy class you slept through in college, but I mean it literally. Every single day you walk out your front door and you step into a scene that's already started, one with set pieces and supporting characters and plot twists you never saw coming, and the only question is whether you're going to play your part on autopilot or actually show up for it. I

There's a concept from UCB training that I keep coming back to, even though I've never set foot in their building. Not yet, anyway. But their philosophy adds useful depth to my own, so I pay attention. The idea: find the unusual thing in your scene. The bank robber who cares more about the tellers' feelings than the money. The doctor who's afraid of blood. That one offbeat detail that makes the scene play. "Unusual" is vague on purpose. It's whatever you notice as unexpected.

I've been wondering what advice works in every improv style, and I think I found the layer underneath. There's a note that keeps surfacing in improv conversations lately, the idea that the most universal piece of advice you can give any player regardless of their training or tradition is simply to add specific information. It makes sense on the surface, a vague scene start dies on the floor while a specific one fills in the room around you, and I've seen enough wishy-washy sc

Will Hines is an improv performer and teacher you might know from the UCB Theatre in New York or from his book How to Be the Greatest Improviser on Earth and his newsletter Will Hines Improv Nonsense which has become a kind of water cooler for improvisers who think seriously about what they do. He recently wrote something that stopped me cold. The Toronto problem is too much agreement and not enough direction. He was teaching in Toronto and noticed that players would agree be

You hear a lot about "Yes, And" in improv. You hear about support, about agreement, about building on each other's ideas. And all of that matters. But there's a quieter piece that holds it all together. Accountability. In improv, like most things, accountability starts with the basics. You said you'd be at rehearsal. So you go. You said the show was at 8. You're there at 7:30, warmed up and ready. You said you'd learn that format. You study it on your own time. None of this i

I had a student once who could talk his way through any scene. Fast lines, clever setups, always had something to say. And the audience liked him well enough. But he never really landed. There was always this gap between what he was saying and what the scene actually needed. One night I told him, "For the next five minutes, you cannot speak a single word. You can make sound, but no language. You have to find the scene through your body." He looked terrified. But he did it. An

I've bombed auditions. Real bombs. The kind where you walk out of the room and you already know, before the callback list goes up, before the email comes, before anyone says a word. You know in your bones. And that walk to the car is one of the longest walks there is. I've also gotten the call. The callback. The part. The yes. And I've learned something strange about those two experiences: I wouldn't trade the bombs for the wins. Not because the wins don't matter. They do. Bu

You know it when you feel it. That thing between two people on stage where every move lands, every look means something, and the audience leans in because they can tell something real is happening. We call it chemistry, we treat it like magic, like some people have it and some people don't and you just have to hope you get lucky. But chemistry isn't magic, it's not even mystery. It's a skill you can practice and a choice you can make. And here's what improv taught me about it

You know the ones I'm talking about. The people who tell you "you killed it" when you're pretty sure you barely survived. The ones who point out a strength you didn't even know was there. The ones who celebrate your show even when you spent the whole set chasing a tag that never landed. These aren't yes-men. They're not enablers. They're witnesses. And in improv, same as in life, that's a very different thing. The scene partner you deserve In a scene, the best partner doesn't

Here's something I've noticed after years of teaching improv. When you ask a new student to come up with something funny on their own, a character or a line or a scene starter, they freeze. Their brain starts racing through every movie they've ever seen and every comedian they've ever liked and every idea they've already had, and what comes out is usually fine. Serviceable. But it rarely surprises anyone, including them. But put that same person on stage with a partner. Give

A few days ago, Lloydie over at Improv Chronicle published a piece called "When Dogma Dies, Improv Comes Alive." It's a good read. The central idea is that an informed point of view is worth more than one you inherited just because it's the only school you've ever known. And the pool metaphor stuck with me: you can't see the water you've been swimming in until you get out. I read it and nodded along. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized the real takeaway isn't just