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#34 LESSONS FROM THE IMPROV STAGE with Sandy Marshall & Sandy Jobin-Bevans

#34 LESSONS FROM THE IMPROV STAGE with Sandy Marshall & Sandy Jobin-Bevans

Talk About Talk - Executive & Leadership Communication Skills

October 16, 201945m 7s

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Show Notes

Lessons from the Improv comedy stage can help us improve our communication skills! Comedians Sandy Marshall and Sandy Jobin-Bevans share their expertise – and a few laughs – including playing the scene you’re in, the beauty of mistakes, knowing your audience, testing your audience, “YES-AND,” burning a suggestion, and more! Whether you’re pitching for business, interviewing for a new job, or talking to your kids, these improv lessons can make you a more effective communicator. Thank you Sandy & Sandy!

 

References & Links

Sandy Jobin-Bevans

Sandy Marshall

Other References

Talk About Talk & Dr. Andrea Wojnicki

 

Interview Transcript

Dr. Andrea Wojnicki: Sandy and Sandy, thank you so much for joining us here today.

Sandy Jobin-Bevans: Well, thanks for having us.

Sandy Marshall: Thank you, Andrea. It’s good to be here.

AW: Let’s start off for people that maybe don’t have context. And can I ask you, Sandy Marshall to describe what is improv comedy?

SM: Improv comedy? I’m going to start and answer. And then I want to hear what Sandy says. I would say improv comedy, at its core, is about listening and thinking on your feet. Improvisation is an art form. It’s been around for quite some time in comedy. Improvisation really is thinking on your feet and being agile and building on what someone else is saying.

SJ-B: Yeah, I think that’s a good distinction. It doesn’t have to necessarily be comedic to be effective. You’d be an improviser that’s using improv techniques and not have to be funny. Our background is in the comedy side of it.

AW: So if I was to go to an improv comedy show, can you share with the listeners just how that would unfold?

SM: Sure. Yeah, I probably would have a host who would come out on stage Welcome, everybody. Hopefully that person would not say “How’s everybody doing tonight?” Cuz they might actually be truthful.

SJ-B: Okay, yeah, Bill Hicks used to say as a stand up comic, he used to say that when you say How’s everybody doing tonight, you just wasted three seconds of your time on stage. So don’t –  just assume everyone’s okay.

AW: So actually, when I was learning to do podcast interviews, someone said, Don’t ever ask people on mic how they are. And I’ve noticed since then very few interviewers on the radio – you rarely hear them say, how are you? But every now and then you hear an inexperienced person say, How are ya?

SJ-B: Nooooo- it’s an unnecessary moment.

SM: That’s right. Yeah. So the host would come out,

SJ-B: back to the back of the show.

AW: awkward silence!

SJ-B: That’s right. Yeah.

SM: So if you’re seeing an improv show, it may consist of, you know, a series of improvised scenes or monologues or songs with an ensemble of somewhere between three and six or seven people on a stage. Sometimes the scenes themselves are much longer, some are shorter. There are distinctions in improvisation between long form and short form. So get to the joke quicker, you know, beginning middle and end. In some cases, there’s a long form, it’s a little more like jazz, it might be a longer scene. Really the show consists of a group of people making everything up on the spot based on a suggestion from the audience.

SJ-B: Yeah. And when the show goes well, people often watch it and say, that had to be planned, because it was so good, it had to be planned. And when the show goes bad, they never want to see a comedy show again. So the best thing I think that can happen to you is that you can have, say you had six scenes in a night, five are great and one’s terrible. So they realize that they couldn’t have planned all that because you wouldn’t want that terrible scene. Yeah, it’s very true if it’s too good, and sometimes it’s detrimental. So it’s a strange thing,

AW: because then people think it’s ,,,

SJ-B: Oh, it’s planned. It has to be planned. There’s no way you guys just thought of that in your on your own. Yeah.

AW: I think that fact about something being too consistently good, affects a lot of contexts. It just reminded me when people write a recommendation online, for example, there’s research that shows that if they’re glowingly positive and they refuse to say anything negative about it, then people discard it. And they say it’s not credible. If you just have to say one little thing and it’s kind of like: five out of six, awesome improv skits? That was real.

SJ-B: Right, right. You were talking about a resort and you’re like the beach was amazing. The food was amazing. But there were not enough towels. Yeah, I believe it.

AW: Yeah. So when you first described or defined improv comedy, the first word that came out of your mouth actually made me very happy. It was listening. People have asked me, What do you think is the number one most critical communication skill? and if I had to choose, it would be listening. So hopefully we can we can build on that a little bit, when we get into the section where we talk about improv skills. As you were also defining improv, I was wondering, are the three to six people on the stage – are they competing? Are you competing with the other comedians?

SJ-B: Well, the whole idea of becoming an improviser is that you wouldn’t be competing because we always talk about we’ve got your back or a we always talk about being others-focused as well. So if you’re making other people look good, that’s a huge skill we have as improvisers I think if you’re competing, it’s a good idea to go be a stand up. And I think that’s definitely a different atmosphere. Certainly there are people who become pretty competitive on stage, but then the end up just doing lots of scenes alone.

SM: It’s very true. Yeah.

SJ-B: It shouldn’t be like that. The great shows are when everybody’s there to look out for the other people that are on stage.

AW: Well, it sounds like fun actually.

SJ-B: It is. It is very fun. That takes time to become a very good improviser. But it doesn’t take much time to go to an improv class and just start. People have a blast doing it. And you know, we teach a lot of corporate improvisation and teach improv skills to a lot of big companies. And that’s the first thing – they’re very trepidatious and then they realize, oh, we’re laughing we’re having a good time.

AW: So did you take classes on improv?

SJ-B: Personally, I was in Winnipeg, and I was studying to be a high school history teacher. A friend of mine was saying, well, we have an improv and sketch troupe and one guy can’t make it could you improvise in the show tonight? I had never improvised my entire life and taken a class never done it – never. And he’s like, you seem pretty funny. And I did in front of a paying crowd of like 300 people and that was my first time ever improvising, and I didn’t take a class until six or seven years later. When I got to Second City, they were like: you should take class. Please just to learn the terms we use.

AW: You didn’t know the vocabulary?

SJ-B: No, not at all. So I was like, okay,

AW: so what is some of the vocabulary?

SM: I’d say like a core tenet is the phrase YES AND. So, using the word yes to build on an idea that somebody else is offering something. You might say it’s his initiation, or an offering and an improv scene, you know, things like callbacks or edits or support. There’s a thing that every improviser does before a show and they’ll say got your back. So before the group goes on stage. Everybody’s backstage getting ready to go on with a lot of confidence, a lot of energy. Just a quick moment where everybody, one-on-one says, got your back, got your back, got your back and something we don’t really see in everyday life as well. As Sandy said, we work with businesses or groups, you can tell pretty quickly if a group does have each other’s back or doesn’t. But in the improv world, when you’re doing a show, ideally, you’re going out and you’re really focusing on how can you best listen, work with your fellow improvisers and get each other’s back, and then have fun along the way. Because if you’re not having fun, the audience definitely is not going to be having fun.

SJ-B: No, and they’re the first ones to notice when things are going wrong. The audience knows something’s wrong … The other thing is offers. Offers are things that you’d make a suggestion in a scene. So an offer should be accepted. The YES AND  side of it is: yes is I heard your offer,  I use your offer and then and is I build on that offer. Offers are a big terminology.

AW: So you don’t literally say the word offer on stage?

SJ-B: No. That’s just what we call it. I made an offer and you didn’t accept it or I made an offer. It was great that you accepted it would be something you talk about after the show. The thing about coming from out West was we had all these other terms like pimping. So pimping is when you say to somebody, okay, now you’re going to sing a song – so you make somebody else do the thing you don’t want to do. And in Winnipeg we used to call it shivving each other like a jailhouse term. You got shivved. Thanks for shivving me in the back with that.

AW: So in the shownotes, and I’m gonna have to have a list of the vocabulary terms that we’re learning. I just have to say, there’s been now probably at least three times in just in the last couple minutes, where you guys have said things where I’m like, wouldn’t it be nice if we acted like that at work and wouldn’t it be nice if that was the kind of camaraderie that we had before we went into a big brainstorming meeting, or we went into even a board meeting?

SJ-B:  yeah, it’s more like don’t screw this up, John, Rather than, I’ve got your back.

AW: It’s like, it may be the competition thing, right versus the we’re in this together.

SJ-B: When we teach improvisational skills to people that are generally in business, they tend to pick up things and go, Okay, let’s make it easier for each other. When we do like pair exercises. Salespeople tend to go, “I tried to make it hard for Steve and Steve figured it out. But I just kept making it hard for him!” It is very competitive. They’re trying to make it too… They’re trying to mess each other up. They’re often trying to find: how do I win this particular exercise? When you’re not really supposed to win them, but they do look for it. They look for the way to win an improv exercise.

AW: Like I’m the funniest and you look like an idiot.

SJ-B: Yeah, I just make you look bad. They have the opposite idea of how improv works.

SM: A lot of that comes from fear as well. I think too, right? So if in the boardroom or onstage people aren’t naturally supportive, there’s always something else going on. Improv can be a real metaphor towards where somebody is on the day. And early on in improv classes, one of the things we do teach students is that this is a safe space to be confident to take chances. And in life, we don’t always hear that, especially in the business world. If you’re new to a company and you’re getting on board and you might hear, we really want you to take chances and help you know, those thinking new ideas and may not be a company that walks the walk with that, right? Somebody might confidently share some ideas and quickly get shut down, right? So you really have to walk with that. And as you’re trying to be an improviser, one of the first skills you need to really develop is confidence and being confident to speak in public, confident to take chances in front of total strangers in an audience of people that have paid money to be there. So in that scenario, you really can only rely on the support of your fellow improvisers to get your back and that helps continue to breed more confidence. But when you’re seeing that competition or people pimping each other – in some cases, it’s just kind of in good fun. Because everybody’s been doing this a long time. It’s kind of a fun way to mess with each other. In most cases, it can be about fear or lack of confidence or something.

AW: Yes, and I’m sure when that kind of stuff happens on stage, there’s reciprocity right away.

SM: Yeah, yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah. In some cases, like in the in the business world. If you hear people get shut down in meetings, something I often think of it, it’s okay, whatever, you’ll be okay, where you don’t take it personally or more like, you’ll be okay, yeah.

SJ-B: I want to say one thing though, I’ve actually taught an improv class at a company. So what we try to do when we’re teaching these improvisational skills to businesses is – you can’t have anybody in the room that’s not in the workshop. So you can have someone standing on the side with a clipboard, or like they –  they tried to do it, they often try to do sit on the sides. AW: They’re curious?

SJ-B: I want to watch all these people actually in this scenario, and then sort of started analyzing how these people are in our company. So that’s not a very comfortable way to jump into an improv thing. And I actually had a client a couple years ago who I said, look, nobody can just be standing on the side. They have to be involved. I know you’re probably gonna make judgments, these people are going to still make judgments. They’re gonna be involved and be there. And he said, Oh, yeah, no problem, no problem. He showed up the workshop and walked up, shook my hand said, “nothing I could do. These four are going to watch.” So he ambushed me. Totally changed the tone of the room, because there’s now 20 people going, am I gonna keep my job because I made a bad offer as an improviser? So they do try to sneak in.  I even had a scenario where I was teaching, the guy got fired. He got fired because his offers. They didn’t like them. And the person in the class was secretly grading people basically, and just said they would come in. And it was like Ted’s not here anymore.

AW: Wow.

SJ-B: Yeah.

AW: Wow. So basically what was happening there was their objective was completely different from what you thought the objective was.  You thought it was improvisational skills.

SM:  Yeah.

AW: That they could then translate into real life and real work. And they were: let’s put them in this awkward situation and see who thinks and who swims.

SJ-B: That’s exactly what they’re doing. And they just thought like, Ted’s had enough warnings. He’s gone. So that was really weird and shocking, because now everyone the next day, second day was like on edge because he’s not there anymore.

AW: Is this Survivor?

SJ-B: Exactly. So that’s the completely wrong attitude to have when you’re bringing improvisers in to teach communication skills or storytelling or things like innovation. It’s like, you know, someone didn’t innovate properly. They’re fired. That’s not the right message for sure.

AW: Or they didn’t brainstorm properly. You know, they say there are no bad ideas. Well, actually, there are bad ideas.

SJ-B: Yeah, there’s that one idea Ted brought.

SM: The funny thing about building on the one idea. Funny thing about that is, oftentimes that idea is the germ for the solution everybody was looking for, but they just didn’t see it in that context on that day. And improvisers going through training programs will often say, I didn’t get a lot of stage time. Yeah, you know, and you’re like, that’s okay. Like, not everybody gets us. There’s nobody gets the equal amount of stage time you go to an improv show. Back to your earlier question. You won’t see everybody play equal number of crazy characters every night. You’ll see some people surprisingly, play a lead a lot. And some people play support, just because that’s a natural evolution of those scenes. I can remember there was one audition way back in the day, where there were a couple of people who quickly took center stage. And I was like, Well, I guess I’m just going to sweep the floor. And I ended up getting the gig because I was just the sweep the floor guy in the background and wasn’t trying to compete, but it was…

AW: Were you literally sweeping the floor?

SM:  With a with a mimed broom. Mimed. But I gotta say it. I gotta say the mimed broom: that gets to object work. That’s more terminology. You’re asking me about what that would be called object work They’re objects that don’t exist.

AW:  So that was gutsy though!

SM: Yeah.

SJ-B: Yeah. But you stood out by taking a backseat.

SM: Yeah.

AW: But you were also demonstrating that you are engaged. I love how this is going back and forth between what is only appropriate on the improv stage, then what is only really appropriate in the boardroom and understanding about the kind of implicit or tacit communication that’s going on amongst employees, right? So you need to know your audience.

SJ-B: You do really need to know your audience, which is a big part of what we’re instructing, when you’re talking improvisers for sure. And it’s like, that’s the skill that people learn when they’re doing storytelling or presentation skills. Knowing your audience is so much different, right.

AW: So there’s knowing them in advance.

SJ-B: Yeah

AW: Being prepared, right? And then there’s also getting to know as you’re performing?

SJ-B: Absolutely, you can test an audience as you’re doing it. There’s some simple ways to test an audience. While you’re doing it. Swear once. See how that goes. Maybe do something like, maybe something that pushes the sexual envelope. See how that goes. Try certain things to do.

AW: So go through the taboos one by one?

SJ-B: Oh yeah, you just like you can filter through like four or five pretty quickly in the show. Now you can see where the audience is and where they want to go, where they don’t want to go. Because if it’s a random theater crowd, you don’t know they are until they arrive.

AW: I was watching some standup on the weekend. I think it was Kevin Hart. And he said, you know, the thing about going on stage is: everybody there wants to laugh. Well 99%?

SM: Yeah.

SJ-B:  Yeah, right.

AW: Well, there’s probably 1% that really is just trying to shoot you down and heckle you.

SJ-B: That’s a big part of being a performer is definitely to accept that the audience wants you to succeed. It’s just like going to an audition too. If you go to audition, the casting director wants you to succeed, because that’s makes their job a lot easier. They can pick somebody who’s going to be great.

AW: I tell that to my kids, when they’re going to tryouts. The coaches want you guys to kick butt so – go.

SJ-B: Makes their job easier.

SM: And also when you’re casting, you don’t want to sit there all day and see everybody not do well.  You want to see them rock and kill it. So you want to create that environment where they’re set up to succeed. They know it’s a safe place. And you’re like, even though small little moments when somebody is coming into a casting session, or an audition ago, hey, Andrea, we’re glad you’re here today. You good? Okay. Great, have fun. It’s cool. You sweated about this audition or this scenario for at least a week, if not two, you’ve talked to 10 other people about it. There’s a lot of pressure in the industry about what this specific moment could be. But let’s put that aside and just know, hey, we’re just in this room on this day, and hopefully, you can have fun and, you know, maybe it moves forward. And if not, then maybe we’ll see you next time when it’s all good. You know, because you don’t want to be – I think in those moments, there’s this like, industry perception around the crazy audition or it’s all this pressure and that and there is. But a lot of it doesn’t need to be there. And the people who are auditioning in those scenarios or casting. They don’t want people to be in their heads or

SJ-B: No. But I would say the worst audience is if it’s your ex girlfriend, so that’s bad.

AW:  Did that happen to you?

SJ-B: if you have ex girlfriends, boyfriends, ex husbands, wives… Well, yeah, for sure. And then you can tell when there’s people in the audience that just hate you. So they’re like, they just want you to be terrible.

AW: Can you share any details?

SJ-B: I only would just say like, I’ve had the experience of like, you are performing sketches or improv after your ex girlfriend’s troupe has been on and they’ve been terrible.

AW: Oh – she’s a comedian too? Oh – bad!

SJ-B: Yeah. And I’ll go on stage media to Yeah, and then you go on stage and it’s just like, they’re like, just arms crossed, like I hate this. So there are definitely those kind of scenarios where this person can’t stand me. They are here to watch me fail. They just definitely happen.

AW: So then the analogy, then back to the boardroom. Yeah, is the guy that goes up to do the pitch. And then he leaves the room and his colleague goes in to give a different pitch, and only one of the pitches is going to be accepted. Right. And so it’s a zero sum game and the thing about comedy though, is that it’s not a zero sum game. You can laugh at everybody.

SJ-B: Yeah, yeah.

SM: Yeah.  That’s true.

SJ-B: Unless they broke up with you and then I just keep circling back to that. It was a long time ago. I remember this, but that did come back to me. That is an example of a bad audience member.

SM: And somebody who’s out to get you –  also to your point, if you’re able to laugh at everybody. You have to start by laughing at yourself and be able to look in the mirror and go, Hey, like, I’m not perfect. I’m kind of giving it all and having a lot of fun in this scenario, and if people are doing that, they’re like, okay, I can do that as well.

AW: So there’s balancing that you said before – confidence, right? So there’s balancing the confidence with also not being too full of yourself.

SM: For sure. The confidence piece is: I’m confident in being imperfect and flawed and I will make a ton of mistakes, and I’m gonna have a lot of fun along the way. And if you want to come along for the ride, that’s cool.

SJ-B: And the audience appreciates that for sure. the honesty of like, I made a mistake. I don’t want to own it.

AW: So they say self-deprecation. It’s kind of like low hanging fruit in stand up?

SJ-B: Sure. I would agree with that. For sure it is. The greatest stories are how bad the audition went. And that’s the story you tell at the bar, right? And my wife’s an actor too. And often when she’s about to do an audition or callback or something, I’ll say, look, either have a great audition or have a great story. Just come home with something. So come back happy or come back. I gotta tell you what happened. It was so brutal.

AW: You are going to be quoted on that.  That is so beautiful.

SJ-B: So much fun to have a bad audition story when it goes wrong and it’s just gold. Gold. Yeah.

AW: So and then the analogy there is when you go to do a job interview, right, and you either get the job or you have a good story.

SJ-B: because that’s exactly it. That is an audition. It’s a job interview every single time.

SM: So when you’re pitching business to use that is a contextual tie-in to improv and all this stuff we’re talking about – With pitching the business, if you’re pitching a new client, as an example, people want to see you be able to react to questions out of nowhere, think on your feet, they don’t want to see a deck for 100 slides. That’s the know your audience piece, no more than 10 slides. But they also want to know, hey, if we ask you a stumper question, or if, you know, Carol, the main boss, comes in at the last half hour, I don’t know where that you’re going to be okay. And that’s where the improv training comes in. We’re kind of in a boardroom. Like, you know, if you’re pitching business in the boardroom, and you’ve already improvised, there’s really not a lot that’s going to be potentially worse than some of these crazy situations or scenarios because it’s in an office in a protected environment. With rules and regulations.

AW:  But sometimes it is high stakes and it’s got the adrenaline going and I think … you’re getting presentations and people are firing questions at you …

SJ-B: But as improvisers we often say to play the scene you’re in, not the one you want to be in. We say you play the scene you’re in not the one you want to be in.

AW: That’s a great mantra or quote as well. I love that. I love that! So and it’s also at a meta level, right? It’s the scene you’re in like, what is your life or what is your job, right? Yeah, but then there’s also I was actually thinking you were gonna say something about your kid who you thought was a goody-goody in a straight-laced A+, comes into your house –  stoned.  You have to play the scene you’re in.

SJ-B:  Yeah, right. You can’t say like, you should be this or I thought you were this. Exactly that’s exactly it. Or it’s like, you know, you’re in this great scenario for parents. Your kid comes up, says I’m gay. Play the scene you’re in, and not the one you want to be in. Right. So it was kind of scenarios or I don’t want to go to college –  play the scene you’re in.

SM: That’s a great point and tying the play the scene you’re in piece, along with what you’re saying, Andrea, about answering tough questions or being in a corporate scenario or being in the hot seat. There’s another piece of lingo which is really simple. A phrase called Thank you, which we use all the time, where if a tough question comes up, and … say you’re pitching business, and if somebody asks you a really tough question, you go, thanks for the question. That immediately defuses any sort of anxiety you might have just by a little bit. It gives you two seconds to think about your answer. And it also tells the group, you’re cool with it. It just level sets everything. It’s a little piece of jujitsu in those high pressure situations. Let you go, let’s you say, Oh, thanks for that. Okay. Well, here’s what I think.

AW:  I think you gotta be careful with the tone though, the way you’re saying it is very, like great, right?

SJ-B: Thank you, Diane. Wow, okay. Wow, thank you for that I was in a flow, but you’ve just stopped it for your question.

SM: Thank you for that soul killing question. Yeah, yeah, but you’re right, like a genuine thanks. In that moment. Taking time to connect with a person helps diffuse any sort of pressure you might have. It also just gives you a chance to sit with it for a second. Versus going, Oh, well, well, well. And I think it’s those micro moments that make everybody else feel at ease in business situation. So if the power goes out or if the deck doesn’t work. So it’s like, Hey, if you’re presenting, don’t take the hundred slides, it’s a follow up like, it’s a big win to go into a business pitch and just have a conversation with somebody – that’s improvised. Obviously, you have to keep the train on time, you have to get your points across, you have to have a beginning, middle and end to a conversation. But the same time if you don’t hit slide 49, literally nobody cares. And a lot of people put a lot of pressure on themselves, to have that script in hand, because they may not have just the comfort of having a real conversation, where they might have the pressure of getting all these ideas across when you really could do that over a longer period.

AW: I just have to say I feel like you’re speaking to me, the podcast host that has the list of questions in front of her.  I’m trying really hard not to look at it.

SJ-B: this, this is actually your intervention and I hope you appreciate it. It’s gonna get really tough for you in about 10 minutes, but we’re just easing into the real intervention. Okay. I have a letter from your child here. Dear Mom. No, I think…

SM: What  copy would you like? Yeah.

SJ-B: That is such a true point to say thank you. I would say one thing that is a gift when people have a question, everyone else might be thinking it. And I and oftentimes when you pitch to a boardroom of people, and no one asked the question you leave there and like, I don’t really understand that. I didn’t want to ask a question, but I don’t understand it. So moving on, that at least gets that they’re interested in engaging and clarified. I think that’s a gift to people. That’s what I think. You should be genuine.

SM: You’re really good at asking that. You say that quite often on calls and meetings. You’re great at that. You’ll say I have a question that everybody else might have. But I’m fine to ask it. Yeah. What time do we have to be there tomorrow? Whatever it is, right? Because then everybody goes, thank you for asking the question that was on everybody’s mind.

AW: I’ve actually seen that in board meetings when somebody asks something and you physically see people go, Oh, yeah, thank goodness. So then if you are the one that’s on stage and you explicitly thank them, then it kind of really just reinforces that you’re putting everybody at ease.

SJ-B: Well, if you say thank you to a suggestion from the audience as an improviser, they’re going to give you more suggestions later. But if they give you a suggestion, and you’re like, really? okay, fine! We’ll go to a gas station. They’re never going to give suggestion at any improv

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