Buddhism and Improv

In my last post, I talked about the the thematic connections between comedy and Buddhism and how comedy is a useful tool for attaining some of the goals of Buddhism.  Another strong connection between the two is in the art form known as improvisation, or improv.  In improv,  groups of actors create characters, scenes, songs or other performance pieces on the spot without any specific preparation. Improv has several remarkable parallels to Buddhist practice.


"Play touches and stimulates vitality, awakening the whole person – mind, body, intelligence and creativity."
-Viola Spolin

Improv was first developed as a series of games and activities during the New Deal as a part of a larger Public Works project.  It was originally envisioned as a tool which would help learners break down some of the barriers of adulthood and allow them to unlock their creativity through play.  In the years since, it has become primarily associated with comedy.  As a comedic art form, it was developed and flourished in Chicago at places like The Second City and iO.

“I became immersed in the cult of improvisation. I was like one of those athletes trying to get into the Olympics. It was all about blind focus. I was so sure that I was doing exactly what I'd been put on this earth to do, and I would have done anything to make it onto that stage.” -Tina Fey

In Chicago and other cities with big comedy populations, there is a distinct improv community.  As in Buddhism and other Eastern traditions, improv places a very strong emphasis on teacher student relationships.  Much of a student's experience is dictated by the approach and quality of the instructors.  While many improv teachers simply teach as an income supplement others are dedicated motivational figures.  Some even become guru figures in the community and to scores of dedicated students.  In the 1990's, I was lucky enough to study under the late great Marty DeMaat, a wonderful and gentle man who instilled a sense of ethical and responsible comedy in his students.  I often like to think about improv as being like a martial art as it takes years to master and involves discipline and commitment.  Unfortunately, they do not give out colored belts for attaining competencies in improv.  But they should...

Like Zen Buddhism, improv presents a set of fundamental contradictions and paradoxes at the heart of its practice.  In improv, we are expected to make something out of nothing.  If it is being done correctly,  there is no specific preplanning or preparation in pure improv.  You simple go out and do it.  Mind you, his is not the way that theater is normally done.  Your average play will be rehearsed for several weeks before going up.  Improv presents a very un-Western approach in that it is intuitive without excessive structure or control over the process.

Another paradox associated with improv and comedy in general is that you are expected to create comedy without "trying to be funny."  Good improv instructors will always stress that their students are supposed to be honest on stage, they are supposed to support one another, and they are to remain in harmony but they are never to actively "try to be funny."  Partially, this is because nothing is less funny than someone desperately trying to get a laugh out of you but mostly because if you are onstage focusing on getting a reaction from the audience, you are not present in the scene and supporting your partners.  Trying to be funny is often the sign of a performer with a delicate ego that needs the approval of an audience and that's not fun for anybody.


Is what we're doing comedy? Probably not. Is it funny? Probably yes... What we do is too enchanting to be quantified.
-Del Close


In an improv performance, you are onstage performing in front of an audience (hopefully a big audience) literally putting yourself in a position where you will be judged with not preparation or script to fall back on with only your partners onstage to support you.  Even for people who don't have a problem being in front of an audience, this can be terrifying.  A lot of actors are scared to even try it.  But as an improvisor, you are expected to keep a clear head in the middle of all that.  If you are conscientious and well-trained, you are not thinking about all those eyes on you, or how to get a laugh from the audience, or what you will be doing after the show, or even what you will say or do next.   You are simply out there doing it.  If you are successful, you are not thinking about anything in particular and have achieved a kind of peaceful detachment in which you are almost a spectator.  It's like a meditation paradox in which people are told to "clear their thoughts" or "don't think about anything" both ideas actually involve thinking.  As with improv, once you have "solved" these paradoxes, you have mastered silmultaneously practicing the mindfulness and mindlessness that frees us from over-thinking.

Actors and improvisors are fond of the phrase, "being in your head."  It describes a situation when you are onstage and thinking about everything else in your life, or obsessing over your own performance while you are giving it.  This is perhaps improv's strongest parallel to Buddhism.  In our every day lives, we are often so narrowly focused on ourselves that we are not paying attention to what is really going on around us.  We are often so obsessed with the past and the future that we ignore the present.  In this way, improv is like a creative meditation performed in front of an audience.

Dharma Comedian: A Look at Buddhism and Comedy

Note: This post is based on a talk given at The Buddhist Temple of Chicago in November of 2013

I’ve often had the experience where  I’ve had a bad day at work and I come home in a rotten mood and I am just "not having it."  This is definitely that "disquietude" that Buddhists like to talk about, that general state of unhappiness or dissatisfaction which so much of Buddhism attempts to address.  So, I'll be deep in that nebulous funk but then maybe I will talk to a friend who will crack a really funny joke or maybe I’ll catch an old episode of The Simpsons on TV and I will just have a good long laugh and all of the negativity and tension will fall away.  That’s one of the wonderful properties of laughter:  it has the ability to change your perspective and is therefore of great value to Buddhists as a tool for managing the self.

My perspective on it is a little bit unique as I have been considering and working with comedy for a long time.  I remember watching the original cast of Saturday Night Live when the show was first put in syndication when I was a very small child.  I literally grew up on sketch comedy like SCTV, Kids in the Hall, In Living Color and MadTV.  When I was a teenager, I started taking improv classes at Chicago's famous comedy theater The Second City and was lucky enough to watch people like Tina Fey and Rachel Dratch perform on stage before they moved on to SNL.  Since then I have had a lot of experience writing, performing in, and directing sketch comedy with Chicago groups like Salsation and Wig Bullies.

For me, comedy as the art of using laughter to uncover truths about the human experience in a way that’s inherently fun and entertaining.  That may sound a little grandiose but I am describing the best and most fulfilling kind of comedy.   Think of it like food: there is food that is really nurishingand good for you and there is the food that you may eat because there is nothing else around or you just need a quick snack.  But in really good comedy, truth is a main ingredient: the truer that something is, the more genuinely funny it is.  As a Buddhist, I take that idea a little further.  I believe in comedy that has an ethical framework and something true and useful to say about the world in which we live.

When we are creating comedy, we often talk about “targets.”  Every good joke has a target or an object on which it is commenting.  If I am directing a show and someone brings in a sketch, my first questions will often be “What’s your target?” and “What are you trying to say with this?”   We’ve all probably seen comedy that’s mean-spirited or that relies on stereotyping groups of people or putting them down.  That’s why it is so important that we question the targets and purpose of comedy.  Is it being used to satirize the powerful and the hypocritical to illuminate some truth about our lives or is it being used to make fun of the weak and defenseless to get a cheap laugh?

Sketch comedy duo Key & Peele.

For me, one of the main connections between comedy and Buddhism is that comedy can help you to not take yourself too seriously, which dovetails nicely with Buddhist practice which is concerned with managing the ego/self above all things.  If you can really laugh at yourself, then you have probably cultivated some humility and perspective about your life.  To take that idea further, when I am writing comedy and I start thinking about my targets, I like to start with myself.  To paraphrase RuPaul, if you can't laugh at yourself, how in the Hell you gonna laugh at anyone else?  I find it fulfilling to write characters that exhibit my own worst qualities: arrogance, greed, pettiness, hypocrisy, jealousy…etc.    For me, comedy is a way to take these qualities and pull them out into the light and have a good laugh at them and at myself.  If you've ever been the butt of a joke, you know nothing knocks you down to size like being laughed at.

Family Outting, a sketch I wrote and performed in for Wig Bullies.

Not only is it therapeutic for me but I really do believe that all good and meaningful comedy has to be personal and true.  You may chuckle at a late night TV joke about some celebrity but you’ll probably soon forget it  but comedy that touches you and feels real and true will stick with you. It may also make you think or change your mind or illuminate some truth about the world.  

Good comedy costs something from the person creating it.  For it really to affect other people it has to be personal, maybe even a little uncomfortable.  Maybe you have not given a lot of thought to comedy theory but you know when something feels real and true.  When you can point to a character and say, “Yes!  That’s me!  I do that!” or you hear a joke or a line of dialogue and you think, “That’s exactly right!  That hit it on the head!”

When we are honestly dealing with these more unpleasant parts of the personality, we are venturing into what can be considered Black Comedy, which finds humor in darker subject matter and sometimes has a more biting tone than regular comedy.  This is the realm of Characters Behaving Badly, which is something that as a viewer I really enjoy.  My justification for this is the idea that spending time with these kinds of severely flawed characters has instructional value because it helps to identify those qualities in myself and others in the world.  As a Buddhist and someone who does believe that comedy has a moral dimension, the tension is whether or not the piece glorifies bad behavior or comments on it.  In Shin Buddhism, there is an idea called Shinjin, which describes a kind of small awakening.  Not the grand Awakening that is often thought of in the context of Buddhism but an awakening to the reality of one's entrenchment in the world of petty desires.  For me, comedy-especially Black Comedy-is a way of achieving Shinjin.

I like to use the animated series Archer as an example of this.  Archer features a number of characters who Behave Badly but centers on a James Bond-esque spy, who is pathologically selfish and kind of a jerk.  Archer walks the line of possibly wallowing in being mean-spirited but it has moral value in that the character pays a terrible price for his bad behavior. He never really gets away with it.  While he may be presented as being "cool" in many superficial ways, the show also makes it a point to show that he is actually quite sad and isolated and he can't quite understand why.  In a sense, Archer is a meditation on the perils of selfishness.

From Archer.

SEE ALSO:  Absolutely Fabulous, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, South Park

Buddhists may also find a lot to like in HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm, which is a fictionalized account of the life of comedian Larry David.  David was the co-creator of Seinfeld, which was sometimes sometimes given the Zen description of being a  "show about nothing."  The overarching theme of Curb is that the fictional Larry David is prideful and cannot help getting into petty conflicts over  minor differences with people.  For Buddhists, its very valuable to see this play out because in our day to day lives, it really is about the small choices that we make.  Each day does not confront us with epic moral dilemmas about but small decisions about we deal with the people around us.  The fictional Larry David is almost like some stock character that one would create to illustrate the dangers of pride and pettiness.

From Curb Your Enthusiasm

While I wouldn't necessarily lump it with the above comedies in their (likely accidental) take on Buddhism, Louis C.K.'s sitcom Louie manages to parallel Buddhist thought and ideas to a striking degree.  Take this quote from the very first episode:

'It's hard to really, like, look at somebody and go, "hey, maybe something nice will happen." I know too much about life to have any optimism, because I know even if it's nice, it's going to lead to shit. I know that if you smile at somebody and they smile back, you've just decided that something shitty is going to happen. You might have a nice couple of dates, but then she'll stop calling you back and that'll feel shitty. Or you'll date for a long time and then she'll have sex with one of your friends, or you will with one of hers, and that'll be shitty. Or you'll get married, and it won't work out and you'll get divorced and split your friends and money and that's horrible, or you'll meet the perfect person who you love infinitely, and you even argue well and you grow together and you have children, and then you get old together and then she's gonna die. That's the best-case scenario, is that you're gonna lose your best friend and then just walk home from D'Agostino's with heavy bags every day and wait for your turn to be nothing also.'

Disguised as an amusingly cynical thought as part of a stand up session, is the very Buddhist idea of impermanence, the notion of accepting the fact that reality is constantly changing and all things (including our lives) have a finite end.  While his point may not be to embrace or celebrate the idea of impermanence, he is at least addressing it, which is unusual in American society where we tend to ignore change and especially death until it is unavoidable and then it is a unexpected traumatic event.   If you actually are able to watch the episode, it is interesting listen for the audience reaction to this as though he is saying something shocking, proving that we may live in a society where Buddhist ideas are hip and risque.  In any case, Buddhists will want to check out  Louie  and non-Buddhists may find themselves exposed to some concepts that are connected to Buddhism.  

Louis C.K. on Conan discussing cell phones and existentialism.

I have no idea if Louis C.K. has any connections to Buddhism but at least his life philosophy seems to have developed some nice parallels to Buddhism.  One of the great things about Buddhism is that it is not necessary to be a Buddhist to be a buddhist.  The core ideas sometimes separately and spontaneously  manifest themselves in unexpected places, like in the world of comedy.  Independent of there being a lot of Buddhists in the world of comedy, it proves that these ideas are universal and true.

Next: Buddhism and Improv

Patrick Garone

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