Education & Learning

Seriousness feels safe because it keeps your skills visible, but that safety comes with a tax on the ideas you're actually trying to find. Someone sits in the back row and watches us do a game where we have to accept every object as real. She assumes we're warming up for the actual work, and I used to assume that too. The real shift happens when she sees how much harder the game gets than our actual scenes. You start to notice that the work was happening all along, and nobody

We've all been there, you're in a scene, or a meeting, or staring at a blank page, and instead of making a move you wait, you comment, you hedge, you interrupt someone else's momentum because it feels safer than committing to your own. That's not just an improv habit, it's a life habit. And improv is the gym where we unlearn it. The Cost of Waiting for Permission Every time you wait for someone else to go first so you can react, you're handing over the steering wheel. In a sc

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

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

Improv, short for improvisational theater, is an exciting art form that thrives on spontaneity, creativity, and collaboration. At its...