Audience versus Improviser

by Katy Schutte

It seems to me that there is sometimes quite a disparity between how much an audience enjoys a show and how much the performers enjoy a show (or how good they think it was). 

For me, there are three broad reactions I’ll have after doing a show:

• Recriminating myself and/or the group for being awful (sometimes out loud, sometimes in my head  
• Fairly satisfied, but analysing the crap out of the show (“Mr Muscle was a funny character, but why didn’t we have any depth to our relationships?”)
• An air-punch where it was so great that I love my life and the show and everyone I’ve ever met (Bill Arnett has the term ‘way-homer’ for these; where you keep remembering a great moment from your show, all the way home)

There’s also a reaction around the ego where you personally feel you did or didn’t do good work.  Sometimes it can feel like you’re the only one who dropped the ball, or the only one who kept it together.  Interestingly, in improv, if the show as a whole fails, you feel like you’ve failed, because it’s a team game.  Conversely, sometimes a show can fail because one person stood out and the whole team game fell apart.  You’ve got to make other people look good.

With short form at least there are in-built safety nets; if you are brand new you will likely succeed because;

• The audience are probably your friends and family.
• Games are built around letting the audience know when to laugh and automatically generate jokes. For example, New Choice means that you are regularly given a set up, set up, twist that always works.
• Also, the audience love to see you die just as much – if not more – than they like to see you succeed.  In ‘Die’ for example, the competitive storytelling game where the audience shouts die when you mess up telling the story.  If no one died, the game wouldn’t be fun.

With long form it’s a little harder because there is less tolerance of bad improv.  There aren’t built-in safety nets (unless you count a form you’re using, but that’s really just a structure).  If you are just truthful and listen well, the audience are much more keen to see that than you being clever or funny, but it does take years and years for people to feel perfectly comfortable doing those simple things.

Coming off stage it’s sometimes confusing having the audience really love a show that you thought was bad or okay.  When someone comes up to you to tell you how great your show was, don’t tell them that they’re wrong!  Telling a fan of your show that they are incorrect or that your show is poor makes them feel bad and rips on your work, neither of which have a good outcome!  Just say thank you and work on your craft.  Also, they may be right, and you may be wrong. 

There seem to be a couple of reasons for the disparity between the audience and improviser’s viewpoints.  Audiences may not have seen as much improv as you.  For some people, they are pretty amazed that you can make up a show as you go and thoroughly enjoy the magic unfolding.

For me, I feel like a show fails when I am consciously working hard on it on stage.  Improvisers call this ‘being in your head’.  My favourite of the shows I have done are where my characters feel like they are being channelled and have a life of their own, that the beats or chapters of the narrative naturally fall out one by one.  I am perfectly in the group mind of the company and we all have similar ideas and initiations, or immediately enjoy and jump on board the surprises.  So, what’s the difference between one of those shows and one where I am standing on the side thinking ‘I haven’t really done many characters, maybe I’ll do a character’?  Well, here’s my revelation; nothing.  Nothing from the audience’s perspective anyhow.  For them it’s a great show.  They enjoyed everything about it.  It just happens that today, your auto-pilot didn’t kick in as well and you had to fly on manual.  It’s sometimes difficult to know which way to fly.  I had a show after Christmas where I hadn’t done a show for a few weeks and just thought ‘ah, it’ll be fine – I’ve been doing improv for years’.  Even if you’re an Olympic diver, you can’t just fall off the board and expect it to work, you have to use all your awareness and training and make that dive happen.  That show was a belly flop.  If you have a show where some other part of your brain is doing all the work; lucky you.  I’m not suggesting you spend all your time on stage consciously planning and analysing, but I am suggesting that you need to be alert and open the whole time, you can’t just sit back and expect it all to happen. 

There’s also another kind of show where you loved it, but the audience didn’t.  It was your best work, you did great.  These shows tend to disappear after you’ve done a fair bit of improv, but the causes are mostly vanity and in-jokes.  If you’re doing all your best schtick and having a super time but not listening to the other players, you may feel you did a great show, but the audience probably felt the gap between you and the other players.  In-jokes are also a problem.  You may have something that you do in rehearsals (we have some 8-year callbacks in the Maydays) but the audience are not only going to miss the joke, but will feel distanced by it.

It’s great to know what you’re working on, it’s the only way your improv will get better.  Enjoy the things you did well just as much as you notice the stuff you want to build on.  You are doing this because you love it (no one chooses improv as a sure-fire career path) so notice the great bits.  I used to keep a ‘Creative Arnica’ file on my laptop; every time someone said something nice about my or my team’s improv, I would make a note of it.  That way, if I had a shitty show or thought my work sucked I could have a look back and realise that I was probably just forgetting to give myself positive notes as well as constructive ones.  Creative Arnica; what can I say?  I lived in hippy Brighton for 10 years.

Remember that improv is a team sport.  Everyone has your back.  The team win – you win!  Hell, that’s why I ditched stand up to do more improv.  And it’s okay to fly on manual sometimes.  It won’t feel quite as magical as those autopilot gigs, but unless you show it on your face, the audience can’t tell the difference.

Conscious Incompetence (and why it's your friend)

by Katy Schutte

Over years of teaching improv, I have begun to notice that many students at one point or another appear to have a crisis of confidence and dips in their skill sets.  There seems to be an ongoing cycle that starts with enthusiasm, becomes more of a serious work ethic and then turns into a mini freak-out.  I have always advised these students - based on observation - that a dip in confidence seems to come along at the same time or just before a big jump in skills.  I had no evidence or explanation for this apart from my own observations.  Until now.

I was working in Chantilly, France recently, coaching improvisational thinking with leaders and was struck by something one of the other coaches mentioned.  If you work in the corporate world, this is probably not news to you, but it really lit up a light bulb for me.  There is a scale that runs like this:
Unconscious incompetence
Conscious incompetence
Conscious competence
Unconscious competence

So: we don’t know that we can’t do something, then we know we aren’t doing it right, so we learn to do it, then we forget that we’re even doing it.  

For me, these are very clear levels within our improvisational learning.  The most important of which is conscious incompetence. 

When you are a total beginner in improv, you can often hugely enjoy performing; there are no nerves, no stress, you know you can do whatever you want and there’s nothing important riding on it.  You perform, you get LAUGHS - which is amazing - and then you’re done.  Fun.  After a while, you realise that you are maybe hitting on similar characters and gags because you know they work and because they feel easy and comfortable.  You begin to realise that there’s more to improv.  Where is the initial spark you had, why has it gotten harder?  There is more to learn.   You look at the people around you and see that they have skills you don’t, or that you’re not as good at.  So you work on those skills.  You increase your range, you take more risks, you are starting to enjoy the work again.  You get a lot better, then it’s easy, then you are slightly disconnected.  You’re maybe the best person in your company and you start to feel frustrated that others can’t keep up, or that the beginners class is too easy for you.  So you are consciously competent.  You join a more advanced class and really enjoy the scenes, they are rich, you are all listening to each other and the audience likes your shows.  You believe that this is the norm.  You are no longer stressing about your skill level because it is comfortable.  You have forgotten your struggle.  You are unconsciously competent.  You are GOOD.

Oh wait, another group came to town.  How the hell are they doing the improv they are doing?  What is long-form?  Is that monologue genuinely from real life?  Their physicality is incredible.  They sing!  Then here we go again.  Alexis Gallagher always maintains that it is best to be the second worst person in a company.  I think that’s a nice way to aspire to good improv.  That way, you are always consciously incompetent and trying to learn the skills you see around you.  But you’re not the worst, so you’re not going to feel like crap.  And confidence is a key part of successful improv.

This is by no means an experience that is only applicable to beginners.  I come across these blocks in my work every so often when I’m working with amazingly tight companies, strong singers and improvisers that never forget a name or drop a ball.  Just remember, whenever you know that you are terrible, that your improv is stale, that your work sucks, that you are the least funny/interesting person on stage; that is the point where you can go up a level.  That is the point where you’re challenging yourself and taking risks.  If you know you’re the most funny, interesting, talented, spontaneous person in the room, change rooms.  It’s important to feel good about conscious incompetence.  It’s the point where you’re most likely to surprise yourself, to take big risks and to push up your skill level.

Your degree of competence is important to different people in different ways:

The audience.  Audiences love to watch people that are at their ease, even if they are enjoying their own incompetence.  

Your peers.  Your fellow improvisers, employers and teachers; they all want you to be good.  They want you to step up and they want to help you achieve great things.  They also have your back.

Yourself.  No one is a harsher judge than yourself.  Enjoy it.  Let you be the harsh critic of you.  Just don’t let the critic get in there when you’re playing.  Love a show, get out of your head.  Then sit down after and watch the video, see what you did good and bad and set yourself some goals.  A side note on notes; I was shocked the first time I had two improv teachers contradict each other.  It’s not like maths, there is no absolute right.  Do what you think is more interesting.  Just make sure you’re not doing it because it’s safe.  Push your own boundaries and take advice when it speaks to you as the right advice.  Try everything you get taught and keep what works for you.  Always go in with an open mind, then jettison stuff afterwards if it doesn’t help.

Now stand up and declare “I am consciously incompetent” and enjoy how much you can improve every time those words ring true. 

www.katyschutte.com
@katyschutte

The Rules of Impro

I don’t think there are rules in impro. I want to explore three main lines of thought I have around the rules of impro.

1. The benefits of Rules
2. The drawbacks of Rules
3. My relationship with the Rules

The Benefits

I think that people use rules to teach because they work. If you are writing an impro book then rules make good chapter or paragraph headers. You can chunk down decades of experience into compartmentalised ideas. It’s similar to me pulling the three main points of this article out above. I don’t think that I can capture everything there is to say about rules in impro in three ideas but it helps me and the reader. You know the practical advice is coming at the end, the first two sections are just explanation. It helps you to organise how you take in this information. Using rules can do the same thing, they are handholds for learning.

When running a workshop, using rules is a good way to depersonalise feedback. Telling a first-timer they are being too negative and dragging their partner down can be intimidating, telling them to follow the rule of Be Positive is easier for a lot of people to accept. It’s something taught in customer service as well, you never tell a customer they can’t have a refund because “I said so,” you tell them that “Unfortunately the rules say we can’t accept this item,” putting the focus onto something impersonal. Whether it’s entirely appropriate for workshops is another question but it certainly works and is used. Getting up in front of people and taking feedback is not a usual activity for most of us, giving direct feedback can be isolating, giving everyone the same rules to follow encourages a group atmosphere. Giving a group a rule to follow lets them all act together without too much trouble, because we are familiar with following rules without thinking about them.

"Please" and "Yhank you" are examples of rules we use. Without thinking we know exactly when to use them. If you learn a language with different rules then you can see how much we take for granted. For example in Cantonese there are two different thank yous, Mhgoi and Dojeh. Mhgoi is thanks for a service and Dojeh is thanks for a gift. I had to look that up because I can never remember which is which, but for a Cantonese speaker it’s obvious. A lot of social behaviour is based on rules so we can get along without having to analyse every interaction. Rules do a lot of work so you don't have to.

In summary, we use rules because they present familiar territory and can be used without much thought.

The Drawbacks

So what are the drawbacks then? I think it comes down to over-reliance on the safety and seductiveness of rules. On the concept of safety, I think this is one of the important things I realised about my approach to improv, and it relates to a learning experience I had in an Imprology workshop, run by Remy Bertrand. The introductory exercise was to introduce ourselves in pairs and then tell the group the other person’s life story. We all new this was the exercise, so we did our best to remember everything, then we talked about it. One guy said he wasn’t sure how much to reveal to the group of his partner’s story. Remy noted that she already knew it was going to be told to the group and it was interesting the extra rules we choose to put on ourselves. Not giving away too much often is the safer option in life, but it is fascinating how much of that can bleed into impro and stop you doing things that you need to be doing. A lot of my learning has been noticing habits and then doing the opposite in scenes because that takes me new places. So one drawback is that a certain part of our psychology just wants to attach to the rules and not look any further. I think I have gained a lot if freedom in improvising by acting exactly how I don’t act in real life. Going somewhere new can only be done by stepping outside of the boundaries.

The other way that I think rules limit is by becoming a sort of fetish. It is a very seductive idea that we can memorise a few simple sentences and become great improvisers. I know I subconsciously assumed that’s how it worked when I started. I read Impro by Keith Johnstone and because I understood what he was talking about I just assumed that I got it. It took a lot of experience to realise that just because I remembered the ideas didn’t mean that I understood them, much less was putting them into practice. Learning the rules can also give you a false sense of security. It’s easy to learn the rules and then note all the times that other people don’t follow them, tricking you into believing that you are somehow better because of other people’s flaws. It makes no sense but it’s a mental trick that happens to all of us everywhere in life. The speck in another person’s eye is easier to see than the plank in your own eye. Rules can be a useful ladder to learning but they can also just be a speck-measuring scale.

In summary the drawback is that they present familiar territory and can be used without much thought.

My Relationship

When I think about the rules I think about the adage “Don’t mistake the map for the territory”. When rules work they do so because they are getting you to do rewarding improv, but rewarding improv is its own thing. It exists apart from the rules. Rules are the signpost, not the end result, and rules have their limits.

For example even something that I treat as a cast-iron rule has its limits. Don’t Gag is a pretty good rule to follow, but if you get stuck in a scene with no energy, no end in sight and you know you can’t sort it out, one way to end it is to say something blatantly gaggy in a slightly louder voice so they pull the lights. Gagging is a bullet in the head of a scene, but sometimes you need to put a scene down and move onto the next. If you turn that into the rule: Don’t Gag Unless You Want to End a Scene, then I think you just create another problem. You absolve yourself of having to commit to scenes. You can just eject at any moment your interest starts to lull. Rather than being sensitive to the needs of the scene you can decide the scene is dead and kill it rather than jump in with what it needs.

Not having rules is an interesting challenge for me because I like rules and I like getting things right. I studied maths and solving equations is essentially just applying the right set of rules to a problem. I enjoyed calculus because differentiation and integration are just applying two opposite sets of rules to equations and seeing what comes out the other side. I was good at maths because I was good at understanding rules and then knowing how to apply them. Compared to something like chemistry, where you need to memorise chains of reactions and catalysts and reactants, maths is easy. So even though I don’t believe in hard rules I still find myself unconsciously adopting advice as set in stone without thinking about it.

This is why it is important for me to avoid unconscious adoption of rules. I decided that I don’t want to replace my social rules with another set of improv rules because I don’t see that as the lesson of improv. When I read Del Close and Johnstone and Napier I see the same thing, there are lots of things that get in the way of being genuine and spontaneous. The rules are designed to take a lot of that out of your way, but if you aren’t careful you just put another set of blocks in the way. The only way that I can realistically be open and attentive to everyone I play with is if I practice being open and attentive with everyone I play with.

That is something I am happy to make my goal in improv. Let’s be honest if I wanted to work in an environment where most of what I said was passed over and people followed a set of arbitrary and unexamined rules I could just go out into the world. Deciding that improv is about self-awareness and understanding in order to relate creatively to other people seems like the more challenging and therefore more rewarding approach to take. I have to be different every time I work with somebody new, that’s more exciting than being the same every time. In the long run I think this approach builds personal confidence and also encourages supportiveness in a group. The rules don’t keep you safe, being in a group that listens is what keeps you safe.

What Improv Taught Me About Life

I think that the most important lessons I have learned in improv have had a huge impact on my regular life. So I thought I would list some choice pointers I have learned and how I think they apply to life in general.

 It’s About Choices Not Ideas

When I started improvising I thought it was about cleverness coming together on stage, now I see it more as just reacting to what is already there. One of the most powerful pieces of advice I got from a teacher was to “love it or hate it, just pick one” in reaction to an offer. You can find out why your character has that reaction as part of the reaction, but either one is better than just doing nothing. It is simple actionable advice and helps me have fun on stage more than any clever idea I come up with. In life I think that choosing to do something is what ultimately gets you places, you often learn loads afterwards whether it was the right or wrong thing to do. Being paralyzed into doing nothing is one of the worst feelings in the world, and it’s easy to talk about grand projects and plans without doing anything about them. Ideas are very seductive and I know that talking about things has often been an excuse for me to not actually do anything about it. I see the same thing in “talky” scenes, two people talk about a scene that would be awesome to watch, but because there are a lot of funny ideas being thrown about they get to fool themselves into thinking they are really doing something.

The real example of this in my life was my choice to do standup for the first time. I was talking about setting a date to do it, then in the middle of that conversation I said “Wait a minute, why am I talking about setting a date to set a date, I will set that date now. I will do standup in the next month,” and I did standup for the first time about 2 weeks later. I would never have done it by talking about it, I needed to make a choice and set myself a deadline. Talking about it was not doing it.

Some Choices are Stronger Than Others 

I have found that playing positive characters usually gets me more places than negative characters, and playing characters that care about other characters is where it all comes together. The obvious opposite of this is the character that doesn’t care. If you play character that doesn’t care about anything you are making it harder on yourself when you improvise. To clarify this point, look at Inspector Clouseau or Basil Fawlty, Imagine if the Inspector didn’t want to solve crimes and sat around the station all day, or if Basil didn’t care about his hotel and sat behind his desk glumly. Suddenly two classic comedy archetypes are just supporting characters. It seems really obvious but it can be very tempting to play a useless policeman who doesn’t want to do anything, and suddenly you’ve put a huge barrier in front of yourself.

In life I think the most recent example of this was when I left a job that involved helping the public in a government office. Due to the limits of civil service funding it meant that everyone was overworked and there was no way to help everybody who needed it. It felt more like pushing people through on a conveyor belt than genuinely helping them. The position was temporary contract, and I knew that the job was obviously not for me long-term, but one of the most frustrating things was how so much cynicism had crept into the workplace. I decided I didn’t want to get cynical about it, and I still wanted to help people that needed it, eventually that led me to volunteering for Samaritans, which has been rewarding experience that teaches me new things all the time. The listening training there has fed back into my improv. So for me the choice to go and do something else instead of walking away and doing nothing was the stronger choice. Be somebody who cares, in improv and real life.

It’s About Patterns, Not the New

A scene filled to the brim with original ideas is like a load of spokes with no rim, there may be interesting shapes to look at but it doesn’t go anywhere. I find scenes where I build up a game or story with another player feel more satisfying than ones that have load of different things going on with no focus. I think supporting the other player by using what they have said or done lets them know you are together on stage, and gives both of you confidence. You find the original stuff after you have both agreed and gone into new territory.

In life this is what convinced me to write this article. I was worried whether this was going to be anything original about improv, but then I realised it doesn’t have to be. Repeating things is what cements them in our minds. There are loads of “What X taught me about Y” precisely because of patterns. We like to compare things and see how they relate. Drawing attention to these patterns is another way of reinforcing our learning. We resist doing what has already been done, but sometimes you need to go round and make that rim so you have a wheel. Another pattern, this point is now complete.

Commitment is All You Have 

Whatever you learn and no matter how many years you practice I think there will always be times when you are standing on stage feeling completely lost or out of place. When you realise you are feeding peanuts to a Nonsense Machine and don’t know why you are doing it, all you can do is commit. You feed those godamned peanuts to that machine like it’s the most important thing in the world, and it suddenly its all fun again. Especially if it was not fun in the beginning, really committing to it is the only way to make it fun. That’s why many scenes flounder for the first half and then somebody finds something interesting and it takes of from the second half. If we just commit to the first thing in the scene we can have a great scene from the very beginning. Why start a scene half-way through when you can avoid all that uncertainty from the beginning?

Similarly in life, whatever you are doing you either commit to it, or you are waiting to bail on it at some point. So that’s why I think it’s important to commit to the things that I do, like improv. I may not have all the skills I need to improvise at the moment, but the only way I can get them is by continually working at it. And that holds for everything I do in life. The alternative is starting your life halfway through.That is something to regret. Putting your heart into what you do is never something to regret.

Television And Improv Sittin' In A Tree, Engaged In An Endless Series Of Mutual Misunderstandings

Did I really say that TV is dead? (yes, here) It sounds like the sort of sweeping statement I might steal from somebody smarter than I and then pompously pass off as my own.

Was I right? I don't think so, but I was probably in a bad mood. TV isn't dead, I work there for a start. My monthly salary is testament to its continued vitality. I suppose that I do view most of my traditional televisual content via the iplayer or similar mechanism. I rarely allow the tyranny of TV scheduling to rule my viewing habits. But I am not the nation and while there is a significant shift in how the UK (and beyond) consumes its TV content, TV is still the vector of choice for most. For now.

I think the point I may have ballsed up making was that we live in an age where TV companies aren't a requirement for making content now. Cheap cameras and youtube have opened doors for us all and recent shows like Felicia Day's The Guild are ideal examples of things we don't need a network for. Anyhow.

Jon makes some observations about TV's relationship with improvisation. I agree, it's a poor dynamic. Why do TV and improv seem such poor bedfellows. Let's look at a recent example. I have worked with many of the performers who participated in the BBC's Fast And Loose and know them to be daring, smart and funny improvisers, I was disappointed to see that they seemed very restricted by the format of the show. Now, I understand why those restrictions were put into place by the producers over the development process. Or I think I do, and isn't that the same thing? (On the Internet? Yes.)

Let us compare, in broad terms, the production process of a stage improv* show in London and that of a TV improv show (which might look like I'm talking about Fast and Loose, I'm not, I don't know much about the production process of that particular show. I speak in broad generalities).

The stage improv show might cost anywhere between £0 and £100 to put on for a night, depending on your venue, publicity costs, cast-subsidised T-shirts et al. What's the worst that can happen? If you get no audience, you're out £100 and an evening. If you have a bad show, you're probably not getting that crowd back again, but there's plenty more fish in your facebook group. You can put on another show, happy that your company's brand hasn't taken much of a hit. Good. This is how it should be, people should be putting on new improv shows and trying new stuff all the time, because the cost of failure is minimal or non-existent.

Now, TV. Well, you're gonna need a venue, that means a studio and cameras, plus people to operate the cameras, a director and gallery staff, someone to manage them. You'll need a warm up guy for the audience, floor managers to wrangle them and the talent. Of course, you'll need talent, at least one of whom is a "name" because the company needs as many selling points as possible. You need to rehearse the format, same as you would for a stage show, only this time you're paying people to do it. You've got to design not just a logo, but then get front and back title sequences made, plus theme music as well as stings, beds and more for mid show. Then there's the graphics for the show, the astons and animations, they need designing and building, so does the set and the storage costs for your equipment. Now at this point, I have no idea how much you've spent. But I'll bet we're somewhere over £100,000. (Does my argument fall down because I don't have actual figures? If you think it does, replace my speculative number with the phrase "a huge amount of money", thanks). That done, that money spent, how do you make sure your show isn't shit? It's improv, right, that's always a risk, you could have a bad show tonight. What's the worst that could happen? Well, let's say the TV show has a bad night, 2-3million people watch it, some of them don't come back, you get bad reviews in the press, you're the guy who spent £100,000 on a lemon. You're the guy whose boss wants to know how we make next week's show good.

You're a producer, not an improviser, so that's just a worst case scenario. You're already in a position (important phrase coming up) to demonstrate that you have put practical measures into play to prevent the show tanking. The important word is demonstrate. These measures don't have to work, but they have to look like they would have done. It's like maths, you may not get the right answer, but if the working in the margin looks good then you'll get some marks. Here's some of the measures I've heard reports of producers from around the world consider to tighten up improv ideas:

• What if we pre-improvise the scenes, that way we can pick the good ones and perform them on the night?
• Games are funny, so a bunch of games at the same time must be funnier. Funny's exactly like numbers right?
• Maybe each show could be about three hours long and we'll edit together the best 27 minutes?
• I like the guessing game, that never gets old. Why don't we just do that over and over.
  
• Maybe the audience suggestions are too weird, why don't we prep funnier suggestions and set-ups?
  
• These improvisers aren't working, lets get stand-up comedians to replace some of them. Those guys get lots of laughs.
  

Remember if you are a producer with an idea (good or bad) that someone else has come up with and you're not fucking with it in some way, you're not producing right.

That's my diatribe done with. I understand the two main reasons why Fast and Loose wasn't the show I wanted it to be.a, I wasn't in it** and b, it was produced by producers.

Which brings me to my main point, the cost of failure for a TV production company and an improv troupe are vastly different, almost opposites. Our stage show? If we fuck that up, who's gonna care? About twelve people? The TV show has huge amounts of time, money and energy invested in it and it's going to be seen by a lot of people. Its failure has significant consequences for everyone involved and I swear, to the producer who just wants to make good TV, it looks like these procedures help.

In short, I think improv will continue to have a tricky time on TV, until TV execs learn more about the nature of improv itself. Maybe that time will come? We may have to just keep making these shows, each iteration with a little less control and a little more freedom for the casts until a company is eventually persuaded to take a more substantial risk. I'm not holding my breath. But why do so many improvisers seem to really want there to be a TV improv show? Answer me with opinions and words please.

*I unwaveringly use the term "improv", if this bothers you because you prefer "impro" I would ask you to ignore the "v" and never explain to me the reasoning behind your preference.
**And if I was, you can trust I'd be doing whatever I was asked by the producers, I need money.

(Also, one tiny afterthought, while Drew Carey is far from the world's greatest improviser, I doubt he stole "Improvaganza" from my beloved RFT. There's a finite number of good improv-puns out there, I used Improvaganza in the past before I'd heard of Edmonton and the good work that goes on there. I am as guilty as he.)

Foxcroft
(Edited - 15/09/2011 to remedy my own grammatical inadequacies)