Improv techniques to be better at "status," conversation, and story-telling
Keith Johnstone's "Impro"
I’ll start with the assumption that basically none of us are going to actually DO improv classes or sets - although I will point out that the most interesting and intellectually diverse “coastal elites” I’ve known in real life did actually do improv and standup, and it would probably be fun.
But we’re all busy, we have lives and jobs and training schedules and kids and things like that - so why should we pay attention to a recently deceased, 90 year old educator, playwright, and theater director like Keith Johnstone?
Well first, the book is a delightful blast from the past, from a time and person who can talk flatly and literally about how servants behave,1 who has extended and entirely unironic discourses on loas and voodoo-mediated trances and possession, and where a large part of his techniques involve getting more creativity and spontaneity from his acting and theater students.
It’s also chock full of fun and memorable turns of phrase and insightful quips. Here’s one of my favorites:
“Laughter is a whip that keeps us in line. It’s horrible to be laughed at against your will. Either you suppress unwelcome laughter or you start controlling it.”
But overall, I hope to get you two things:
To better observe and more consciously play status games (I’m sure you can think of multiple occasions it might be useful to “tune” your status consciously in a given interaction)
To give you techniques to be more creative and a better conversationalist and storyteller
What are the main takeaways?
Techniques to become more engaged with your senses and the world.
New frames and lenses on status and self-consciousness.
Techniques and mental frames to act more spontaneously and interestingly in conversation and interaction.
Let’s begin with the typical anomie and predictability of adult life:
“As I grew up, everything started getting grey and dull. I could still remember the amazing intensity of the world I’d lived in as a child, but I thought the dulling perception was an inevitable consequence of age—just as the lens of the eye is bound gradually to dim. I didn’t understand that clarity is in the mind.”
I personally think this is “familiarity” or “predictability.” If your mind and senses are indeed a predictive feedback loop with additional inputs on surprisal, and particularly if the world does indeed get more gray during depression, then having strong priors and lots of predictability will necessarily lead to this dulling and greyness.
“I’ve since found tricks that can make the world blaze up again in about fifteen seconds, and the effects last for hours.”
Johnstone’s tricks essentially involve perturbing your priors, or altering your “observer:”
Pace about the room energetically, shouting out the wrong name for everything your attention alights upon.
Practice observing hypnagogic images2 - being able to cultivate the stillness and half-asleep-but-conscious mind states this requires, from which you are able to “attend” to the images. This ultimately allows you to “attend” to the real world in the same way.3
Not mentioned, but going on vacation, immersing yourself in the “new,” is a great way to enhance your perceptions.
Almost dying is a perennial favorite, that makes everything brighter and crisper and more saturated, but I can’t recommend this one due to the inherent risk.
He also doesn’t mention this, but “seeing everything with new eyes” is pretty much one of the reference outcomes of taking powerful psychedelic drugs, many of which are entirely legal now in cities like DC and Denver.
You can also just straight *choose* to do this, by “interrupting” your priors and actually paying close and fully-engaged attention to the patterns of light and shadow on an object, the blue and purple and brown highlights in a “white” crumpled comforter in sunlight, and similar.
Frames and lenses on status games
Status is a perennial favorite topic in our demimonde, and I found some of his insights particularly fun and cogent.
“I don’t myself see that an educated man in this culture necessarily has to understand the second law of thermodynamics, but he certainly should understand that we are pecking-order animals and that this affects the tiniest details of our behaviour.”
He alights on status as a technique to make stage acting and improv more natural and true to life:
“Try to get your status just a little above or below your partner’s,’ I said, and I insisted that the gap should be minimal. The actors seemed to know exactly what I meant and the work was transformed. The scenes became ‘authentic’, and actors seemed marvellously observant. Suddenly we understood that every inflection and movement implies a “status, and that no action is due to chance, or really ‘motiveless’.”
This is a fun thing to do consciously, btw, when you know what to look for - explicitly observing somebody else’s “status” and trying to frame yours as just above or below theirs really makes you aware of the tells of status in a way that intellectually knowing or reading a list doesn’t.
He has a couple of fun status asides where he asserts that comedians are people that we pay to lower their own and other’s status in humorous ways. Or that “tragedy” is a high status person being wiped out, so that everybody on the ladder can jump up one rung.4
And what about “performing status,” which we do at all times when around other people?
Interesting and specific “status” behaviors to look out for:
In a given interaction, the higher status person generally looks at the lower for longer stretches. The lower status person glances and looks away several times.
The higher status can break eye contact first, but will not look back, or if they do, it will be with steady regard again. A lower status person who breaks eye contact first glances back quickly.
The higher status person in an interaction moves smoothly, and often more slowly. Lower status people move with more jerky movements, and will often move more quickly.
The higher status person keeps their hands away from their face - hands near or on the face or hair or head is a low status move.
Higher status feet are turned outwards - inward turned feet are a sign of lower status.
Higher status people “spread” and take more space. Their personal space is larger, and inhabits a larger space or perimeter. More of the shared “public” space is “theirs” in terms of body language and occupation.
In the limits of this taking of space - in a master / servant dynamic, the servant behaves as if all space belongs to the master.5 A servant’s primary purpose in fact, is to elevate the status of the master, and most “work” they do is secondary to that.
Higher status people move their heads less when they speak. The trick to being authoritative and regal is speaking with a still head. “Officers are trained not to move the head while issuing commands.”
“Ers, and “ums” and pauses, if short and at the begining of a sentence, signal low status. Higher status partners have longer “errrs,” or pauses, and they’re more often in the middle of a sentence.
Higher status interlocutors speak with more clarity and purpose, lower status with hesitations, filler words, changing volume, trailing off, and the like.
And once again, there’s nothing like “doing” to really drive this home. Actually deploy some of these in real interactions, actually try to modulate your status real time to be slightly higher or lower than your interlocutor, and that’s where the real learning happens.
And of course, when you’re looking at things in a status interaction frame:
“It was hysterically funny, but at the same time very alarming. All our secret manoeuvrings were exposed. If someone asked a question we didn’t bother to answer it, we concentrated on why it had been asked. No one could make an ‘innocuous’ remark without everyone instantly grasping what lay behind it. Normally we are ‘forbidden’ to see status transactions except when there’s a conflict.”
Self consciousness and self expression
Actually this “instantly grasping what lays behind it” is a recurring sort of theme. One of his greatest struggles is to get people to actually improvise, pivot, or answer a question WITHOUT pausing, without conscious intermediation, *without* social appropriateness filters.
People are ever-afraid of “giving up the game,” of inviting a glimpse into their “true” selves, and will resist answers and flow and accepting offers that might do that.
This is far from an “improv” only pattern - you’ll see this on dates, when people are at a party where they don’t know most of the people, when people are generally unsure of their standing, or even if they’re just particularly introverted or reserved by nature.
“I see the ‘personality’ as a public-relations department for the real mind, which remains unknown. My personality always seems to be functioning, at some level, in terms of what other people think. If I am alone in a room and someone knocks on the door, then I ‘come back to myself’. I do this in order to check up that my social image is presentable: are my flies done up? Is my social face properly assembled? If someone enters, and I decide that I don’t have to guard myself, then I can get ‘lost in the conversation’. Normal consciousness is related to transactions, real or imagined, with other people.”
But in this sense, “personality” is blocking other people and ourselves from the fullest range of our minds and expressions, and blocking us from more interesting and engaging conversations and lives. That self consciousness and desire to filter and portray the best face is limiting your access and creativity.
Johnstone, of course, has a number of techniques to mitigate or break through this resistance.
Why might we care, as people and not actors?
First, because many of us are in positions where creativity and the quality and breadth of your ideas matters, and these parts of us are part of our creativity and breadth.
Second, because it makes us better and more interesting friends, conversation partners, and dates.
Finally, I’ll let Johnstone articulate it:
“These ‘offer-block-accept’ games have a use quite apart from actor training. People with dull lives often think that their lives are dull by chance. In reality everyone chooses more or less what kind of events will happen to them by their conscious patterns of blocking and yielding. A student objected to this view by saying, ‘But you don’t choose your life. Sometimes you are at the mercy of people who push you around.’ I said, ‘Do you avoid such people?’ ‘Oh!’ she said, ‘I see what you mean.”
“Having a more interesting” life is probably the BEST possible reason to take on exercises like this.
“Offer-block-accept”
An offer is anything somebody else is putting out there - your conversational partner, somebody who’s just made eye contact with you, even inanimate objects, like a tumbleweed blowing past.
An “accept” is what we now think of as the essence of improv - a “yes, and.”
A “block” is anything that prevents the action or conversation from developing.
A conversation can be interesting and engaging with the dullest of starts, and this is because a good partner can assume an offer has been made even with the weakest of signals, and can steer the conversation or interaction to interesting places. You can be that person!
We’ll touch briefly on what makes things interesting later (it’s largely surprisal), but one of the keys to being more interesting is “blocking” less of your own internal world, and being less afraid of limiting everything you think or say for self-consciousness or “personality” reasons.
Understanding “blocks,” “offers,” and “accepts” is a useful conversational and interaction frame to have - people who are “difficult” conversationalists routinely block, make poor offers, and make poor accepts.
The way to make the conversation better (aside from giving up and finding another interlocutor) is to “see” offers in more places, to see “deeper” to react to more interesting aspects of what was offered, and to make more interesting accepts. Again: aim for the surprising, aim for the more diverse and off-the-beaten path thoughts and avenues.
Automatic Reading
This is a straight “greater creativity and access to the subconscious” exercise.
He gets students to start a scene by asking them to visualize themselves in a library. They take a book down. What color is it? “Blue”. Open it up, look at the publisher’s page. Who is the publisher?
Here if they prevaricate, say they can’t see it because it’s blurry, say it’s written in Russian, or whatever, he overcomes the objection. “I’m handing you a magnifying glass.” Text being too small is met with “I’m shrinking your down to the size of the book.” Text being in another language with “there’s words in English written in the margin,” or in our day “you hold up your phone, which automatically translates the Russian writing,” and similar.
He asks for the publisher again. “Hol….Holford.” You ask them to page through the books and stop at a page that has verse, and to read what’s on the page. He has a number of free association style outpus he got with this method in the book.6
This is basically an “automatic reading” guided visualization, and you can do it by yourself if you play both parts internally and pierce the usual deflections and self-deceptions that make the book unreadable.
Automatic writing
Much like the above, but you look at a blank sheet of paper and ‘see’ a word, and write it where you saw it. He says he’s filled many notebooks with this method, and “there’s a great gap between what I would choose to write, and what actually emerges.”7
Subconsciously “othered” stories
He relates a party, teaching, or improv trick where you get a story out of another person by claiming it’s your story, and answering yes, no, or maybe to any questions they ask about the story, and then having them put the pieces together. This technique takes advantage of you as the “other,” which frees them from self consciousness and worries about social approval.
The trick is that you’re answering on essentially random criteria, like whether the question sentence ends or begins in a consonant, vowel, or “y.”8 The story they make is entirely their own, and is a random walk through whatever’s occuring to them in their own internal idea-space.
This is a fun party game you can deploy in that awkward pause before conversation starts or breaks up into smaller groups.
Better storytelling and narration
Have you ever wanted to be a better story teller? Would you consider it a mark of approval to be called a raconteur? Johnstone points to some of the key elements.
Stories are a pattern that connects to itself. The more elegant and complete the connections, the better the story.
People have a tendency to think of stories as a collection of tropes or archetypes. Dark stormy nights leading to katabasis or Hero’s Journeys, man vs nature or good vs evil, complete with conflict peaking in the third act, after which things wrap up into a clean happily-ever-after or denouement.
Yes, stories have conflict and resolution. Stories have characters. But the best way to *frame* stories is as a routine that’s been interrupted. This is particularly useful for our own careers as storytellers, because most stories we would tell involve ourselves or a loved one, and the genesis of most stories is indeed a routine that’s been interrupted unexpectedly.
Secondly, stories are characterized by reincorporation. Your story can and should take you to wild and wooly places, where memorable and infamous characters go about their doings, but you need to remember incidents and people that have been brought up and have fallen out of the action, to reincorporate them before wrap up.
“Often an audience will applaud when earlier material is brought back into the story. They couldn’t tell you why they appluad, but the reincorporation does give them pleasure.”
And again, the more elegant and complete your reincorporation and connection, the better the story.
The key to good stories is surprisal
Finally, stories surprise.
“It’s no good the knight killing the dragon and deflowering the virgin any more. Killing the virgin and deflowering the dragon is more likely to hold the audience’s attention.”
He points to a few improv-specific examples of surprising turns, because the key to a truly great improv skit is truly surprising turns - climb under the sheets with the monster, start growing feathers, become a boot fetishist suddenly - but similarly, the key to a good story is also strong surprisal.
I think this is probably where most people struggle - they want to tell stories, but think they lead boring lives. This is certainly one area where fiction has the upper hand, and “Golden Age of TV” streaming has spoiled all of us with maximally-surprising superstimuli.
But IS your life boring? I think framing things in the right way, and really “selling” the unusual or suprising or delightful things that interrupted whatever you were doing gets you pretty far. I mean, you’re telling the story for a reason, right? The guy in the neon orange afro riding by on an electric scooter while yodeling? The kid making a hilarious face and threatening to burn down the entire world if they can’t find another hot dog? Make the face, mime the body language, imitate the yodel, mug for the camera (or your interlocutor in this case).
I would urge you to consider that surprisal is contextual too. Framing helps within the story - you can frame and shade things “away” from the surprise to increase the contrast.
And outside-of-story context is another channel. If you’re a heavily tattooed, muscular dudebro, and you relate a story about taking your grandma to a spa day where you guys are being maximally pampered and getting mani-pedis together before the interruption of routine and central conflict happens, that’s worth extra surprisal, too. Or spin it the other way - you’re a glasses wearing academic or data scientist who was out on his 1500cc maximally aggressive motorcycle, when suddenly…
And if you truly lead a boring life and do nothing out of character - well, change THAT. That’s no way to live! You only *get* one life!
Starting to live a more story-worthy life is almost certainly the right move, whether it ultimately leads to better stories or not.
After all, if we ARE in a simulation,9 you have a moral and ethical duty to lead as interesting and entertaining a life as possible, lest our universe get cancelled in favor of the lovable hijinks of the one with networked gas-giant intelligences with poor pangalactic sphincter control.
What would you get from reading the book yourself?
A delightful romp through the look-and-feel of the past, including insight into 30-50’s era schooling and how formal schooling is an anti-creativity factory.10
More in depth improvisation and creativity techniques, along with a ton of actual acting advice and multiple examples for every technique here.
He has a whole section on “Masks” I didn’t even get into because it was so acting specific, but he has a TON of interesting stories of hunter gatherer cultures using masks, possession by gods and voodoo loas, and more.
Actually this was one of the more mind-bending moments I had when rereading and reviewing Greg Clark’s Son Also Rises recently. Clark went to Oxbridge so long ago, the college actually assigned him a servant when he was admitted, whose duties included cleaning his room and making his bed.
Keith Johnstone is more than twenty years older than Clark!
“It’s not easy to observe hypnagogic images, because once you see one and think ‘There!’ you wake up a little and the image disappears. You have to attend to the images without verbalising about them, so I learned to ‘hold the mind still’ like a hunter waiting in a forest.”
“I was relaxing myself and conjuring up horrific images. I had recalled an eye operation I’d had under local anaesthetic, when suddenly I thought of attending to my mental images just as I had to the hypnagogic ones. The effect was astounding. They had all sorts of detail that I hadn’t known about, and that I certainly hadn’t chosen to be there. The surgeons’ faces were distorted, their masks were thrusting out as if there were snouts beneath them! The effect was so interesting that I persisted. I thought of a house, and attended to the image and saw the doors and windows bricked in, but the chimney still smoking (a symbol for my inhibited state at the time?). I thought of another house and saw a terrifying figure in the doorway. I looked in the windows and saw strange rooms in amazing detail.”
“After a lot of practice at attending to the images I conjured up, I belatedly thought of attending to the reality around me. Then the deadness and greyness immediately sloughed off—yet I’d thought I’d never move through a visionary world again, that I’d lost it. ”
“This is why tragedy has always been concerned with kings and princes, and why we have a special high-status style for playing tragedy.”
He points to a fun factoid I’d never heard that’s related to the master owning all the space - Henry Cavendish, the gentleman scientist of “confirming the gravitational constant” fame, is reported to have fired any servant he caught sight of. “Imagine the hysterical situations: servants scuttling like rabbits, hiding in grandfather clocks and ticking, getting stuck in huge vases.”
The great dragon dare not stir
The trainer watches kindly but
At the slightest movement taps it
on the nose
The eyes glint fire
and yet the muscles dare
not exert themselves nor let the
flame burst forth
Which would engulf the city in
one flash.
The trainer speaks of kindness and
consoles
And says he is the dragon’s only friend
Sometimes the dragon purrs but
oh the pain
Of never moving those enormous limbs
“Word-at-a-time letters usually go though four stages: (1) the letters are usually cautious or nonsensical and full of concealed sexual references; (2) the letters are obscene and psychotic; (3) they are full of religious feeling; (4) finally, they express vulnerability and loneliness.”
Another rule I came up with that I like better, as I think it partitions the space a little better:
If the question has an odd number of words, answer “no.”
If the question has an even number of words, answer “yes.”
If the question has 5-6 words, answer “maybe.”
You may have to fudge the rules to avoid logical inconsistency or frustration, depending on how pedantic and logical / frustratable your questioner is. He also uses this technique to tell his own kids bedtime stories, which I thought was fun.
And honestly, “that time a bunch of tarted-up apes accidentally created a superintelligent god using electricity and tricky sand” sounds like a very-likely-to-be-simulated sort of thing.
“Most children can operate in a creative way until they’re eleven or twelve, when suddenly they lose their spontaneity and produce imitations of ‘adult art’. When other races come into contact with our culture something similar happens. The great Nigerian sculptor Bamboya was set up as principal of an art school by some philanthropic Americans in the 1920s. Not only did he fail to hand on his talents, but his own inspiration failed him. He and his students could still carve coffee tables for the whites, but they weren’t inspired any more.”