Yes, And... The Power of Improv Classes in Combatting Loneliness
When I was younger, friendships just sort of… happened. It was all very organic and carefree: I went out into the world and did the things I wanted to do – which usually involved pubs and flopping around sweaty dancefloors – and along the way, without any conscious effort (without even registering it at all, really), I made dozens of wonderful, excitable friends.
It was only when I moved to a big new city at the age of thirty that I began to think consciously about friendship. I remember my first Friday night in my rental flat, sitting on my bed doing endless sudokus for want of evening plans, the city beyond my window alive with the rev of motorbikes and distant sirens. ‘Okay’ I remember thinking. ‘I suppose I ought to go out and… find some… friends?’ The notion was weird. It was as though I’d just learned my hair would no longer grow unless I grimaced and strained.
My first attempt was to take a book to a pub and look wistful. It happens in films all the time, right? A sad intellectual sits in a steamy-windowed cafe reading a paperback, and some zesty beatnik with bright eyes like Peter Pan drops down into the chair opposite and asks what they’re reading and why the long face. Nobody did, of course; I drank a Guinness and read the same line of The Count of Monte Cristo forty eight times in a row then ate a bag of crisps and went home baffled as to why the boisterous table to my right hadn’t invited me to join their game of Uno.
I decided to be more proactive. The world would not come to me, I realised. I had to go to it! To sprint towards it – with a bold heart and wide-open mind! The months that followed were a flurry of activity. I attended life-drawing sittings, salsa schools, hiking groups, spoken word nights, piano lessons, bouldering sessions and, on one strange evening, a carol-singing event. I met several Guess Who board’s worth of new faces, filled my diary with odd stories, and learned how to dance, draw, climb and sing. I chatted to the strangers I met at these events – laughed and swapped contact details, and felt I was gaining ground.
And yet a new problem soon emerged: I never saw the same face twice at any of these events. Unable therefore to build the sturdy foundations of friendship born of regular meetings, I was instead impelled to make a horrifying leap: texting ‘wanna hang out?’ to people I’d chatted to for one hour, two weeks before. Everybody, very understandably, was busy. It might have worked in a village, but you just can’t do that in a big city. You look mental and desperate. Which I was, obviously – but you don’t want people to know that.
Then, one afternoon, while I was bemoaning my predicament to a long-distance friend on Facetime, she offered me a lifeline.
“Have you ever tried improv?”
I paused, my eyes flicking between my phone and the website for horse riding classes I had been perusing on my laptop.
“Improv? Like, improvised comedy?”
“Yeah.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Why not?”
“Mortifying.”
Improv, as far as I was concerned, was lame. A potently American thing – zany celebrities with films to promote appearing on Saturday Night Live, yelling meagre punchlines before an audience compelled to guffaw by men holding placards. I imagined myself standing onstage in a spotlight, pretending to be a gnome or a priest or whatever, hooting and winking to a loathsome crowd before being pelted unconscious with hurled vegetables. I imagined the kind of people who would go to such classes: weirdos! Obviously! Who else would subject themselves thus – throw open the floodgates of cringe with such abandon?
The answer, it turned out, after yet another bored Friday night with nobody to text, was me.
“Welcome to improv class,” said the teacher, pacing before the class of twelve, rubbing his palms gleefully. “Has anyone done this before?”
Nobody had.
“Well, the first thing to know about improv is that you don’t have to be quick, funny or clever. You just have to be yourself, and the rest will follow.”
Bollocks, I instinctively thought. Of course you had to be quick, funny and clever – that’s what the word ‘comedy’ implied. Once again I imagined myself on a stage, the skies darkening as a wave of tossed cabbages and gone-off tomatoes blotted the sun.
“We’re not going to do anything today that feels uncomfortable or scary. It might feel a bit different, like trying on a new pair of shoes, but we’re going to build up so gradually that you barely notice.”
Our first activity: the teacher would make a series of comments, and we were to walk to one side of the room or the other based on how much we agreed with them.
“I like speaking in front of crowds.”
I practically elbowed the other students out of my way to get to the furthest crevice of the room’s ‘No’ side.
“I enjoy trying new things.”
Reluctantly, I floated back to the centre.
“I enjoy meeting new people.”
As I drifted towards the ‘Yes’ zone, I noticed everybody – every single new face – made the same move.
After that, we stood in a circle and were asked to introduce ourselves using a short alliterative nickname that we could act out. If your name was, I don’t know, Bruce, for example, you might say ‘Hello, I’m Bowling Bruce’ – and then you’d bowl an imaginary ball, and the group would then repeat your nickname aloud and copy your movement – a clever way of helping people learn one another’s names quickly. As nicknames were given around the circle and I sensed it would soon be my turn, I began to panic. What went with ‘Dan’? Dodgy, dirty, dumb, doggy–
“Dancing Dan,” I quavered at last. Shit.
And, as the teacher nodded his encouragement, I did a little half-hearted jig.
“Hi, Dancing Dan,” said everyone, jigging politely in return.
I knew it, I thought. Powerfully, powerfully lame.
The next activity was storytelling. In pairs, we were to begin telling the story of our last holiday. Then, when the teacher hit a little hand-drum he’d brought along, we were to stop and let our partner take over.
“I went to Greece last year with the guys,” began my partner, a little awkwardly. “We rented an apartment on the beach, and we hired jet skis one day so we could–”
Thunk.
I shrugged internally. This was dumb. Might as well have a little fun with it.
“– zoom around naked without getting stopped by the police. I adore being nude on the ocean, it makes me feel like a dolphin. Sometimes, when nobody is around, I like to–”
Thunk.
“– splash around in my bath for hours, pretending I’m a mermaid,” said the total stranger standing opposite me.
I found myself laughing – my partner too. And not just laughing a bit, but cackling. Real, pawing-at-each-other-helplessly cackling. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed so deeply. Around the room, where other pairs were busy telling stories, similar bouts of giggles broke out at random – warm laughter, collecting in the air like the smell of baking bread.
“So stupid,” I said, dabbing at my eyes. “What the hell.”
More games followed – nothing too strenuous or out-there, nothing beyond the sort of ‘student pre-drinks’ shenanigans I’d become well-versed in at university. Word association, counting games, impressions: the more we fooled around, the more silly I felt, more willing to say whatever was in my mind, suddenly assured in the realisation that it didn’t particularly matter what I said – the point was only to say something and see what your partner chose to do with it. There were no mistakes, said our teacher – there was no way you could mess up. If you missed a cue, flubbed a delivery, or in a panic blurted out something so juvenile it would make a ten-year-old roll their eyes, we threw our hands in the air and cheered. And sometimes, cocking it up – completely mishearing a line and responding in a way that came across as contextually insane, for example – led to the biggest laughs of all.
The gradual upping of the ante was so gentle that I barely noticed the change in atmosphere: the twelve strangers who had stood around with hands in pockets at the beginning of the two hours were, by the end of it, rosy-cheeked, relaxed and beaming. Something had shifted – something that felt, in the moment, monumental. I felt not just alright – not even good, but fantastic.
Over the next two months, Tuesday evenings became the highlight of my week. London is a serious city; rents are high and the streets are filled with people hurrying to corporate jobs in gleaming towers. But for two hours every week, in one small room in a spartan basement, I was free to be an idiot – to be totally stupid, unfunny, lame, slow-witted, goofy as hell, and wildly immature. It was a sense of liberation I’d not found in any other of my outings – or anywhere, really, in as long as I could remember.
I came to know my fellow classmates not only by name, but by their sense of humour, their delivery of silly lines, and their willingness to make fools of themselves. We performed for each other, we made each other laugh and congratulated one another, we bombed and consoled one another. I came to realise that this was what I’d been missing in my early attempts at friend–finding, this was what bonded people: showing up, week after week, and growing together – seeing each other shine, seeing each other balls it all up, and laughing it off and trying again.
The course finished in May, after eight weeks and 16 total hours of tomfoolery – and all for the sum total I might previously have spent on two ill-fated nights out. And, when my birthday rolled around a couple of weeks later, I looked at my phone and opened the Whatsapp group we’d created.
‘I’m thinking of having a birthday picnic next week,’ I typed. ‘Would anybody fancy joining?’
My finger hovered over my phone button for a long time. I thought of all the silliness we’d shared – the weeks of pretending to be television presenters and palm readers and pirates, doubled-over laughing at our own, deeply imperfect attempts to be funny, quick and clever – and I hit send.
I sat for a minute, wondering. Then, all at once, came a flurry of responses.
“Yes!”
“Love to!”
“So down!”
“I’ll dust off my ball gown.”
“See you there, Dancing Dan!”
I stared at the replies for a long time. Then I put down my phone, looked out of the window, and smiled. A moment later my phone buzzed with one more reply.
“Woohoo!” it said. “Friendship!”
Written by Dan Hackett
